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Story Time: Ps3 PiggyBank?
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Story Time: Ps3 PiggyBank? - Video
Vodafone will soon charge its prepaid customers to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube and MySpace and will change how it charges for data usage, the telco announced on its website.
If you currently have infinite social networking included in your recharge, you will still be able to access those sites, but from the 13th of February, your usage will be taken from your data allowance, Vodafone said. After you have used that up, surfing will be taken from your Flexible Credit.
A Vodafone spokesperson said the company decided to end free social networking to eliminate "confusion and worry" when accessing these sites indirectly.
"We recognise the way we now access social networking sites has changed. Where once we would access sites like Twitter and Facebook directly, today there are a range of sites that provide portals to social network sites, eg. Hootsuite for Twitter, Facebook for YouTube etc.
"While a customer may be visiting one of the sites listed in the pack, because theyve entered the site indirectly through a portal, we cant provide free access to the site - again this can cause confusion and worry."
Data usage for all prepaid plans will be charged in 1MB increments, with a minimum session of 1MB, Vodafone said. This means customers who use less than 1MB each time they connect to the Internet will still be charged for 1MB. Currently, data usage for Flexi Cap Recharge is charged in 25KB increments, with the minimum data session 25KB.
In December Optus announced it would no longer offer unlimited access to social networking sites for new postpaid customers. However, Optus still offers free social networking for prepaid customers.
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Updated: Vodafone to end free social networking, data charges to change
Free access to social networking sites on mbile phone plans is becoming an increasingly rare thing in Australia. Following Optus decision last December to stop offering free social networking access to new contract customers, Vodafone has taken a similar step with its prepaid plans.
A notice published on Vodafones site confirms that access to the official sites for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, You Tube and MySpace will no longer be included as part of any prepaid recharge after February 13. Unlike Optus, Vodafone doesnt offer free social media on its contract plans, so theres no change there. (Optus is continuing to offer the free social networking option as part of its prepaid plans, as do several of its resellers.)
Vodafone is also standardising its data charging for prepaid customers into 1MB increments. This already applied to most of its prepaid options, but is being rolled into some older plans. If you want a Vodafone network plan with smaller increments, Crazy Johns uses 10KB as the measure on some prepaid plans.
Vodafone [via Reddit]
Originally posted here:
Vodafone Dumping Free Social Networking Access On Prepaid Plans
January 9, 2013
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online
Networking might be the key to moving along in your career path, but its also a great way to meet that special someone and its a skill that just might be inherited.
Thats the conclusion of researchers who have just completed a new study titled Genetic Origins of Social Networks in Rhesus macaques which was recently published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
If you are a more social monkey, then youre going to have greater reproductive success, meaning your babies are more likely to survive their first year, said post-doctoral research fellow Lauren Brent, who led the study. Natural selection appears to be favoring pro-social behavior.
This is really a landmark paper, said James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California-San Diego who studies human social networks but was not part of the study. Theyre showing that the positive behaviors which build social networks might be heritable, and thats consistent with what weve been seeing in human studies.
In the study, researchers spent two years observing the social interactions of a group of free-ranging monkeys as well as analyzing their family trees. These macaques are the descendents of a group of monkeys released in 1938 from India on the undeveloped 38-acre Cayo Santiago Island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico.
After learning to identify each of the almost 90 monkeys on sight, field researchers recorded social interactions between individuals in 10-minute periods, recording some four to five hours of behavioral data per primate.
Based on the observational data, the team constructed a network of interactions to analyze pro-social and anti-social behavior. They also used a metric that they called betweenness or the shortest paths between individuals and eigenvector, a friends-of-friends measure that showed degrees of separation among a group of friends.
The really popular monkeys would have a high eigenvector, or a really big friends-of-friends network, Brent explained.
