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fyi // Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory | The Authors Guild Blog

2012-01-31T13:27:00.001-08:00

I have my differences with the Authors Guild (viz., which deity anointed as representative of all word-based intellectual-property creators in dealing with Google?) -- but this piece is right on point.

The "Backstory" examples are particularly relevant. For a couple of decades now, we have seen (and some of us have been thrashed by) the tension between enabling technologies and trends that enable and foster independence (cheap shipping, cheap computing, the Internet) and the consolidation of market power at key points in the supply chain.

What doctors, authors, filmmakers, musicians, chicken farmers, brewers, better-staple inventors, and mobile-phone manufacturers all have in common is some gore point that forces them to kowtow to insurers, publishers (yes, publishers), studios, networks, theater chains, venue chains, processors, distributors, superstores, and mobile carriers whose veto will dry up their markets.

It is fair to say that this isn't new and we shouldn't be so naive; that if your don't like churches you shouldn't be a preacher and if your don't like hospitals you shouldn't be a surgeon.

What has changed is that there used to be at least a few competing "buyers" in the supply chain, and there was the occasional antitrust watchdog action to keep them in line. Since 1981 (another tidbit from the vaunted and mythologized Reagan Legacy), not so much.

The first couple of reader comments below the story warn us of both typical monopolist thinking and of always fighting the last battle. Amen.

At the time they did it, what Standard Oil and U.S. Steel did in the marketplace wasn't illegal -- but it sure was wrong, and over decades Congress and the executive corrected it. More than a century later, is it too much to wish that politicians would honor Theodore Roosevelt with actions to reaffirm Sherman and Clayton and Robinson-Patman?

And we claim we don't publish fantasy...

//Scott

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[from http://blog.authorsguild.org/2012/01/31/publishings-ecosystem-on-the-brink-the-backstory/ ]

Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory

Posted January 31, 2012

Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek's January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book's title? "Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business." A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday's NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. "The Bookstore's Last Stand," reads the headline.

These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February's Harper's Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that's affected bookselling and countless other industries. It's a story that hasn't previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.

We'll get to that in a moment. First, let's set the stage with the other two stories.

Burning Down the Houses

Brad Stone's Businessweek story discusses Amazon's campaign to prevent other booksellers from securing a foothold in the booming e-book market and the company's furious reaction to Random House's decision last March to adopt agency pricing for e-books, just as five of the other "Big Six" trade publishers had the previous year. (Before agency pricing, Amazon could sell e-books from Big Six publishers at deep discounts, taking losses at a rate that Barnes & Noble could never afford to match. See How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble, Probably for more.)

Mr. Stone writes that after Random House's March 2011 agency-pricing announcement,

Amazon could no longer run the best play out of its playbook – slash prices and sustain losses in the short term to gain market share over the long term. … "For the first time, a level playing field was going to get forced on Amazon," says James Gray [of UK bookseller John Smith & Son and formerly of Ingram Content Group]. Amazon execs "were basically spitting blood and nails."

Amazon's response to Random House's move was stunning and swift:

The next month, an Amazon recruiter sent an e-mail to several editors at big publishing houses, looking for someone to launch a new New York-based publishing imprint. "The imprint will be supported with a large budget, and its success will directly impact the success of Amazon's overall business," read the e-mail, which was obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek.

Even with a large budget, directly affecting the success of Amazon's overall business is a tall order for a new publishing imprint. Amazon pulled in well north of $40 billion in revenue last year (final numbers aren't yet in), dwarfing the combined revenues of the Big Six publishers.

Luring a substantial contingent of bestselling authors away from the Big Six seems the only plausible route for an imprint to affect Amazon's overall business. Amazon needed someone with a substantial industry pedigree to pull this off. Amazon quickly – in time for last spring's Book Expo America — landed just the man for the job: Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of Warner Books.

Just three months after Random House's announcement, Amazon had all but declared war on the six unruly members of its book supply chain. Jeff Bezos had $6 billion in cash, the patience to absorb losses for years, and a former Big Six chief to lead the fight. The long-running behind-the-scenes battle for control of the publishing industry had finally broken into full public view.

Barnes & Noble's New Role: The Contender

While Amazon directly threatens traditional publishers with its new imprint, it continues to undermine the ecosystem on which book publishers, and most new authors, depend. Julie Bosman describes this well in her NYT article, focusing on the last remaining brick-and-mortar bookseller with nationwide clout:

Without Barnes & Noble, the publishers' marketing proposition crumbles. The idea that publishers can spot, mold and publicize new talent, then get someone to buy books at prices that actually makes economic sense suddenly seems a reach. …

What publishers count on from bookstores is the browsing effect. Surveys indicate that only a third of the people who step into a bookstore and walk out with a book actually arrived with the specific desire to buy one.

"That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal," said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.

Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It's new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.

To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year's Borders' bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N's 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N's sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders' collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That's what's passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.

There is a bright spot, however. Barnes & Noble, led by William Lynch, has exceeded all expectations in the past two years with its launch of the Nook. B&N's 300-member Silicon Valley office, after giving Amazon's Kindle developers a two-year head start, beat Amazon to the tablet market by fully twelve months, and introduced what's generally seen as the state-of-the-art e-ink reader, the Nook Simple Touch, eight months ago.

B&N, in other words, has been out-engineering Amazon, and Ms. Bosman's story is the best account we've had of B&N's efforts. In the process, B&N has seen its e-book market share climb from zero, two Christmases ago, to roughly 27% today.

B&N remains vulnerable, however. The engineering race against Amazon continues, and Amazon has leverage for acquiring content for its Kindle (see Contracts on Fire: Amazon's Lending Library Mess) that B&N can't match. And, critically, one tool that should help B&N, our antitrust laws, is instead poised to undo it.

