sábado, 5 de abril de 2014

Integrated Biometrics: A conversation with CEO Steve Thies

 

 

By Adam Vrankulj

steve Thies

April 4, 2014 - 

Integrated Biometrics is a biometric sensor provider, which boasts super-thin sensors and high resolution images.

The company’s sensors use a patented technology, which relies on a thin film to capture images and is flexible in terms of integrations, as the sensors themselves have such a small physical footprint. BiometricUpdate.com had a chance to chat with CEO Steve Thies about the technology, the company and the future.

“[Our sensors capture fingerprints] from a real image of the finger,” Thies said. “Once you put your finger on our film, an electric field runs through the film and illuminates the film to produce a high resolution image of your finger – close to 1500 dpi.”

According to Thies, Integrated’s film sensor with a TFT camera is less than 300 microns thick.

“We’ve got good adoption programs with our finger FAP 45 scanners,” Thies said. “We’ve got one that’s called the Watson and one that’s called the Sherlock, and both of those products are being accepted in both domestic and international markets.”

Currently, the company’s products are predominantly aimed at the government space, though Thies says the consumer space is something the company is currently watching closely.

“What we produce today is our FBI-certified scanners in FAP 30 and FAP 45 sizes, with a couple of other sizes on our drawing board for 2014,” Thies said. “We think our technology is ideally suited for high-value, high-security transactions.”

“Our TFT-film combination is dynamite for mobile applications.”

Reported previously in BiometricUpdate.com, the company recently launched its IBtap area fingerprint sensor, which has flexible physical properties, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. According to the company, the IBtap flexible fingerprint sensor is the world’s only non-optical FBI certified fingerprint sensor. 

Due to the nature of Integrated Biometrics’ film sensor technology, it is relatively finger-agnostic, working with both moist and dry fingers, young and old fingers and even dirty fingers.

“We call our sensor the smartest scanner because the technology adapts to the finger you put on the sensor,” Thies said.

As CEO of the company, Thies works closely with the company’s CTO, as well as the operations and business development teams. He also works closely with investors and is charged with ensuring everyone at the organization is working on Integrated Biometrics strategic initiatives.

The company produces its sensors in South Korea, but also has employees in the United States According to Thies, there are approximately ten employees in the United States and another twenty in South Korea.

As for future steps, Thies says the company is looking to add to its team, and increase its distribution around the world.

“Biometrics is all about having high performance identity, and you can’t make data better if you don’t start with data itself,” Thies said.

 

Integrated Biometrics- A conversation with CEO Steve Thies - BiometricUpdate.com 2014-04-05 12-40-22

Half of North Korea Misses Windows XP Upgrade Deadline

 

Logotipo do Windows 8 - Resultados da busca Yahoo Search - Mozilla Firefox 2014-03-26 06.11.36

North Koreans are among those who can’t abandon Windows XP by any means and new statistics provided for the month of March 2014 come to confirm that Microsoft has a really tough mission to convince local users to upgrade.
The clock is ticking for Windows XP and end of support will be announced in just three days, but one in two computers in North Korea is still running the operating system launched 13 years ago.
StatCounter data for March 2014 shows that Windows XP currently has a 49.94 percent share in the country, so it’s clearly the dominant operating system, despite Microsoft efforts to emphasize the risks of staying with an unsupported OS version.
Windows 7 obviously comes next with 32.58 percent, while Windows 8, Vista, and Mac OS X are following closely. Almost nobody heard about Windows 8.1, as only 1.94 percent of the computers in the country are running it, so it’s hard to believe that those moving from Windows XP to a newer OS version (if someone really does that) would actually choose Windows 8.1 as their next OS version.
There’s no doubt that such a large market share for Windows XP is bad news for Microsoft, as the company has invested a fortune to make people aware that support for the operating system launched in 2001 is coming to an end.
The company has often been accused for relying on so-called “scare tactics” by warning users that their computers could get hacked if they do not upgrade, but today’s statistics confirm that only a few actually got the message and trusted Microsoft’s words.
The April 8 end of support will leave millions of computers unprotected, as worldwide a total of 27 percent of desktop PCs are still running Windows XP. While there’s still time to upgrade to a newer and more secure operating system for end users, organizations would still need a few more weeks or even months to complete the transition, so buying custom support might be a really good investment.
Microsoft has recently signed
a deal with the UK government to provided extended Windows XP support for the government’s computers, and the company is reportedly negotiating with authorities in some other countries to do the same thing until all local PCs are upgraded to a newer OS version. Custom support is usually offered for another 12 months, so everyone should be off Windows XP by this time next year.

