Regulators ask Edison questions about San Onofre restart plan









Federal regulators have sent Southern California Edison a new set of detailed questions that will help them evaluate the feasibility of a partial restart of the shuttered San Onofre nuclear plant.


The plant, which once supplied enough power for about 1.4 million homes, has been out of service for close to a year because of unusual wear on steam generator tubes that carry radioactive water.


Edison has requested permission to restart one of two reactor units at the plant and run it at 70% capacity for five months. The company provided analysis to show that the lower power level would alleviate the conditions that caused the tubes to vibrate excessively and knock against support structures and adjacent tubes.





In questions submitted Wednesday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked Edison to provide additional analysis showing what the extent of the tube-to-tube wear would be and whether the plant would meet standards for tube integrity if the unit were operated at 100% of its licensed power.


Activists opposed to the plant's restart expressed hope that if Edison can't show that the plant could operate safely at 100% power, it might be required to apply for a license amendment and go through a courtroom-like hearing to operate at reduced power — something they have been pushing for.


NRC spokesman Victor Dricks declined to comment on that issue.


Edison spokeswoman Jennifer Manfre said the company would be answering all of the NRC's questions as part of a thorough review process. She declined to comment on how Edison's response might affect that process, but said the company is "confident that Unit 2 at San Onofre can be operated safely and within industry norms."


Dricks said he did not anticipate that the latest round of NRC questions would extend the timetable for reviewing the restart plan. The NRC has said tentatively that it could reach a decision on the restart proposal in March.


The questions submitted Wednesday addressed some other issues discussed at a public meeting between Edison representatives and NRC staff earlier this month. NRC senior materials engineer Emmett Murphy questioned whether tubes that have been plugged to take them out of service — either because of wear or as a precaution — could eventually pose problems.


Some of the tubes, Murphy pointed out, "are adjacent to a retainer bar that vibrates, and this vibration was the cause of wear in some tubes." In the long term, he said, the plugged tubes could wear through and break, damaging other tubes.


The NRC also queried Edison on details of an upgraded loose parts monitoring system the company proposed to install.


Edison has not proposed a restart plan for the plant's second reactor, where the tube damage was more extensive.


But Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the manufacturer of the steam generators, has been testing mock-ups of redesigned support structures that could be part of a longer term repair plan for the plant. Inadequate support structures in the steam generators have been blamed in part for the wear problems.


The NRC last month cited some procedural issues with the testing. A Mitsubishi spokesman said that the issues had to do with documentation and that the test results were accurate.


abby.sewell@latimes.com





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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Sunset on Mars


On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera (Pancam) mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th martian day, or sol. Spirit was commanded to stay awake briefly after sending that sol's data to the Mars Odyssey orbiter just before sunset. This small panorama of the western sky was obtained using Pancam's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer color filters. This filter combination allows false color images to be generated that are similar to what a human would see, but with the colors slightly exaggerated. In this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the Sun would be visible to us if we were there, but an artifact of the Pancam's infrared imaging capabilities is that with this filter combination the redness of the sky farther from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the martian sky. Because Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is, the Sun appears only about two-thirds the size that it appears in a sunset seen from the Earth. The terrain in the foreground is the rock outcrop "Jibsheet", a feature that Spirit has been investigating for several weeks (rover tracks are dimly visible leading up to Jibsheet). The floor of Gusev crater is visible in the distance, and the Sun is setting behind the wall of Gusev some 80 km (50 miles) in the distance.


This mosaic is yet another example from MER of a beautiful, sublime martian scene that also captures some important scientific information. Specifically, sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long martian twilight (compared to Earth's) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.


Image: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell [high-resolution]


Caption: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

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Obamas join military families for kids’ concert






WASHINGTON (AP) — First lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia are rocking out with hundreds of kids from military families and Washington-area public schools at the Kids’ Inaugural Concert.


Pop star Usher started off the proceedings Saturday evening with his hit song “Yeah.” The concert is chock-full of A-list talent, including Katy Perry, Mindless Behavior and members of the cast of the Fox series “Glee.”






The concert continues a tradition started at the 2009 inauguration by honoring the nation’s military families. It’s being hosted by Mrs. Obama and the vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, and emceed by Nick Cannon.


Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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The Boss: New Leaders Inc. C.E.O. on Giving Children a Chance





I AM the youngest of 10 children in my family, and the only one born in the United States. My father was a municipal judge who fled Haiti during the Duvalier regime. He and my mother settled in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, but could not initially afford to bring over my four brothers and five sisters, who stayed in Haiti with relatives.







Jean S. Desravines is the chief executive of New Leaders Inc. in New York.




AGE 41


FAVORITE PASTIMES Karate and taekwondo


MEMORABLE BOOK "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character," by Paul Tough






Since he did not speak English fluently, my father worked as a janitor and had a second job as a hospital security guard. He later took a third job driving a taxi at night to pay for my tuition at Nazareth Regional High School, a Roman Catholic school in Brooklyn. My parents were determined that I was going to get a good education, and wanted to keep me away from local troubles, which did claim two of my childhood friends.


Working so many jobs overwhelmed my father. He had a heart attack and died at age 59 behind the wheel of his taxi. My mother found it difficult to cope without my father and moved back to Haiti in 1989 with two of my siblings. I thought I would have to leave school because I had no money for tuition, but Nazareth agreed to pay my way.


I wound up sleeping in my car for almost three months, showering at school after my track team’s practice. I also held down two jobs, both in retailing, and one of my sisters and I rented a basement apartment in East Flatbush.


After graduating from high school in 1990, I attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn, on athletic and academic scholarships. I worked first at the New York City Board of Education, where H. Carl McCall was president, then in his office after he became New York State comptroller. I later worked in the office of Ruth Messinger, then the Manhattan borough president.


I broadened my nonprofit organization experience at the Faith Center for Community Development while earning my master’s of public administration at New York University. I married my high school sweetheart, Melissa, and we now have two children.


In 2001, I began to work toward my original goal — improving educational opportunities for children — and joined the city’s Department of Education. I was later recruited under the new administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to help start a program as part of his Children First reforms.


In 2003, I became the Department of Education’s executive director for parent and community engagement, and, two years later, senior counselor to Joel I. Klein, then the school chancellor. He taught me a great deal about leadership and how to change the education system. But I began to realize public education could not be transformed without great principals who function like C.E.O.’s of their schools.


So in 2006 I returned to the nonprofit world, to New Leaders, a national organization founded in 2000 to recruit and develop leaders to turn around low-performing public schools. Initially, I managed city partnerships and expanded our program in areas like New Orleans and Charlotte, N.C.


In 2011, I became C.E.O., and revamped our program to produce even stronger student achievement results, streamlined our costs, diversified funding sources and forged new partnerships. We have an annual budget of $31.5 million, which comes from foundations, businesses, individuals and government grants, and a staff of about 200 people at a dozen locations.


We have a new partnership with Pearson Education to provide greater learning opportunities to public school principals. The goal of these efforts is to have a great principal in each of our nation’s public schools — to make sure that, just as I did, all kids get a chance at success.


As told to Elizabeth Olson.



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Obama loyalists are now Organizing for Action









WASHINGTON — Underscoring its potential to become a political heavyweight, a new advocacy group launched Friday to push President Obama's second-term agenda will be guided by his most-trusted strategists and have access to his reelection campaign's most-prized assets, including its intricately detailed voter databases.


In an email to supporters with the subject line "Say you're in," Obama vowed that the group, Organizing for Action, would be "an unparalleled force in American politics."


"It will work to turn our shared values into legislative action — and it'll empower the next generation of leaders in our movement," the president wrote.





Jim Messina, who managed Obama's 2012 campaign, will be chairman of the board, and longtime Obama advisor David Axelrod will serve as a consultant. David Plouffe, Obama's top political advisor, will also have a role when he leaves the White House, a move expected to happen soon.