This brings us to an unlikely tale of books, chickens, beer, and a Silicon Valley gentlemen's agreement.

The Backstory: Amazon, Chicken Processors & Silicon Valley

Harper's cover art rivals Businessweek's: an enormous businessman wearing a gray pinstriped suit is preparing to literally eat the competition, a jumbo handful of gray-suited men and women. In the article, "Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets," (key excerpts at link, full article by subscription) Barry Lynn views the state of book publishing through a different lens.

Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon's dominance isn't just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it's about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department's interpretation of antitrust law based on "Chicago School" theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.

To a chicken grower, for example, the relevant market isn't restaurants or household consumers of chicken, it's the market of chicken processors. Through a variety of machinations, including long-term contracts and the physical placement of processing plants (think baseball, before free agency), chicken growers now routinely have a market of only one processor to sell to.

Chicken growers own their land, buildings, and equipment, and all of the debt and risk that go with them, but these entrepreneurs have no real control over their economic lives. Growers buy their chicks and feed from their poultry processor, for example, and processors often require growers to make new investments in buildings and equipment. The processors, Mr. Lynn seems to suggest, have something much better than mere capital: the economic power to dictate how others use theirs.

It's not just chicken growers who face constrained markets, Mr. Lynn writes. In free-wheeling Silicon Valley, computer engineers and digital animation workers employed by Apple, Google, Intel, and Pixar, among others, were subject to a secret agreement not to bid on each others' employees, according to a Justice Department lawsuit filed, and settled, in 2010. (On Friday, former employees of some of the companies filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court in San Jose based on the Justice Department investigation.)

It's even hit beer. The 1,750 U.S. microbrewers may appear to operate in a competitive environment, but they nearly all sell through two distributors: ABI and MillerCoors control 90% of the distribution market.

For book publishers, the relevant market isn't readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling's online future as it works to undermine bookselling's remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Amazon controls every growing segment of the industry: online physical books, downloadable audio books, online used books, and e-books. Amazon commands about 75% of the online market for print books, and 60% of the e-book market (a percentage that decreased from Amazon's reported 90% two years ago, as a result of agency pricing).

Mr. Lynn reports on a conversation with the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the U.S.:

He explained that Amazon was once a "wonderful customer with whom to do business." As Jeff Bezos's company became more powerful, however, it changed. "The question is, do you wear your power lightly? … Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous."

The head of a small publishing house in Manhattan, Mr. Lynn reports, was even more blunt:

"Amazon is a bully," he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. "Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly."

Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book – and of the First Amendment – dare not speak openly of the company's predations.

Mr. Lynn then turns to Amazon's blackout of Macmillan's buy buttons, two years ago this week:

At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan's e-books. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer's dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the "natural" one for an e-book.

In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the "agency model." When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions. The reasoning was obvious: the sudden loss of sales, which could amount to a sizable fraction of Macmillan's total revenue, would soon bring the publisher to heel.

This was not the first time Amazon had used this stratagem. The retailer's executives had previously cut off small firms such as Ten Speed Press and Melville House Publishing for bucking their will. But the fight with Macmillan was by far the most public of these showdowns.

In the late 1970s, when a single book retailer first captured a 10 percent share of the U.S. market, Congress and the regulatory agencies were swift to react. As the head of the Federal Trade Commission put it: "The First Amendment protects us from the chilling shadow of government interference with the media. But are there comparable dangers if other powerful economic or political institutions assume control…?"

***

Today, … a single private company has captured the ability to dictate terms to the people who publish our books, and hence to the people who write and read our books. It does so by employing the most blatant forms of predatory pricing to destroy its retail competitors. … [It] justifies its exercise of raw power in the same way our economic autocrats always do: it claims that the resulting "efficiencies" will serve the interests of the consumer.

The book industry is in play, and has been for a while. The good news is that people are finally starting to pay attention.

Comments:

Showing 13 comments

C. Heyer

If you're surprised by the negative comments on this article, it must be because you haven't tried to sell a book lately. Would you think that 40,000 in sales might get you a contract on your next one? Nope. Not good enough. So the writers went elsewhere--to Amazon. Now Amazon is getting so big, they're pounding the writer too. The publishing establishment waited far too long to do anything productive to address the problems in their own business. The part I like about the eBook business is that you license your book. You don't end up liking the deal, you can get out of it. Some big company hasn't grabbed all your rights and told you you're lucky you were one of the chosen and you're getting a whopping 15%, of which you give 15% to the agent. This probably isn't even live online yet, and Amazon is trying to figure out how to take the rights in perpetuity. Jeff Bezos wants to be "the only one." The publishing companies need to start making better deals with the writers. Make it a real partnership, change the game. Is there enough imagination within the business to do that?
truman

This is a classic case of technological disruption. It was only a few years ago when publishers were worried about B&N having too much power over the distribution of their books, and now publishers are counting on B&N to save them from the Amazon beast. On the retail end it's natural that consumers will come to expect lower prices; this has happened in every other "software" category, especially music. No one plunks down $18.99 for a CD anymore so why buy a book for $25.99? So the game has changed; get used to it. One thing the author fails to mention is that the publishers themselves went through a stage of mergers that placed most of the power within a few big players. Shareholders from these big corporate powers demanded never-ending growth and profits and weren't willing to invest in new talent then. Funny how it was okay when publishers were exhibiting the same behaviors that Amazon is being accused of now.

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Season of hope... // Thirty years of a disease: The end of AIDS? | The Economist

2011-12-21T09:56:00.001-08:00

It's the time of year to imagine the end of war, of hunger, of disease.

