Posted by randfish

NOTE: All of the slide decks in this post are free to download and distribute, as are any of the stats/graphics in them (please reference the source if you do). Hopefully they’ll be helpful learning tools and will make your deck-building processes easier than mine have been!

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for me, and they’re not slowing down anytime soon. Just 2 weeks ago, I jetted off to San Marino (a small country in the northeastern part of Italy) with my travel blogging wife, Hannah Smith from Distilled, Marcus Tandler + Niels Dorje of TandlerDorje, Gianluca Fiorelli and Google’s Avinash Kaushik (along with several great local speakers). Below are two of my presentations from that event (Be-Wizard):

From there, I headed to Rome, where, thanks to the US State Department and LUISS University, I gave a talk on entrepreneurship and told the story of SEOmoz, which contains my usual level of oversharing and transparency:

In Rome, I also did a video interview with Robin Good of MasterNewMedia on a number of SEO related topics. After our interview, he filmed my presentation of the "Story of Moz" deck above, which, depending on quality, may be available sometime in the near future.

Next up was London for the awesome Link Building event from Distilled (can’t share decks from that, sorry) followed by 2 days at home in Seattle and then a mad dash to Phoenix for Infusioncon (just before Link Building V2 in New Orleans). At InfusionCon, I gave a fairly comprehensive, SEO 101 style talk that was quite well received:

One thing I’ve noticed that’s very powerful as a marketing/influence tactic for me personally is the sharing of my slidedecks on services like Slideshare. Because I’ll often tweet the link to the presentation as I go on stage or just prior, I’m able to give the audience an opportunity to download and follow along. This has several cool effects:

• The slideshow URL gets tweeted and re-tweeted and seen by thousands more people than just the few hundred usually in the room. Those attendees are often the most active sharers, resulting in a terrific, positive re-inforcement cycle (so long as I do a good job)
• Having the slideshow seen by so many often means it goes to the frontpage of Slideshare, getting even more exposure. When I spend a dozen or more hours making a slide deck for a presentation to 300 people, it’s great to know that there’s the potential to get much more exposure via inbound marketing of that content afterward
• The slideshow pages contain lots of links, which drives visits to many web marketing sites I reference, as well as SEOmoz itself. Those sites who get traffic often send me notes of thanks (when it’s I who should be thanking them for making my job easier) and everyone wins as the audience gets valuable links and the sites, Moz included, get high quality, relevant traffic.

If you’re on the road at events large or small, let me highly recommend this approach. And, hopefully, these slide decks prove useful, too!

My next few trips will take me to SMX Munich, where I’ll be leaking our first results from the user surveys and correlation data collected for the 2011 version of the Search Engine Ranking Factors. After that, I’m off to SMX Sydney, where I’ll be on a number of panels around SEO topics. In late May, we’re working to hold an informal, free Moz meetup with Avi Wilensky’s ProMediaCorp in New York City (dates/specifics TBD) followed immediately by Distilled’s Boston PRO Training seminar and, finally a keynote of SMX France in Paris in early June.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at one of these events!

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For both personal knowledge and client satisfaction, it’s really important to be able to track SEO progress quantitatively as well as qualitatively. One of the benefits and detriments of the field of SEO is that there is a lot of data out there, which helps make SEO tracking easier but at the same time can be overwhelming to even advanced SEOs. In a lot of ways, it’s just a matter of choosing which data to use. For instance, just as you wouldn’t use a katana to spread chevre, you wouldn’t use the PR of a homepage to track a domain’s success in search results. In a two part series beginning today, Rand is going to go over the definitions of some of the most popular metrics available right now, as well as the best ways to use metrics in your SEO analysis. Check back next Friday for part 2!

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m very excited to have you with us today. Today we’re talking about a question that plagues a lot of webmasters, a lot of SEOs, and a lot of marketers. And that is: How should I use metrics? There are so many metrics on the Web. How should I use metrics to analyze links, analyze pages, analyze sites, use them in my link building practices, and use them in my outreach efforts?

