Game Review Pokemini

The Pokemini game tells the story of Minis who have traveled to Earth looking for "yummy donuts". The game opens with the tale of the Minis then allows you to pick your own mini character. Once you select your character, you can enter your nickname, your zodiac sign and then the fun can begin! You can change your Minis appearance by purchasing hair, clothing (using donuts) and free edits are available to alter their psychical appearance. You are also given a home which you can decorate. You can visit other Minis in their home and they can visit you. Quests are available and you are rewarded for finding particular items. The game is made by the Cocone Corporation and is now available on iOS and Android devices.

Apple iTunes Store: http://bit.ly/Victoria_Android 

Google Play: https://bit.ly/Victoria_iOS

When you sign in everyday, you earn a login stamp and you can use the stamps to win prizes. Outside your home, you are given a tree to water and you earn points and donuts for taking care of it. You can also water other Mini trees when you visit to gain points and donuts. Other ways to earn free donuts is by placing a "slap" on another Minis Slap board, or watching ads for items such as video games or taking product surveys (in which you have to supply your email address). You can meet other Minis by the Jet Set option which will take you to another players home. You can also leave messages on their bulletin board and interact with their furniture. At your home, you can customize it however you like, buy and rearrange your furniture and visitors will pop by. You can even cook and eat tasty treats. You can also give gifts to other Minis however it doesnt come cheap and will cost you 50 donuts. When you level up by obtaining points and donuts you are awarded new items. Your Mini will need to rest when they are tired. They will also need to eat when they are hungry.

I really liked the options for clothing and hair styles in addition to facial features. Most of these options however do cost donuts so you have to save up. The graphics are adorable and the music is delightful. The controls are pretty easy and theres a Tip icon to assist you in the game play if needed. The game is a fun past time. I especially like that you can interact with other gamers from around the world by leaving messages, visiting their homes, giving gifts or even entering a Chat room. I think the price of gift giving is a bit high and I was also confused when I went to purchase a Rose Gown and was told I had to "spin" for it in which I did not get the dress but a hat instead. I am confused on that part and was upset because I had enough money for the dress yet the spin took most of my donuts.

In closing I am still learning my way around this game however it is fun and enjoyable for all ages. I plan to continue playing. The Confessions of a Cosplay Girl Blog approves and recommends Pokemini!

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Kim K defends her nude photos says I dont do drugs I hardly drink Ive never committed a crime I am allowed to be sexy

Kim Kardashian who has never shied away from showing off her body says she is amazed at how the Internet reacted to the nude photos which she posted yesterday.
In a post she titled "Happy International Womens Day," Kim addressed her tweets from last night.
Kim wrote:

"Hey, guys. I wanted to write a post elaborating on my tweets last night. In all seriousness, I never understand why people get so bothered by what other people choose to do with their lives. I dont do drugs, I hardly drink, Ive never committed a crime—and yet Im a bad role model for being proud of my body?" 

"It always seems to come back around to my sex tape. Yes, a sex tape that was made 13 years ago. 13 YEARS AGO. Literally that lonnng ago. And people still want to talk about it?!?! I lived through the embarrassment and fear, and decided to say who cares, do better, move on. I shouldnt have to constantly be on the defense, listing off my accomplishments just to prove that I am more than something that happened 13 years ago. Lets move on, already. I have." 

"I am empowered by my body. I am empowered by my sexuality. I am empowered by feeling comfortable in my skin. I am empowered by showing the world my flaws and not being afraid of what anyone is going to say about me. And I hope that through this platform I have been given, I can encourage the same empowerment for girls and women all over the world."

Many thanks to my hubby Kanye West, who "is so accepting and supportive and who has given me a newfound confidence in myself. He allows me to be me and loves me unconditionally," and want North West to "be proud of who she is. I want her to be comfortable in her body. I dont want her to grow up in a world where she is made to feel less-than for embracing everything it means to be a woman."

"Its 2016. The body-shaming and slut-shaming—its like, enough is enough. I will not live my life dictated by the issues you have with my sexuality. You be you and let me be me," the celeb wrote. "I am a mother. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, an entrepreneur and I am allowed to be sexy."

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A Neat Way for Producing Cash by Marc Charles

Hi Gang:

This was published on LOP -- a proven method for producing cash....in this economy.....seriously:


League of Power -- Weekend Business Blueprint


Have fun and play nice!

Your humble host.........


Marc Charles

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Questions about antibiotics vs surgery for acute appendicitis

A study from Finland suggesting that antibiotics may be a viable alternative to surgery for acute appendicitis has created a stir. As you might have expected, I had some concerns about the paper which you can read in my blog post here.

