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After a surge in measles cases in the United States in 1989, 1990, and 1991, Congress passed a budget bill that included the introduction of a program called Vaccines for Children, which would offer free preventative shots to children who were uninsured.
The program was a huge success. It helped increase childhood vaccination rates, and nationally, around 90 percent of children now receive immunizations against diseases like measles and polio. Today, the program covers 14 vaccines, and in the period since it was introduced, overall vaccination rates have prevented hundreds of millions of illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths in children.
However, Vaccines for Children has not created universal access to these medications, and a vaccination gap remains between children who are insured and those who don’t have any healthcare, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data shows. Among children born in 2023 and 2023, those who had private insurance were more likely to be up to date on their vaccines by their second birthday than those who were uninsured or eligible for Medicaid, according to the National Immunization Survey data published last week. Only 79.3 percent of uninsured kids receive a polio vaccine, for example, compared with 96.1 percent of privately insured children.
“It hasn’t changed a lot over the past few years,” says Holly Hill, a medical officer in the Immunization Services Division at the CDC, who conducted the analysis. “Each year we’ve looked, we’ve seen big disparities among kids who don’t have insurance or something other than private insurance and the ones who do. It continues to be an issue.”
Similarly, she says, the data shows that kids living below the poverty line, regardless of insurance status, are less likely to be vaccinated. “It points towards access issue or payment issues.” There are no indications that uninsured or poor families are more likely to be vaccine hesitant, and decline vaccinations, she says.
The Vaccines for Children is intended to target some of those access issues, by ensuring that insurance coverage or cost does not stand in the way of vaccination. However, some challenges still exist: While vaccinations are free under the program, providers can charge an administrative fee for the process of delivering the shot. In addition, doctors have to opt into the program, follow separate record keeping procedures than other vaccinations, and report the doses they deliver back to their state health departments—which some physicians find to be too big of a hassle. New parents may also be unaware that these free vaccination programs even exist, Hill says, and it might help to increase distribution of information in hospitals or other locations new parents frequent.
Hill’s new analysis of National Immunization Survey, however, does find the number of children who did not receive any vaccines remained steady at 1.3 percent. “We’re not seeing an increase in the proportion of kids with no vaccines.” Less than one percent of privately insured children had no vaccinations, and 7.4 percent of uninsured children had no vaccinations.
For the first time, the survey also asked about the flu shot, and found that only around half of children had received it. “It came in last in terms of coverage,” Hill says. “It should be an area of focus more so than in the past. It was a disappointing finding.”
The flu shot also had the biggest gap between privately insured and uninsured children: Only 34.7 percent of uninsured children had received a flu vaccine, compared with 68.5 percent of those on private insurance and 48.2 percent on Medicaid.
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Are The Series X Halo Infinite Limited Edition Bundles Still Available?
Are the Series X Halo Infinite limited edition bundles still available?
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A lot of Xbox players are extremely disappointed that they didn’t get the chance to own one.
We’re talking about the Halo Infinite limited edition Xbox Series X, which is really hard to get.
The only way of getting one now is if you buy from someone, or if you catch a retailer restock.
Microsoft is also informing players when they can buy more, but you have to hurry if you want it.
If we think about gaming and 2023, usually, the first thing to come to mind is the new generation consoles that everyone has struggled to get their hands on all year long.
This year was also marked the 20th anniversary of Xbox, and also the big launch of the long-awaited Halo Infinite.
And yes, of course, Microsoft looked for a way to incorporate all these three milestones into one product, thus creating the Halo Infinite Xbox Series X bundles.
It goes without saying that these consoles were so desired, and received such praise and demand that literally hundreds of people went and bought them at insane prices on eBay and other platforms.
We’re now way past Halo Infinite’s launch, and many gamers are still looking for this unique collectible bundle, hoping that they can still get their hands on one.
Harder said than done, as you might imagine, as purchasing an anniversary Xbox Series X is almost impossible nowadays.
To quickly answer the question in the title, unfortunately, no, there aren’t any Halo Infinite Series X available at this moment, except if you buy from someone that already has.
But, there are still ways in which you can acquire one if you tap into the right sources and you’re fast on your feet.