Today I’m going to start with part one of two. In part one of two, what we’re going to cover is all of the metrics that are available for links, well, many of the metrics that are available for links from the primary sources, and what each of these mean, because it can be really confusing if you don’t know and aren’t familiar with these metrics, to apply them in your day-to-day work. But if you know what these mean, you’ll be able to have a lot of insight into how they can be used to analyze the sites and pages that you’re looking at and what you can do with them. So, let’s get started.

First off, we’ve got three big groups of places that link metrics come from, at least from the SEO perspective. There’s Open Site Explorer and Linkscape. There’s Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. There’s Majestic SEO. All three of these – Google, Yahoo!, and Bing of course being separate ones – but all three of these have metrics that they compose on their own.

That means if you’re looking in lots of different tools, for example, I saw someone asking in the SEOmoz Q&A, I’m using this link diagnostics tool, or I’m using Raven SEO. Or I’m using some other tool sources. I’m using Google Webmaster Tools. I’m using the search engines. I’m using a third party tool that’s pulling in different information. Virtually all of those sources come from one of these three.

Essentially, they all build their own indices, right? Open Site Explorer and Linkscape builds its own index of the Web. Majestic SEO has their index of the Web. Google and Bing have their own indices of the Web. Yahoo!’s is going away. But all of these can produce individual metrics.

So let’s start with Open Site Explorer and Linkscape. Linkscape powers Open Site Explorer. It powers the link intersect tool. It powers your pro web app, and it powers lots and lots of other tool bars, so the mozBar, the quirk search status bar, the SEO book toolbar. And you’ll find these metrics in tools like Raven, as well.

First off, mozRank. mozRank is analogous to Google’s PageRank. It’s essentially using virtually the same formula. Ours is slightly different, so as not to be patent infringing, but it runs the same way. So it’s an iterative algorithm running across the Web’s link graph, and essentially, it says links are votes. The pages with more votes have higher page rank, and therefore, they cast more important votes. It’s sort of like a representational democracy with mozRank and PageRank.

mozRank is for an individual page only, so it’s assigned to each URL on the Web. For the 40 billion to 50 billion pages that are in our Web index, most of those pages have very, very tiny amounts of mozRank. So when you see 3, 4, 5, those may not look like big scores, but remember that mozRank is logarithmic. That means that there’s a tremendous number of pages with very low scores, and then it’s increasingly harder and harder to get more and more mozRank.

For example, a mozRank 5 is actually, I think, eight and a half times more important. It means it has eight and a half times more link juice, or more mozRank, than a mozRank 4 web page. So this is a very good thing to know. And that’s why it’s so granular, why it shows two significant digits, like a 4.56, because 4.56 might actually be substantially more than, say, a 4.21. That’s quite a big difference.

mozTrust is similar to mozRank, but it does something very unique. It biases so that mozRank, or link juice, can only flow from trusted sites, and then it calculates the same type of thing. Essentially, what it’s saying is not every page on the Web passes mozRank, only these initial trusted seed sets of sites, which we essentially gather the same way as we’ve seen search engines do it in their research papers and patents. Identifying those sites and having those, I believe it’s around 250 or 350 sites passing out mozTrust.

So the more mozTrust you have, if I’ve got a 3.75 mozTrust and I move up to a 5.05, if your mozTrust moves up in this fashion, this means that not only have you gotten more links, which will be reflected in your mozRank as well, but it means that you’ve gotten more trusted links. It means that the sources that are linking to you are coming from better and better places, or the sources that are already linking to you are getting more trust from the sites that are linking to them. Those are both possibilities.