Half of North Korea Misses Windows XP Upgrade Deadline 2014-04-05 10-29-54

From an open sewer to a jewel of the city: Aziza Chaouni on uncovering and restoring the Fez River

 

Blog_FF_AzizaChaouni

For much of the past 20 years, architect and engineer Aziza Chaouni has been battling to restore the Fez River, which winds through the city’s medina – Fez’s historic medieval center and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Heavily contaminated and covered over with concrete to contain the smell, the Fez River had been all but forgotten in recent decades. Not anymore: Chaouni has succeeded in uncovering the river, by working with the city’s water department since 2007, and she is now restoring and reconnecting the riverbanks with the rest of the city, while creating open, green public spaces, allowing the medina to breathe again. At TED2014, we asked her to tell the story of this extraordinary task.

How did you begin the task of uncovering the Fez River?

The whole story actually started as my thesis at Harvard. My thesis advisor told me to do something “that you feel passionate about and that could make a difference.” For years, I’d seen the river in my hometown being desecrated, polluted and filled up with trash and rats. It had become an open sewer and a massive trash yard at the core of the city.

The Fez medina has about 250,000 inhabitants, and all their untreated sewage went straight into the narrow river that runs through it. The river was also heavily contaminated by nearby crafts workshops and tanneries — with chemicals such as chromium 3, which is lethal. People working in the tanneries were getting skin cancer, and some of them were dying. It was terrible. Obviously the river started to stink, so people started building walls to block the view. Then, because it became a health hazard, they covered it with concrete starting in 2002. And because it was covered, people began using that open space as trash yard.

Actually, the first covering began in 1952, when Morocco was still a French protectorate, but it was for political reasons — so that French colonial power could easily enter the medina and control the population. Then, as the population grew and Morocco became independent, covering happened because of the stench.

In your Fellows talk at TED2014, you showed how the water feeds into both public fountains and those in private courtyards. Do people actually use that water? Were they getting sick?

Of course they were, especially from the toxic chemicals dumped in the river by craftsmen. It became dangerous to drink from a running fountain. Besides, a series of droughts and excessive extraction from the water table left little water available for the medina water network. By the 1980s, most of the fountains had become defunct, yet they had been central to its urban fabric. Imagine if Rome had no more running fountains! Can you imagine La Seine or the Thames being suddenly covered? The Fez River is smaller in scale, but the effect is similar: a central part of the city was amputated. When I witnessed all this, I was in college at Columbia University in New York at the time. I would have been 19. I was outraged; I wrote an article in the newspaper and I received hate mail, because of course it made the city look bad. At the time, I was an aspiring engineer. But due to my age and lack of experience, I was not taken seriously.

Pollution in the Fez river. Photo: Aziza Chaouni

Pollution in the Fez River. Photo: Aziza Chaouni

Contaminated water will also have been entering your food supply, your groundwater.

Of course! Yes! Yes and yes and repeatedly yes. It would pollute the water table, which feeds the most fertile agricultural basin of Morocco. But this didn’t upset anyone. Environmental protection is almost seen as a luxury in developing countries: economic development, health and education are understandably bigger priorities. It’s a different mentality in Morocco. I heard many times: “Look, we’re eating the food and we’re fine, hence  nothing’s wrong!”

Many people are eating food exported from Morocco.

I know. And of course it’s not just Morocco — in so many emerging countries, you have high levels of environmental pollution, but you just don’t know about it as there is not much control or accountability. But the point is that if you uncover such a large-scale environmental hazard, even as an architect, you feel outraged and want to do something about it. So I decided, for my thesis, to propose re-envisioning the medina if the river were to be cleaned and uncovered.

