The Science Behind Jobs' Hormonal Imbalance

by Carol Pinchefsky

Left: 2007. Right: 2008.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs has addressed rumors concerning his weight loss in a statement to the press. In this statement, Jobs said, “after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause--a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.”

Jobs previously suffered from islet cell pancreatic cancer, a less common type of pancreatic cancer. Typically, pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate: with a wide array of symptoms that include depression and jaundice, pancreatic cancer is tricky to diagnose, and many cases advances until surgery is no longer a viable option. However, the type Jobs had is slower growing and has a favorable survival rate.

Dr. Robert Zimmerman, interim chairman of the Department of Endocrinology at the Cleveland Clinic, one of U.S. News and World Report’s top ten best hospitals nationwide for endocrinology, says that weight loss is a common after-effect of the Whipple procedure, which Jobs had undergone. Patients who undergo the Whipple procedure lose part of their pancreas, duodenum, bile duct, and perhaps the stomach. The digestive tract of the patient is then reconstructed.

Dr. Zimmerman said, “Assuming that it’s not re-occurrence from the tumor…[Jobs’ weight loss] could be a complication of the surgery.”

Dr. Zimmerman explained that islet cell pancreatic cancer can disrupt the production of hormones like insulin. “The islets are the cells in the pancreas that normally secrete insulin, and [pancreatic cancer] can cause people to have low blood sugar.” People who lack insulin are at risk for complications like weight loss.

Although weight loss is cause for cheer in most Americans, Dr. Philip Philip, co-editor of the book Pancreatic Cancer and professor of medical oncology at the Karmanos Cancer Institute, said this is not the case for previous cancer survivors like Steve Jobs. Severe weight loss may raise an alarm that the cancer has recurred.

Dr. Philip said, “For the cancer to be removed in 2004 and for him to have the symptoms now, it probably indicates there’s a cancer activity. And weight loss is one of the typical symptom of a cancer that’s active, especially if it’s growing or getting worse.”

If Jobs’ illness interferes with his work, he stated, “I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO.”

The Board of Directors responded in another press release, offering Jobs “our complete and unwavering support during his recuperation.”

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Boxee Officially Goes Public, Adds BBC iPlayer and Joost Content

Posted by Aviv

Boxee, a service which lets users play and view their music, videos and photos on a connected laptop, HDTV or Apple TV, has officially stepped out of private alpha and into the public eye. Users can now sign up for Boxee on the company’s website, as they claim “you are now free to be entertained.”

Boxee takes some of the major content providers around today, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr, as well as your own digital music, photos, videos and pretty much any other file in any format and gives you the control to browse, playback and enjoy all of this on your HDTV or connected computer. Up until now the service has been in a private alpha growing to a nearly 200,000+ installed user base.

Most users have needed to request a confirmation code to join Boxee and experience the service. As of today, this has changed. Boxee has gone public and anyone can sign up now. Boxee is currently available for Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV customers, with the Windows version moving into private alpha as the rest move away from it.

Boxee explains on their company blog: boxee’s private alpha went well beyond our expectations. over 200,000 people signed up.. today we’re opening our alpha to all Mac, Ubuntu and Apple TV users. Windows is also moving into private-alpha (which means you still need to get invited, but we’re going to release thousands of invites every week). bear with us as we scale…)

Gizmodo has a handy guide for maxing out the potential of your Apple TV with boxee.

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iPhoto update helps show merits of geotagging

By Stephen Shankland

(CNET) -- With its launch of iPhoto 09, Apple has begun showing some reasons why it's worth enduring the hassle of geotagging your photos.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president, unveils iPhoto 09 at Macworld Tuesday.

It's generally not easy right now to label your photos with information about where you took the pictures -- the process usually is done with special software to marry the photos with location data taken from a separate GPS receiver.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, demonstrated what you can do with iPhoto at the Macworld 2009 keynote Tuesday.

iPhoto 09 works best with photos that already have been tagged.

That's getting more common, as GPS hardware support becomes less of a rarity. For example, Nikon's Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS receiver, and Nikon has begun selling its GP-1 GPS receiver, which can plug into its SLR's flash mount so location data is embedded in the photo.

Apple's iPhone can geotag its own photos, and camera manufacturers say GPS support in cameras has become a matter of when, not if.

But the software also can help you tag your own images. Clicking a photo flips it over, letting you type in a location, then showing the spot using a map. (Google supplies back-end mapping services). Helpfully, iPhoto then can spread that location data to other photos with similar time stamps, and they can be bundled together into a group called an event.

OK, but what can you do? Once you have geotagged photos, what can you do with them?

For one thing, sift through them geographically using iPhotos' new Places interface. Viewing an iPhoto event can show an associated collection of pushpins on a map, and clicking each pin shows the photo.

For another, you can search for photos based on where you took them, not on whatever filing system you might use. iPhoto can handle geographic hierarchies, so if you labeled a photo with "Eiffel Tower," it'll find it with a search for "France" or "Paris."

Last, you can create photo books based on location. For people who want to create albums of their travels, this is a good idea, especially since you can use the tags both for selecting photos to print and to add maps into the book itself.

There's no support for the painful part of geotagging, though: extracting location data from a GPS unit. There are other programs that can handle that chore, including Microsoft's Pro Photo Tools, Breeze Systems' Downloader Pro, or GPS Photo Linker.

iPhoto is bundled with Macs, along with other members of the iLife suite: iMovie, Garage Band, iWeb, and iDVD. People who have earlier versions can upgrade to iLife 09 for $79.

Tag, you're it

In some glorious future, computers might be able to understand the content of your photos just by "looking" at them, letting them retrieve just what you want when you ask.

But for now, it's mostly up to you to add metadata, textual information such as titles, captions, star ratings, and geotags. If you want to find pictures of the Sydney Opera House, you'll have to know when you took them, what folder you tucked them into, or hope you labeled them with appropriate tags.

iPhoto 09, like Google's Picasa Web Albums, adds another major tagging automation feature, though: face recognition. The software finds faces, lets you put a name to them, then offers other views of what it judges to be the same person. After you're done, you can view photos of a specific person.

And if you've tagged people in Facebook, it'll slurp up those tags through a synchronization process. Yahoo's Flickr, which has extensive tagging and geotagging abilities, also benefits from this synchronization ability.

So what's the upshot here? Good news and bad news.

The good news is that the world of digital photography is moving to a new organizational scheme, finally shedding the filing-cabinet metaphor of a hard drive's file system or the shoebox full of prints. The new tag-based world is more flexible and approachable in several ways, and it is still fully compatible with the older methods.

The bad news is that in order for it to work, you have to do a little more work getting the tags right in the first place.

I, for one, think that it's worthwhile. Here's an example why: my sister needed photos for an end-of-year letter, and because I am the de facto family photographer, she looked to my online shots. The way she found photos of her family members was simply by searching my photos by her family members' names at Flickr. That's far superior to clicking on every photo album for the year and seeing what's within.

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