Domain mozRank and Domain mozTrust are essentially exactly the same as mozRank and mozTrust, but they happen on the domain-wide level. So the problem with looking at mozRank on a homepage or PageRank on a homepage is that it’s not actually for the domain as a whole. If I go to SEOmoz.org and I look at its homepage page rank, it used to be an 8 and now it’s a 7. That doesn’t actually tell me how important the whole domain is. It just tells me how important the homepage of that site is. That’s not what I want. What I want is how important is this domain on the Web compared to all the other domains. That’s exactly what these two metrics will do. The first one, mozRank, will look at raw popularity, raw importance. The second one, mozTrust, looks at trustworthiness of that domain.

Next, you get some metrics that you should be pretty familiar with. They’re fairly self-explanatory. So there’s number of links, and number of links will include all the kinds of links that we know about – followed and no-followed links, external and internal links to a page, 301 redirects to a page. Soon, they’re going to include rel=canonicals, the number of pages that rel=canonical to a page, and we’ll be marking those out as that’s become a pretty big part of the Web now. With each of these, you can dig deeper. So if you’re in Open Site Explorer or if you’re in the mozBar, you can dig deeper into a full list of metrics and get all of those.

Number of linking route domains is similar in that it describes the number of links. But rather than saying this is how many unique pages have a link here, it’s how many domains as a whole have a link here. Number of linking root domains is well correlated with Google’s rankings generally indicating that domain diversity, getting links from lots of different places, is quite good. In fact, the best single metric, non-aggregated metric, that we’ve got to predict Google’s rankings with correlation data is the number of Linking C-Blocks. C-Blocks is a little bit tricky. A domain might be something like SEOmoz.org, but a C-Block might include SEOmoz.org and OpenSiteExplorer.org, and I think we might host a few other domains, SEOmoz.com, which redirects to SEOmoz.org.

Linking C-Blocks is essentially saying, “This C-Block of IP addresses, how many of those are there on the Web that contain at least one link to this page?” So looking at linking C-Blocks can be quite a good metric, as well. This is currently in our API, so you can download and look at it. I think a few different tools use it. Soon it will be in more of our places. The new version of Open Site Explorer that’s coming out in July should have that.

Page authority and domain authority are a little complicated. Basically, imagine all of these metrics and lots more of these metrics, lots more pieces and factors of these metrics being calculated using a machine learning model against Google’s search results to try and predict what single metric best correlates by aggregating all of these and multiplying them and dividing them and using all sorts of fragments of them to get the highest correlation numbers.

Page authority is a number from 0 to 100 that describes how important or how potentially well this page could rank given no other features about it. So we don’t know what query it’s trying to rank for. We don’t know the anchor text that it’s trying to rank for. We don’t know what keywords are on that page or anything. All we know is based on the links, how well-correlated is this particular page with rankings?

The second one, domain authority, is the same thing of 0 to 100, but doing a similar thing for domains. It’s essentially saying, “How well would this domain overall perform?” As you can imagine, correlation with page authority is better than domain authority. We’re going to talk about how to use all these metrics in the next segment, where I might possibly be wearing this shirt. That’s just a coincidence, never mind that.

Let’s jump over to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Majestic and talk about some of their metrics, as well. Google obviously calculates PageRank internally. They have PageRank scores for every page on the Web. My understanding is that’s updated multiple times per day. But in the toolbar, which is where we get the data, we get the data in the Google toolbar, which looks like this and it’s colored in and it’s a 4 out of 10, that amount of PageRank.

The Toolbar PageRank is only updated every three to nine months, so not particularly regularly. It doesn’t always reflect the true numbers. Sometimes Google will penalize pages or sites by removing their Toolbar PageRank, bringing down their Toolbar PageRank if they think they’ve been selling links and they want to show that they know about those sold links, that kind of thing.

The toolbar number from 0 to 10 is a rough indication of how important Google thinks that page is. But I’d be careful about relying on it because it’s not updated very frequently. You could launch a new site tomorrow and it would be three or four or five months before it showed PageRank, and yet it would have PageRank probably starting the next day when you got links into it. PageRank does correlate very well to mozRank. They’re usually just a few, .5 or .6 apart. But mozRank updates every time the Linkscape web index updates, which is once a month. PageRank is much less frequently.