My thesis took a slightly different approach to what I’m doing now. You see, the medina of Fez used to boast one of the oldest universities in North Africa, the Quarawiyine, but after Morocco’s independence in 1956, the government established an American style campus outside the city, which symbolized modernity. The university’s move caused the entire cultural life of the city to fade away. In my thesis, I proposed building a university in the medina, with the various departments to occupy the urban voids along the river. These voids had been created when the river was covered: houses were destroyed to make way for the heavy machinery required. My vision was that, once uncovered, the river would serve as a pleasant green feature, and its banks would be used as a circulation system linking the departments. Classrooms would be located in nearby abandoned buildings. The university model was unusual and innovative: it would be one of a heterogeneous network of buildings embedded within the medina’s urban fabric.

For me, bringing back the water and the university represented a double win. The university idea hasn’t happened yet, but working on this thesis allowed me to start thinking about the potential of the river for the city and its inhabitants. Many ideas I developed back then became a solid departure point for the actual project, which I started in 2007 in collaboration with my then-partner Takako Tajima.

You’d been thinking about uncovering the Fez River for almost 10 years by then. How did the Fez River Project become a reality?

When Takako and I learned in 2007 that the city would finally be diverting and treating the medina’s sewage, we knew that with clean water, it would be possible to uncover the river and use its banks. We could create much-needed green, open space in the medina. It only has 43.5 square feet of green space per person, while UN standards recommend between 215 to 275 square feet per person.

Inside the medina, the uncovering of the river opened up new possibilities to restore the river banks as pedestrian pathways, reconnect the river banks to the city fabric and transform what used to be urban voids into green, open spaces. So we proposed three main interventions: a pedestrian plaza, a playground and a botanical garden. We used four main strategies: precisely placed interventions strategically phased to enhance water quality, remediate contaminated sites, create open spaces, and build on existing resources for economic development. These interventions had to benefit the population on several levels — social, environmental, economic, urban — and be resilient, so that it would still function regardless of changes in budget, political climate, and so on.

At the wider city scale, we needed to prevent the newly cleaned river water inside the medina from getting polluted upstream, so we recommended measures for improving regional water quality, too. Depending on soil geomorphology, levels of water pollution, adjacent urban fabric and ecological systems, we purposefully located various rehabilitation tactics like canal restorers, constructed wetlands, bank restoration and storm-water retention ponds.

Before: A portion of the Fez river before uncovering, the concrete plaza being used as a dump. The blue marks indicate the locaation of the river. Image: Aziza Chaouni

Before: A portion of the Fez River before its uncovering. The concrete plaza being used as a dump and the blue marks indicate the location of the river. Image: Aziza Chaouni

Now that the water is clean, is biodiversity coming back?

Not inside the medina, but downstream. The changes in biodiversity are definitely noticeable: the flora looks more healthy. Inside the medina, there’s now construction, and craftsmen have not completely stopped polluting some areas of the river and its banks. So it’s more of a long-term goal, but it will happen.

It sounds as though you met with a huge amount of resistance. Yet now, the Fez River Project is celebrated. How did this happen?

The moment things changed was when we won two very important design prizes, called the Holcim Award for Sustainability in 2007. It’s one of the most lucrative prizes — up to $400,000 for the Gold Regional and Global awards — in the design field. The prize brought the Fez River, its problems and potentials to the attention of a large public. When something becomes that important publicly, there are many new stakeholders that emerge — everyone wants to help the project while projecting their own agendas. Suddenly, many voices started to be heard. But sadly, our input was seen as less necessary or relevant. So it became something of a battle.

Why is having many people interested difficult?

Having many voices interested in architectural and urban issues is a positive thing in many regards: for example, it can allow for a democratic design process. However, it can sometimes also create hurdles and harm a project as it dilutes its central design ideas. As some of my colleagues have observed, any municipal project around the world is the most complex project you can possibly work on, especially on a large scale. Because there are just so many variables, there are so many changes in the sociopolitical landscape, and so many commercial and economic interests colliding.