On Twitter, many surgeons have commented on both the paper and my post. Several interesting questions come to mind.

Based on this and other similar studies, is the treatment of acute appendicitis with antibiotics now a mainstream alternative to surgery?

Should surgeons now mention the Finnish study results during their informed consent discussions with patients?

Is CT scanning accurate enough to differentiate a reasonable percentage of uncomplicated appendicitis from more complex cases? Previous papers have reported conflicting data on this topic. Will this lead to more CT scanning (if that is even possible)?

What do patients want? In an effort to avoid surgery, are they willing to take a 25-30% chance of a recurrence of appendicitis?

Will patients be able to understand the distinction between complicated and uncomplicated appendicitis?

We all agreed that ertapenem is not a first-choice antibiotic in the United States. In fact, the real questions may be is a three-day hospitalization for intravenous antibiotics really necessary, or as is the case with acute sigmoid diverticulitis, would a course of oral antibiotics as an outpatient be sufficient to deal with an attack of uncomplicated appendicitis?

How will it work if antibiotics and surgery are considered equivalent treatments? Although I am retired, I think I am qualified to say that I would not have enjoyed going to an emergency department at 10 o’clock at night to see a patient with acute appendicitis who after a discussion, chooses to be treated with antibiotics. Should these medically-treated patients be admitted to surgery or another service? Should the emergency physician have the discussion with the patient and only call the surgeon if the patient elects to have an operation?

Is it appropriate for an anonymous blogger to be questioning the methods and results of a paper published in a top-tier journal such as JAMA?

What do you think about all of these questions?

Many thanks to the following for their input. If I omitted someone, I apologize. @jdimick1, @NirajGusani, @TomVargheseJr, @ChrisFriese_RN, @LVSelbs, @NatalieBlencowe, @JBMatthews, @ehldallas, @zuckerbraun, @SarahB_MD, @docaggarwal, @aneelbhangu, @smootholdfart, @DRSoup34, @hswapnil, @qdtrinh, @TimLaheyMD, @jonessurgery, @RogueRad, @DrKathyHughes, @putrescine, @krchhabra, @Apathetic_Cynic, @SimonRBarron

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Recognition

The following is based on an actual case that occurred a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

A 65-year-old man arrived in the emergency department by ambulance after being found unresponsive. His respiratory rate was 40/minute, heart rate was 170/minute, and temperature was 102.2°. He did not respond to Narcan or an ampule of 50% dextrose. Blood sugar was 600 mg/dL. The diagnosis of diabetic ketoacidosis was made. IV fluids and an insulin drip were given. After some hydration he became more alert and complained of abdominal pain. On examination, his abdomen was tender to palpation. Four hours after arrival, a surgical consultant was called and diagnosed an incarcerated inguinal hernia. Before the patient could be taken to surgery, he suffered a cardiac arrest and could not be resuscitated. Review of the case revealed that although blood cultures were drawn and were eventually positive, antibiotics had not been ordered.

What happened? The possibility that this patient was septic never occurred to the doctors managing the case. I am sure that if a scenario like this appeared on a test, those doctors would have immediately chosen the right antibiotics. Some doctors are "book smart" but cant deal with a real live patient.

Although the doctors didnt do a very thorough abdominal exam at first, the real problem here was recognition.

I was reminded of this case by a recent article about a 2013 paper that appeared in a journal called Human Factors. The paper, "The Effectiveness Of Airline Pilot Training for Abnormal Events," pointed out that pilots doing their periodic training know that certain crises—stalls, low-level wind shear, engine failures on takeoff—are part of every simulator session and will occur in predictable ways.

The authors presented those situations in unexpected ways, measured pilots reactions, and found that experienced pilots responded less skillfully.

From the paper: Our control conditions demonstrate that pilots’ abilities to respond to the “schoolhouse” versions of each abnormal event were in fine fettle. The problems that arose when the abnormal events were presented outside of the familiar contexts used in training demonstrate a failure of these skills to generalize to other situations.

They suggested four ways to improve training and testing.

1) Change it up. In other words, dont practice things the same way every time.

2) Train for surprise.

3) Turn off the automation. Dont let the pilots depend on automated systems to help them recognize what is going on because if those systems fail, pilots will have trouble dealing with the situation.

4) Reevaluate the idea of teaching to the test which can "present the illusion that real learning has taken place when in fact it has not."

Item #3 is particularly relevant because of some recent interest in the negative effects that automation is having on pilots and possibly society in general. The 2009 crash of an Air France plane into the South Atlantic Ocean has been analyzed in several recent publications. (Here and here)

The cockpit voice recorder transcript is chilling. In a storm, the autopilot failed, and the plane stalled. Three pilots failed to recognize what happened and did all the wrong things.