Here's to all those folks who have looked through their grief toward a better future.

Merry Christmas... /Scott

http://www.economist.com/node/18774722?fsrc=nlw%7Cpub%7C12-21-2011%7Cpublishers

The end of AIDS?

ON JUNE 5th 1981 America's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak of an unusual form of pneumonia in Los Angeles. When, a few weeks later, its scientists noticed a similar cluster of a rare cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma in San Francisco, they suspected that something strange and serious was afoot. That something was AIDS.

Since then, 25m people have died from AIDS and another 34m are infected. The 30th anniversary of the disease's discovery has been taken by many as an occasion for hand-wringing. Yet the war on AIDS is going far better than anyone dared hope. A decade ago, half of the people in several southern African countries were expected to die of AIDS. Now, the death rate is dropping. In 2005 the disease killed 2.1m people. In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, the number was 1.8m. Some 5m lives have already been saved by drug treatment. In 33 of the worst-affected countries the rate of new infections is down by 25% or more from its peak.

Even more hopeful is a recent study which suggests that the drugs used to treat AIDS may also stop its transmission (see article). If that proves true, the drugs could achieve much of what a vaccine would. The question for the world will no longer be whether it can wipe out the plague, but whether it is prepared to pay the price.

The appliance of science

If AIDS is defeated, it will be thanks to an alliance of science, activism and altruism. The science has come from the world's pharmaceutical companies, which leapt on the problem. In 1996 a batch of similar drugs, all of them inhibiting the activity of one of the AIDS virus's crucial enzymes, appeared almost simultaneously. The effect was miraculous, if you (or your government) could afford the $15,000 a year that those drugs cost when they first came on the market.

Much of the activism came from rich-world gays. Having badgered drug companies into creating the new medicines, the activists bullied them into dropping the price. That would have happened anyway, but activism made it happen faster.

The altruism was aroused as it became clear by the mid-1990s that AIDS was not just a rich-world disease. Three-quarters of those affected were—and still are—in Africa. Unlike most infections, which strike children and the elderly, AIDS hits the most productive members of society: businessmen, civil servants, engineers, teachers, doctors, nurses. Thanks to an enormous effort by Western philanthropists and some politicians (this is one area where even the left should give credit to George Bush junior), a series of programmes has brought drugs to those infected.

The result is patchy. Not enough people—some 6.6m of the 16m who would most quickly benefit—are getting the drugs. And the pills are not a cure. Stop taking them, and the virus bounces back. But it is a huge step forward from ten years ago.

What can science offer now? A few people's immune systems control the disease naturally (which suggests a vaccine might be possible) and antibodies have been discovered that neutralise the virus (and might thus form the basis of AIDS-clearing drugs). But a cure still seems a long way off. Prevention is, for the moment, the better bet.

There are various ways to stop people getting the disease in the first place. Nagging them to use condoms and to sleep around less does have some effect. Circumcision helps to protect men. A vaginal microbicide (none exists, but at least one trial has gone well) could protect women. The new hope centres on the idea of combining treatment with prevention.

A question of money

In the early days scientists were often attacked by activists for being more concerned with trying to prevent the epidemic spreading than treating the affected. Now it seems that treatment and prevention will come in the same pill. If you can stop the virus reproducing in someone's body, you not only save his life, you also reduce the number of viruses for him to pass on. Get enough people on drugs and it would be like vaccinating them: the chain of transmission would be broken.

That is a huge task. It is not just a matter of bringing in those who should already be on the drugs (the 16m who show symptoms or whose immune systems are critically weak). To prevent transmission, treatment would in theory need to be expanded to all the 34m people infected with the disease. That would mean more effective screening (which is planned already), and also a willingness by those without the symptoms to be treated. That willingness might be there, though, if it would protect people's uninfected lovers.

Such a programme would take years and also cost a lot of money. About $16 billion a year is spent on AIDS in poor and middle-income countries. Half is generated locally and half is foreign aid. A report in this week's Lancet suggests a carefully crafted mixture of approaches that does not involve treating all those without symptoms would bring great benefit for not much more than this—a peak of $22 billion in 2015, and a fall thereafter. Moreover, most of the extra spending would be offset by savings on the treatment of those who would have been infected, but were not—some 12m people, if the boffins have done their sums right. At $500 per person per year, the benefits would far outweigh the costs in purely economic terms; though donors will need to compare the gain from spending more on knocking out AIDS against other worthy causes, such as eliminating malaria (see article).

For the moment, the struggle is to stop some rich countries giving less. The Netherlands and Spain are cutting their contributions to the Global Fund, one of the two main distributors of the life-saving drugs (the other is Mr Bush's brainchild, PEPFAR), and Italy has stopped paying altogether.

On June 8th the United Nations meets to discuss what to do next. Those who see the UN as a mere talking-shop should remember that its first meeting on AIDS launched the Global Fund. It is still a long haul. But AIDS can be beaten. A plague that 30 years ago was blamed on man's iniquity has ended up showing him in a better, more inventive and generous light.

"impossible!" // Publishers Challenge Audience Report | Adweek

2011-12-19T10:31:00.001-08:00

"How could my account be overdrawn? I still have checks..."

"Frankly, I believe any drops, or increases, are less a symbol of a magazine's audience than they are a shining example of deficiencies in the research collection process itself. Do you really think a Wired reader is going to spend that amount of time completing a written and online survey? If so, they're not likely the affluent, intellectual readers we target anyway."

Guess those in-person surveys aren't the way to go, eh?

On the bright side, reported readership of Obsessive-Compulsive Monthly Weekly Daily Hourly is up 10,000%...