Microsoft sent players Halo Infinite Xbox Series X email invitesThere are, however, players that got really lucky and, when they checked their emails, spotted an invitation coming straight from Xbox, telling them they can now purchase the limited edition bundle.
For the time being, this is one of the easiest ways to get your hands on an Xbox Series X console, especially this particular model, which is so desirable.
But this isn’t the first time Microsoft helps players out this way, it’s actually the second batch of email invites for this limited Xbox Series X model.
Microsoft Store is sending emails for limited Xbox Series X again, but it’s for the Halo Infinite model. @Wario64 chúng tôi BeyondTheGrave (@BeyondGrave) December 21, 2023
If you also checked your inbox and found nothing, make sure you also check the spam and junk folders, just to be o the safe side.
Expert tip:
How can I also sign up to receive emails from Xbox?We’re glad you asked because the answer is pretty simple and accessible for everyone. Basically, all you have to do is sign up for Microsoft Store’s mailing list.
Just head on over to any page of the Store and wait a few seconds for the pop-up to appear. Once that happens, input your name and email address, your location, and press Sign Up.
Pretty easy right? However, some gamers are saying that there is an extra step worth doing if you would like to improve your chances of receiving this important email.
We can’t prove that it works 100%, but gamers that have taken this extra step are reporting that they’ve received the message shortly after.
Keep a constant eye on retailer retock schedulesTo further increase the odds of you landing one of these limited edition consoles, be sure to monitor restocks for the major distributors.
When we say that, we mean places such as Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Game Stop, and of course, the Microsoft Store.
Indeed, it is hard to score a Halo Infinite Xbox Series X, but not impossible. It’s all about perseverance and making the right moves in key moments.
We just wish that there was something that these big companies could do in order to eliminate scalping, but until that happens, if it ever will, we just have to pick up the scraps left by these people.
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4 Myths About Google Panda That Are Still Doing The Rounds
Google Panda was an update introduced in 2011, aimed at preventing low-quality content from gaming its way into the top ranking slots on SERPs. How Google feels about SEO is open to question, but we can say for sure that when you could just pump out reams of garbage content stuffed with keywords and get your site above the fold on the first page, they hated it. Panda’s whole purpose was to make search rank correlate with quality.
Which is a good thing.
The workings of Google’s algorithms is always proprietary. We keep trying to guess; they keep changing the rules. As a result, there are beliefs about the way Panda actually works and even what it’s for that have clung on for years. Some of them aren’t true anymore; some of them were never true; all of them are myths that could lead you to waste your time and even potentially damage your search rank.
#1 – There Will be a Panda Update SoonThere sure will. Tomorrow, in fact – and the day after. In March of 2013, Google announced that Panda would become Panda “Everflux”, integrated with the basic search algorithm and updated constantly.
This myth comes from the impact of the initial Panda rollout, when the desired effect of Panda – spammy sites tumbled down the rankings – were accompanied by numerous undesired outcomes including many scraped sites actually rising up the rankings. In short, the result of the initial Panda rollout was chaos. People look to the likelihood of a “new” Panda update in deep concern in case all that happens again.
The worst downside of this myth is that we’re all like sportspeople taking our eyes off the ball to look at the (non-existent) UFO. There are important Google updates that are changing the way online business is conducted, and because they’re not labeled “Panda” we’re all looking the other way. Last April’s mobile-friendly update hit more sites than Panda (or Penguin, come to that) but it caused less of a stir. We’ve learned to live with Panda, and it’s helped a lot of us by making content marketing and search optimization a lot easier to align.
#2 – The Duplicate Content Filter is Part of PandaThis one is just totally untrue. It’s common, though, because they aim at similar results – rewarding quality – and they came in at the same time.
In a Twitter discussion with Marie Haynes, Google’s John Mueller said categorically that “Those are 2 separate & independent things.”
That seems pretty final.
But it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get slapped for having a bunch of duplicate content. Google has gotten a little more sophisticated at dealing with duplicate content over the years – after all, nearly every site has some. But large amounts will open you up to loss of traffic. It’s not technically a penalty. It sure feels like one when your traffic nosedives, but when you fix it and your site gets recrawled, the traffic should recover. That doesn’t happen with Panda penalties.
