Mediaboss Marketing

Leveraging on the popularity of social media, Citibank Singapore has launched the first credit card in the country to integrate social networking as part of its core card features.

With its new Clear Platinum Card, cardmembers are engaged through three ways.

"Clear Deal of the Month" allows cardmembers to customise their card experiences and rewards every month.

Benefits are also tailored to the consumer's increasingly online lifestyle, with 5X rewards for online shopping for the first time in Singapore, while engaging them via mainly electronic communication platforms such as social media, instead of traditional marketing channels.

Ms. Jacquelyn Tan, Head of Credit Payment Products at Citibank Singapore Limited, said: "With the new Citibank Clear Platinum card, we are building on the role of the consumer?s voice in this social media space to give cardmembers the power to actively customise their own card experiences, from merchant promotions to events, for the first time in Singapore."

During the launch, members also get the chance to win weekly prizes, as well as a grand prize at the end of six weeks, where they can work with Citibank Singapore to customise a party of his/her choice worth S$5,000.

ellenja@sph.com.sg

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Citibank launches 'social networking' credit card

Published by David Gilson at 14:00 UTC, March 9th 2012

These days, social networking apps are the hub of our online life. They entertain us, bring us together, let us communicate, and explore. Therefore it's imperative that any mobile platform provides a great experience for working with networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Symbian has long enjoyed the powerhouse of Gravity for Twitter, Facebook, and others; but in the last 12 months it has been joined by a set of impressive Qt-based applications. Here we gather together the reviews of our favourite applications to cover all of your needs.

LinkedIn Review| Score N/A| Store| Free

LinkedIn is the lesser publicised social network aimed squarely at professionals. Its core features are sharing links, participating in group discussions, and making new contacts.The client provides access to all the core functions - for example, users can read and post status updates, with an option to have the update tweeted.LinkedIn provides a home screen widget, which gives an overview of one's invitations and inbox messages, along with a search link.

Facebook Review| Score 90% | Store | 1.50

There are quite a few Facebook applications for Symbian, however a favourite in the All About Symbian (virtual) office is fMobi. It is one of the most feature-complete Facebook applications on any platform, and has a unusual style mimicking the Symbianapplication menu.

Here's a summary of Steve's take on fMobi,

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Top Five Symbian Social Networking Apps

ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) Mutations in HIV that develop during the first few weeks of infection may play a critical role in undermining a successful early immune response, a finding that reveals the importance of vaccines targeting regions of the virus that are less likely to mutate. A new study in the journal PLoS Pathogens, led by researchers at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, applied the same next-generation technologies that have revolutionized sequencing of the human genome to study how HIV adapts within the first few weeks after infection.

Ragon and Broad investigators applied an approach called pyrosequencing that allows the simultaneous sequencing of hundreds of viral variants within an individual over the course of infection. These data provided a substantially deeper and more sensitive view of the complexity of mutant strains circulating in a patient following HIV infection and how each of those strains evolves over time. Combining these genetic data with detailed immunological analyses enabled a comprehensive evaluation of viral-host interactions during the critical acute phase of HIV infection.

The study revealed that the majority of early, low-frequency mutations developing during the first few weeks after infection represent rapid adaptations to avoid the response of CD8 'killer' T cells, which play a key role in recognizing and eliminating HIV-infected cells. "These data reveal the ability of HIV to rapidly avoid front-line immune responses attempting to contain the infection," says Todd Allen, PhD, senior author of the study and a Ragon Institute faculty member.

More importantly, Allen notes, their study revealed that rapid viral escape from a few dominant immune responses coincided with the inability of individual patients to maintain early control of HIV. "The ability to sensitively assess early virus evolution across the entire HIV genome revealed that limiting the ability of HIV to become resistant to the earliest immune responses may be a critical component of a successful vaccine," he says. "Therefore, the key to controlling a highly variable pathogen such as HIV may lie in a vaccine's ability to redirect immune responses towards more critical, highly conserved regions of the virus that are unable to successfully mutate."

An important component of the study was development of novel bioinformatics tools to handle the enormous and highly diverse sequence dataset and to assemble the thousands of sequencing reads into complete HIV genomes for analysis and detection of genetic mutations. While next-generation sequencing approaches have helped transform the sequencing of mammalian genomes, the high degree of sequence diversity within and between HIV strains has hindered the routine application of those powerful sequencing approaches to highly variable pathogens such as HIV. In the current study the researchers were able to apply their approach to successfully sequence the entire HIV genome from dozens of infected individuals.

"The genomic and computational tools developed as part of this study allow researchers to interrogate the complete HIV genome and to identify genetic variants of the virus with unprecedented resolution, allowing us to obtain a novel map of how the virus is changing during the course of an infection." says Matthew Henn, PhD, the lead author of the study and director of Viral Genomics at the Broad Institute.