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[from http://www.adweek.com/news/press/publishers-challenge-audience-report-137182 ]

Publishers Challenge Audience Report

Fall study shows widespread readership declines

By Lucia Moses

Magazine publishers are demanding explanations from GfK MRI after its fall magazine audience report showed more than two-thirds lost audience versus a year ago, many of them by double digits.

Some year-to-year audience fluctuations are common, but the fall report was unusual. About 70 percent of the 220 magazines measured were down, according to MRI. Big decliners included Wired, down 22 percent to 2.5 million; Bon Appétit, down 17 percent to 5.8 million; O, The Oprah Magazine, down 10 percent; and New York, down 14 percent.

Print ad buyers use the semiannual report to decide where to spend clients' budgets, so declining audiences are the last thing publishers need. Until now, the overall magazine audience had held steady, giving periodicals needed ammo at a time when newsstand sales and ad revenue were falling. The fall MRI report showed the total magazine audience down 3 percent, though.

Publishers' unhappiness doesn't end there, though. Some are complaining that the report under-represents their digital audience.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Until recently, magazine measurement firms focused on their print audiences, but readers are now getting magazine content on mobile devices and online as well as in print. To that end, MRI, along with rival Affinity, has begun measuring magazines' digital footprint, a step that some publishers hoped would boost their overall numbers. MRI's fall report was its first to include such comprehensive data.

One publisher, whose title saw a double-digit audience decline, fumed, "Magazines with robust readership are showing declines, and magazines with significant digital platforms are not seeing those recognized. MRI is going to have a lot of explaining to do."

Another publisher, Bon Appétit's Pamela Drucker Mann, said it was a "challenge" to understand why Bon App's audience fell 17 percent, given strong year-over-year newsstand sales for the past several issues under new editor Adam Rapoport.

"We did speak to MRI about this, and they said it typically takes syndicated research 12-18 months to reflect an editorial change," she emailed. "Therefore, we conclude these numbers to reflect reader fatigue toward the former Bon Appétit editorial product and the exact reason Adam's team was brought on to reshape the editorial vision of the magazine."

Howard Mittman, publisher of Wired, said the problem was the methodology itself. MRI gathers the information by conducting in-person surveys with 26,000 interviewees.

"The last wave had Wired showing a healthy double-digit increase, and this latest wave has us showing a double-digit decline," Mittman emailed. "Frankly, I believe any drops, or increases, are less a symbol of a magazine's audience than they are a shining example of deficiencies in the research collection process itself. Do you really think a Wired reader is going to spend that amount of time completing a written and online survey? If so, they're not likely the affluent, intellectual readers we target anyway."

Anne Marie Kelly, MRI's svp of marketing and strategic planning, said MRI stands behind its research.

While it's true that MRI changed its questions with this survey to capture digital readership, she said, "We did a lot of testing to make sure this question would be understood by all consumers and would not impact the print numbers."

As for the digital data, she said it's only preliminary and won't be part of MRI's official ratings until the spring when a second wave of research will have been done.

As for the decline in print audience, she suggested that circulation, which has been on a downward trend, played a part.

"Circulation is down," she said. "There are fewer magazines out there. We don't know how much of those [readers] have migrated digitally. I'm not saying it's good news. But we're in the middle of a transition."

About the Author

Lucia Moses is a staff writer for Adweek.

@lmoses
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Fail of the Year? / The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained - NYTimes.com

2011-12-15T14:22:00.001-08:00

Here is one more example of the wisdom of "measure twice, cut once" -- it's so ridiculous to see all that scrap lumber on the marketplace floor...

(from http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/the-year-of-c-e-o-failures-explained/)

The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained

In some ways, the most interesting stories in tech for 2011 weren't the products. They were the companies. Or, more specifically, their chief executives.

Or, to be more specific still, the C.E.O.'s' idiotic blunders.

There was Hewlett-Packard's chief, Léo Apotheker, whose software company background apparently left him baffled by H.P.'s hardware business. He killed off H.P.'s promising, brand-new TouchPad tablet only seven weeks after its release, along with Palm Pre phones and a huge range of products based on the company's WebOS operating system—and proposed jettisoning the computer business that had made it famous.

After a huge public outcry, he was fired, and the new chief executive (Meg Whitman) reversed the changes or suspended them.

There was Netflix's C.E.O., Reed Hastings, who decided to raise the price of Netflix's most popular plan 60 percent — and then split the company in two. One would just mail DVDs, while the other would offer streaming movies from the Internet. Each company would have its own Web site, movie queues, billing and name (Netflix and Quickster, or Qwikster, or Qwiquster, or something). It would require twice as much administrative effort by its customers, and it made no sense whatsoever.

After a huge public outcry (and after losing a million customers), he backed off from the company-split idea and left well enough alone.

There was Cisco's chief executive, John Chambers, who decided to shut down the Flip camcorder business he had bought only two years earlier for $590 million. Killing off the Flip involved taking the world's most popular camcorder off the market and laying off 550 people.

After a huge public outcry, well, nothing happened. He's still the C.E.O., and the Flip is gone.

These C.E.O.'s may have had their own internal business reasons for these unpopular decisions. But they were internal, self-interested reasons. Reasons intended to please stockholders, perhaps.

Even so, all three committed several cardinal sins: Putting customers last. Rewarding loyalty with rudeness. Failing to make their cases to the public.

All of them wound up looking terrible. All of them increased the sense of disconnection between big companies and the millions who buy their products.

I've never worked a 9-to-5 job, so I may feel the biggest sense of disconnection of all. Maybe life inside a company is so different from real life that what seem like crazy decisions to me seem perfectly justified to the number crunchers.

