Mediaboss Marketing

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Dr. Maria Kleinstaeuber kleinsta@uni-mainz.de 49-613-139-39100 Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz

Those suffering from nagging tinnitus can benefit from internet-based therapy just as much as patients who take part in group therapy sessions. These are the findings of a German-Swedish study in which patients with moderate to severe tinnitus tried out various forms of therapy over a ten-week period. The outcome of both the internet-based therapy and group therapy sessions was significantly better than that of a control group that only participated in an online discussion forum and thus demonstrated both the former to be effective methods of managing the symptoms of irritating ringing in the ears. The study was conducted by the Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy division of the Institute of Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning at Linkping University in Sweden.

According to the German Tinnitus League (Deutsche Tinnitus-Liga, DTL), two percent of the population suffer from moderate to unbearable tinnitus. But the symptoms of tinnitus can be successfully managed by means of cognitive behavioral therapy. However, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to take a course of psychotherapy. As shown by the German-Swedish study, those affected by tinnitus can now achieve the same level of outcome with the help of an internet-based therapy program, which encourages them to adopt individual and active strategies to combat their tinnitus. For the purposes of the study, the training program developed in Sweden was adapted so that it could be used for German patients and then be evaluated for its effectiveness.

The study showed that distress measured using the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory was reduced on average from moderate (40 points) to mild (29 points) in participants who completed the internet-based training course. The results for subjects in the cognitive behavioral therapy group were also very good, with distress levels being reduced from 44 to 29 points. In contrast, there was hardly any change in this respect in the control group subjects participating in the online discussion forum. Their average distress level was 40 points at the beginning of the study and remained at 37 points thereafter. "Our internet-based therapy concept was very effective when it came to the reduction of tinnitus-related distress or, to put it another way, at increasing the tolerance levels of subjects with regard to their tinnitus," concludes Dr. Maria Kleinstuber of the Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy division at JGU.

At the same time, another interesting result was produced with regard to the preferred method of therapy. A significant number of subjects were initially skeptical with regard to the internet-based therapy concept and expressed a preference for the group therapy course. However, they were randomly assigned to the groups. To everyone's surprise it turned out on the completion of treatment that there was no difference in the effectiveness of the two strategies. "This means that the internet-based therapy concept produced as positive a result as group therapy despite the initial skepticism," says Kleinstuber. Initial evaluations indicate that the effects of both therapy forms were still persisting after six months.

The authors of the study propose that internet-based forms of therapy should be increasingly used in the psychotherapeutic treatment of tinnitus patients. Furthermore, they call for additional research on patients' skepticism of internet-based therapy, particularly in view of the long waiting times and the lack of outpatient forms of therapy.

###

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Here is the original post:
Internet-based therapy relieves persistent tinnitus

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jan Zverina jzverina@sdsc.edu 858-534-5111 University of California - San Diego

On a January evening in 2011, Egypt with a population of 80 million, including 23 million Internet users vanished from cyberspace after its government ordered an Internet blackout amidst anti-government protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The following month, the Libyan government, also under siege, imposed an Internet "curfew" before completely cutting off access for almost four days.

To help explain exactly how these governments disrupted the Internet, a team of scientists led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego conducted an analysis based largely on the drop in a specific subset of observable Internet traffic that is a residual product of malware. Many types of malicious software or network activity generate unsolicited traffic in attempting to compromise or infect vulnerable machines. This traffic "pollution" is commonly referred to as Internet background radiation (IBR) and is ubiquitously observable on most publicly accessible Internet links.

The analysis marks the first time that this malware-generated traffic pollution was used to analyze Internet censorship and/or network outages, and the researchers believe this novel methodology could be adopted on a wider scale to create an automated early warning system to help detect such Internet reachability problems in the future.

"We actually used something that's generally regarded as bad traffic pollution due to malware for a beneficial purpose, specifically to improve our understanding of geopolitical censorship behavior," said K.C. Claffy, CAIDA's founder and principal investigator for the research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Added Emile Aben, part of the research team and a system architect with the Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), an independent organization based in The Netherlands that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination: "We believe that research such as this has security relevance and implications for every nation in the world."