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Social Networking May Be An Inherited Skill Say Duke Researchers
BLUE BELL, Pa., Jan. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE MKT: INO) and its development partner VGX International, Inc. (KSE:011000) will move Inovio's hepatitis C (HCV) DNA vaccine into a phase I/IIa clinical trial by the end of 2013. This advancement is based on outstanding results of a preclinical study which demonstrated for the first time that a multi-antigen SynCon HCV vaccine can generate robust T-cell responses not only in the blood but, more importantly, in the liver, an organ known to supress T-cell activity. VGX International is funding all preclinical and clinical development.
In preparation for entering clinical trials with its HCV vaccine (INO-8000), Inovio has completed manufacturing of its multi-antigen HCV vaccine and is performing IND (Investigational New Drug application)-enabling toxicity testing in animals. INO-8000 is a SynCon HCV therapeutic vaccine targeting NS3/4A, NS4B, and NS5A proteins of HCV. INO-8000 was designed with Inovio's SynCon process to broadly cover HCV genotypes 1a and 1b, the types that have been most difficult to treat with drug therapies.
It is estimated that more than 5 million people in the United States are infected with hepatitis C, and perhaps as many as 200 million around the world. This makes HCV one of the greatest public health threats of this century.
HCV vaccine research to date has mostly focused on one area of the virus (the NS3/4A proteins) to induce T-cell responses; however, there has been little research aimed at elucidating whether vaccines targeting proteins other than NS3/4A can induce potent T-cell responses within the liver. In this study, Inovio and its collaborators developed SynCon antigen constructs that targeted three other areas of the HCV virus (NS4B, NS5A and NS5B) and then demonstrated that each vaccine construct expressed its respective protein and that all three constructs induced potent HCV-specific T-cells in mice.
Prior research has also identified that a successful HCV vaccine must be able to induce not only strong HCV-specific T-cell responses that target several components of the virus but that these cells must migrate to the liver and remain activated. In this study, Inovio researchers observed in the liver not only NS4B-, NS5A- and NS5B-specific CD4+ and CD8+ (or killer T-cell) responses, but also a large pool of vaccine-specific T-cells. This pool of vaccine-specific T-cells was shown to be fully functional in an environment in which T-cell activity is usually suppressed. In fact, using a transient HCV infection model in mice, therapeutic immunization with INO-8000 was able to clear HCV antigens from the liver, demonstrating the therapeutic potential of this vaccine.
The pioneering preclinical research appears in the peer-reviewed journal Plos One in an article entitled: "Induction of Intrahepatic HCV NS4B, NS5A and NS5B Specific Cellular Immune Responses following Peripheral Immunization."
In addition to moving forward with INO-8000, Inovio has a long-standing partnership with ChronTech Pharma, which is developing its NS3/4A-based HCV DNA vaccine using Inovio's proprietary delivery technology. Interim results of ChronTech's open-label, randomized phase II trial are expected later in the first quarter of this year.
Dr. J. Joseph Kim, Inovio's President and CEO, said, "Inovio is a leader in developing therapeutic vaccines for HCV and HBV. The major hurdle to developing therapeutic vaccines for these ailments has been the inability to generate a functional T-cell response in the liver. The fact that our preclinical model demonstrated functional T-cells in the liver in this published study suggests that INO-8000 has the capacity to clear that hurdle. There have been important recent drug therapy advances for HCV; however, a safe and effective therapeutic vaccine could play a vital role in enhancing the potency of HCV treatments, especially for genotype 1, while achieving the desired goal of eliminating the use of interferon/ribavirin and their undesirable side effects."
About Hepatitis C and Inovio's SynCon Vaccines
Hepatitis C is an infectious disease affecting primarily the liver, caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The infection is often asymptomatic, but chronic infection can lead to liver failure or liver cancer. Approximately 80% of people who become infected with hepatitis C virus develop chronic infection.
Originally posted here:
Inovio Pharmaceuticals to Initiate Clinical Trial for its Hepatitis C Therapeutic Vaccine (INO-8000) Later this Year