After: What this portion of the river will look like once it is uncovered, and the area shaded built to create a public plaza. Image: Aziza Chaouni

After: What this portion of the river above will look like once it is uncovered, and the area shaded built to create a public plaza. Image: Aziza Chaouni

But fortunately, there is no turning back now. The river is uncovered — a process that took three full years — and the first public space is almost finished. It’s a plaza. People are using it, even though it is still under construction. So, no matter what the design ends up looking like or how people change it, at least the worst has been avoided: the river could have remained terribly polluted and its existence even forgotten by the inhabitants of the medina, erasing a large part of the history of the city. Like in other other medinas in the Middle East, the covered river could have easily become a vehicular road, which is a harbinger of bad news for medinas.

When roads are introduced into these medieval cities, their pervasive pedestrian network starts to slowly be transformed. Narrow pedestrian streets become larger and are gradually replaced by roads. Also, once-inward-facing houses start to open up with businesses facing towards these new, large roads. As a result, the medinas’ urban fabric loses its unique character, which is marked by an organic, labyrinthine pedestrian system. The medinas of Tunis and Algiers illustrate well this tragic, irreversible transformation.

How many more years before your final vision comes to pass?

For me, on a fundamental level, I would say that the core of our vision has happened: the river has been resuscitated, both figuratively and literally. It is uncovered and acknowledged by all as a “river,” not a sewer. This presents a unique potential for the medina of Fez. A key lesson we have learned is that a resilient design project, with a solid core idea, can surmount any changes that come its way. Its core idea will remain, even though its aesthetics, timeline, methodology will drastically changed. In architecture school, we are taught that one’s project should be implemented as closely to one’s drawings as possible. In developing-world contexts, especially while working on municipal projects, this task is almost impossible. The architect needs to leave his or her ego in the back seat and develop a resilient, phased design with key principles that can sustain changes of stakeholders in the socio-political sphere, with the economic landscape and so on.

How much are you invested personally in the Fez medina? Did you grow up here?

My dad and my grandparents on both sides of the family were born and raised in this medieval city, so it’s absolutely very close to my heart. I grew up not inside the medina, but in the newer part of the city, right next to it. What’s amazing is that it’s not a place for tourists — it is a living city, and not much of its urban fabric has changed since the 7th century. People live there, work there — so if you want to buy, for example, a type of cake, special fabric, sweets or pickles, it can only be sold in certain neighborhoods of the medina. Tourists do go there as well, of course, but the medina of Fez has not given way to massive gentrification.

It sounds magical.

When my American mother-in-law, who’s a historian, came to Fez, she said, “I never felt so much that I was back in time, back in the medieval era. You almost forget which time period you’re in.”

You call yourself a nomad, and work on quite a few other projects around the world, specializing in eco-tourism in arid regions. But your work in Fez must take up a huge amount of time.

Let’s say I am a semi-nomad with a double life. I am an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and I have a small design office with two people in Toronto, and an office of five people in Fez, my hometown. I usually spend about three months of the year in Fez, and I keep daily contact with my team and clients while I am in Toronto.

The nice thing about the University of Toronto is that it’s a research university, so I am expected to work on research projects. Obviously, I like to link my research to my practice, as they both feed on each other. I’m not an architectural historian — I teach students to become professional architects, so it is a big asset to be practicing, especially in countries like Morocco. That way, I can share with my students design expertise specific to developing world contexts.

I also have an applied research lab called DET at the University of Toronto that focuses specifically on ecotourism in emergent countries, in very remote areas. I have been focusing on deserts and arid climates these past years, and I have worked on projects in Southern Morocco and Jordan.

Proposed dwelling sites for an eco-tourist destination in Ain Nsissa nature reserve, Morocco. Image: Aziza Chaouni

Proposed dwelling sites for an eco-tourist destination in Ain Nsissa nature reserve, Morocco. Image: Aziza Chaouni

Can you give us an example?

Well, we work with the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism, for example, when they need to set up guidelines for investors to develop tourism projects in fragile, remote sites. Of course, Morocco is a developing country, and they want outside investors, but they also know that if they just let people do whatever they want, they will mess up those landscapes. In a desert, there is no margin for error. You mess it up, you kill everything, and that’s it. You’re all done. You have so few resources, too. So investors can be scared to come in.