Homepage PageRank or what some people call Site PR – they’ll say my website is PR 6 or my website is a PR 5. This is a fallacy. There are no PR 6 websites. There is only a website whose homepage has a PageRank score of a 5 or a 6 or a 7, whatever it is. Site PR is not a particularly good metric, and it doesn’t actually describe the site. Sometimes you’ll find sites that have a Homepage PageRank of a 5, but internal pages that are a 6 or a 7. That happens quite frequently when there are important resources on those sites that get more linked to than the homepage.

This number can be found in Google’s toolbar, and there are lots of other toolbars that you can add in and many tools show it. The SEOmoz toolset doesn’t show it. Some of you might know that Google asked us a couple years ago not to show PageRank in our web app or our toolbar anymore. So we took it out because we wanted to stay on good terms with those guys.

The number of links that Google shows, this is via the link colon command, so link:www.SEOmoz.org will show a number of links that are not particularly interesting or accurate. It’s usually a very small sub-sample. I think for SEOmoz they show maybe 1,500 or 1,800 links. Obviously, there are several hundred thousand, maybe millions of links pointing to SEOmoz.

The reason that they do that is because they don’t want to show all the link information that they’ve got. If you go inside Google Webmaster Tools, they will show you a more accurate, but still not wholly accurate, link count. But that will only be seen for your particular site that you’ve registered in Google Webmaster Tools. So do be aware of that.

Yahoo! also shows the number of links. They show kind of two link numbers. One comes from Site Explorer, which may or may not be going away. We still haven’t heard from Bing about what’s happening with that. The other one is from the Yahoo! Web Index, which has gone away in a lot of places, but you can still find it in a few countries. For example, if you go to Yahoo! India, which I think is IN.Yahoo.com, you can still run link commands against that web index and see numbers of links. They don’t exactly match up to the Site Explorer numbers, but it’s okay. When you’re using Site Explorer and the Yahoo! index, it’s more about trying to find who’s linking to this page, particularly if Open Site Explorer or Majestic is not showing that data. Yahoo! is often fresher and crawls more deeply than some of those other ones.

Let’s move into Majestic SEO. Before I get started, I just want to say, although they’re a competitor, I have a lot of respect for these guys. They’ve done some great work. I am not intimately familiar, so I hope I’m going to describe them accurately. As far as I know, from talking to the guys over there, what I’ve got is pretty right, but someone can correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

Majestic does show, like SEOmoz, the number of links. That’s just the raw number of pages that are linking to a particular site. That’s not a key metric, though. The key metrics that they usually show right on top in the new Majestic explorer is, I think, number of external back links, which essentially says how many links come from sites that are not this site, not counting internal links.

They also show referring domains, which is their word for linking root domains, I believe. I think that’s root domains, not sub-domains, when you look at referring domains. They have numbers of unique IP addresses as well as number of Class C subnets. So, Class-C subnets correlates to Linking C-Blocks.

Here’s the tough part. When you look at these numbers, SEOmoz’s numbers, Majestic’s numbers, Yahoo!’s numbers, Google’s numbers, they’re all different. The reason is pretty obvious, because they all maintain different web indices. Majestic has an extremely large web index, much larger than Yahoo!’s or Linkscape’s, but it’s quite old. There is a lot of old data in there that hasn’t necessarily been recrawled that might exist or might not. There’s not a lot of canonicalization and de-duplication of content, which the search engines and Linkscape are relatively better at.

Google and Yahoo!, obviously, have great web indices, but they expose much less data about them and a lot fewer metrics. SEOmoz has a smaller web index that’s updated once a month, 40 billion or 50 billion pages, versus Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, which are probably in the 100 to 110, maybe 120 billion range. So when you’re comparing these numbers, you’re not always going to get good similarity between them.

