Tepid Sales of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Point to Shaky Market

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Plenty of consumers already own PCs and seem content to make do with what they have.

BELLEVUE, Wash. — It used to be that a new version of the Windows operating system was enough to get people excited about buying a new computer, giving sales a nice pop.

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

Earlier versions of Windows all came out during periods when the PC’s status as the center of computing seemed far more secure.

Not this time. Windows 8, the latest edition of Microsoft’s software, failed to pack shoppers into a Microsoft store in a mall here last week, at a time when parking lots in the area were overflowing. The trickle of shopping bags leaving the store with merchandise was nothing like the steady stream at a bustling Apple store upstairs.

Claude Ballard was among the customers at the Microsoft store who tried out Surface, a new Microsoft-designed Windows tablet. Mr. Ballard, who described himself as a “semiretired” computer systems manager for a real estate firm, said he was intrigued by the eye-catching design of Windows 8 — but not enough to scrimp to buy a new computer this year.

“It’s economics, really,” he said. “It’s going to be a better year for my mechanic than it is for me.”

Weak PC sales this holiday season suggest that the struggles of Microsoft and other companies that depend heavily on the computer business will not abate soon. Plenty of consumers already own PCs and seem content to make do with what they have, especially in a shaky economy in which less expensive mobile devices are bidding for a share of their wallets.

While there are also many tablets running Microsoft’s new, touch-friendly Windows, they have so far failed to emerge from the shadow of competing products from Apple and Amazon and other devices that are being snapped up by holiday shoppers.

Emmanuel Fromont, president of the Americas division of Acer, the world’s No. 4 PC maker, said sales of the company’s Windows 8 PCs had been lower than expected. He said one factor was the system’s unfamiliar design, which appeared to be making consumers cautious.

“There was not a huge spark in the market,” Mr. Fromont said. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question.”

The clearest evidence of Windows 8’s disappointing introduction comes from the research firm NPD, which estimates that sales of Windows machines have actually dropped from a year ago.

According to NPD, stores in the United States sold 13 percent fewer Windows devices from late October, when Windows 8 made its debut, through the first week in December, than in the same period last year.

Those figures do not include sales in Microsoft’s own stores, which were the only place to buy a Surface tablet during that period, but because the stores are scarce, analysts believe it is unlikely they made a big difference.

“I think everybody would have hoped for a better start,” said Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD. “The thing is, this market is not the same market that Windows 7 or Vista or even XP launched into.”

Those earlier versions of Windows all came out during periods when the PC’s status as the center of computing seemed far more secure. In the intervening years, smartphones and tablets have become much more serious rivals for a share of consumer spending on technology. Sales of PCs have been declining for much of the year.

While most people are not getting rid of their PCs altogether in favor of mobile devices, analysts believe they are postponing purchases of new ones.

“What you’re seeing is not a retirement of PCs, but a push-out in the replacement cycle,” said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “If people used to buy PCs every four years and are now buying them every five years, that could lower PC sales by 20 percent over time. That’s substantial.”

Mr. Sacconaghi predicted that global PC shipments would be down 3 percent in 2012.

The shift in spending to tablets is one reason that Windows 8 is so critical for Microsoft’s future. The company overhauled its operating system with a radically different, tile-based interface that is easier to navigate on touch-screen devices. Microsoft intends the software to be flexible enough that it can still be used on conventional laptops and desktops, including newer models with touch screens.

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Meat company owner sues USDA for right to slaughter horses

Rick de los Santos wants to reopen an animal slaughter business that's been banned in the U.S. for years. Along the way, he's also opened a can of worms.

The Roswell, N.M., meat company owner sued the federal government last week, alleging that officials ignored his application to resume domestic horse slaughter for food because the practice had become an emotional political issue throughout the West.

After waiting a year for permits, De los Santos, 52, says he's using the courts to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture to resume inspections necessary to open what would be the nation's first new horse slaughterhouse since 2007.

"I've submitted all the paperwork and have been told all along 'Oh, it won't be long now,'" said De los Santos, who owns Valley Meat Co. "I followed all their guidelines. I put more than $100,000 in upgrades and additions on my facilities to handle equine slaughter. And then the government comes back and tells me, 'We can't give you the permits. This horse issue has turned into a political game.'