But it doesn't seem like you'd need a business degree to appreciate that these would be bad decisions. Whenever I see a company shooting itself in the foot like that, I always wonder: how could anyone be so stupid? When do people become so stupid?

Last spring, I taught a class at the Columbia Business School called "What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop." I focused on consumer-tech success stories and disasters.

I distinctly remember the day I focused on products that were rushed to market when they were full of bugs — and the company knew it (can you say "BlackBerry Storm?"). I sagely told my class full of twentysomethings that I was proud to talk to them now, when they were young and impressionable — that I hoped I could instill some sense of Doing What's Right before they became corrupted by the corporate world.

But it was too late.

To my astonishment, hands shot up all over the room. These budding chief executives wound up telling me, politely, that I was wrong. That there's a solid business case for shipping half-finished software. "You get the revenue flowing," one young lady told me. "You don't want to let your investors down, right? You can always fix the software later."

You can always fix the software later. Wow.

That's right. Use your customers as beta testers. Don't worry about burning them. Don't worry about souring them on your company name forever. There will always be more customers where those came from, right?
That "ignore the customer" approach hasn't worked out so well for Hewlett-Packard, Netflix and Cisco. All three suffered enormous public black eyes. All three looked like they had no idea what they were doing.

Maybe all of those M.B.A.'s pouring into the workplace know something we don't. Maybe there's actually a shrewd master plan that the common folk can't even fathom.

But maybe, too, there's a solid business case to be made for factoring public reaction and the customer's interest into big business decisions. And maybe, just maybe, that idea will become other C.E.O.s' 2011 New Year's resolution.

d'oh! // Swearing is good for you (unless you're like Gordon) - Science - News - The Independent

2011-12-06T14:17:00.001-08:00

Do we agree with this study? Yes... hell, yes! But we need a American-English translation, dammit...

Why be anti-fane when you can be profane?

cheers//S
P.S. Who the ___ is that guy in the picture?

--
[from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/swearing-is-good-for-you-unless-youre-like-gordon-6270250.html ]

Thursday 01 December 2011

Victims of paper cuts and stubbed toes don't need scientists to tell them about the pain-healing power of cursing but research suggests the more you swear, the harder pain becomes to bear. A study by Keele University confirms that swearing can act as a form of relief. But those who have become habituated to cursing (think Gordon Ramsay, inset, or The Thick of It's Malcolm Tucker) are less likely to feel the benefits.

Richard Stephens, of Keele's School of Psychology, said there was no "recommended daily swearing allowance", and it remains unclear whether certain swearwords are more effective analgesics than others. "We are just scratching the surface of how swearing can influence our emotions," he added.

His findings, in America's The Journal of Pain, found that those who swear just a few times a day doubled the time they could withstand the "ice-water challenge",- how long they could hold their hands in a container full of ice-water. Those who admitted to the highest level of everyday cursing – up to a chain-swearing maximum of 60 expletives a day – did not show any benefit when undertaking a similar challenge.

The mechanism, the scientists say, is simple, swearing elicits an emotional response leading to what is termed "stress-induced analgesia", also known as the "fight or flight" response, along with a surge of adrenalin.

Frequent swearers can utter profanities without feeling an emotional response,and thus do not get the same pain-relieving effects. So, it seems, swearing lightly in one's daily routine can help in the occasional, stressful situation. "It would be silly to advocate swearing on the National Health Service," Stephens said, "But swearing seems to activate parts of the brain that are more associated with emotions.

"In the context of pain, swearing appears to serve as a simple form of emotional self-management. Whether swearing has beneficial effects in other contexts is something we would like to explore further."

$%!#&!$! A history of swearing

* The original meaning of the adjective "profane" derives from the Latin meaning "in front of" and "outside the temple". It refers to items not belonging to the church. For example, "The fort is the oldest profane building in the town, but the local monastery is older".

* A 2000 report co-commissioned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the BBC ranked swearwords on their severity. The most severe words related to racial abuse. The mildest were "baby words" such as "poo, wee and bum" and rhyming slang "berk".

* Regarding broadcast swearwords, 52 per cent of respondents to the ASA survey said that the "c" word should never feature in television programmes, whereas just 7 per cent had a problem with the word "bloody".

* Every language, dialect or patois, whether living or dead, has its own share of forbidden speech. Additionally, young children will memorise the "illicit inventory" long before they can grasp its sense, be;ieves John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute.

* About 80 to 90 words each day – between 0.5 per cent and 0.7 per cent of all words – are swearwords, according to analyses of recorded conversations.

* A 2006 survey found that 36 per cent of 308 British senior managers and directors accepted swearing as a part of workplace culture. "If swearing is discriminatory it is a complete no-no," said employment lawyer Brian Palmer. "Employers have a duty of care towards their employees so they have a reasonable working environment."

Rob Sharp

###

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving ‘Oz’ Munchkins, Dies at 93 - NYTimes.com

2011-11-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

When we were kids, The Wizard of Oz was on TV every year from 1956 on. It gave me the willies, but I watched it every damn time.

By the time I was older (say 12 or 13...) I got un-scared enough to love the technology of the movie, the Munchkins (they trashed the Culver Hotel!)... and then the music.

We all knew "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" was a classic, but who'd have thought that Karl Slover would be still singing it for fans seventy years later?

Or that "Over the Rainbow" would be covered by just about everybody -- and that as grownups we would take it on as a kind of hymn, listening through tears as we send off people who leave us too soon?