"If we can take the enthusiasm and passion that people showed throughout the campaign and channel it into the work ahead of us, we will be unstoppable," Messina wrote in an email to campaign donors.


To accomplish that, however, the organization must avoid the fate of a previous effort Obama officials made in 2009 to transform his first presidential campaign into a permanent advocacy force. That project, the similarly named Organizing for America, was criticized by many Democrats for failing to effectively harness the president's grass-roots supporters.


The new group, unlike its predecessor, will be independent of the Democratic National Committee. It is being run by Jon Carson, who most recently directed the White House Office of Public Engagement. Based in Chicago and Washington, the organization's board is stocked with veteran Obama aides Robert Gibbs, Stephanie Cutter, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, Erik Smith and Julianna Smoot, as well as technology entrepreneur Frank White, a top campaign fundraiser.


Set up as an tax-exempt advocacy group, Organizing for Action will have freer rein to operate, as well as the ability to deploy the sophisticated databases and software developed for Obama's reelection campaign. The campaign will lease those valuable assets to the advocacy group, retaining control for the foreseeable future.


The arrangement gives Obama allies supervision over the campaign's voter files, technology and email lists, which are coveted by other Democratic candidates and interest groups. The campaign has not yet made any decisions about who else will get access to them.


The decision about how — and if — the campaign's infrastructure will be shared is one of the most pressing questions being raised in Democratic circles in the wake of the group's launch.


"We've never had a presidential campaign that created and retained the kind of information that the Obama 2012 campaign built," said Democratic strategist Steve Hildebrand, who served as a top Obama campaign official in 2008. "So it's going to take more than a few weeks to figure this new environment out and how it should apply to future elections."


Those assets could give other candidates a strong edge, and party strategists warn of a backlash if the Obama campaign does not share its resources. But deciding who would get to use them could be tricky — particularly in the fight for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, which could see Vice President Joe Biden competing against Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.


The current arrangement raises many questions, including whether the campaign will have the funds for the costly project of keeping the files current. "They are a hot commodity right now, but these lists quickly become like stinky cheese," said Steve Rosenthal, a veteran Democratic organizer. "If you don't keep updating them, they have pretty limited value."


Officials said Friday that Organizing for Action, which was set up under the tax code's section 501(c)4 as a nonprofit social welfare organization, will accept unlimited individual and corporate donations but not contributions from lobbyists, similar to the self-imposed rules governing the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Committee.


The organization plans to disclose its donors, as the inaugural committee does, even though tax-exempt advocacy groups are not required to do so. But it remains to be seen how frequently Organizing for Action will share that information and whether it will reveal the amount of the donations.


matea.gold@latimes.com





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Did <em>Glee</em> Rip Off a Jonathan Coulton Cover of 'Baby Got Back'?



Musician Jonathan Coulton, best known for his geek-friendly tunes like “Code Monkey” and the two (amazing) theme songs for the Portal videogames, got a bit of a surprise this morning when a Twitter follower sent him a video that looked and sounded like a Glee remix of the Sir Mix-A-Lot song “Baby Got Back.” The problem? It was almost identical to Coulton’s very distinctive cover arrangement of the same song on his 2005 album Thing a Week One.


“I assume [Glee] heard [my cover] and wanted to put it in their show. Which is flattering, but also an email would have been nice — just a hi, howya doin’ kind of thing,” Coulton told Wired by e-mail.


Coulton notes that the YouTube video was not an official Fox release of the song, but the track is currently for sale on the Swedish version of iTunes, as reported by Kotaku, where it appears to be offered from the official “Glee Cast” account. The song is reportedly slated for the Jan. 24 episode “Sadie Hawkins.” Wired reached out to a Fox representative, who said that they had no comment on the matter.


Coulton immediately posted the video on Twitter side-by-side with a link to his version of the 1986 hit single, and the resemblance was beyond uncanny, even simulating quirks like Coulton’s name drop of “Johnny C.” It was so close, in fact, that Coulton speculated that the same audio might have been used on the track, and recruited his followers to help him analyze the track.


“I’m still waiting on the science,” said Coulton. “It’s possible they chose to reproduce the arrangement exactly, but I’m not sure why they would have kept all my bad choices in there and not found one thing to improve. Though I will say their mix is better than my 2005 version, so that’s good.”


Coulton adds that he’s trying to sort out the legal ramifications, and that while he’d be fine with fans using his arrangement of the song “for fandom’s sake, but if it is a large corporation using other people’s ideas to make money, whether it’s legal or not, it’s kind of gross.”


Asked about his new or upcoming projects, Coulton joked, “I’m creating a new TV show. It’s called Glee.”


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Schilling to sell bloody sock worn in Red Sox 2004 World Series






CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – Former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, owner of a bankrupt video game company, plans to auction off a blood-stained sock he wore in the historic 2004 World Series championship.


The sock, worn by Schilling in Game Two of the first World Series won by the Red Sox in 86 years, is expected to fetch more than $ 100,000 when it hits the auction block next month, Chris Ivy, director of sports at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, said on Thursday.






Schilling took the mound after having an unorthodox surgical procedure done on his injured right ankle, enabling him to pitch in Game Two of the team’s four-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals.


The sock had been on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, since 2004, Ivy said.


Online bidding for the sock will open at $ 25,000 on February 4, followed by a live auction in New York on February 23, he said.


Last year, the state of Rhode Island sued Schilling and the former head of a state economic development agency over a $ 75 million loan guarantee the agency made to 38 Studios, a failed video game company owned by the retired baseball player.


The quasi-public agency made the loan in 2010 to lure Schilling, who promised to bring 450 jobs to the economically depressed state from neighboring Massachusetts. The deal was brokered by former Rhode Island governor Donald Carcieri.


38 Studios filed for bankruptcy in June, leaving Rhode Island taxpayers responsible for repaying roughly $ 100 million, including interest, to private investors who had bought bonds the state issued on behalf of the company.


The lawsuit charges some of the defendants committed larceny and permitted the video game company to rely on financial assumptions that were based on “known false assumptions.”


(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and David Gregorio)


Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Well: A Great Grain Adventure

This week, the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman asks readers to go beyond wild rice and get adventurous with their grains. She offers new recipes with some unusual grains you may not have ever cooked or eaten. Her recipes this week include:

Millet: Millet can be used in bird seed and animal feed, but the grain is enjoying a renaissance in the United States right now as a great source of gluten-free nutrition. It can be used in savory or sweet foods and, depending on how it’s cooked, can be crunchy or creamy. To avoid mushy millet, Ms. Shulman advises cooking no more than 2/3 cup at a time. Toast the seeds in a little oil first and take care not to stir the millet once you have added the water so you will get a fluffy result.

Triticale: This hearty, toothsome grain is a hybrid made from wheat and rye. It is a good source of phosphorus and a very good source of magnesium. It has a chewy texture and earthy flavor, similar to wheatberries.

Farro: Farro has a nutty flavor and a chewy texture, and holds up well in cooking because it doesn’t get mushy. When using farro in a salad, cook it until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.

Buckwheat: Buckwheat isn’t related to wheat and is actually a great gluten-free alternative. Ms. Shulman uses buckwheat soba noodles to add a nutty flavor and wholesomeness to her Skillet Soba Salad.

Here are five new ways to cook with grains.

Skillet Brown Rice, Barley or Triticale Salad With Mushrooms and Endive: Triticale is a hybrid grain made from wheat and rye, but any hearty grain would work in this salad.


Skillet Beet and Farro Salad: This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting.


Warm Millet, Carrot and Kale Salad With Curry-Scented Dressing: Millet can be tricky to cook, but if you are careful, you will be rewarded with a fluffy and delicious salad.