What you will find, though, is if you compare competitors or if you compare different websites with each other, so if I compare SEOmoz.org and Search Engine Land and SEO Book and Webmaster World, I should see that usually, in each of these cases, the link numbers are going to be higher for one of them and lower for another one within a certain percentage range. Those are the numbers that you want to pay some more attention to.

Now you’ve got a really good background on all these link metrics, a ton of link metrics. Next week, we’re going to talk about how to use and apply these link metrics in your link building outreach processes. Take care. See you later.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Posted by Dr. Pete

I came across a great analogy over at Zen Habits, and it’s got me rethinking how I view social media:

If my personal website is my digital home, then my social networking profiles on Facebook and Twitter, etc. are my embassies. Embassies exist to maintain relationships with "distant lands".

Although the post is really about gaining focus and managing your digital life, I think the idea of social media profiles as embassies in distant lands is fantastic, and I’m going to run with it. My apologies to the author (Tyler Tervooren), who probably didn’t intend anything I’m about to say.

Here are 6 ways to build up your social media embassies without an international incident…

1. Declare Independence

Before you can really have an embassy, you need to be a sovereign nation. It’s great that your Facebook page has 100 Likes and your band’s MySpace profile just cleared the double-digit friend mark, but what happens when the rules change? An embassy isn’t a permanent home – politics change, alliances shift, and you ultimately have no control over someone else’s territory.

The impact of social media is growing, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean you should surrender your entire presence to someone else’s site. Make sure you have a permanent online home that you control. Your social media embassies should be an extension of that home.

2. Be a Model Citizen

Your embassy is, first and foremost, your face to the world. You don’t see countries set up a lawn chair next to a cooler under an umbrella with "Embassy" written on it in permanent marker. It’s ok to create a light profile for some recon – you may decide that a given social network isn’t for you – but once you’re in, remember that you’re representing your home country. Finish your profile, and put a little time into it. Connect with people and participate. Nothing says "poser" (or "spammer") on Twitter, for example, like someone with 1 update, no bio, and an egg for an avatar.

3. Respect the Locals

Being on a social media site is like travelling in someone else’s country. If you never plan on coming back, you can play the obnoxious tourist all you want. If you want to set up a home away from home, though, you need to respect the locals, their customs, and even their leaders. Don’t assume that what flew in some other country will be acceptable in your new embassy. To put it simply: listen first, and then participate.

4. Learn the Language

This is an extension of (3), but it’s important to enough to stand on its own. Every social network has its unique lingo, and talking the talk can really help smooth over any diplomatic missteps. Know your hash-tags from your emoticons, and remember that the slang that can be hip in one country can make you look like a loser somewhere else. I’m not saying you have to talk like you’re in high-school or pepper every conversation with "OMG LOL WTF?!", but learn to appreciate the flavor of the local language. It will also help you avoid misunderstandings.

5. Bring Your Credentials

Anybody with an email address can set up a social media embassy, and it’s easy to forget that being a stranger in a strange land is a privilege. What do you bring to the table? Can you produce the paperwork, if you have to? Treat this as a thought exercise – I strongly believe that the more you understand your own value proposition, the more effective you’ll be in social media. Know why you’re there, and you’ll be able to back it up with real contributions.

6. Foster Allegiances

Embassies have an important function – to be in the right place at the right time when a crisis occurs and to be near the heart of international relations. Your social media embassies aren’t just a place to broadcast your opinions and hurl links at people. They’re an opportunity to build relationships. I’d estimate that 60-70% of my current consulting business has come from a combination of blogging and my participation in social media.

Take the time to learn about people – Twitter and Facebook blend business and personal relationships in a way that makes it easy to build rapport (if you’re sincere about it). Pay close attention to existing allegiances – who do your allies know, and how many steps away are those contacts from you? Done carefully (without pushing your own agenda too hard), it’s easy to broaden your circle of influence, sometimes in just a couple of steps.