Specifically, the research team including scientists in Italy and The Netherlands used UC San Diego's Network Telescope, which consists of a globally routed segment of Internet address space that carries almost no legitimate Internet traffic. Also known as a 'darknet' because this subset of addresses does not have any devices assigned to them, the UC San Diego network telescope collects what could be considered "garbage" of the Internet, such as traffic due to mistyped IP (Internet protocol) addresses, malicious scanning of address space by hackers looking for vulnerable targets, backscatter from random source DoS (denial of service) attacks, and the automated spread of malicious software, including botnet and worm activity. The team also used other multiple sources of large-scale data available to the academic community, such as global routing signaling information.

"Using a combination of this data allowed us to narrow down which forms of Internet access disruption were implemented in a given region over time, but the malware-induced traffic helped us uncover things that the other data did not reveal," said Alberto Dainotti, who recently joined CAIDA from the University of Napoli Federico II in Naples, Italy, and served as lead author of the study, called Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship. "Among other insights, we detected what we believe were the Gaddafi government's attempts to test a firewall to conduct higher precision host-based blocking while they were executing the coarser approach of router-based disconnection."

"On a larger scale, we were able to analyze how regimes go about bringing down an entire country's Internet infrastructure," said Aben.

Read more:
Internet censorship revealed through the haze of malware pollution

The Internet is gaining users each day -- mostly in non-English speaking regions.

That's because the web's reach is spreading fast. While it took 30 years to get two billion people online, the Internet is now adding one billion new users every four years.

[More from Mashable: Twitter Now Available in Right-to-Left Languages]

Smartling, an enterprise translation management company, created this multilingual, interactive HTML5 infographic to show who is using the Internet today around the world. Smartling believes that to create a global web, the platform must speak more languages and businesses much adjust their practices to reach new audiences in non-English speaking markets.

90% of today's web users live in non-English speaking countries. Only 13% of the world's web users live in North America. In comparison, Asia is home to 45% of web users, Europe is home to 23%, South America is home to 10%, Africa is home to 6% and the Middle East is home to 3.3%.

[More from Mashable: How To Hire a Great Developer [FLOW CHART]]

The infographic highlights market share growth, ecommerce and mobile trends in South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The amount of Arabic on the Internet -- 3% of all sites in 2011 -- has increased by 2500% since 2000. Similarly, Russian's current 3% share is up 1800% in the last decade. China added more Internet users in three years than people in the U.S. And China, India, Iran, Nigeria and Russia have added the most new Internet users in the last five years.

You can view the infographic in nine different languages -- Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portugese and Spanish -- on Smartling's website.

What do you make of these statistics? Do you think the rise of non-English speakers presents a challenge or an opportunity? Let us know in the comments.

Read this article:
Is There Too Much English on the Internet? [INFOGRAPHIC]

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) Iran's supreme leader ordered Wednesday the creation of an Internet oversight agency that includes top military, security and political figures in the country's boldest attempt yet to control the web.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the Supreme Council of Cyberspace will be tasked with preventing harm to Iranians who go online, state TV reported.

The report did not spell out specifically the kind of dangers that the council would tackle. But officials have in the past described two separate threats: computer viruses created by Iran's rivals aimed at sabotaging its industry, particularly its controversial nuclear program, and a "culture invasion" aimed at undermining the Islamic Republic.

Khamenei's statement follows ambitious plans announced by officials to create homegrown alternatives for Internet staples like Google, which would in effect make it unnecessary for many Iranian web users to visit any site based outside the country's borders.

The cyberspace council will be headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and includes powerful figures in the security establishment such as the intelligence chief, the commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, and the country's top police chief.

It also includes the speaker of parliament, state media chiefs, government ministers in charge of technology-oriented portfolios, and several cyber experts.

"Given the need to make constant plans to protect (Iranian users) from harm resulting from (the Internet) requires a concentrated center for policy-making, decision-making and coordination in the country's cyberspace," Khamenei said in his decree.

Khamenei's order for creation of the council follows a series of high-profile crackdowns on cyberspace including efforts to block opposition sites and setting up special teams for what Iran calls its "soft war" counter-measures against the West and allies.

Iran has blamed Israel and the U.S. for Stuxnet, the powerful virus that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities and other industrial sites in 2010. Tehran acknowledged the malicious software affected a limited number of centrifuges a key component in nuclear fuel production. But Iran has said its scientists discovered and neutralized the malware before it could cause serious damage.

Tehran's perception of threats extends beyond viruses, however.

See the rest here:
Iran's leader sets up Internet control group

06-03-2012 12:38 Cut part of Dream High 2 ep 12 with Nana, Siwoo and Hong Joo

Excerpt from:
Dream High 2 (ep 12 cut) Hyorin