Skillet Wild Rice, Walnut and Broccoli Salad: Broccoli flowers catch the nutty, lemony dressing in this winter salad.


Skillet Soba, Baked Tofu and Green Bean Salad With Spicy Dressing: The nutty flavor of buckwheat soba noodles makes for a delicious salad.


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With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing


SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.


Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.


Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.


“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.


This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.


“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.


Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.


The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.


“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”


Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.


“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”


Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.


A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.


“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.


Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.


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White House launches campaign for support of gun control measures









WASHINGTON — A day after President Obama announced a wide-ranging series of gun-control initiatives, the administration kicked off its campaign to create public support and pressure lawmakers to pass the most comprehensive legislation since the mid-1990s.


"We're going to take this fight to the halls of Congress. We're going to take it beyond that," Vice President Joe Biden told the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Thursday. "We're going to take it to the American people. We're going to go around the country making our case, and we're going to let the voice of the American people be heard."


The administration will use Obama's fearsome campaign infrastructure to try to galvanize supporters around an issue that faces a protracted fight on Capitol Hill. To do so, the administration will pit its own grass-roots network against gun-rights groups, such as the National Rifle Assn.





"If you think we've suffered too much pain to allow this to continue, put down the paper, turn off the computer, and get your members of Congress on record," Obama wrote in an opinion piece in the Connecticut Post. "Ask them why getting an A-grade from the gun lobby is more important than giving parents some peace of mind when they drop their child off for first grade."


The newspaper is based in Bridgeport, near Newtown, the site of last month's school shooting that left 20 children and six staff members dead and set off calls for new gun laws.


The mobilization efforts by the president's campaign committee began in earnest Thursday, with campaign manager Jim Messina emailing supporters an online petition and urging them to "stand with the president."


Biden, in his speech to the mayors, acknowledged that there may not be "absolute unanimity" on how to mitigate gun violence, but emphasized consensus.


"Everyone acknowledges we have to do something.... I hope we all agree that mass shootings like the ones that we witnessed in Newtown 34 days ago cannot continue to be tolerated," he said.


Biden outlined many of the initiatives announced by Obama on Wednesday, including administrative actions to improve federal research on gun-related violence and to direct the attorney general to reevaluate the categories of people who should be prohibited from owning a gun. And he made a forceful pitch for the policies that must pass Congress, including a universal background-check system for every gun sale and a ban on high-capacity magazines.


"High-capacity magazines don't have a practical sporting purpose or hunting purpose. As one hunter told me, if you got 12 rounds, it means you've already missed the deer 11 times," Biden said. "You should pack the sucker in at that point."


But Biden spent much less time speaking about an assault weapons ban, which will face stiff opposition in Congress. He also contended that the gun industry would exploit any loopholes in a new law to continue to manufacture the weapons.


"I know as well as anyone, having written the first assault weapons ban, that the industry will do whatever it can to get around it, and they'll figure out a way," the vice president said. "But I also know we have to try."


Chris Koos, the mayor of Normal, Ill., said a "surprising" number of his constituents have voiced support for an assault weapons ban. "I thought there'd be some push-back," Koos said, in his city of 52,000 people in a rural region. But he said Vietnam veterans have been particularly outspoken in their support for a ban, having used similar firearms in combat.


"They know what they are for," Koos said.


But Betsy Price, mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, said most residents of her city were opposed to bans on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines.


"Good, outstanding citizens really want to keep their guns," she said.


But Price praised the president's efforts to improve mental health treatment and record-keeping, especially the executive action informing healthcare providers that they are not prevented from sharing relevant information about people who are prohibited from owning guns for mental health reasons.


Biden took pains to assert that the White House respected the 2nd Amendment.


Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle said that message may resonate in his state. "Nebraska is certainly a very, very conservative state. A red state, solid. But when you start polling people, particularly my constituents, you start seeing there is a public concern about the gun violence," he said.


"That's what the vice president is trying to do," Suttle said. "He's saying, 'Hey, the 2nd Amendment is your right. It's our right. Let's move on to the other aspects.'"


Dick Moore, the mayor of Elkhart, Ind., said Biden's choice for his first day on the stump was a savvy one. "He just sent a whole bunch of emissaries back home with what he said," Moore said. "Whether you're for or you're against, you get the word around the country pretty fast this way."


melanie.mason@latimes.com





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Facebook Wants New Breed of Flash Memory for Storing Old Pics



With each passing day, more than 350 million digital photos find their way onto Facebook, joining the more than 240 billion that are already there. Jay Parikh is the man who makes sure all those photos can remain online from now until the end of time, and that’s going pretty well. But he wants a little help. He wants the world to build him a new kind of flash memory ideally suited to storing all those old pics you rarely look at anymore.


The way things are going, he’ll probably get it. As Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering, Parikh oversees the development of both the software and the hardware needed to operate the world’s most popular social network, and in recent months, he and his colleagues have developed a certain knack for convincing the world’s hardware companies to build stuff that suits Facebook’s particular needs — and the needs of other massive online operations. Just yesterday, Intel, AMD, and two other chip makers put their weight behind Facebook’s effort to create a new type of server that lets you add and remove processors whenever you like.


In the spring of 2011, Facebook founded something called the Open Compute Project, hoping to remake the hardware industry through communal collaboration, and on Wednesday, even as the company was showing off the latest fruits of the project, Parikh was calling for more.


Today, Facebook stores all your photos on good old-fashioned mechanical hard disks. This works well enough, but now that the company is juggling hundreds of billions of photos, many of them dating back three or four years, it makes less sense by the day. Those older photos aren’t accessed that often, and if they remain on hard drives, they continue to sap relatively large amounts of power.



“We can’t say: ‘Hey, you want to look at that picture from Halloween five years ago? We’ll go grab the tape and put it on the drive and send it to you in the week.’”


— Jay Parikh



Traditionally, companies have moved their older digital data to, say, magnetic tape. With Facebook, there’s an added rub. Even those older photos must be stored in a way that lets you instantly retrieve them. “We can’t say: ‘Hey, you want to look at that picture from Halloween five years ago? We’ll go grab the tape and put it on the drive and send it to you in the week,’” Parikh explained on Wednesday, during a speech at the Open Compute Project’s latest summit meeting. “That just doesn’t work.”


Parikh and company could move those older photos to the sort of flash memory devices that are now invading other parts of the computer data center — devices that consumes far less power than hard disks — but these carry relatively high price tags. Today’s super-speedy flash devices are a great to store information that’s accessed all the time, but they’re too expensive for the kind of “cold storage” Facebook needs for old photos.


So Parikh wants someone to build him some flash storage that’s cheaper. Basically, today’s flash is built to maximize the number of reads and writes you can make — the medium tends to degrade as you read and write — but he wants a version that specifically designed for data that’s accessed only occasionally.


“We want something with a low write-endurance,” he told us on Wednesday. “We want to get to something with a much, much lower unit cost per gigabyte.” This will also reduce the company’s power consumption, and according to Parikh, it will give his engineers more flexibility when it comes to writing software. “You play all sorts of neat software tricks in terms of how you optimize it.” When you’re reading and writing data on spinning hard drive platters — and you want to keep speeds up — there are tight restrictions on how you can do so.


On stage, during his speech, Parikh likened storage devices to cars. Right now, he said, it was as if his only options were a minivan and a high-end sports car. What he really wants is a third option — something more like a Prius. “We want is a continuum of options,” he said. “Today, the spectrum is very coarse. There’s tape on one end. There’s flash on the other end. And spinning disks in the middle. And that’s it.”


That may seem like a tall order, but Facebook is now so large — and so influential — it can make such requests in earnest. According to Facebook hardware design and supply chain guru Frank Frankovksy, Facebook engineers have long worked hand-in-hand with the Utah-based flash storage outfit Fusion-io, playing directly into the company’s latest designs, including the new 3.2 terabyte flash introduced on Wednesday at the Open Compute Summit, and Fusion-io chief David Flynn is only too happy to advertise this relationship.


