FTC Issues Final Breach Notification Rule for Electronic Health Information
News release: "The Federal Trade Commission has issued a final rule requiring certain Web-based businesses to notify consumers when the security of their electronic health information is breached. Congress directed the FTC to issue the rule as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The rule applies to both vendors of personal health records–which provide online repositories that people can use to keep track of their health information–and entities that offer third-party applications for personal health records. These applications could include, for example, devices such as blood pressure cuffs or pedometers whose readings consumers can upload into their personal health records. Consumers may benefit by using these innovations, but only if they are confident that their health information is secure and confidential."

A pun is a play on words. Examples: http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/punterm.htm

The 40th edition of Gray’s Anatomy: The Anatomical Basis of Clinical Practice was published in 2008. The title of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy is a pun on the book title.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis was one of the major Victorian-era World's Fairs. The Fair celebrated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. It was delayed from a planned opening in 1903 to 1904 allow for full-scale participation by more states and foreign countries. The Fair opened April 30, 1904, and closed December 1, 1904. Of notable interest is that St. Louis had held an annual Saint Louis Exposition (1884) since the 1880s as agricultural, trade, and scientific exhibitions, but this event was not held in 1904 due to the World's Fair. The Fair's 1,200 acre (4.9 km²) site, designed by George Kessler [1], was located at the present-day grounds of Forest Park and on the campus of Washington University, and was the largest fair to date. There were over 1,500 buildings, connected by some 75 miles (120 km) of roads and walkways. The Palace of Fine Art, designed by architect Cass Gilbert, featured a grand interior sculpture court based on the Roman Baths of Caracalla. Standing at the top of Art Hill, it now serves as the home of the St. Louis Art Museum. The Administration Building is now Brookings Hall, the defining landmark on the campus of Washington University. Some of the mansions from the Exposition's era survive along Lindell Boulevard at the north border of Forest Park. The huge bird cage at the Saint Louis Zoological Park, dates to the fair. Festival Hall contained the largest organ in the world at the time, built by the Los Angeles Art Organ Company. After the fair, it was placed into storage, and eventually purchased by John Wanamaker for his new Wanamaker's store in Philadelphia. See Wanamaker Organ for more details. The famous Bronze Eagle in the Wanamaker Store also came from the Fair. It features hundreds of hand-forged bronze feathers and was the centerpiece of one of the many German exhibits at the fair. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase_Exposition

The Wanamaker Organ was originally built by the Los Angeles Art Organ Company, successors to the Murray M. Harris Organ Co., for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. It was designed to be the largest organ in the world, an imitation of a full-size orchestra with particularly complete resources of full organ tone including mixtures. In addition to its console, the organ was originally equipped with an automatic player that used punched rolls of paper, according to the Los Angeles Times of 1904.[3] It was designed by renowned organ theorist and architect George Ashdown Audsley. Wild cost overruns plagued the project, with the result that Harris was ousted from his own company. With capital from stockholder Eben Smith, it was reorganized as the Los Angeles Art Organ Company, and finished at a cost of $105,000, $40,000 over budget. The Fair began (in late April, 1904) before the organ was fully installed in its temporary home, Festival Hall. It still was not entirely finished in September of that year, when Alexandre Guilmant, one of the most famous organists of the day, presented 40 very well-attended recitals on the organ. Following the Fair, the organ was intended for permanent installation by the Kansas City Convention Hall. Indeed, the original console had a prominent "K C" on its music rack. This venture failed, bankrupting the L. A. Art Organ Company after the Fair closed. There was a plan to exhibit the organ at Coney Island in New York City, but nothing came of this.
The organ languished in storage at the Handlan warehouse in St. Louis until 1909, when it was bought by John Wanamaker for his new department store at 13th and Market Streets in Center City, Philadelphia. It took thirteen freight cars to move it to its new home, and two years for installation. It was first played on June 6, 1911, at the exact moment when British King George V was crowned. It was also featured later that year when U.S. President William Howard Taft dedicated the store. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanamaker_Organ

"Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time"
New York Times Special Issue: How changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything
"..if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater...in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution."
See also World Bank: Role of Women, key to South Asia's Development

Bipartisan Policy Center Releases Report on Improving Health Care Quality and Value
News release: "In response to increasing concerns in the health care debate regarding the long-term costs of reform, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) released a report examining various steps for reforming the health care system to one that delivers better care at lower costs. The report, entitled, Improving Quality and Value in the U.S. Health Care System, supports the bipartisan health reform recommendations released earlier this year by Senators Howard Baker, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole in their budget-neutral framework for comprehensive health reform, Crossing Our Lines: Working Together to Reform the U.S. Health System.
Related postings on health care reform

House Health Care Reform Bill Available on GPO’s Federal Digital System
"As lawmakers and Americans discuss health care reform, The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has made available H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, in electronic and printed form. The bill was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce. The authentic, electronic version is available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys), named by Government Computer News as one of the Government’s best Web sites. GPO authenticated the document by digital signature. This signature assures the public that the document has not been changed or altered. A digital signature, viewed through the GPO Seal of Authenticity, verifies the document’s integrity and authenticity."

August 22 is the birthday of screenwriter Julius Epstein, (books by this author) born in New York City in 1909. He and his twin brother, Philip, took an unpublished play called Everybody Comes to Rick's and turned it into a screenplay for one of the most-quoted and beloved classic movies: Casablanca. Julius Epstein said that his screenplay for Casablancacontained "a great deal of corn, more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined."
August 23 is the birthday of Edgar Lee Masters, (books by this author) born in Garnett, Kansas (1868). He grew up in small farming towns in Illinois, and he wanted to write a novel about growing up in Illinois, but he didn't know where to start. Then the editor of a poetry magazine sent him a book of poems called Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, epigrams from classical Greece, many of them about the details of daily life and ordinary people. So Masters took that idea, and he wrote Spoon River Anthology (1915), in which residents of a small Illinois town called Spoon River speak from beyond the grave and tell their life stories, more than 200 characters in all.
The Writer’s Almanac