"So what else do you do? I figured it was time to go to court."

The slaughterhouse owner, whose business had been slaughtering cattle, is also suing the Humane Society of the United States, Front Range Equine Rescue and Animal Protection of New Mexico, accusing those groups of defamation and causing loss of income during the dispute.

The dispute over killing horses has raged for years. Equine advocates have accused the Bureau of Land Management of failing to protect tens of thousands of mustangs that wander government-owned land in 10 Western states. Many of the animals are corralled each year and sent to long-term holding facilities. And reports surfaced this fall that the BLM was knowingly selling wild horses for slaughter, an outcome banned annually by Congress. The agency is investigating the claim.

In 2007, the last three domestic slaughterhouses in the United States were closed. Since then, unwanted domestic animals have been shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter.

Many animal protection groups and public officials were outraged at the idea of resuming domestic horse slaughter, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who has opposed the plan.

Many animal advocates says horse slaughter has no business in the U.S.

"Everything is wrong with this idea," said Sally Summers, founder of Horse Power, a Nevada-based equine advocacy group. "The economy has done just fine without this type of slaughter. And these plants are toxic to the community. They hurt these towns; they don't help them."

Summers said that many of the drugs that U.S. owners give their horses to ensure longevity and peak performance are carcinogenic. "This stuff gets into the water table through the drains," she said. "It's a nightmare. This man is smoking a pipe and I don't know what's in it."

The USDA declined to comment last week on the pending litigation. The agency has until January to respond to the suit, filed in federal court in late October.

De los Santos says his lawsuit will show that a recent "marked change in cooperation" by the USDA is due to pressure the government is receiving on the horse issue.

Some support a return to domestic horse slaughter. The American Quarter Horse Assn. says a 2011 report from the federal Government Accountability Office shows horse abuse and abandonment have been increasing since Congress essentially banned horse slaughter by cutting funding for USDA inspection programs in 2006.

The number of U.S. horses sent to other countries for slaughter has nearly tripled since domestic horse slaughter ceased. Most animal advocacy groups agree that some of the worst abuse occurs in the slaughter pipeline that often takes horses to inhumane facilities in Mexico.

Last year, 68,429 horses were shipped to Mexico and 64,652 to Canada, according to USDA statistics compiled by the Equine Welfare Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending horse slaughter. That compares with total exports of 37,884 of the animals in 2006.

De los Santos says he is tired of sitting in southern New Mexico and watching countless truckloads of horses en route to Mexico for slaughter.

"I've seen 130,000 horses a year on their way to Mexico — they go right through our backyard — and I wanted to tap into the market," he said. "I could have hired 100 people by now. Everyone in our community agrees we need this type of service. And I'm tired of waiting."

De los Santos says he is ready to start killing horses humanely.

"Everything that has four legs that walks can be slaughtered the same way, but we're ready to do this humanely," he said. "We've upgraded our knocking chutes for giving them that lethal hit."

He says he can't understand why everyone is so upset. Americans kill cows; why not horses?

"My wife says horse is on the menu all over Europe, but the moment you mention horse slaughter in the U.S., you've got a problem," he says.

john.glionna@latimes.com

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Terra/MODIS Color Image of Copahue Eruption Plume Across South America

For the first time since 2000, Copahue is erupting, sending an ash plume across southern South America. So far, the eruption is following the same patterns as the activity that ran from July to October 2000. That activity started with phreatic (water-driven) explosions, so it will be interesting to see if this eruption has new juvenile magma involved. Earlier this year, a study of the summit crater lake suggested new magma was intruding under Copahue and the SERNAGEOMIN report mentioned. that seismicity was rising before today’s eruption.

I grabbed the brand new Terra/MODIS imagery for South America and the plume from the Copahue was glorious – stretching over 350 km across Argentina to the east of the volcano. For a sense of scale on the image, the distance between Copahue and the Embalse los Barreales is ~225 km. The plume itself has been reported to be over 9.5 km / 30,000 feet tall.