Fusion-io’s high-speed flash cards are already driving Facebook’s database software — where so much of your text-based today is stored — but someday, Facebook will also move flash into the cold storage facility it’s building outside its data center up in Prineville, Oregon. It needs to get its hands on an entirely new type of flash before that can happen. But that shouldn’t be a problem.


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Minaj, Carey fail to boost “American Idol” audience






LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The audience for “American Idol” slumped 19 percent to 17.9 million viewers, its lowest season opener, despite the debut of judges Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban, according to early ratings data released on Thursday.


The two-hour premiere of the show’s 12th season on Fox television also lost 19 percent of the 18-49 age group most coveted by advertisers, Nielsen figures showed. Total viewers dropped to 17.9 million from 21.9 million in 2012.






Despite the drop, “American Idol” was still the most watched show by a huge margin on U.S. television Wednesday night, beating all shows combined in the 18-49 demographic on the three other biggest TV networks.


Fox executives also noted that “Idol” beat the 2012 September premiere of NBC singing show rival “The Voice” by some 46 percent in total viewers.


“American Idol,” long a ratings juggernaut for Fox, lost its eight-year crown as the most watched show on U.S. television last year to “Sunday Night Football.”


Singers Carey, Minaj and country artist Keith Urban joined the show as judges after Jennifer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler left last year.


Fox is a unit of News Corp


(Reporting By Jill Serjeant, editing by Stacey Joyce)


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Personal Health: That Loving Feeling Takes a Lot of Work

When people fall in love and decide to marry, the expectation is nearly always that love and marriage and the happiness they bring will last; as the vows say, till death do us part. Only the most cynical among us would think, walking down the aisle, that if things don’t work out, “We can always split.”

But the divorce rate in the United States is half the marriage rate, and that does not bode well for this cherished institution.

While some divorces are clearly justified by physical or emotional abuse, intolerable infidelity, addictive behavior or irreconcilable incompatibility, experts say many severed marriages seem to have just withered and died from a lack of effort to keep the embers of love alive.


Jane Brody speaks about love and marriage.



I say “embers” because the flame of love — the feelings that prompt people to forget all their troubles and fly down the street with wings on their feet — does not last very long, and cannot if lovers are ever to get anything done. The passion ignited by a new love inevitably cools and must mature into the caring, compassion and companionship that can sustain a long-lasting relationship.

Studies by Richard E. Lucas and colleagues at Michigan State University have shown that the happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness — or unhappiness.

Infatuation and passion have even shorter life spans, and must evolve into “companionate love, composed more of deep affection, connection and liking,” according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

In her new book, “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky describes a slew of research-tested actions and words that can do wonders to keep love alive.

She points out that the natural human tendency to become “habituated” to positive circumstances — to get so used to things that make us feel good that they no longer do — can be the death knell of marital happiness. Psychologists call it “hedonic adaptation”: things that thrill us tend to be short-lived.

So Dr. Lyubomirsky’s first suggestion is to adopt measures to avert, or at least slow down, the habituation that can lead to boredom and marital dissatisfaction. While her methods may seem obvious, many married couples forget to put them into practice.

Building Companionship

Steps to slow, prevent or counteract hedonic adaptation and rescue a so-so marriage should be taken long before the union is in trouble, Dr. Lyubomirsky urges. Her recommended strategies include making time to be together and talk, truly listening to each other, and expressing admiration and affection.

Dr. Lyubomirsky emphasizes “the importance of appreciation”: count your blessings and resist taking a spouse for granted. Routinely remind yourself and your partner of what you appreciate about the person and the marriage.

Also important is variety, which is innately stimulating and rewarding and “critical if we want to stave off adaptation,” the psychologist writes. Mix things up, be spontaneous, change how you do things with your partner to keep your relationship “fresh, meaningful and positive.”

Novelty is a powerful aphrodisiac that can also enhance the pleasures of marital sex. But Dr. Lyubomirsky admits that “science has uncovered precious little about how to sustain passionate love.” She likens its decline to growing up or growing old, “simply part of being human.”

Variety goes hand in hand with another tip: surprise. With time, partners tend to get to know each other all too well, and they can fall into routines that become stultifying. Shake it up. Try new activities, new places, new friends. Learn new skills together.

Although I’ve been a “water bug” my whole life, my husband could swim only as far as he could hold his breath. We were able to enjoy the water together when we both learned to kayak.

“A pat on the back, a squeeze of the hand, a hug, an arm around the shoulder — the science of touch suggests that it can save a so-so marriage,” Dr. Lyubomirsky writes. “Introducing more (nonsexual) touching and affection on a daily basis will go a long way in rekindling the warmth and tenderness.”

She suggests “increasing the amount of physical contact in your relationship by a set amount each week” within the comfort level of the spouses’ personalities, backgrounds and openness to nonsexual touch.

Positive Energy

A long-married friend recently told me that her husband said he missed being touched and hugged. And she wondered what the two of them would talk about when they became empty-nesters. Now is the time, dear friend, to work on a more mutually rewarding relationship if you want your marriage to last.

Support your partner’s values, goals and dreams, and greet his or her good news with interest and delight. My husband’s passion lay in writing for the musical theater. When his day job moved to a different city, I suggested that rather than looking for a new one, he pursue his dream. It never became monetarily rewarding, but his vocation fulfilled him and thrilled me. He left a legacy of marvelous lyrics for more than a dozen shows.

Even a marriage that has been marred by negative, angry or hurtful remarks can often be rescued by filling the home with words and actions that elicit positive emotions, psychology research has shown.

According to studies by Barbara L. Fredrickson, a social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a flourishing relationship needs three times as many positive emotions as negative ones. In her forthcoming book, “Love 2.0,” Dr. Fredrickson says that cultivating positive energy everyday “motivates us to reach out for a hug more often or share and inspiring or silly idea or image.”

Dr. Lyubomirsky reports that happily married couples average five positive verbal and emotional expressions toward one another for every negative expression, but “very unhappy couples display ratios of less than one to one.”

To help get your relationship on a happier track, the psychologist suggests keeping a diary of positive and negative events that occur between you and your partner, and striving to increase the ratio of positive to negative.

She suggests asking yourself each morning, “What can I do for five minutes today to make my partner’s life better?” The simplest acts, like sharing an amusing event, smiling, or being playful, can enhance marital happiness.


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

The Personal Health column on Tuesday, about making marriages last, misspelled the given name of a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who studies happiness. She is Sonja Lyubomirsky, not Sonya.

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State of the Art: Imagining Ho-Hum C.E.S. as an Action Movie - State of the Art





Hi boss! I’m back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. You assigned me to report on what’s new and exciting, but I have some bad news. The answer is: almost nothing.




I mean, think about it: Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook don’t even attend C.E.S.; they’d rather make their product announcements on their own schedules without being locked into this every-January thing. It’s still a big show, bigger than ever this year, with 3,200 exhibits and 150,000 attendees, but I wonder why people bother. Whose product announcement will get any press at all when it’s buried by 3,199 others?


C.E.S.’s organizers publish a daily magazine during the show that profiles new products announced there. Here are some actual examples: “Braven Expands Bluetooth Speaker Line.” “Armpocket Unveils Smartphone Cases.” “Bits Ltd. Expands Line of Surge Protectors.”


So if you want an exciting column from me, the thrills won’t come from the news of new products at C.E.S. I’ll have to spice things up another way. See what you think of this.


As he plummets toward the Nevada desert, two deafening sounds assail Daxton Blackthorne’s eardrums — the wind rushing past his ears at terminal velocity, and a deafening explosion over his head. Fumbling for his parachute cord, he’s blasted by the searing heat from the fireball that, until seconds ago, was his Cessna Citation.