I have been saying for years that we need to teach med students and residents how to think. Recognition of rare events would be a good area to focus on.

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More evidence that the manuscript peer review process is broken

To the surprise of almost no one, asking authors of research papers to submit names of potential peer reviewers for their manuscripts turns out to be a bad idea.

According to a recent New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Charlotte J. Haug, a number of research papers have been retracted because reviews were fabricated. Email addresses of suggested peer reviewers were not legitimate. The bogus email addresses were almost all created by authors of papers who then reviewed their own work favorably using fake identities. 

More about the problem can be found on the blog Retraction Watch.

This type of fraud is simple to do because anyone can set up an email address on Gmail or Yahoo mail using any name. Unless a reviewer has an academic email address, proving legitimacy is impossible.

However even if a reviewer has an “edu” address, how would an editor know that a suggested reviewer is not the author’s sister-in-law or a former mentor?

Every medical student who applies for residency knows that you don’t ask someone for a letter of recommendation unless you are sure that it will be favorable. Why would an author take a chance on recommending someone to review a paper without knowing that the review would be a good one?

I agree with the Dr. Haug that soliciting the names of possible reviewers from authors can save editors time and bother. Having spent three years as an associate journal editor, I have experienced the frustration of trying to find high quality reviewers or even a warm body of any quality to do the job.

I also agree with her that a root cause of this problem is the pressure on faculty to publish.

Another problem is that there are too many journals. In 2014, well over 5000 journals and 760,000 papers were included in Medline. The combination of “publish or perish” and superfluous journals leads to the proliferation of marginal papers.

The problem is not simply fake reviews. Since journal reviewers are not paid and have many other responsibilities, they may not thoroughly read papers or provide useful comments about manuscripts.

Some have suggested paying peer reviewers, but who would pay them? Certainly not publishers, even though they make tons of money. And paying might attract unqualified people looking to make a little extra cash.

What about post-publication peer review? It is already happening on blogs, on sites like PubPeer, and even on PubMed. However, the volume of papers published in medicine alone certainly precludes post-publication review of all of them.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. New journals are appearing every day. Most are “open access” and the charge authors “processing fees.” For many of these publications, processing fees do not include even a cursory manuscripts peer review.

With so many journals publishing just about anything for the right price, readers will have to do their own peer reviewing. Be skeptical my friends. 

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Too Much Advertising Spam on Content Sites

In the light of all the changes Google have made to try to give readers a decent web experience - stop laughing - and get people to spend their advertising money with them...

... you might think that professional sites like HubPages and Squidoo would have learnt some sort of lesson about not spamming their viewers.

Here is a screen shot of one of my HubPages pages.

What you will notice, or would do if it had copied properly, is that there is far too much advertising compared to the content.

A full size block at the top followed by the Title.

And then... another block of ads.

This is despite me trying to put a stickman picture in the place where they normally put EVEN MORE ads to make my page look less spammy and more attractive to a potential reader.

...

That is the first page a searcher will see.

In my opinion it is off-putting.

It says "In here is the same advertising heavy garbage that most of the web consists of.  This article exists purely to con you into spending money".

Well great.

Thanks HP!

...

Further down the screen... if the reader gets that far and didnt immediately back-arrow, is another insane block of garbage.

An entire screen of adverts!

What the hell is wrong with these sites that they dont see the value in toning it down?

It is not about stuffing every single possible advert in a readers face.

Is it?

It is about engaging with them, building trust, hoping for repeat visits, longer read times  - and, and, and.

...


The old game of creating masses of generic garbage content are gone for good.

You need readers, visitors - who are pleased with your site and its content and who will share that pleasure.  That hackneyed social network thing but more than that.

Stuffing adverts directly at a poor search visitor who has had their fill from all the other sites is just damaging your own site.

I wouldnt bother reading that article.

Would you?

HubPages Adds Floating Adverts

In an almost unbelievable change - HubPages have now added even more adverts to my content.

Not content with virtually destroying my pages with over the top adverts they have added a floating set that accompany the poor reader as they scroll through.

You cant tune these out because they follow you everywhere.

The adverts apparently link through to a page that is all adverts!  Unbelievable.  The worst spam-filled page possible.  What it says to me very loud and clear in that they dont care about their writers or their readers.  The content is absolutely just there for their advertising.

Now we all know the game but shouting it in such an obvious fashion is surely a mistake?

If I come across that sort of advert stuffed page I tend to leave it and make a mental note not to bother with that site again.

It makes a mockery of their attempts at quality control.  The best writing in the world could not compete with wall to wall advertising.

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