How’s Your Embassy?

How is your own social media presence like an embassy? Are you on good terms with the locals, or are you teetering on the brink of war? This is mostly a thought exercise, and I’d love to hear what other people think about it in the comments.

Photo borrowed from Bodew.com. It really has no relevance to the post, but I was looking for a picture of a flag umbrella with a lawn chair, found this, and loved it. I’m not even entirely sure what it is, but someone please go buy one.

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Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, a part of the Sahara Desert, has a bone-dry climate with scant rainfall, yet does not blend in with Saharan dunes. Instead, the rocky plateau rises above the surrounding sand seas. Rich in geologic and human history, Tassili n’Ajjer is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, and covers 27,800 square miles (72,000 square kilometers) in southeastern Algeria. This image from 2000 was made from multiple observations by the Landsat 7 satellite, using a combination of infrared, near-infrared and visible light to better distinguish between the park’s various rock types. Sand appears in shades of yellow and tan. Granite rocks appear brick red. Blue areas are likely salts. As the patchwork of colors suggests, the geology of Tassili n’Ajjer is complex. The plateau is composed of sandstone around a mass of granite. Over the course of Earth’s history, alternating wet and dry climates have shaped these rocks in multiple ways. Deep ravines are cut into cliff faces along the plateau’s northern margin. The ravines are remnants of ancient rivers that once flowed off the plateau into nearby lakes. Where those lakes once rippled, winds now sculpt the dunes of giant sand seas. In drier periods, winds eroded the sandstones of the plateau into ‘stone forests’ and natural arches. Not surprisingly, the park’s name means ‘plateau of chasms.’ Humans have also modified the park’s rocks. Some 15,000 engravings have so far been identified in Tassili n’Ajjer. From about 10,000 B.C. to the first few centuries A.D., successive populations also left the remains of homes and burial mounds. Image Credit: nasa

Posted by richardbaxterseo

This morning I set myself a challenge. Using some inspiration from recent excellent ideas, strategies and articles about the Panda update, I decided to see if I could cobble together a quick strategy to weed out pages that might be deemed as “low quality” in the eyes of Google’s most recent major algorithm update.

I gave myself two hours to get the data and to put this post together, with the intention that you’ll be able to download the template and pick up your analysis from where I left off.

It’s all about poor performance

This methodology should help you identify poorly performing pages that have few, if any links and a high average bounce rate across a wide spectrum of keywords. This might help you identify any page candidates that need a rethink.

Step 1 – Head to Google Analytics

Head over to analytics and navigate to Traffic Sources > Search Engines:

Now, select “Google”

Step 2 – Get lots of raw data

Make sure you can get your hands on plenty of data by inserting the &limit=50000 query into your report URL. This might come in handy later!

Step 3 – Sort by landing page

We’re interested in landing page performance, so in your left hand sort column, select “landing page”

Step 4 – Download the data as CSV and create an Excel Table

Ok so far so good – by now you should have a rich data set all tuckered up in Excel. To make your data into a table, highlight it and press CTRL-L on your keyboard.

Step 5 – Head to Open Site Explorer

Next, we’re going to export all the links data that Open Site Explorer can give us, and use VLOOKUP to add the number of links to each URL in our table. Whee!

If you’re not familiar with VLOOKUP, check out Mike’s awesome guide to Excel for SEOs. Create an Open Site Explorer top pages report (My favourite report since, ever), download the data and throw it in an Excel tab called “Top Pages”.