For now, though, his concern isn’t the air-to-air missile that has just dispatched his jet, courtesy of the Bora Boran Mafia on his tail. It isn’t even the fact that Daxton Blackthorne is all that stands between them and the collapse of American democracy.


It’s finding a good place to land.


There! Squinting in the blinding sun, he spots an enormous chain of low-slung buildings, stretching through the bustling downtown like a sleeping cobra: the Las Vegas Convention Center.


He hits the roof of the South Hall hard — too hard. Keeping low, he scuttles across the gravel to a ventilation shaft and emerges, moments later, in a blasting cacophony of color, sound and electronics.


He hears the crash of boots behind him as his pursuers explode from the same shaft. Got to move, Daxton thinks. Detaching his ’chute, he darts among the booths, dodging clumps of buyers, reporters and electronics executives.


He weaves among the exhibits, barely noting their wares. External battery packs for phones. Car chargers for phones. Screen protectors for phones. Cases for phones.


What is this place? he thinks, pulse pounding.


Booth after booth. GPS units. Tablets. Earbuds. Bluetooth speakers. Phone cases. Row after row of Chinese manufacturers he’s never heard of. Like this one, Huawei, selling the world’s largest Android phone — the thin, shiny Ascend Mate, with a 6.1-inch screen. That’d be like talking into a cutting board, he thinks.


He bursts into the Central Hall, and the sensory overload is immediate; he pauses, gasping, to take it in. TV screens. Thousands. Screens bigger than a man. Screens stacked up to the distant ceiling. Screens brighter and louder than explosives in the morning. Sharp, Sony, Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Panasonic. The bombardment is almost as lethal as the one that took down his Cessna.


Here are OLED screens, with incredibly black blacks, vivid colors and razor-thin bodies; this LG model is only 0.16 inches thick. Panasonic and Sony each claim “the world’s largest OLED screen” — 56-inch prototypes.


Footsteps pound behind him. Too late to run. He’ll blend in. He merges into a throng of eager showgoers.


“Three-D may have been a flop,” a rep is saying. “But this year, the industry is back with an irresistible offering: 4K television. Ultra HD, we call it. You thought HDTV was sharp? Now imagine: four times as many pixels. Stunning picture quality, in stunning screen sizes.”


Daxton figures you’d have to sit pretty darned close to see any difference between HDTV and 4KTV. But never mind that — out of the corner of his eye, Daxton spots the black uniforms of his pursuers, fanning through the crowd. Play along, he thinks. “Excuse me,” he shouts in a faux French accent. “What is there to watch in 4K?”


“Unfortunately, 4K video requires too much data for today’s cable, satellite, broadcast, Blu-ray, or Internet streaming,” is the reply. “But at Sony, we’re leading the way! If you buy our 84-inch 4K television for $25,000, we’ll lend you a hard drive with 10 Sony movies on it — in gorgeous 4K.”


Daxton can think of better uses for $25,000; a jetpack would come in handy right about now. He dives into the crowd. Must. Find. Disguise.


A crowd wearing headsets is gathered before a Samsung TV. That’ll do. He grabs one; it covers both his eyes and his ears.


“You’re seeing a prototype of Samsung’s OLED dual-view technology,” the spokesman says. “This TV can display two 3-D video sources simultaneously, or four regular ones. Imagine: Your children can be playing Xbox while you watch the Super Bowl!” Daxton moves the switch on the earpiece; sure enough, the TV’s image changes accordingly, along with the audio from the tiny earpiece speakers.


But angry shouts in Tahitian are closing in. He bolts through an archipelago of audio booths, hawking celebrity headphones bearing the names of the rapper 50 Cent, the heavy-metal band Motorhead, the runner Usain Bolt, the N.F.L. quarterback Tim Tebow and the TV reality star Snooki. When did Snooki become an audiophile? he wonders.


By the time he storms into the North Hall, his lungs are screaming. He stands, panting, in a broader area populated by gleaming, polished automobiles. Here are Ford and General Motors, announcing new developer programs, open platforms for new apps that will run on their cars’ computer screens. Ford’s Sync AppLink bans games and video apps, for safety reasons. Good thinking, Daxton thinks. Wouldn’t want distracted driving.


Here are Audi and Lexus, announcing self-driving cars. Glancing at the video loop, he notes that the Audi prototype can, at this point, drive itself only through specially equipped parking garages, like the one set up at the Mandarin Oriental for a demonstration.


But on the Lexus stage, he spots something much more enticing: a car, festooned with sensors, that can actually drive itself on regular roads, much like Google’s fleet of 12 autonomous cars.


“California and Nevada have both made self-driving cars legal, with certain restrictions,” the executive on stage says. “And this Lexus LS safety-research vehicle is a pioneer. The 360-degree laser on the roof detects objects up to 230 feet away; the front camera knows if the traffic light is red or green. Side cameras, GPS and radar enhance what could someday be a safe, efficient, road-aware vehicle.”


There’s a burst of commotion from Daxton’s near right. It’s them. He vaults onto the stage. “Love the idea of self-driving cars,” Daxton tells the presenter. “But right now, I need a car I can drive myself.”


A saber blade shatters the air next to his ear. With a burst of adrenaline, he dives through the open window of the Lexus. His assailants push through the crowd and clamber after him, but he’s already powered on the car. Huddling low, he guns the engine and shifts into gear.


As a hail of bullets shatters the rear window, the Lexus arcs off the stage, plows through seven rotating shelves of phone cases, and, in a cloud of plaster and twisted beams, erupts through the wall of the convention center.


With a wry smile, Daxton adjusts his rear-view mirror just in time to see the knot of black-suited Bora Borans shaking their fists in the distance.


He brushes some safety glass off his shoulder, slips on sunglasses, and leans back into the leather seat.


“Now that’s what I call an exciting show,” he says, grinning, and he swings onto the open road for home.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about the range of wares on  display at the Consumer Electronics Show, misspelled the name of a Chinese electronics manufacturer at the show. The company is Huawei, not Huwei.



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L.A. pension boards asked to end investments in assault gun firms









Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Wednesday that he has asked the city's three pension funds to review all investments and work to end those in companies that manufacture assault weapons.


Invoking the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 27 dead in Newtown, Conn., last month, Villaraigosa said it was inappropriate for the city to make money off weapons manufacturers.


"It's a moral and financial imperative to end our relationship with these companies," said the mayor, who added that it was unclear how much pension money was invested in weapons makers.





"I don't want to make a quarter, not a penny, not a dime off of companies that make those weapons of war," he later added.


His City Hall news conference came just hours after President Obama announced a new package of gun control proposals in response to the school shooting.


In letters to the city's pension boards — for employees of the Department of Water and Power, the city of Los Angeles, and the police and fire departments — the mayor requested a report on the feasibility of removing all investments in weapons makers.


"We should not invest in or support companies that put military-grade weapons on our streets," Villaraigosa wrote to the pension boards.


The letters and announcement mirror a similar call from Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Jan Perry, who called for an end to such investments in a Jan. 11 City Council motion.


Villaraigosa's directive to review city pension investments was not a result of Perry's motion, according to the mayor's spokesman.


Two days ago, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel requested a similar review of that city's pension investments. Villaraigosa stressed that the push for gun safety must come from the local level, and said he would be holding a news conference Friday with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Mayors Against Illegal Guns group.


The mayor also said he would support a citywide ban on the possession of high-capacity magazines, which was proposed by Councilman Paul Krekorian on Tuesday. He also said that he would want to see the California ban on selling and manufacturing high-capacity magazines broadened to include possession and that he would favor a federal ban.


