Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

YouTube turns 5 years old and this is my third installment to celebrate YouTube's fifth birthday.  This blog post presents the video called Y ouTube Turns 5: My YouTube Story . For me, all of this started when I was using a camcorder at the 2006 NFL Draft and interviewed my friend Oakland Raiders Legend and Stanford Hall of Famer Michael Dotterer as we were walking to 21 Club restaurant in New York City. On the way, Michael said "you're a vlogger, You should start video-blogging" or words to that effect. He also mentioned an online show called Rocketboom.   That was here : Later that year I was lucky enough to attend Vloggercon in San Francisco, and met a lot of interesting people including Irina Slutsky and Schlomo Rabinowitz, who produced the event : The stars of Vloggercon were Amanda Congdon and Andrew Michael Baron the founders of Rocketboom. While not YouTube stars, Amanda and Andrew's daily video news show with videos hosted on their ow...

This blogger just received a letter from an unnamed source and written by Jeff Leung of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in San Francisco that announces a formal economic relationship between Hong Kong and The United States beneficial to California wine makers. The bottom line is that for winemakers in America, and particularly in California, Hong Kong has made doing business there much easier. US wine exports to Hong Kong totaled $49 million in 2009-2010. The U.S. is Hong Kong's fourth largest wine importer; America wants to be number one. The Secretary of Commerce of the United States, Gary Locke, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Rita Lau, in Hong Kong. The "Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in Wine-related Businesses" (MOU) was signed between Hong Kong and the United States on Monday, May 17, 2010. Because of the MOU, Hong Kong will facilitate in the pairing of wines with regi...

BRT Along Geary in San Francisco  AC Transit has embarked on a program to construct Bus Rapid Transit in Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro and the East Bay. Bus Rapid Transit is best described as combining the "dedicated lane" advantages of light rail systems with the cheaper equipment purchase and maintenance costs of buses to have a new kind of urban transit system. Bus Rapid Transit has become "the thing" Worldwide; there are scores of examples of successful programs and systems. While AC Transit has worked for four years to advance Bus Rapid Transit, the latest round of voting by elected officials in Berkeley proves that more education is required. In Berkeley, the City Council was under the impression Bus Rapid Transit would harm deliveries to businesses along Shattuck Avenue. In the last blog post this blogger presented a photo where a Bus Rapid Transit system was in the middle of Shattuck Avenue and asked how such a configuration would harm busine...

According to the City of Oakland, Ca, Yahoo! Cleveland Heights Neighbors Group , two African American men attempted a home invasion on the 500 block of Montclair 5 AM, May 10th. This is the Oakland Yahoo forum report: Sorry (and scared) to report another home invasion robbery attempt. My neighbor just informed me that there was a home invasion and robbery attempt at the house next to him. This occurred on the 500 block of Montclair Saturday Morning at about 5:00 am, the suspects are two young, African American males (no other description). The main house is a rental and the owner and his family live in the in-law downstairs. The suspects gained entry through a back upper window by stepping up on a garbage can (not sure if the window was locked or not). The upper unit was empty, so nothing was taken. The owners downstairs heard the noises, came up to investigate and the suspects fled. Unfortunately that was not the only crime of that kind; note the word "another....

Mark Hyman, MD recently wrote an article which can be found on Huffingtonpost.com, which outlined how Americans have been convinced by skewed scientific research to believe that antidepressant medications are an effective treatment for depression. Here is what he had to say: "Here's some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don't work. What's even more depressing is that the pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work. As a physician, this is frightening to me. Depression is among the most common problems seen in primary-care medicine and soon will be the second leading cause of disability in this country. The study I'm talking about was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. It found that drug companies selectively publish studies on antidepressants. They have published nearly all the studies that show benefit -- but almost none of the studies that show these d...

Most of us have had that "OH NO! I think I have that!" moment, after poking around online, trying to figure out the cause of our vague physical symptoms. A 2004 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 79 percent of Internet users -- roughly 95 million Americans -- have researched health information online. People now have access to incredibly complex medical information, with little ability to sift through it or interpret it accurately. The abundance of health information available online, valid or not, has contributed to what the media have coined ‘cyberchondria’ (researching diseases on the internet, and then worrying that you have the symptoms of that disease.) These people are often frustrated when their self-diagnosis does not prompt their doctor to order the tests and/or medications they feel necessary. Yet after getting checked out by a doctor and getting a clean bill of health, most of us feel reassured, and are then ready to move on. For hypoch...

Berkeley AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit The latest phase of the AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit issue is that Berkeley's City Council's 4-2-2 vote that effectively reject the kind of study that AC Transit wanted to do in connection with the environmental report for a dedicated-lane Bus Rapid Transit Route was confusing. The vote, which got 4 yes decisions, just one less than five needed, reflected Berkeley's overall lack of understanding of what Bus Rapid Transit was and the many ways that it could be done. There was concern about a hypothetical loss of parking spaces when BRT becomes a reality. However, AC Transit did make it very clear that any parking spaces that are displaced to mark off the dedicated bus - only lane would be mitigated. AC Transit told the East Bay Express that it is ready to build parking lots and to work closely with these people who are concerned to find solutions that work for them. Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland’s At-Large member of the City Counc...