With the help of my mentor and thesis advisor, Professor Hashim Sarkis, I was able to convince the Moroccan Ministry of Tourism to finance my students’ trips to Morocco. Then, under my guidance, they develop innovative solutions and guidelines, which then become bylaws. We started developing, for example, new types of ecological nomadic tents that leave very little impact on their context—they fold up and can be moved easily.

Then, I was asked to work in Jordan by the Royal Society of Conservation of Nature (RSCN), also in a desert area, to help them establish a new protected area north of Petra called Shobak. RSCN, an NGO, runs all national parks, not the government. Since they only receive 10% of their money from the government, they need to generate the other 90% to conserve nature. So they rely on eco-tourism, and wanted new ideas about how to develop it. The fact that I speak Arabic, and that I can also easily speak to women because of my gender, has been a big asset to understand the aspirations of local populations. A lot of men from these remote areas migrate to cities, so mostly women are left.

And you’re working on a Canadian project, as well?

Yes, after I’d been to Jordan, I collaborated with Parks Canada in Toronto to study the first very urban national park in Canada, Rouge National Urban Park, created in 2012. I applied for a grant to compare Rouge Park, which is right in the middle of the suburbs, with another urban national park in Rio, Guaratiba Biological Reserve, which contains a unique mangrove habitat. Both parks are adjacent to large, sprawling cities, and they will be under even more pressure in the future. How can we manage parks like this in new ways? How can we build next to these new parks?

Thanks to a LACREG grant, we did research for two years, then created an app that compares the two parks — how they are run and funded, their adjacent urban areas, their leisure activities, their ecosystems, endangered species. But the part we’re most proud of is that we created guided tours with a feature that allows visitors to become stewards of the park by reporting environmental abuse. Because these parks are usually not well-known, people can take different tours that will explain their history. But the most important issue is that urban parks are very hard to manage because they are readily accessible, and park rangers have a hard time being vigilant. So the app allows anyone who sees something or someone harming the parks — such as littering, poaching, off-leash dogs, harming wildlife — to take an image, immediately upload it to Flickr, and geo-tag it.

 

From sewer to jewel- Aziza Chaouni on uncovering the Fez river - TED Blog 2014-04-05 05-27-12

Coming to Your Twitter Feed: 15 New Types of Ads

 

April 4, 2014 2:31 p.m. ET

New ads—lots of new ads—are on their way to Twitter Inc. TWTR -2.07%

Hoping to win over e-commerce companies and mobile-game developers, the communications platform will debut 15 types of new ad products and improved ways to target users over the next six months, according to people familiar with the company's plans.

The first batch will be released in a few weeks and will include a product that will coax users to download apps through Twitter, these people said.

Over the past year, some consumer brands have thrown more advertising dollars toward Twitter, especially during live events such as the Super Bowl or Academy Awards. Twitter's simple suite of promoted advertising products—a trio of ads that target select users and receive preferential placements as tweets, trends and recommended accounts—haven't resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies whose advertising decisions are driven by app downloads, subscriber sign-ups and purchases.

Twitter's advertising revenue, which makes up the bulk of its earnings, more than doubled in the fourth quarter to $219.6 million from the same period a year earlier. Twitter, which has yet to turn a profit, is under pressure to show its young advertising business is deserving of its current market cap of $26.9 billion. The company's stock has fallen about 33% so far this year to $42.96, approaching its post-IPO low of $39.06.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

To address advertisers' needs, Twitter is taking a page from Facebook Inc. FB -4.61% 's playbook. Twitter has been beta-testing a mobile-app install ad unit. It is similar to the popular product Facebook launched in late 2012 and that has fueled its mobile advertising revenue, which last quarter accounted for more than half of overall revenue for the first time.

Facebook users downloaded 245 million mobile apps after seeing ads for those apps in their news feeds last year. It essentially recommends apps for Facebook users to download. Replete with an "install now" or "shop now" button, the format has been used by mobile game companies such as London-based Supersolid, the developer behind "Super Penguins" and "Adventure Town."