"Getting this done at the state, getting this done nationally, has to be the priority," Villaraigosa said.


wesley.lowery@latimes.com





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Judge Tells Apple, Amazon to Try to Settle Their 'Appstore' Beef











The judge presiding over the Apple and Amazon lawsuit over rights to the “appstore” name has told the two companies to sit down and at least try to settle their dispute before trial.


San Francisco U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte issued an order Tuesday telling the two sides to talk it out. This doesn’t mean they’ll come to terms before the August 19 trial, but they must at least pretend to try.


If the talks, first reported by Bloomberg, don’t lead to a settlement, the mess lands in U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton’s courtroom in Oakland. Hamilton, like Laporte, seems tired of the bickering. On January 2, Hamilton dismissed Apple’s claim that the Amazon Appstore for Android was falsely advertising itself as an app store for iOS apps. No one is confusing the Appstore for Apple’s App Store, she said.


Apple filed its lawsuit against Amazon the day the Appstore for Android (which only sells apps that run on Google’s Android operating system) went live, back on March 22, 2011. The iPhone maker is accusing Amazon of infringing on its copyrighted “App Store” name. Meanwhile, Amazon countersued Apple, arguing that “app store” is a generic phrase and that Apple shouldn’t be the only company to use the term.






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“American Idol” returns with feuds, fame, fortune






LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “American Idol” returns on Wednesday with the tantalizing promise of fame, fortune and feuds – and that’s just among the celebrity panel hired to find the next pop music sensation.


Singer Mariah Carey, rapper Nicki Minaj and country artist Keith Urban make their debut as judges when the TV talent contest begins its 12th season on Fox.






“All three judges are eminently qualified. It’s a good spectrum in terms of embracing hip-hop, country and pop,” HitFix.com music blogger Melinda Newman said.


“What everyone is going to be looking at, sadly, is how Mariah and Nicki Minaj get along, instead of focusing on the contestants,” she said.


Carey, with more than 200 million album sales, the outspoken Minaj, one of the most exciting voices in rap, and Urban are expected to revive interest in the contest. Last year average audiences dipped below 20 million, and “Idol” lost its eight-year crown as the most watched show on U.S. television to NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”


The three newcomers replace departing judges Jennifer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler who quit last year after two seasons.


The new panel, rounded out by old hand record producer Randy Jackson, didn’t come cheap. Carey is reported to be earning approximately $ 18 million for the season, Minaj about $ 12 million and Urban $ 8 million.


But industry watchers say “Idol” needs more than big names to bring in audiences at a time of cutthroat competition from talent contests like “The Voice,” “The X Factor,” and “America’s Got Talent.”


“While shaking up the show can initially provide curiosity tune in, at the end of the day, the panel needs to click with each other and with fans,” Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd said.


“‘Idol’ used to have the playground all to itself. After four months of ‘The Voice’ and ‘ X Factor’ last fall, are audiences still going to be excited by ‘Idol’?” Hibberd asked.


The new season of “Idol” was making headlines in September, when video of Carey and Minaj arguing during early auditions was leaked online.


Minaj also was reported to have threatened to shoot Carey, who said in a TV interview last week that she had hired extra security while filming the show.


FOCUS ON CONTESTANTS


In a tense media appearance last week, the two divas claimed they had put their feud behind them, attributing the fight to passionate differences of opinion about the contestants auditioning for a chance to make it through to later rounds.


Newman said it would be a shame if the fight overshadows the show’s original mission of finding new talent, an achievement that could prove the biggest boost to “Idol” ratings.


“All these shows have become more about the contestants than the judges. It would be nice if ‘American Idol,’ as the one that started it all, got the focus back on the contestants.


“Ten years ago, people were really excited when they were voting for (‘Idol’ winners) Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood. There needs to be a powerhouse group of contestants who really capture people’s interest, and who you want to root for,” Newman said.


The new judges say that’s what they want too.


“When I watch these shows and someone says yes to a person who clearly doesn’t deserve it, it bothers me,” Minaj told TV reporters last week. “And I want to jump through the TV because I feel like, for the people who are talented, it kind of minimizes how talented they really are. So when I came on, I didn’t really have a problem with saying no, because I kind of felt like we’re looking for the best of the best.”


Aspiring rappers – never a group that has been embraced by “Idol” producers or fans – will get short shrift.


“I definitely don’t think a rapper should be in this competition … When I got involved in the competition, I specifically said, I hope they didn’t try to do that because I was on the show, because I think America loves that it’s an honest singing competition,” Minaj said.


American Idol” kicks off on Wednesday on Fox with a two-hour premiere, followed by a one-hour show on Thursday. Fox is a unit of News Corp.


(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Stacey Joyce)


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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F.D.A. to Tighten Regulation of All-Metal Hip Implants





After an estimated 500,000 patients in the United States have received a type of artificial hip that is failing early in many cases, the Food and Drug Administration is proposing rules that could stop manufacturers from selling such implants.




Under the proposal, which the agency is expected to announce on Thursday, makers of artificial hips with all-metal components would have to prove the devices were safe and effective before they could continue selling existing ones or obtain approval for new all-metal designs.


Currently, companies have to show only that their devices resemble ones already on the market, and they are not required to conduct clinical studies before selling them.


The F.D.A. action is intended to close a loophole in the 1976 federal law under which medical devices were first regulated. It is the agency’s first use of powers that Congress granted to it last year to deal with medical devices, like all-metal hips, that have been in regulatory limbo for decades.


The move comes amid one of the biggest device-related failures in decades. Just a few years ago, all-metal hips — implants in which the ball and cup component is made from a metallic alloy — were used in one of every three joint replacement procedures performed annually in the United States.


Traditional hip replacements, which are made of materials like plastic and metal, typically last 15 years before wearing out. But the all-metal hips, which companies rarely tested in patients before aggressively marketing them, are failing at high rates not long after implantation.


As a result, thousands of patients have been forced to undergo painful and costly operations to replace the devices. In addition, tiny particles of metallic debris released as the artificial joints move have caused severe tissue and bone damage in hundreds of patients, leaving some of them disabled.


Dr. William H. Maisel, deputy director for science at the F.D.A., said the agency’s proposal would require makers of all-metal hips to produce clinical data to justify their use because of the “large number of patients who received these products and the numbers of adverse events associated with them.”


The use of all-metal implants has plummeted, with the devices now accounting for about 5 percent of hip implants. For some of those devices, which are used in a procedure called resurfacing that is an alternative to total hip replacement, the F.D.A. already requires clinical trials before granting approval.


The impact of the proposal on manufacturers of traditional all-metal hips will not be immediate, and industry lobbyists may oppose its adoption or seek to modify it. Agency officials said it would most likely take a year for the rules to be finalized; after that, producers will have 90 days to submit clinical data to support a device’s safety and effectiveness.


In 2011, the F.D.A. ordered manufacturers of all-metal hips to conduct post-marketing studies to determine, among other things, whether the implants were shedding high levels of metallic debris. Dr. Maisel said he expected that device makers might try to use data from those studies to satisfy the proposed requirements.


If a company decided not to submit clinical data or if the information failed to meet agency standards, it would have to stop selling the implant.


The regulatory limbo involving all-metal hips resulted from the Medical Device Amendments of 1976. The law set differing test requirements for various devices, depending on the perceived risk of using them or the role they played in sustaining a patient’s life and health.


Producers of devices considered high risk, like implanted heart defibrillators, had to perform clinical trials to obtain F.D.A. approval for new products. But makers of devices considered less risky, like hospital pumps, had to show only that a new product resembled one already on the market.


However, at the time the legislation was passed, several types of medical devices, including all-metal hips, were already on the market. So lawmakers crafted what was supposed to be a temporary solution: regulators would treat potentially high-risk products like the hips as moderate-risk products until officially determining how to classify them.


But in the case of all-metal hips, the final classification never happened. Over the years, the F.D.A. started procedures to classify the implants but never completed them. Implant companies also lobbied the agency to classify all-metal hips as moderate-risk products rather than high-risk ones.


