LONDON: A toddler's life has been saved after a nurse spotted she had cancer by looking at a photo on Facebook.Nicola Sharp was browsing through friend Michele Freeman's profile when she saw a photograph of Michele's two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Grace.The flash photograph showed Grace with a white pupil in her left eye instead of the 'red eye' tint most people would have - a sign of eye cancer.Nicola, 42, who has worked in paediatrics for more than 20 years, immediately contacted Michele and Grace was later diagnosed with retinoblastoma. She was found to have two tumours and lost all sight in her left eye.Medics told Michele if the cancer had spread it could have been fatal.Grace now has to travel to Birmingham every four weeks for specialist laser treatment and will have to monitor the condition for the rest of her life.Michele, 37, said: 'There is no doubt in my mind that Nicola saved Grace's life. There were no signs that Grace had any problems with her eyes and we never would have known without her.'There is very little awareness of this condition and only around 50 people in the UK are diagnosed with it each year. 'Without Nicola, we don't think we would have discovered there was anything wrong with Grace until she had a routine eye test at school, when things could have been much worse.'Nicola, who lives in Middleton, is the team leader for school nursing services for NHS Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale.She said: 'I was just looking at the photos when I noticed something odd. 'Normally, you get a red eye tint in photos, but where the eye comes out white it can mean something is wrong. We were praying it was nothing serious, but unfortunately it was.'Retinoblastoma only affects young children and the most common symptom is that the pupil tends to reflect light as white, like a cat's eye. When diagnosed early, it is very treatable and can be cured.Michele, of Mount Street, Heywood, added: 'I really want to give a massive thank you to Nicola and to all my family and friends who have been so supportive over the past four weeks. It has been horrible and without them I couldn't have coped.'Michele, who works for Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, and Nicola know each other through visits to Birch Farm on Doctor Fold Lane, where Michele and Nicola's daughter Francesca have horse stables.
Industry tracker SearchIgnite said on Tuesday that Google has tightened its powerful grip on US internet advertising revenue but a Bing-Yahoo! alliance is fielding a viable challenge.Google's share of spending on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising at online search services grew to 80 percent in the third quarter of this year while Bing claimed 6.4 percent and Yahoo!'s portion slipped to 13.4 percent.Microsoft search engine Bing and Yahoo! have been testing making money from search advertising as part of an alliance arranged to join forces against market king Google.Google chief executive Eric Schmidt last month said that Microsoft's Bing search engine was the Mountain View, California-based company's main threat."Absolutely, our competitor is Bing," Schmidt said in a Wall Street Journal interview video posted online. "Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine."Yahoo! and Microsoft forged a Web search and advertising partnership a year ago that set the stage for a joint offensive against Google.Under the agreement, Yahoo! will use Microsoft's search engine on its own sites while providing the exclusive global sales force for premium advertisers.Microsoft has begun handling all Yahoo! online searches in Canada and the United States and will eventually power Internet searches at Yahoo! websites worldwide.
Facebook.com is visited monthly by 540 million people, or slightly more than 35 per cent of the internet population, according to Google Ad Planner worldwide data gathered using recently-acquired Double Click.
Approximately 570 billion pages are viewed monthly at Facebook.com, more than eight times as many pages as are viewed each month at second-place Yahoo.com, which gets 490 million visitors, according to Google.
The figures support word from Facebook that it has not been abandoned by members despite carping by politicians, consumer groups and privacy advocates that want tighter safeguards on personal information at the website.
Only 23,515 people had signed up as of Friday at a We're Quitting Facebook website as "committed" to dump the social-networking service as part of a campaign to stage a mass protest on May 31.
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That number represents less than .006 per cent of Facebook's more than 400 million members.
Facebook is overhauling privacy controls in the face of a barrage of criticism that it is betraying the trust which has made it the world's biggest social network.
Facebook redesigned its privacy settings page to provide a single control for content and "significantly reduce" the amount of information that is always visible to everyone.
Facebook also said it is giving users more control over how outside applications or websites access information at the service.
"This is a pretty big overhaul to the system we already have,"
Mr Zuckerberg said while outlining the changes during a Wednesday press briefing at the social network's headquarters in the California city of Palo Alto.
"Now we are making it so there is less information that has to be public. People want a simple way to control the way information is shared with third parties, so that is what we are doing," he said.
The revamped privacy controls began rolling out on Wednesday.Facebook last month sparked criticism from privacy and consumer groups, US politicians and the European Union by adding the ability for partner websites to incorporate data regarding members of the social-networking service.
Critics continue to call for Facebook to make all user information private by default and then let people designate what they want to share case-by-case in an "opt-in" model.
Facebook has rejected such a model, saying the service is based on a premise that people want to connect and share with friends and people around them.
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