Tip: for the purpose of this blog post, you’ll need to remove the domain name from the Open Site Explorer data. Do a find and replace for your domain, replacing the domain URL with nothing, like this:

Step 6 – VLOOKUP time

Next, you’re going to need to combine the analytics data with the top pages data from OSE. Create a new column in your analytics data called “Links” and add your VLOOKUP, just like this:

Pro tip: use IFERROR to weed out any nasty N/A errors, replacing them with a 0, like this:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP([@[Landing Page]],toppages,6,0),0)

Step 7 – Create your pivot table

With a complete data set, you’re now able to create your pivot table. Insert a pivot table and setup your filters, labels and values like this:

Step 8 – Filter by bounce, visits and use conditional formatting

At the end of my data mashing, I came up with this table:

I can only imagine what this data might look like on an extremely content thin, "low value" site. Any page with a very high bounce rate, measurable level of traffic and low / no links might cause some concern and there are certainly a few pages in this list I’d like to take a closer look at.

If you’d like to take a closer look at your pages, you can download this Excel document here:

http://bit.ly/PandaData

PRO Tip: Add your keyword data

I have a working theory that it’s good to have a complete picture of a landing page’s performance. In principle, you could build a more complete picture using keyword data. Think about it like this: if a page has a slightly below par bounce rate, with the keyword data intact you can investigate the problem a little further. Is there a specific keyword that’s causing a problem? How would you approach this problem?

I hope you enjoy using the data and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this type of analysis could be developed further. Happy number crunching!

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• NASA To Release Messenger’s First Orbital Images Of Mercury Media Teleconference Scheduled for 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday
  NASA will release the first orbital image of Mercury’s surface, including previously unseen terrain, on Tuesday afternoon, March 29.
• NASA Administrator To Speak At Maryland Events This Week
  NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will deliver remarks during two events in Maryland this week

About UC Davis

For more than 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has more than 32,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than 21,000 staff, an annual research budget that exceeds $678 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

New research documenting changes in the incidence and outcomes of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in the U.S. between 1995 and 2006, found a significant increase in incidence rates among patients 5 to 39 years of age and in African Americans. A second related study—the largest pediatric lupus nephritis-associated ESRD study to date—revealed high rates of adverse outcomes among children with ESRD due to lupus nephritis. Despite novel therapies, outcomes have not improved in over a decade. Both studies now appear online in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR).

More than 300,000 Americans are diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), a chronic autoimmune disease that causes widespread inflammation, extreme fatigue, joint pain, and organ damage. Approximately 15% to 20% of all cases of SLE occur among children. Medical evidence has shown that up to 60% of adults and 80% of children with SLE develop nephritis—a potentially serious complication of lupus in which inflammation of the kidney could lead to renal failure. Prior studies report 10% to 30% of patients with lupus nephritis progress to ESRD within 15 years of diagnosis, despite aggressive treatment.

“Our studies examined trends in the incidence and outcomes of ESRD due to lupus nephritis for both adults and children in the U.S.,” said lead study author Karen Costenbader, MD, MPH, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Researchers identified patients with lupus nephritis ESRD using data (1995-2006) from the U.S. Renal Data System, a national registry of patients who receive renal dialysis or kidney transplantation. Demographic and clinical characteristics, changes in rates of waitlisting for kidney transplant, kidney transplantation data, and all-cause mortality were examined.

The research team identified 12,344 cases of lupus nephritis ESRD with a mean age of onset of 41 years; 82% were female and 50% were African American. During the study period standardized incidence rates (SIRs) increased significantly among patients 5 to 39 years of age, African Americans, and in the U.S. Southeast. In fact, African Americans had a SIR of 6-7 times that of white patients. Researchers also noted that rates of pre-emptive kidney transplantation at ESRD onset slightly increased, but kidney transplantation rates within the first three years of ESRD declined. Rates of mortality did not change in over a decade of evaluation.

In the study specifically examining outcomes among children with lupus nephritis-associated ESRD, there were 583 cases identified and the mean age of onset was 16.2 years. Of those children with ESRD, 51% were African American, 39% were white, and 24% were Hispanic. Dr. Linda Hiraki, lead study author, with Dr. Costenbader and colleagues determined that within five years of ESRD onset 49% of children were wait-listed for kidney transplant, 33% received a kidney transplant and 22% died. The primary causes of mortality among children with ESRD were cardiopulmonary complications (31%) and infections (16%); risk of mortality in African American children was almost double that of white children.