The result was that device makers like Johnson & Johnson and Zimmer Holdings were able to start selling a new generation of all-metal hips a decade ago without running clinical tests.


Under the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act of 2012, the agency now has a more streamlined way of classifying older devices. It no longer has to seek an economic review of a decision’s impact, a process that can take years, said Nancy K. Stade, the F.D.A.’s deputy director for policy.


About 20 types of older medical devices still await reclassification.


In recent weeks, the first of thousands of patient lawsuits involving the most troubled all-metal device, an implant once sold by the DePuy division of Johnson & Johnson, have started to come to trial. Some plaintiffs’ lawyers say it may cost Johnson & Johnson billions of dollars to resolve the litigation, which involves an implant called the Articular Surface Replacement.


On Thursday, the F.D.A. also expects to issue new guidance to doctors monitoring patients who have received all-metal hips.


For the first time, the agency will recommend that patients who are experiencing pain or other symptoms that indicate possible device failure undergo routine testing to detect levels of metallic ions in their blood.


Dr. Maisel said the agency was not recommending a specific ion level at which doctors should consider replacing an implant. Instead, he said physicians should monitor such tests over time and use that data, along with other information, to make such decisions.


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DealBook: H.P. Said to Have Suitors for Two Units

Hewlett-Packard has received a number of inquiries from would-be buyers for its Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems units in recent weeks, though the technology company isn’t interested in selling at the moment, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

The volume of calls from potential suitors and bankers picked up after H.P. filed its annual report with regulators on Dec. 28, this person said. In the securities filing, the company said, “We also continue to evaluate the potential disposition of assets and businesses that may no longer help us meet our objectives.”

That is fairly standard legal boilerplate. But H.P. has been struggling with poor performance at both Autonomy and E.D.S., having significantly written down the value of those acquisitions. The company has also claimed to have found accounting and disclosure issues at Autonomy, and has forwarded findings from an internal inquiry to securities regulators in the United States and the division’s home in Britain.

Some of the expressions of interest may also have arisen amid the sudden flurry of news coverage surrounding a potential leveraged buyout of Dell.

Still, H.P.’s management team, led by its chief executive, Meg Whitman, is not interested in selling what it considers to be “core” businesses. The company is focused on growing its enterprise business, which sells software and services to corporate clients.

Shares in H.P. were up 3 percent by late afternoon on Wednesday, to $17.03, after The Wall Street Journal reported news of the inquiries. The company’s stock remains down some 35 percent for the last 12 months.

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Supreme Court upholds state laws on floating homes









WASHINGTON — A house that floats on the water and has no power to move on its own is a home, not a vessel, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.


The 7-2 decision upholds laws in California, Washington and other states that say floating homes that are attached to the shore and do not travel are governed by local laws applying to homes, not by federal admiralty law regulating ships and boats.


The ruling will also affect operators of dockside casinos and restaurants, who will now be able to rely on the same state and local laws that protect property owners. State laws, for example, give some protection to store owners for accidents and injuries suffered by their customers or employees. But federal admiralty law gives more generous protections to sailors and harbor workers who are injured working on vessels.





In Tuesday's opinion, the high court narrowed somewhat the definition of a vessel.


It is not "anything that floats," said Justice Stephen G. Breyer, but something "actually used for transportation."


The court ruled for Fane Lozman, who had parked his two-story floating home at a marina in Riviera Beach, Fla. City officials tried to evict him from the marina and later sued him under federal admiralty law over unpaid docking fees. They eventually seized the structure as an abandoned vessel and had it destroyed. In upholding this decision, a federal judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta said the floating home was a vessel because it was capable of moving on the water and, indeed, had been towed several times, including one trip of 200 miles.


Lozman appealed, arguing his home should have been protected under ordinary real estate laws, not classified as a ship subject to seizure.


The Supreme Court, in Lozman vs. City of Riviera Beach, agreed and said a "reasonable observer" looking at the plywood box home would conclude it was a home, not a vessel. It was not "designed to any practical degree for carrying people or things on water," Breyer said. He noted the home had no rudder, steering mechanism or source of propulsion.


The justices sent the case back to Florida, where Lozman can seek to recover a $25,000 bond taken out before his home was seized and destroyed.


"Our clients are thrilled. This 'reasonable observer' test may seem like an obscure technicality, but it's big news for hundreds of floating homeowners we represented in Sausalito and Seattle, and for hundreds of others throughout the nation," said Michelle Friedland, a lawyer in San Francisco. "They live in homes that are designed to remain stationary and are affixed to the land through electrical and other utility connections."


Judy Patterson, executive director of the American Gaming Assn., said the ruling "will have a positive impact on our industry, framing the right of riverboat casino operators and ensuring they do not face overly broad liability, as would have been the case if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way."


Breyer also said that a vessel, once moored, can lose its legal status as a vessel. "For example, an owner might take a structure that is otherwise a vessel (even the Queen Mary) and connect it permanently to the land for use, say, as a hotel," he wrote.


In dissent were Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Anthony M. Kennedy. They said Breyer's "reasonable observer" standard would probably cause confusion in the lower courts.


david.savage@latimes.com





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Syria Dropped Hallucinogen Weapon on Rebels, Secret Cable Says



The Syrian military used an exotic chemical weapon on rebels during an attack in the city of Homs, U.S. officials now believe.


The conclusion — first reported by Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin and laid out in a secret cable from the U.S. consul general in Istanbul — contradicts preliminary estimates made by American officialsin the hours after the December 23 strike. But after interviews with Syrian activists, doctors, and defectors, American diplomats in Turkey have apparently rendered a different verdict. It’s important to note that this was the conclusion of a single consulate within the State Department, and there is still wide disagreement within the U.S. government over whether the Homs attack should be characterized as a chemical weapons incident.


“We can’t definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23,” an unnamed U.S. official tells Rogin. Danger Room has been unable to independently verify the claims.


Agent 15 is another name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate or BZ, a powerful hallucinogen that the American military tested out on its own soldiers during the Cold War. Its emergence on the Syrian battlefield would be nothing short of bizarre. While Syria is well-known to have a massive supply of chemical weapons, international observers haven’t ordinarily included BZ on that list. Over the years, there have been rumors of BZ being used on a battlefield — including one that Iraqi insurgents were dosing themselves with the drug to pump up their aggressiveness. This would be the first confirmed case of BZ employed as a weapon. At the moment, however, it is not confirmed.


“The reporting we have seen from media sources regarding alleged chemical weapons incidents in Syria has not been consistent with what we believe to be true about the Syrian chemical weapons program,” White House national security council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement. “If the Assad regime makes the tragic mistake of using chemical weapons, or fails to meet its obligation to secure them, the regime will be held accountable.”


International leaders, including President Obama, have called the use of chemical arms in Syria a “red line” that could trigger outside intervention in the civil war that has killed more than 60,000 people. It’s unclear whether the White House would consider a BZ strike to be a transgression of that line; Agent 15 isn’t nearly as deadly as a nerve agent like sarin. Last week, America’s top military officer said preventing a chemical attack by the Assad regime would be “almost unachievable.”


American and allied intelligence services have been watching the Syrian government’s acquisition and possible use of chemical weapon components for years. They’ve blocked the importation of precursor chemicals and equipment into Syria when they’ve been able, and immediately reported to the White House when the Syrian military began mixing those precursor chemicals and loading them into munitions for a possible attack.


But when U.S. officials first caught wind of Syrian rebels’ chemical weapons claim, the officials didn’t make much of it. In graphic videos uploaded to YouTube, opposition activists said they were hit by a gas that was “something similar to sarin,” a deadly nerve agent. The videos showed victims howling in agony and barely able to breathe. But the symptoms, as gruesome as they were, didn’t seem like the one produced by sarin.