"Not having the direct-app install link is an issue," said Edward Chin, a Supersolid co-founder about why the company has yet to advertise on Twitter. Instead, "a lot" of Supersolid's advertising budget is spent on Facebook.

The app-install ad unit will be delivered using Twitter's "card" technology, an expandable tweet allowing advertisers to include a button that lets users perform the desired action. When users click a "download" button, they are taken to Apple Inc. AAPL -1.29% 's app store where they can download the app. Once it starts downloading, the user is automatically taken back to the Twitter app. This format brings Twitter more in line with app-install ads on Facebook.

Twitter has been experimenting with other ways to use the card to boost users' engagement with advertisers. For example, it tested a "call-to-click" button that would put users on the phone with businesses. The company has also been in talks with payments processor Stripe Inc. to help allow users to purchase goods directly through Twitter.

Twitter's top executives, including CEO Dick Costolo, showed off a sampling of these new ad offerings to a troop of visiting ad industry executives last week, according to a person who attended the meeting. Whereas Twitter Cards is currently limited to seven predetermined formats, executives suggested the product will become a more open platform that would give marketers more creative freedom to come up with their own uses of Cards. Twitter, for example, showed how Cards can be used to encourage users to sign up for sweepstakes and contests with one-click sharing of their email addresses.

As Twitter ushers out more ad products, the company will need to be careful not to inundate users with too many ads. Twitter has long maintained that the user experience comes first—one where the main timeline isn't overwhelmed by a rush of ads. The amount of ads served in users' timelines haven't increased much since 2010 when Twitter debuted its first advertising product.

Twitter will also need to find a way to bring down the customer acquisition costs through its ads. AdParlor, a social-media advertising manager, estimates the cost of acquiring a new user through Facebook is below $4 in the U.S. That compares with a current cost of about $20 through ads on Twitter, according to a person familiar with the matter. Recent beta-test results of the app-install unit show that the cost has become more competitive with Facebook, this person said.

Japanese mobile gaming company Gree Inc. 3632.TO -1.41% said Facebook's mobile app install ad unit is one of the top three drivers of its game downloads. Sho Masuda, Gree's vice president of marketing, said the combination of factors such as scale, having a clear call-to-action button, visually-driven ad format and refined targeting capabilities make the Facebook ads effective.

"We have made attempts trying to make it work but have not seen the scale we want," said Mr. Masuda of the company's experience advertising on Twitter. "We're providing feedback [to Twitter] on how else we can shape their product in a way that works for us," Mr. Masuda said. He declined to comment on whether Gree was testing any ads, though an ad urging users to download its "Knights and Dragons" game has been seen on Twitter.

Other app-install ads that have recently shown up in users' streams include those from mobile-payments company Square Inc. Digital-music streaming service Spotify AB is one of Twitter's beta testers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Stockholm-based Spotify declined to comment.

Beyond advertising, Twitter has also begun improving methods of targeting users by offering a wealthier trove of data in recent months, a move that follows Facebook's footsteps. In December, Twitter signed or expanded partnerships with large third-party data marketers such as Datalogix Inc. and Acxiom Corp. ACXM -6.05% that allow advertisers to target users based on their consumer behavior when they are not on Twitter. While the two databases can't make out personal identifiable information such as email addresses and phone numbers, combining the databases can inform advertisers what Twitter users are doing when they are away from the service.

More detailed knowledge of Twitter's user segments could convince game developers like Mr. Chin of Supersolid to give advertising on the real-time service a chance.

Mr. Chin said Facebook's wealth of user data also allows for more "quality downloads" where the sophisticated targeting capabilities make it more likely that users continue to play the game after downloading the app.

—Hannah Karp contributed to this article.

Coming to Your Twitter Feed- 15 New Types of Ads - WSJ.com 2014-04-05 05-03-37

Body vive active : enfin une activité pour les "larguées" des cours de fitness

 

Par Emilie Cailleau | Topsante – jeu. 27 mars 2014

Trop rapide, trop compliqué. Si vous avez toujours l'impression d'être la mauvaise élève à votre séance de gym, ce nouveau cours Les Mills devrait vous plaire. Présentation en exclusivité.