I'll wager that lyricist Yip Harbug knew. When Wizard screened in San Luis Obispo, Louis B. Mayer and Mervyn LeRoy tried to cut the song on the grounds that it slowed the pace. Cooler heads prevailed. But one verse was left out, and we hardly ever hear

Someday I'll wake and rub my eyes
And in that land beyond the skies,
You'll find me
I'll be a laughing daffodil
And leave the silly cares that fill
My mind behind me

Godspeed, Karl Slover. See ya one day.

//S

---
[from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/movies/karl-slover-one-of-the-last-surviving-oz-munchkins-dies-at-93.html ]

November 16, 2011

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving 'Oz' Munchkins, Dies at 93

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MGM, via Photofest // Karl Slover in "The Wizard of Oz" as the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band.

DUBLIN, Ga. (AP) — Karl Slover, one of the last surviving actors who played Munchkins in "The Wizard of Oz," died on Tuesday in a central Georgia hospital. He was 93.

The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, said the Laurens County deputy coroner, Nathan Stanley.

Mr. Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band, but he also played an Oz townsman and soldier, according to John Fricke, author of "100 Years of Oz."

Long after the 4-foot-5 Mr. Slover retired, he appeared around the country at festivals and events related to "The Wizard of Oz." He was one of seven Munchkins at the 2007 unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the film's little people. Only 3 of the 124 actors playing Munchkins remain.

Mr. Slover was born Karl Kosiczky on Sept. 21, 1918, in what is now the Czech Republic.

"In those uninformed days his father tried witch doctor treatments to make him grow," Mr. Fricke said. Young Karl was immersed in heated oil until his skin blistered and then attached to a stretching machine at a hospital, all in an attempt to make him taller. When he was 9, he was sold by his father to a traveling show in Europe, Mr. Fricke said.

Mr. Slover was paid $50 a week for "Oz" and told friends that Toto, Judy Garland's canine co-star, made more money.

###

Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired | The Digital Home - CNET News

2011-11-11T21:11:00.001-08:00

Well, isn't this special?

I may have to rethink my Words With Friends addiction... I need a 12-letter word here.

---

(from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57322150-17/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or-youll-be-fired/ )

Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired

by Don Reisinger November 10, 2011 5:21 AM PST

Attracting top employees can be difficult for cash-strapped startups. So, in many cases, they give out company stock to supplement salaries that employees might feel is below-market.

Zynga followed that strategy. But now the CityVille and FarmVille maker apparently wishes it hadn't, according to a new report.

Citing industry sources, The Wall Street Journal reported today that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, along with his top executives, decided last year as they were preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) that they had given out too much stock to employees. But rather than accept that reality, the executives reportedly tried a different tactic: demand employees give back not-yet-vested stock or face termination.

In order to determine which employees would be asked to give stock back, Pincus and his executives tried to pinpoint workers whose contributions to Zynga--in the execs' eyes--didn't necessarily justify the potential cash windfall they could receive when the company went public, the Journal claims. One Journal source said that Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario.

That reference relates to Google's 2004 IPO when one of the company's chefs, who was hired in the firm's early days, walked away with $20 million worth of stock after the shares went public.

After finding people to target, the Journal's sources say, Pincus offered his ultimatum. However, as one might expect, he faced some anger from employees who didn't believe they should be required to give back the stock. The Journal cited two employees--one who has left Zynga and another that still works with the company--who hired attorneys to reach a settlement that saw them give up some, but not all, of the unvested shares.

Although Zynga's decision might be met with some criticism, the firm's executives reportedly justified their strategy by saying it was best for the company. With the unvested shares, the executives believed they could attract more top talent with the promise of stock.

Speaking of stock, the public might soon have a chance to own part of the social-gaming company. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Zynga was planning to go public after Thanksgiving. The company is expected to raise up to $1 billion in an IPO.

Zynga did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.

built to last... // Larry Haun (1931-2011) - Fine Homebuilding

2011-10-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

Paul Myers and I have been best buddies since the second grade, when he moved into the house three doors up the street.

We have built a lot of stuff together over the years. I think what has lasted best is the bond of knowing what brings one another joy. Today's gift is Paul's guest obit here, reminding us that this month has seen the passing of yet another innovator and builder.

Ottscay,

Every now and then you bring an otherwise unnoticed obit to people's attention. Here's one from me. Larry Haun was a carpenter who ended up playing a role in the Southern California building boom. He developed strategies for efficiency that enabled crews who studied him to build a house in record time. Southern Calif. crews became a national model in stick framing methodology. There are stories told of upset Eastern unionized crews watching as California framers (in short pants and freezing) built circles around them. Larry was behind much of it.

He was quietly compelling, very unassuming. Just a carpenter who loved what he did and shared his knowledge. He was about my size but his skills and natural ability for physical work were mythic. He made a few training films where he can be seen sinking a 16 penny nail with a single blow, digging the claw of his framing hammer into a beam and walking off with it... etc. And none of this was for the camera... it's just how he went about it. He was the perfect ordinary guy who rose to the level of his passion. Any carpenter who cares anything about the craft is mourning the loss.

I found him to be personally inspiring on many levels.

[from http://www.finehomebuilding.com/item/20642/larry-haun-1931-2011 ]

Larry Haun (1931-2011)

October 25th, 2011 in Blogs

Brian Pontolilo, editor

"Larry was always positive and always optimistic. He was the kind of guy who you met once and he was your friend for life. He always stayed in touch, checking in to see how you were doing. I'll miss Larry. His life is worth celebrating." — Justin Fink, senior editor // Photo: Roe A. Osborn

Larry Haun passed away just before noon on Monday, Oct. 24, at the age of 80. A legendary carpenter, longtime Fine Homebuilding contributor and blogger, and prodigious book author, Larry began his building career on the Nebraska prairie at the tender age of 17—and kept building for the next 63 years. In the past few years, he has been "retired," which in Larry's case meant building houses for Habitat for Humanity and wheelchair ramps for people in hospice care; teaching; and generally passing along the wisdom of a compassionate life well lived.