There’s also a big difference between the effects of duplicate content within your site and duplicated content from elsewhere on the web: one dilutes traffic and the other sets red flags flying at Google HQ. E-commerce sites are particularly at risk here because they have thousands of product pages that might be using the manufacturer’s product descriptions or generic placeholders. Canonical tags for duplicate pages and your own copy are the cure.
#3 – Too Much UGC Will Attract PandaUser-generated content used to be the Holy Grail. It’s social proof, it’s content for free, and it’s proof of deep engagement. People don’t contribute content to websites they don’t care about.
Post Panda, that began to change. And now SEOs are recommending that clients remove all the user-generated content from their websites.
Once again, this is an overreaction based on misunderstanding what Panda’s all about. It’s not about user-generated, old, thin, whatever. It’s about quality. Some UGC is very high quality, while some is people telling you how you won’t believe how they made money online with this simple trick. Too much of that second kind can actually go against you, as Google’s John Mueller explains:
“Another thing… which is common with forums is low-quality user-generated content. If you have ways of recognizing this kind of content, and blocking it from indexing, it can make it much easier for algorithms to review the overall quality of your website.”
The alleged UGC price is even worse if your site is a forum or acts like one. In cases like Stack Overflow and Quora where almost all the content is user-generated, what is the risk that Google will hunt down spammy UGC? This very thing happened to Mozilla back in 2013.
Mueller recommends cleaning house before you get hit with a penalty:
“The same methods can be used to block forum spam from being indexed for your forum. Depending on the forum, there might be different ways of recognizing that automatically, but it’s generally worth finding automated ways to help you keep things clean & high-quality, especially when a site consists of mostly user-generated content.”
It’s worth revisiting Mueller’s point about high-quality UGC: when you collate it right UGC campaigns can be among the best forms of content in Google’s eyes, as well as being inspiring and effective for users.
Many forum sites run on a question-and-answer basis. One effective way of keeping poor content out of the bots’ claws without messing up your site’s running is to no-index pages that have questions but no answers or that have only posts from the OP of the thread. When useful content builds, those pages can be indexed.
#4 – All Pages Need to be High QualityThis is probably the biggest myth about Panda. That every single page needs to be perfect for the site to rank at all, and if there’s anything on there that Panda doesn’t like, the whole site will suffer.
In fact, Panda is sometimes applied in quite a granular fashion and generally poor-quality penalties will hit individual pages, not the whole site. The site’s main pages can still rank well even if some of that site’s content doesn’t.
What you’re looking for is the overall picture Google gets of your site. If you have an awesome site with a few bad pages, Panda might hit those pages but your site will rank well just the same. The other way around won’t work out so well. Yoast’s Joost de Valk explains:
“Panda usually affects your site because you have too many low quality pages as a proportion of your overall number of pages.”
Identifying pages that need to be fixed is a matter of checking in your analytics tool to find pages with low traffic and high bounce. Apply common sense: some pages might be really useful for the few visitors they get. Some might have what looks like a high bounce rate because visitors get what they need fast and leave.
ConclusionPanda is a different beast when you look at it close up. Far from being capricious, Panda’s demands seem fairly reasonable when you know what they actually are and how to work with them. Don’t let myths about certain types of content, content length, or some impending Pandageddon update stop you from making your site Panda-friendly!
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Meg Whitman And Hp: Most Likely To Succeed
As we look back on HP over the last decade or so, we see a company that has moved to the #1 or #2 position in each of its chosen markets, despite the fumbles of the last four COEs.Current CEO Meg Whitman is different: she wasn’t selected on narrow criteria like Fiorina or Hurd, or in the panic like chúng tôi was a more measured choice with skill set uniquely suited to the problems facing HP.
To examine her chances at HP, let’s first take a trip down memory lane at the past four CEOs and what each has done to damage HP, and then match Whitman’s background to the task at hand to see if it is a fit. I think you’ll find, as I did, she is the perfect CEO for HP at this critical time.