Redonner goût au sport

A la gym, vous préférez attendre contre le mur que le cours se passe ? Plutôt que de transpirer par procuration, essayez donc le Body vive active. Présenté au Salon Body Fitness, ce nouvel entraînement de la planète des Mills veut remotiver les troupes. Celles qui ont abandonné leurs résolutions sportives, les novices et les déçues des clubs.

Du fitness à son rythme

Quelle différence avec un cours de fitness classique ? L'activité est plus accessible. On n'est pas larguées si on se trompe de pied ! Les chorégraphies sont faciles à suivre et on adapte l'intensité des mouvements. "C'est le plus complet du programme des Mills, explique Laurence Klares, directrice du training les Mills Euromed. On élève la fréquence cardiaque avec des pics d'intensité et on renforce les muscles avec des exercices basés sur un "tubing", une sorte de tube élastique qui augmente la résistance".

Autre argument de taille pour celles qui s'ennuient vite : les séances sont proposées au choix dans un format de 30, 45 ou 55 minutes. Pour un cours de 55 minutes, on alterne 25 minutes de cardio et 25 minutes de renforcement musculaire avec le tubing. Pour les formats plus courts, l'effort est mis sur le cardio, en vertu du principe d'"aérobie" : le muscle puise dans les graisses pour fonctionner. Du coup on perd du poids plus vite (on perd 550 calories par cours de 55 minutes en moyenne).

Concrètement ça donne quoi ?

On retrouve les gestes du Body attack, sans être trempée comme à la sortie d'un hammam. On respire mieux et on prend du plaisir à effectuer les mouvements : déplacements latéraux, sauts, course, squats, fentes, talons-fesses, etc.

On le pratique où ?

Présenté en avant-première à Paris, l’activité devrait débarquer dans les prochains mois dans les centres dispensant des cours Les Mills. Trouvez les clubs concernés près de chez vous sur le site www.fitness.fr.

>> Plus de conseils forme sur (...) Lire la suite sur Topsanté

Salon Body Fitness, c'est parti!
Ski : bien coachée pour les sports d'hiver
5 bonnes raisons de faire du sport en hiver
2h30 de sport par semaine réduirait le risque de grippe
Forme : Born to move, du fitness amusant pour les enfants

 

Body vive active - enfin une activité pour les -larguées- des cours de fitness - Yahoo Actualités France 2014-04-05 04-54-55

Les médecins vont bientôt tester la prescription au « retour à l'activité physique »

 

 

Des discussions entre le ministère de la Santé, le groupe de fitness Vit'Halles et les médecins du 15ème arrondissement de Paris sont actuellement en cours pour lancer une opération pilote consistant à prescrire « un retour à l'activité physique par des protocoles de 8 à 12 semaines ». Alain Barasz, Directeur Général du groupe Vit'Halles, a confié que l'expérience pourrait démarrer en avril prochain.

Les médecins vont bientôt tester la prescription au « retour à l'activité physique » - Crédit photo : © grafica Cette opération pilote consiste à prescrire des "modules de 8 à 12 semaines" à réaliser dans le centre Vit'Halles du 15ème arrondissement de Paris. Les personnes diabétiques, qui connaissent des problèmes d'obésité, ou d'autres soucis de santé sont concernées par l'expérience. Les séances de sport seront ainsi adaptées à la condition physique de chaque patient.

"A l'avenir, tous les médecins pourrait prescrire l'activité physique. L'idée de cette opération, que l'on va baptiser "Retour à l'activité physique", est d'inciter aussi les gens à continuer à faire du sport, même lorsque leur protocole arrive à terme", explique Alain Barasz, Président de la Fédération Nationale du Fitness et du Footing Associé.

L'opération se déroulera dans le 15ème arrondissement de la capitale car "il s'agit du secteur le plus peuplé. Plus de 300.000 personnes y vivent et 175 médecins y exercent", précise le professionnel.