Drawing on the knowledge and skills that he developed during the post-war building boom in Southern California, Larry's first Fine Homebuilding article, "Production-Line Jamb Setting and Door Hanging," appeared in 1989.

Larry made an immediate impact on his first editor, Chuck Miller

"I met Larry for the first time at the Burbank airport in 1989. I'd flown to Southern California to photograph an article that Larry was writing on hanging doors, production style. I'd been on lots of trips like this, but this was the first time anybody ever met me at the airport. Tall and lean, he had on his broad black hat, and he was holding a sign with my name on it. He wanted to make sure I had an extra hand with the photo gear if I needed it, and to guide me to our potentially hard-to-find job site. Going out of his way to help others like this was typical of Larry, as I would see again and again over the next two decades.

"We drove to a tract of partially built houses in Northridge, and set up the lights and tripods in one that was far enough along to be getting its doors hung. The guys working on this house were clearly a hard-working, hard-partying bunch. Loud, irreverent, and profane when Larry wasn't around, they practically turned into choirboys when he came back into the room. It was really something to see. He wasn't pious. He was just calm and respectful, and it rubbed off (at least for a little while) on everybody around him.

"Larry wrote the books on production framing. And he and his brother made the videos to bring the books to life. He's a big deal, but he got that way by paying attention to the little details. He loved to share the tips that he came up with on the job site. I've illustrated lots of them for the 'Tips' column over the years. The latest will be in the next issue."

From production framing to articles and videos to a different kind of book

Larry went on to write more than 20 articles about subjects ranging from basic building skills like nailing and cutting to more advanced framing techniques for roofs, stairs, and walls. He also contributed articles about lessons from the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake and job-site safety. For FHB's 25th-anniversary issue, Larry wrote "One Carpenter's Life," a reflection on his career as a builder. In addition to articles, he contributed to "Q&A," "Tips & Techniques," "Tools & Materials," and "Reviews." In FHB #111, poet, builder, and one-time apprentice Phil Rosenberg celebrated Larry in a poem for "Great Moments in Building History." Larry's tip on one-piece corner boards will appear in our January 2012 issue (#224).

Larry's first book for Taunton, The Very Efficient Carpenter, was published in 1992. Three videos followed, and then a carpentry primer (Homebuilding Basics: Carpentry) in 1999. Larry's long relationship with Habitat for Humanity proved the foundation for Larry's next book, Habitat for Humanity: How to Build a House (published in 2002 and revised in 2008). In all his "how-to" books, Larry was a master at delivering clear, step-by-step information, able to make something as complex as framing a hip roof readily comprehensible to the greenest layperson.

None of us was prepared for Larry's next foray into the world of books. In January 2010, he calmly announced to his editor that he was working on the first chapter of a new book. As Larry modestly put it, "It's a bit scary because it is different from most of what I have written. It has been on my mind for some time, so I am giving it a try." In time, the book would evolve into his most original work, A Carpenter's Life as Told by Houses, which was published this fall.

On the surface, A Carpenter's Life is a book about the history of home building in America from the early days of the 20th century to the present day, told through the conceit of 12 houses that Larry had either lived in or built himself. But to say that this is a book about building is like saying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story about a river. A Carpenter's Life is part memoir, part spiritual journey, part cultural history, part passionate paean to the earth and all who walk on it. With the houses Larry has built and lived in providing the narrative glue, what comes through is our deep connection to the natural world, a yearning for simplicity, a respect for humanity, and an evocative notion of what we mean by "home."

Larry tells a story in A Carpenter's Life about a buckhorn seed that his mother's mother carried with her on the family's wagon trip west. She didn't plant it on the Plains, but kept it to remember where she had come from. She passed it on to his mother, who in turn gave it to Larry before she died. Larry kept it in a small pouch, and now and then would take it out and hold it "and let old memories flood my heart." Recently, he passed it on to one of his children. To all his friends, his coworkers, his students, and his readers, Larry Haun has left much more.

Links to features by and about Larry Haun:

All Fine Homebuilding articles and videos by Larry Haun: Larry Haun's author page
Larry's autobigraphical Fine Homebuilding article: One Carpenter's Life
Larry's blog: A Carpenter's View
Larry's most recent book and memoir: A Carpenter's Life as Told By Houses
The New York Times published an article about Larry in their Home & Garden section.

###

(acoustic) suspension of disbelief // Edgar M. Villchur, Hi-Fi Innovator, Dies at 94

2011-10-18T21:35:00.001-07:00

I guess it was preordained that as a tinker-with-everything kid I would become a hi-fi nerd, but I wonder whether Bea and Dave knew what they were getting into when as a ten-year-old I asked to go to the Cow Palace in South San Francisco one Saturday.

Your typical Modesto kid at the Cow Palace wore leather and denim, worrying the folks about getting stomped. That was on other weekends, for other kids -- I wanted to spend all day at the hi-fi show. The folks indulged me, and off we went.

I was thrilled; the sound was amazing. It was so real. And all those knobs!

So I began collecting... brochures. And opinions -- first of Edward Tatnall Canby in Audio magazine and of the endlessly patient Leroy Gearing, proprietor of the Radio-Electronics store in downtown Modesto where I spent many an afternoon "shopping" for audio gear for the family.