UPDATE 12/22 5 PM EST: Eruptions reader Kirby pointed me to the SERNAGEOMIN webcam pointed at Copahue — check out the eruption live!

UPDATE 12/22 7 PM EST: ONEMI has not called for any evacuations on the Chilean side of Copahue — this article also has a nice gallery of pictures from the eruption as well.

Check out the original post with more details.

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment.

Read more by Erik Klemetti

Follow @eruptionsblog on Twitter.

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Reports: Rolling Stones guitarist Wood ties knot

LONDON (AP) — Two British newspapers say Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has married his fiancee Sally Humphreys at a ceremony at London‘s Dorchester Hotel.

The Sun and the Daily Mirror carried photographs of the 65-year-old rocker with a pale boutonniere and a dark blue suit, and his 34-year-old bride in a traditional white gown and a clutch of matching white flowers.

The Sun quoted Wood as saying “I’m feeling great” as he and his bride kissed and posed for pictures outside the exclusive hotel in London’s upscale Mayfair district.

The newspapers said the guests included singer Rod Stewart and his wife Penny Lancaster as well as ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife Nancy Shevell.

A call and an email to Wood’s U.S.-based agent weren’t immediately returned Saturday.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

Violence in America? We're all responsible

For years, the National Rifle Assn. has been telling us that guns don't kill people, people kill people.

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the group has added a twist. Guns don't kill people; television, film and video games do.

Breaking its days-long silence, the NRA on Friday offered its solution to making American schools safer — armed guards — and laid the blame for the seemingly endless cycle of mass shootings on "a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people."

PHOTOS: Mourning after the massacre

That would be the entertainment industry, which as Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's vice president, went on to explain, creates violent video games, films and television shows that inundate our youth with "the filthiest form of pornography."

Citing, rather inexplicably, old films including "American Psycho" (which was an adaptation of a novel), the NRA condemned Hollywood for its addiction to violence.

This is a complete cultural contradiction. If we are to be a society that celebrates firepower, that believes the answer to violence is violence, then it would follow that our art forms would reflect that.

Which, of course, we are and which, of course, they do. As far apart as the NRA and Hollywood may seem from each other politically, they are two of the more powerful forces affecting popular culture. Intentionally or not, their relationship is symbiotic.

As we have been told repeatedly during the last week, the gun lobby is among the most powerful in Washington, able to cow politicians and presidents into policy often in direct opposition to their personal and publicly stated opinions.

The ban on assault weapons was allowed to lapse because even President Obama, so often labeled as ultra-liberal, didn't want to waste his currency of compromise in a fight he didn't think he could win. And so, as pointed out in a Times opinion piece by U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns, who made a conservative jurist's case for an assault weapons ban after sentencing Tucson shooter Jared Lee Loughner, half of the nation's deadliest shootings occurred after the ban expired, including the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

FULL COVERAGE: Connecticut school shooting

Yet to the NRA, the real villain is the entertainment industry, with its serial-killer serials, bang-bang franchises and first-person shooter video games. Never mind the wide availability of military-style assault weapons; "Batman" and "Call of Duty," the gun lobby would have us believe, is more to blame for all the recent mass shootings. Reality is merely imitating art.

There is no denying that there is too much violence in film and television today, too many video games centered around high and bloody body counts. But how could this not be the case? We live in a country where the suggestion that civilians should not be able to own weapons designed to kill a large number of people quickly is inevitably dubbed as unconstitutional.

The NRA believes that the ability to own guns and use guns defines us as Americans. So how can it blame Hollywood for creating the kind of films and television shows that do precisely the same thing?

No doubt Hollywood will respond swiftly with words we've heard before — violence is essential to drama, art is a way to diffuse the aggressive tendencies we naturally have, imagery cannot become reality if the weapons aren't available, etc., etc. We will be treated, no doubt, to the sight of two self-important, overly influential groups standing on either side of 26 utterly inexcusable graves, pointing fingers at each other.

Accusations of making a national tragedy political have already begun, but it's actually worse than that. We're just making it theatrical, with all the usual suspects reciting all the usual lines, criminally diminishing the lives taken at Sandy Hook to a posturing rerun.