It is interesting to note that until Meg Whitman it appeared that every CEO wanted to exceed their predecessor in terms of how much they unintentionally hurt the company.We’ll start with Lewis Platt, the last internal CEO hire and work forward.
Lewis Platt was a solid HP player but, similar to John Akers (the only CEO fired from IBM), he was unable to see the trees for the forest and was unable to cut, what had become a lumbering company with massive entitlements, down to fighting weight.
Carly Fiorina, who was brought in to shake the company up, was able to cut and provide a vision but she was almost like royalty and didn’t take care of her people. In addition she wanted to move on to a political position and fancied herself as the first woman US president – and started working aggressively toward that goal before finishing at HP.
In what appeared to be an attempt to forestall her termination she undertook a dangerous merger with Compaq, alienating the founding families and creating one of the most damaging proxy fights in the tech industry. Not to mention a mess of overlapping products and lines, many of which still exist today.
Mark Hurd was a cutter, having recognized that to make financial analysts happy you could constantly cut costs as long as you held revenue. He’d actually gotten his tires slashed at NCR before joining HP for similar behavior and was apparently deeply hated by the HP rank and file.
He crippled HP marketing, R&D, and almost put the company so deep into a hole that it couldn’t dig chúng tôi was fired for falsifying expense reports in an alleged attempt to cover up an affair with another HP employee who was also a soft porn actress (you can’t make this stuff up).He left with employee loyalty scores lower than I’ve ever seen them before.
Leo Apotheker was a fast hire to try to cover up the HP board’s bungling of the Hurd termination. It was consistent with a strategy that mirrored the one that killed Sun: to turn HP, a hardware company, into a software company, with a likely similar outcome. Leo could neither speak well on stage or individually to analysts and while he actually often said the right things he wasn’t at all qualified to run HP.
In what has to be one of the worst bone-headed moves ever he panicked after HP’s signature tablet sold poorly and nearly destroyed the $1.2B Palm acquisition. He then appeared to massively overpay for Autonomy – a company that Oracle indicated they’d turned down for a fraction of what HP paid.
To add to what became an historic number of mistakes he announced HP was thinking of spinning out its PC unit which, after a decade of saying HP would never do this, torpedoed trust in the company and nearly cratered HP chúng tôi single handedly did more damage to HP in his 8 months than any competitor of record over the same period that I can recall.
The company that was left after this mess of different strategies, self-dealing practices, and bureaucratic bungling was a mess internally and in desperate need of rebuilding.
So the HP that Whitman inherited was a chúng tôi still was dominant or near dominant in most of its markets but still hadn’t reconciled all of the products from the Compaq merger. R&D was at or below survival levels, employee satisfaction was at an all-time low, and infighting (particularly in the PC unit where the head has been in the process of leaving the unit for 3 years) at an all-time high. One recent billion-dollar acquisition (Palm) was in shambles, and the company’s board was brand new, thanks to the Hurd scandal.
Oh, and to add to all of this, corporate marketing was in turmoil (having been cut to near nothing and having revolving door executive management), and trust in the company was at an all time low.
Servers are in good shape, services have been heavily cut, software is in mid transition and reported to be a mess, PCs have a leadership uncertainty problem, and networking (thanks largely to the 3Com acquisition) is hitting Cisco harder than expected. Printing and Imaging, while dominant, is seeing declining growth and is missing the move to electronic books and media.
Finally customers were fleeing the company, thanks to the handling of the PC unit and the CEO revolving door, and because most of HP’s partners were now competitors or, worse, at war with HP. Oracle and Cisco had been changed from partners to competitors with Oracle wanting HP dead and Microsoft (thanks to the Palm games and some screwy stuff between them and the HP PC unit), was treating HP more as a competitor than a partner.
HP needed a turn around, which is similar to the transition phase when a company moves from startup to corporate chúng tôi Whitman’s background at eBay speaks to this problem and she recognized the need to get the company back into growth mode and away from the crisis of the hour.
Apple Jab At Google Likely At Wwdc
Apple is expected to reveal its homegrown replacement for the Google Maps application, built into iOS 6, as a highlight of the Worldwide Developers Conference opening Monday.