Pour l'heure, la première étape vers "le retour à l'activité physique" consiste à conclure des accords avec les mutuelles de santé pour permettre aux abonnés d'être pris en charge. Swiss Life est le premier organisme à travailler avec le groupe Vit'Halles. Ses assurés peuvent ainsi bénéficier d'une prise en charge de leur abonnement dans les clubs de sport du groupe à hauteur de 100 euros, peu importe la formule de couverture choisie. L'abonnement annuel coûte en moyenne 600 euros dans les centres Vit'Halles.

"Ce n'est que le début. Swiss Life ne devrait pas être le seul à participer à ce nouveau mode de fonctionnement. Nous souhaiterions ouvrir une brèche et inciter les autres mutuelles à nous rejoindre". Il s'agit de leur dire ''en prenant en charge l'activité physique de vos assurés, ces derniers tomberont moins malades. Vous ne pouvez qu'être gagnant", prévient le Directeur Général du groupe Vit'Halles.

Le professionnel travaille actuellement à la création d'un label des clubs de fitness pour inciter justement les mutuelles de santé à rejoindre ce programme. Seuls les centres mettant en oeuvre un "programme sérieux" pourront bénéficier de ce label en 2010.

Actuellement, il existe 2.500 clubs de fitness en France. Quelque 30.000 Français s'entraînent dans l'un des dix clubs Vit'Halles. "Seuls 5% de la population française est inscrite dans les salles de fitness contre 15 à 17% de la population anglaise, hollandaise, italienne ou belge", rapporte Alain Barasz.

Outre le fait d'être peu nombreux, les Français se distinguent également par un taux d'abandon élevé. 35% des nouveaux abonnés ne se dépensent plus dans les salles où ils se sont inscrits au-delà de la sixième semaine. "En général, ces nouveaux sportifs ont commencé avec des cours trop difficiles. Ils ont eu des courbatures et n'ont eu aucun résultat, ce qui ne leur a pas donné envie de revenir. Les résultats se font pourtant ressentir à partir de la huitième semaine, en venant au moins une fois par semaine" confie le professionnel.

A noter que 60 à 65% des abonnés en France sont des femmes, qui pratiquent une fois par semaine, généralement entre 12h et 14h.

Source : © NUTRINEWS



Publié par Alexandre Glouchkoff, diététicien nutritionniste. Lien d'intérêt : Aucun

 

Les médecins vont bientôt tester la prescription au « retour à l'activité physique » 2014-04-05 04-48-11

Live Longer with This 30-Minute Habit

 

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You could cut your mortality risk dramatically if you just did this for 30 minutes: walk.

Or ride your stationary bike. Or dance. Or chase the grandkids around outside. Or shovel some snow. Or all of the above. Just be active for 30 minutes, five times a week. This simple choice cut mortality risk by nearly 20 percent in a recent study.

Walk the Walk
You can't be your best and be there for others unless you take care of yourself first. So no matter how busy life gets, make time for the active things in life that you enjoy. Doesn't have to be a killer ab workout or a sweat-till-you-drop spin class. In a study, people who simply did nonvigorous physical activity for 2 1/2 hours a week saw their risk of dying from any cause drop by almost 20 percent compared with the couch potatoes. If there's no special activity that floats your boat, just walk. Hoofing it for 30 minutes, five times a week, is a small and easy investment to make in your long-term health.

 (What can walking do for you? Check out this Top 10 list.)

Moving Matters
Of course, a little sweat is healthy, too, so if you want to crank it up a notch, and you don't have any health conditions in the way, feel free. When the people in the study kicked activity levels into high gear -- logging 7 hours of moderate-intensity exercise each week -- their mortality risk dropped by 25 percent compared with nonactive folks. Chalk it up to the favorable impact exercise has on weight (active people gain less over time) and blood pressure (exercise helps keep those blood vessel walls nice and relaxed). Make walking a regular part of your life with these easy strategies:

Learn the four secrets to turning your walk into a serious weight loss tool.

 

RealAge Benefits

A physical activity program that builds stamina, strength, and flexibility can make your RealAge as much as 2.8 years younger. Take the RealAge Test!

 

Live Longer - Walking 30 Minutes a Day - Health Tip - Sharecare 2014-04-05 04-34-53