We have all failed. As Americans, as adults, as human beings. As creators and consumers, as politicians and voters. If 20 first-graders shot in their classroom is not proof that things have gotten out of control, then it's hard to imagine what is. Both sides, all sides, need to take responsibility.

Trumpeting a "more is more" mentality, Americans find it increasingly difficult to contemplate the restriction of anything; many of us can't even lose the weight that threatens our lives. The NRA's suggestion that what we really need is armed guards at schools sacrifices not just the notion of a peacetime nation (the terrorists have indeed won, except the terrorists are us) but of civilization itself. Are we really willing to return to the days of the Wild West?

But their point about our art forms, though posed rather hysterically, is not without truth. Too many of our prestige TV shows, our blockbuster films and our popular games revolve around violence. More important, they celebrate people and actions we would deplore in real life.

And while there is value in exploring the outer limits of both human valor and depravity, there is also such a thing as wallowing, of substituting shock for illumination. A high body count, a charming psychopath, should not be a prerequisite for a hit film or show.

In Ang Lee's beautiful film "The Ice Storm," adults argue and engage in endlessly self-absorbed drama while one of their children, unnoticed, forgotten, walks down an empty frozen street, where a power line falls and electrocutes him.

This is not the time for the grown-ups to argue; we have been arguing for far too long, and while we argue, our children die. This is the time for us all to take responsibility, make it not so easy for a young man to imagine a hideous act of violence, and not so easy for him to actually commit it.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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Digital Social Visibility: How Facebook Gifts Change Our Choices

Facebook Gifts rolled out after a two-month beta last week, seamlessly melding social with shopping. Not to be outdone, Amazon recently released its Friends and Family Gifting option with the same kind of social gifting visibility.

For Facebook, another puzzle piece of its business model falls into place. For users, gift giving becomes by default a public rather than private activity: People can now fluidly and visibly give their friends holiday presents ranging from iTunes cards to Chandon champagne.

For our culture, however, an era of subtlety and “secret” Santa gives way to the era of reality TV. In many ways social gifting shrouds purchasing in a cloak of generosity, since the social streaming context removes the gaucheness of sharing these gifts. Yet these new social features also signal a culture where broadcasting our behaviors – whether gifting or other digitally shared activities – becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out, though: It changes the choices we make, both online and offline.

Lauren Rhue is a doctoral candidate and Arun Sundararajan (@digitalarun) is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where they conduct research about how digital technologies transform business and society. 

How so? Our research and observations here are based on analyzing visibility behaviors across a range of social platforms over the last three years. Our data includes over 10,000 users who shared more than a million purchases on Blippy across two years, as well as a recent sample of over 1,000 Pinterest users with more than 200,000 connections and close to a million re-pins.

I Anticipate, Therefore I Change

Social influence always seemed to flow from the person who makes the choice, to the people who observe it. But digital visibility reverses the direction and creates a new form of anticipatory influence: What we do is now influenced by the peers who observe us.

We anticipate how people might perceive us or react, and those anticipatory effects change our choices.

Facebook Gifts, for example, might make us think twice about and possibly revise our shopping lists. Because our gifts aren’t just between us and our loved ones anymore: They become part of our social Timelines, our online personas. They’re the future digital ghosts of our Christmas pasts.

Social psychologists have long documented how introducing passive audience observers into situations affects athletic performance, productivity, decision times, memory recall, and even the sunny-ness of our smiles. Interestingly, modifying what one does in response to an audience isn’t simply a socially learned human trait: Similar behavior has also been recognized in non-human species ranging from Budgerigars birds to peacocks to Siamese fighting fish.

So these audience effects are primal; they’re deeply ingrained in who we are. The underlying behavior we’re witnessing now isn’t new. Rather, social technologies are creating a broader and more visible digital public persona by letting us choose our audiences; expanding the audience beyond the individual or an intimate few; making the audience persistent; and transcending the constraints of space and time.

Consider maverick economist Thorsten Veblen‘s theory of conspicuous consumption, which formalized the idea that we make some of our purchases – particularly luxury goods – to advertise economic power and gain social status. Velben wrote his masterpiece “The Theory of the Leisure Class” over a century ago, when we could not transport our real-world social networks across all of our purchasing, gifting, and other consuming sites and moments.