Attendees are also likely to get a peek at that next-generation iOS, which will reportedly launch in the fall for select devices, including a brand new iPhone handset.
Apple’s anticipated break from Google Maps would be yet another sign of the growing battle between Apple and Google for domination in the mobile space.
Since the original iPhone was introduced in 2007, Google Maps has supplied the iPhone’s built-in mapping and location capabilities. But Apple is reportedly looking to control its own mapping functions as location-based services and features become baked into more mobile apps.
Location on the iPhone is big and promises to get bigger as people increasingly consult their smartphones for local restaurant reviews, finding the nearest car mechanic, tourism tips, and movie times.
Map BuildingApple is wary of leaving such a key component for the iPhone in the hands of one of its biggest rivals and is getting ready to dump Google Maps, The Wall Street Journal reports. Over the past three years Apple has purchased three mapping companies: Placebase, Poly9, and C3 Technologies. Apple in 2010 also revealed in a letter to Congress that it was working on a traffic conditions service for the iPhone — something Google Maps already offers Android users.
Apple in fall 2011 replaced the iPhone’s Google-made geocoder — a piece of software that turns longitude and latitude into a point on a map — with its own technology, according to the Journal.
Then, in early 2012, the first fruits of Apple’s homegrown map effort turned up in iPhoto for iOS.
What Will Google Do?As for Google, critics believe the company will suffer if its business relationship with Apple disintegrates. Many Apple watchers believe the iPhone maker is trying to wean its mobile users off other Google services in iOS. Apple’s digital voice assistant, Siri, for example could encourage more people to give up using Google search — the default search engine for the Safari browser on iOS. Siri can supply data from a variety of sources such as Yelp for local information and Wolfram Alpha for facts and figures.
The majority of Google’s mobile traffic comes from the iPhone, the Journal reports. So if fewer iPhone users turn to Google for information, that means the search giant will see less potential ad revenue and user data from mobile users, an ever-expanding user base hungry for online information.
One thing that Apple probably won’t, or at least can’t, replace is the iOS app for Google-owned YouTube. There simply isn’t a credible replacement for the most popular video site on the Web.
Will You Switch?But will iPhone users accept Apple’s homegrown alternative? Google Maps is very popular thanks to features such as Place Pages with local business information and Street View’s immersive 360-degree photos of locations around the world.
And Google Maps promises to only get better. Google on Wednesday revealed new improvements to Google Maps including 3D flyovers and offline maps access. Google Maps will also be getting more Street View images using a special camera that can be carried by a person on foot, adding to Google’s existing Street View images taken by a fleet of cars and special tricycles.
If Apple does dump Google Maps, the company may also choose not to make a lot of noise about it. Apple may opt instead to discuss potential new features of the iOS Maps app or perhaps a new look, while avoiding issues surrounding its business relationship with Google.
Regardless, many critics and pundits will be waiting to see if Apple on Monday offers a glimpse of what the Maps application will look like in the next version of iOS.
Connect with Ian Paul (@ianpaul) on Twitter and Google+, and with Today@PCWorld on Twitter for the latest tech news and analysis.
Meal Kits Are Full Of Wasteful Packaging—But They Might Still Beat The Grocery Store
If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’ve probably heard of Blue Apron. It’s just one of the many meal kit delivery services that have sprung up over the last seven years, delivering preassembled meal kits to the homes of their subscribers. Think of them as Lunchables for adults who are allowed to use the stove. These meal kits have garnered criticism for their prices, and also for their environmental impact: after all, each preportioned ingredient comes wrapped in its own packaging, much of which is plastic.
A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan offers some surprising results: when compared with the average grocery store meal, five nights of Blue Apron meals purchased by the research team have a far lower environmental impact—33 percent lower, in fact. Blue Apron did not contribute to the study financially, and was chosen as a representative of meal kits more generally. The study authors state that the company’s packaging practices parallel those of other meal kit services, although may not be exactly the same.
“Meal kits represent a fundamental shift in how food is supplied,” the authors write in the paper. “Meals are pre-portioned for consumers and delivered to their doorsteps, circumventing the process of consumers acquiring and portioning ingredients for a meal themselves, but still providing the experience of cooking their meal at home.”