While advances in treatment, such has preemptive kidney transplantation at ESRD onset, have been made in recent years, researchers found no improvement in outcomes. The team reported higher incidence rates in younger patients (ages 5-19 and 20-39 years), among African Americans, and in the Southern portion of the U.S. Age, race, ethnicity, insurance, and geographic region were associated with significant variation in 5-year wait-listing for kidney transplant, kidney transplantation and mortality among children with ESRD. “The changing demographics and poor survival rates highlight the ongoing challenge of caring for these patients,” concluded Dr. Costenbader. “Further research is urgently needed to identify modifiable risk factors and interventions that can improve incidence rates and outcomes for children and adults with lupus nephritis ESRD.”

Source: Wiley

• NASA Invites Media To Open Source Summit March 29-30 In California
  Journalists are invited to attend NASA’s first open source software development summit March 29-30 at the agency’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PDT on both days.
• NASA Makes Selection For Integrated Communications Services
  NASA selected Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of McLean, Va., for the NASA Integrated Communications Services (NICS) contract.
• Massachusetts Students Call Space Station Astronaut
  Students in Springfield, Mass., will make a special call to Expedition 27 Flight Engineer and western Massachusetts resident Cady Coleman aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday, March 29.

Neutron scattering intensity maps of the magnetic excitation spectrum of La5/3Sr1/3CoO4

New evidence suggests fluctuating magnetic stripes are the cause of mysterious hourglass magnetic spectrum of high temperature superconductors. 

Scientists at Oxford University and the Institut Laue-Langevin have used neutrons to probe the magnetic glue thought to produce high temperature superconductivity and have identified stripes of magnetic moments and charge as the cause of a strange hourglass-shaped magnetic spectrum. Their findings, reported in Nature, will aid the search for a model of high temperature superconductivity. A publication in Nature on 17th March.  

Current research into the origins of high temperature superconductivity found in a large class of copper oxide compounds centres on the motion of atomic magnetic moments. Fluctuations of these moments are believed to create an attractive force which binds electrons in pairs and allows them to move around unimpeded giving rise to superconductivity.
Recent debate has focused on the cause of an unusual hourglass shape found in the spectrum of these magnetic fluctuations. The origin of this pattern, which is found in many if not all high temperature superconductors, is thought to relate to an alternating pattern of spin and charge stripes found within the atomic layers. However, efforts to prove this link have been hampered by the weakness of the magnetic signal from the superconductors and by changes in the spectrum caused by superconductivity.
The team instead turned their attention to an insulating cobalt oxide with a similar magnetic stripe pattern. Using neutron scattering at the ILL, the flagship centre for neutron science, the scientists measured the atomic-scale fluctuations in its magnetism and uncovered the same hourglass pattern in the data. Their results provide strong evidence that magnetic stripes are the cause of the hourglass spectrum and play an important role in high temperature superconductivity.
“Our cobalt oxide compound is a magnetic look-alike for the high temperature superconductors,” says Professor Boothroyd (Oxford University). “Its lack of mobile electrons prevents it from becoming superconductive, allowing us to use neutron scattering to look in detail at nano-scale fluctuations in the magnetic motion without the complicating effects of superconductivity. The experiment allows us to isolate the source of the much-debated hour-glass spectrum.”
This represents an important discovery for those aiming to model the origins of superconductivity.

“Future models must now incorporate these magnetic stripes, says Dr Paul Freeman, formerly from the ILL, now at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin. “And with these simple cobalt oxide compounds, we have an ideal candidate for further research into understanding the links between magnetism and high temperature superconductivity.”

Source: Institut Laue-Langevin