There were complaints of strong smells in the videos; sarin is odorless. There were reports that the victims inhaled large amounts of the chemical; a minuscule of amount of inhaled sarin can be fatal.


“It just doesn’t jibe with chemical weapons,” one U.S. official told Danger Room at the time.


But the loss of vision, pain, dizziness, and paralysis reported by the Syrian American Medical Society may correspond more closely with a different kind of unconventional attack.


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Lindsay Lohan pleads not guilty to car crash charges






LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Lindsay Lohan pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to three charges related to a June traffic accident that led a judge to revoke the troubled actress’ probation last month.


Lohan, 26, who did not attend the hearing, was arraigned on misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, lying to police and obstructing police when she said she was not behind the wheel of her sports car, which smashed into a truck in Santa Monica, California.






Lohan’s not guilty plea was entered in a Los Angeles court by her attorney.


The “Liz & Dick” actress is on probation for a 2011 jewelry theft and could be sent to jail if she is found to have violated the terms of her probation.


Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Jane Godfrey, who will also preside over Lohan’s probation hearing, on Tuesday ordered the actress to attend a January 30 pretrial hearing. A date for Lohan’s probation hearing will be set at that time.


Lohan has been in and out of rehab and jail since a 2007 arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession.


The former “Parent Trap” child star was arrested in New York on a misdemeanor assault charge on the same day that the Santa Monica car crash charges were filed.


The Manhattan district attorney’s office has not filed a criminal complaint in the assault case.


(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Stacey Joyce)


Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Personal Best: Training Insights From Star Athletes

Of course elite athletes are naturally gifted. And of course they train hard and may have a phalanx of support staff — coaches, nutritionists, psychologists.

But they often have something else that gives them an edge: an insight, or even an epiphany, that vaults them from the middle of the pack to the podium.

I asked several star athletes about the single realization that made the difference for them. While every athlete’s tale is intensely personal, it turns out there are some common themes.

Stay Focused

Like many distance swimmers who spend endless hours in the pool, Natalie Coughlin, 30, used to daydream as she swam laps. She’d been a competitive swimmer for almost her entire life, and this was the way she — and many others — managed the boredom of practice.

But when she was in college, she realized that daydreaming was only a way to get in the miles; it was not allowing her to reach her potential. So she started to concentrate every moment of practice on what she was doing, staying focused and thinking about her technique.

“That’s when I really started improving,” she said. “The more I did it, the more success I had.”

In addition to her many victories, Ms. Coughlin won five medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke.

Manage Your ‘Energy Pie’

In 1988, Steve Spence, then a 25-year-old self-coached distance runner, was admitted into the United States Long Distance Runner Olympic Development Program. It meant visiting David Martin, a physiologist at Georgia State University, several times a year for a battery of tests to measure Mr. Spence’s progress and to assess his diet.

During dinner at Dr. Martin’s favorite Chinese restaurant, he gave Mr. Spence some advice.

“There are always going to be runners who are faster than you,” he said. “There will always be runners more talented than you and runners who seem to be training harder than you. The key to beating them is to train harder and to learn how to most efficiently manage your energy pie.”

Energy pie? All the things that take time and energy — a job, hobbies, family, friends, and of course athletic training. “There is only so much room in the pie,” said Mr. Spence.

Dr. Martin’s advice was “a lecture on limiting distractions,” he added. “If I wanted to get to the next level, to be competitive on the world scene, I had to make running a priority.” So he quit graduate school and made running his profession. “I realized this is what I am doing for my job.”

It paid off. He came in third in the 1991 marathon world championships in Tokyo. He made the 1992 Olympic marathon team, coming in 12th in the race. Now he is head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. And he tells his teams to manage their energy pies.

Structure Your Training

Meredith Kessler was a natural athlete. In high school, she played field hockey and lacrosse. She was on the track team and the swimming team. She went to Syracuse University on a field hockey scholarship.

Then she began racing in Ironman triathlons, which require athletes to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and then run a marathon (26.2 miles). Ms. Kessler loved it, but she was not winning any races. The former sports star was now in the middle of the pack.

But she also was working 60 hours a week at a San Francisco investment bank and trying to spend time with her husband and friends. Finally, six years ago, she asked Matt Dixon, a coach, if he could make her a better triathlete.

One thing that turned out to be crucial was to understand the principles of training. When she was coaching herself, Ms. Kessler did whatever she felt like, with no particular plan in mind. Mr. Dixon taught her that every workout has a purpose. One might focus on endurance, another on speed. And others, just as important, are for recovery.

“I had not won an Ironman until he put me on that structure,” said Ms. Kessler, 34. “That’s when I started winning.”

Another crucial change was to quit her job so she could devote herself to training. It took several years — she left banking only in April 2011 — but it made a huge difference. Now a professional athlete, with sponsors, she has won four Ironman championships and three 70.3 mile championships.

Ms. Kessler’s parents were mystified when she quit her job. She reminded them that they had always told her that it did not matter if she won. What mattered was that she did her best. She left the bank, she said, “to do my best.”

Take Risks

Helen Goodroad began competing as a figure skater when she was in fourth grade. Her dream was to be in the Olympics. She was athletic and graceful, but she did not really look like a figure skater. Ms. Goodroad grew to be 5 feet 11 inches.

“I was probably twice the size of any competitor,” she said. “I had to have custom-made skates starting when I was 10 years old.”

One day, when Helen was 17, a coach asked her to try a workout on an ergometer, a rowing machine. She was a natural — her power was phenomenal.

“He told me, ‘You could get a rowing scholarship to any school. You could go to the Olympics,’ ” said Ms. Goodroad. But that would mean giving up her dream, abandoning the sport she had devoted her life to and plunging into the unknown.

She decided to take the chance.

It was hard and she was terrified, but she was recruited to row at Brown. In 1993, Ms. Goodroad was invited to train with the junior national team. Three years later, she made the under-23 national team, which won a world championship. (She rowed under her maiden name, Betancourt.)

It is so easy to stay in your comfort zone, Ms. Goodroad said. “But then you can get stale. You don’t go anywhere.” Leaving skating, leaving what she knew and loved, “helped me see that, ‘Wow, I could do a whole lot more than I ever thought I could.’ ”

Until this academic year, when she had a baby, Ms. Goodroad, who is 37, was a rowing coach at Princeton. She still runs to stay fit and plans to return to coaching.

The Other Guy Is Hurting Too

In 2006, when Brian Sell was racing in the United States Half Marathon Championships in Houston, he had a realization.

“I was neck-and-neck with two or three other guys with two miles to go,” he said. He started to doubt himself. What was he doing, struggling to keep up with men whose race times were better than his?

Suddenly, it came to him: Those other guys must be hurting as much as he was, or else they would not be staying with him — they would be pulling away.

“I made up my mind then to hang on, no matter what happened or how I was feeling,” said Mr. Sell. “Sure enough, in about half a mile, one guy dropped out and then another. I went on to win by 15 seconds or so, and every race since then, if a withering surge was thrown in, I made every effort to hang on to the guy surging.”

Mr. Sell made the 2008 Olympic marathon team and competed in the Beijing Olympics, where he came in 22nd. Now 33 years old, he is working as a scientist at Lancaster Laboratories in Pennsylvania.


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 16, 2013

An article on Tuesday about training advice from professional athletes misstated the year in which Steve Spence competed in the Olympic marathon, finishing 12th. It was 1992, not 2004. The article also misstated the name of the institution at which he is now a coach. It is Shippensburg University, not Shippensburg College. The article also misstated the circumstances under which Helen Goodroad attended Brown. She was recruited to row at the university, she did not receive a rowing scholarship. And the article misstated the length of some races that Meredith Kessler won. They are 70.3 mile championships, not 70.3 kilometer championships.

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