These kinds of kits aren’t accessible to everybody: they can be pricey, especially for folks with special dietary needs, and not everyone can be home for delivery (or receive their purchases in a safe place). And it’s not like they’re perfect or even environmentally friendly: they’re just better for the planet than buying identical meals at the store, which should tell you how inefficient and environmentally damaging the grocery industry is.
In the study, researchers Brent Heard and Shelie Miller, along with undergraduate colleagues, received five Blue Apron meals for two: cheeseburgers, salmon, chicken, pasta, and salad. Then, they went to the grocery store and bought all the ingredients to make those meals again.
“We took kitchen scales and weighed the food and the packaging,” says Heard. Then, they did the same with all the stuff bought at the grocery store. Of course, at a grocery store, hamburger buns aren’t sold in packs of two, but packs of six. The same idea extends to other ingredients. To compensate for this difference, the study assumed that some of those buns and other unused ingredients would go to waste, in line with estimates about different kinds of food waste from other peer-reviewed sources.
The researchers employed several common metrics to estimate the impact of each meal and the packaging its components came in: greenhouse gas emissions from the field to the landfill (known as comparative lifecycle assessment) along with the same for land and water use, as well as water pollution. With the exception of one meal (the salmon), all were significantly lower impact than the same meal from the grocery store.
The difference in food waste was a big factor, Miller says. “When people were talking about meal kits, they focused a lot on the plastics and the packaging that were generated,” she says, “but they weren’t really focusing on the whole lifecycle.” In her previous studies of meal kits, she says, many people expressed a lot of guilt over the packaging, which usually includes plastic cold-packs and insulation to keep food fresh. It’s true that meal kits have significantly more of this single-use stuff, Miller says, but there’s a substantial tradeoff in terms of food waste and the amount of energy expended in getting the food to consumers. The trip from the grocery store or the delivery center to your house is commonly known as the “last mile.” A direct-to-consumer model means that the last mile trip is more efficient, since one vehicle generally has to drive fewer places to make the deliveries than each meal kit user going to the grocery store and buying the ingredients for only their own meal.
All this produced a surprising finding: “Meal kits were actually better overall than grocery store meals when you take into account the full system, including food waste,” says Miller. Given that her original motivation for conducting the study was “anecdotal conversations of individuals who were feeling guilty” because they were certain the packaging made such meals more wasteful, this finding came as quite the surprise.
We know that almost half of the food that the U.S.produces is wasted, which has impacts on everything from food security to climate change. With all the research out there on plastic pollution, it might seem like excess packaging would outweigh other concerns—after all, wasted food is biodegradable. A rotting head of broccoli will release greenhouse gases if it molders in a landfill, but it’s not going to stick around and continue polluting the way a piece of plastic will. That just illustrates how limited our view of the food system can be, Miller says: we rarely consider the full lifecycle of the products we rely on. “It really does go to this idea of thinking through as consumers what we actually use,” she says.
The fact that preassembled meal kits have less of an environmental impact than store-bought meals, despite their higher packaging load, also illustrates how messed up our food system is. Grocery stores themselves, which frequently overstock to give that feeling of abundance to their shelves and make sure everything is on hand for consumers, are a big contributor to the food waste problem.
This isn’t to say that everyone should subscribe to a meal kit service to save the planet; you may not be able to fit them into your lifestyle, and chances are you can make choices on your own that are as good or better. If you’re financially and logistically capable of doing so, you can lower the environmental impact of your diet by buying locally produced food, going car-free for as many shopping trips as possible, and cutting down on animal products, which are the biggest greenhouse gas offenders. And when you have the choice, go for foods that have been through less processing and have less packaging: a can of lentil soup is easy to enjoy, but lentils in a bulk bin will likely have created fewer emissions on their journey to your shopping cart.
Not everyone has access to these foods or the time to prepare them. But cutting down on food waste is also crucial, Heard says, and a great way to do this is to meal plan. That ensures that even if you do have to buy bigger portions, you can use them up efficiently—which saves you money, too. Another step we can all take is to stick with the common wisdom of not going to the grocery store hungry: you’re more likely to make an impulse purchase that may go to waste later.
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