Efforts to develop an effective vaccine against HIV have been thwarted in large part because of the virus's ability to rapidly mutate and avoid host immune responses. However, notes Allen -- an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School -- "HIV is not able to mutate at will. Some of these mutations substantially cripple the virus' ability to replicate, which appears to be critical to enabling a few individuals to uniquely control HIV without the need for therapy."

Understanding more precisely how HIV evolves in an individual and how mutations correlate with the ability to control HIV may provide critical insight into the design of more effective vaccines to contain and possibly prevent infection altogether. Efforts are underway at the Ragon Institute to harness these findings to develop and test novel vaccine approaches against HIV that limit its ability to mutate and escape immune control.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Deeper view of HIV reveals impact of early mutations

43 years after the first case of Lassa fever was recorded, the country is still grappling with the virus that is transmitted by hairless tailed bush rats that abound in the country. With more than 40 lives already lost and over 400 others infected this year alone, Olaolu Olusina examines the inadequate surveillance system and lacklustre response to the killer virus which is responsible for some 5,000 deaths every year

Nigerians were indeed jolted when the news of a fresh outbreak of Lassa fever was broken by the Federal Ministry of Health about seven weeks ago. Many were further worried at the revelation that the disease, which had spread into 12 states including Edo, Taraba, Borno, Gombe, Yobe, Plateau, Nassarawa, Ebonyi, Ondo, Rivers, Anambra and Lagos States, was being transmitted through a species of bush rats.

At the last count, the government disclosed that hospital records showed that over 40 lives had been lost to the disease which had assumed epidemic proportions with over 400 persons already infected. Edo and Taraba topped the list of states with the highest casualty figures while about 50 million Nigerians are believed to be at risk from the disease which is even killing doctors and nurses.

Rapid Response Committee

The federal government officially responded to the outbreak of the disease on February 22, six weeks after it had wreaked havoc in more than 12 states with the inauguration of a 23-member Rapid Response Committee chaired by Professor Sunday Omilabu, a professor of Virology and Dean, Faculty of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Medicine, University of Lagos.

Charged with the task of preventing and controlling a further outbreak and spread of the virus, the committee, which also has Dr. Henry Akpan of the Federal Ministry of Health as secretary, is expected to submit its full report and recommendations by June.

Inaugurating the committee in Abuja, Minister of State for Health, Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, said the aim of the committee was to coordinate federal and state governments as well as development partners' response in controlling further spread of the virus.

He disclosed that the federal government was concerned with the spread of Lassa fever in Nigeria, saying the government had earlier initiated a National Lassa Fever stakeholder's forum in 2007 to advocate for action against the virus.

"Government would continue to support the treatment of all reported Lassa fever cases with prompt preposition of ribavirin drugs and personal protective equipment. This year, 500,000 vials of the ribavirin drugs were procured and distributed to the affected states," he said.

The minister also restated the resolve of the federal government to do everything possible not only to control the Lassa fever epidemic but to put in place a mechanism for its effective prevention.

Originally posted here:
Nigeria: Tackling the Lassa Fever Epidemic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The American Dictionary of Regional English has finally reached its final word - "zydeco" - as researchers wrap up almost 50 years of work charting the rich variety of American speech.

The dictionary's official publication date is March 20 but lexicographers and word fans have been celebrating ever since its fifth and final volume emerged earlier this year.

"It truly is America's dictionary," Ben Zimmer, a language columnist and lexicographer, told a Washington, D.C. news conference on Thursday.

He said when the final printed volume was delivered to its longtime editor, Joan Houston Hall, at a meeting of fellow dialect scholars: "There were audible gasps in the room."

The Dictionary of American Regional English's (DARE) 60,000 entries running from "A" to "zydeco," a style of Louisiana Cajun music, serve as a comprehensive sample of how American speech changes from region to region.

That space between sidewalk and curb? Depending on what part of the United States it is in, it can be called "parking," "devil's strip," "swale," "parkway" or "tree lawn."

Hall, who has headed the DARE project since 2000, said she was convinced fears that American English was becoming homogenized through television and mass media were unfounded.

"I don't buy it. Yes, language changes at different rates and at different places," she said. "But most of the words among our family and friends that are regional we don't even recognize as regional."

Although the idea of a dictionary of American dialects had been around since the 1880s, the project did not take shape until 1962, when Frederick Cassidy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was appointed editor.

The DARE project was based on interviews carried out in more than 1,000 communities from 1965 to 1970 by University of Wisconsin researchers.

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Regional dictionary gets in last word as it wraps up work