But we no longer need physical and temporal co-location to realize the benefits of being conspicuous. We can now name-drop our Prada bag purchase or dinner at Masa instantly via a data trail or an Instagram picture … or through a Facebook gift in our stream.

Our audience might not be online when we do this, but they’ll probably see it tomorrow, next week, or maybe even next year.

Are You There, Audience? It’s Me, Social

Of course, the audience only matters if it’s actually there. But we don’t really know how many people see what we post on Facebook, which friends are online when, or what fraction of daily incoming tweets our followers actually notice.

This audience uncertainty is due to the absence of any real surroundings, environmental factors, and tactile cues for situating our digital visibility. These are the kinds of familiar cues that, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, shape our presentation in face-to-face settings.

One way of dealing with this audience uncertainty is to picture the group toward which we aim our shares, from whom we seek to maximize approval (or minimize disapproval): our imagined audience. When you buy your favorite employee a cool Facebook gift this holiday, it’s not just the gift recipient audience you’re playing to – you’re also orienting your largesse to other colleagues and maybe your boss too.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out: It changes the choices we make.

The trouble is, you might get the audience wrong. Your audience might instead end up being your spouse or your employee’s significant other, who could misinterpret the intent of your gift. The fissure between imagined and realized audiences can lead to conflict or the feeling that our privacy has been compromised — even though our intent was social.

This is an example of context collapse: facing multiple and unknown contexts for each of our online shares. It’s the result of having a variety of relationships (including those whittled down to just “Facebook friendships”) with competing social norms on the same platform, along with the online data trails that persist long after we leave them.

Digital social visibility is therefore a double-edged sword: As we transcend the boundaries of physical space and time, we also give up the familiar anchors and cues provided in our face-to-face interactions.

How then do people deal with context collapse? By focusing on the small fraction of our network that does provide visible acknowledgement or cues in the form of likes, re-pins, and votes.

Context collapse is the result of having a variety of relationships with competing social norms on the same platform

The problem is that this approach, however, is that it also changes the products we buy. Our research reveals that people buy more in the categories of products for which they get more feedback.

We’re just beginning to understand the phenomenon of image management as commerce and networks merge. The implications are many: for advertising (how should businesses surface choices for gifting?), for measuring influence (Klout doesn’t even begin to capture tacit persuasiveness and cues), for privacy (losing contextual integrity of our shares); and more.

But for us as individuals, the implications go beyond just buying and gifting. Luxury purchases are only one aspect of conspicuous consumption; individual taste-based goods and services are another. You’ll soon – if you’re not already – spend more time hanging out at hip restaurants or rock concerts, monster car rallies or museums, benefit dinners or book readings. Not just because you want to … but because you’ll detract from your digital visible image if you don’t.

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‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Hoofs It Into a 10th Season

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Put on your dancing shoes; “So You Think You Can Dance” has been given a 10th season, Fox said Thursday.

Auditions for the upcoming season will begin January 18 in Austin, Texas, before moving on to Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Memphis.

Fox’s president of alternative programming Mike Darnell praised “SYTYCD” creator Nigel Lythgoe in announcing the renewal.

“I couldn’t be more proud of the amazing work that Nigel and the entire ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ team has done over the past nine seasons,” Darnell said. “This show is truly one of the most compelling series on television and I can’t wait to bring it back for Season 10.”

Last season, the series underwent a format shakeup after Fox cut the show from two nights a week to one, eliminating the results shows.

Fox did not say when the new season of “So You Think You Can Dance” will premiere.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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As Shoppers Hop From Tablet to PC to Phone, Retailers Try to Adapt

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Shoppers often visit Modcloth, a Web site that sells women’s clothes, on their phones but return on a different kind of device to buy something, said Sarah Rose, a vice president at ModCloth.

Ryan O’Neil, a Connecticut government employee, was in the market to buy a digital weather station this month. His wife researched options on their iPad, but even though she found the lowest-price option there, Mr. O’Neil made the purchase on his laptop.

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

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