Not long after we settled on a KLH Model Twenty compact system (which rested on the old Magnavox), the opinionated one was me. I passed judgment on every stereo in the neigborhood, disparaging most and coveting some (Oh, to have Dr. Garman's Klipschhorns!).

I made lists of the gear I would buy for myself when I had enough money. By about 1970 I had upwards of four hundred bucks, and the winnowing began. The electronics was easy: I would build Dynakits. But speakers and turntables, those finicky devices where vibrations met electricity -- that was tough.
I wanted neutral sound, but loud. Scott Beavers' AR-3s with their dome tweeter sounded absolutely perfect, but they cost $250 apiece. Miles notwithstanding, no way.

The AR-4s were only $50 apiece on sale, and Judy Collins liked 'em, but they were thin in the bass. I chose Dynaco A-25s (still have 'em!) with their modified acoustic-suspension design.

There was no question about the turntable -- it had to be an AR, just like Dick Brown had. (BTW, it lasted thirty years.)

I went to Lafayette Radio on Ninth Street in San Francisco and put down my money. I was in audio heaven. For a decade I hauled that stuff everywhere, injecting music into any environment that would tolerate me, and a few that didn't.

Ed Villchur's ideas were embodied in all of these products, in the industry he launched, and in the reveries of listeners for two generations now.

Thanks.

---
[from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/business/edgar-m-villchur-hi-fi-innovator-dies-at-94.html ]

October 17, 2011

Edgar M. Villchur, a Hi-Fi Innovator, Is Dead at 94

By DENNIS HEVESI

Edgar Villchur [Rosemary Villchur]

Edgar M. Villchur, whose invention of a small loudspeaker that could produce deep, rich bass tones opened the high-fidelity music market in the 1950s to millions of everyday listeners, died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 94.

His daughter, Miriam Villchur Berg, confirmed the death.

Audiophiles have hailed Mr. Villchur as a seminal figure in the field. In its 50th-anniversary issue in 2006, Hi-Fi News ranked him No. 1 among the "50 Most Important Audio Pioneers." John Atkinson, the editor of Stereophile magazine, credits him with bringing hi-fi into the home.

"Villchur's development of what he called the acoustic suspension woofer made it possible for music lovers to buy loudspeakers that were domestically acceptable," Mr. Atkinson said in a 2009 interview. "A guy's wife could accept their presence on the bookshelf in the living room."

Before Mr. Villchur's invention of the AR-1 loudspeaker in 1954, producing high-fidelity bass tones required speakers large enough to generate the long wavelengths of the deep notes. Some speakers were as large as a refrigerator. In the cabinet, mounted toward the front, would be what hi-fi specialists call the drive unit: a cone-shaped device activated by a magnet and a coil of wire to produce the sound. In the early days of hi-fi, manufacturers were not fully aware of the relationship between the drive unit and the acoustic role played by the cabinet itself, and they sometimes left the rear of the cabinet open.

Mr. Villchur realized that if the cabinet were completely sealed, the air trapped inside would act something like a spring that would control the cone's vibrations, greatly enhancing the drive unit's low-frequency performance.

"My measurements showed that my little prototype had better bass and less distortion than anything on the market, yet it was one-quarter the size," Mr. Villchur said in an interview with Stereophile in 2005. "I thought, 'This has got to be the future of loudspeakers.' "

It was. By 1966, according to Stereo Review magazine, Mr. Villchur's company, Acoustic Research, was the leader in the nation's speaker market, with a share of just over 32 percent.

One of Mr. Villchur's breakthrough speakers was placed on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in 1993.

Mr. Villchur also made two other advances that greatly improved high-fidelity performance.

He developed one of the first dome tweeters, a drive unit that produces high frequencies. Before the tweeter, high frequencies were emitted by the woofer, but with very poor sound quality. Instead of the cone, Mr. Villchur (and other innovators working independently of one another) devised small dome-shaped diaphragms that proved optimal for producing high frequencies.

In the early days of the turntable, one of its biggest problems was an effect called rumble: vibrations from the motor and the turntable that were picked up by the needle. Mr. Villchur's solution was to separate the motor from the turntable and connect the two with a rubber belt, significantly reducing the vibrations.

Even though digital sound has largely replaced vinyl and turntables, Mr. Atkinson said, "Edgar Villchur's inventions have led to the application of scientific principles that are used in every loudspeaker now on the market."

Edgar Marion Villchur was born in Manhattan on May 28, 1917, the only child of Mark and Mariam Villchur, who had immigrated from Russia. His father was editor of a Russian-language newspaper, his mother a biologist.

It was his service in World War II that sparked Mr. Villchur's fascination with sound and electronics. He had graduated from City College in 1938, then earned a master's degree in education there two years later. But within a year he was drafted into the Army Air Forces and was trained as an electronics technician. For most of the next five years, while rising to captain, he was responsible for his squadron's radio operations in the Pacific.

After the war Mr. Villchur opened a radio shop in Greenwich Village, making repairs and building custom hi-fi sets. He also taught a course in sound reproduction at New York University.

Mr. Villchur married Rosemary Shafer in 1945. Besides his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Mark, of Boston.

The Villchurs moved to Woodstock in 1952. In his basement, Mr. Villchur began testing his notion of a sealed-cabinet loudspeaker. One day in spring 1954, speaking to his acoustics class at N.Y.U, he hinted at his idea. One student, Henry Kloss, stayed after class, eager to learn more. Soon, student and teacher were in Mr. Villchur's 1938 Buick, headed to Woodstock. In Mr. Villchur's basement workshop, they listened to the copious low-frequency tones on an LP recorded by the renowned organist E. Power Biggs.

Mr. Kloss had a loft in Cambridge, Mass., where he was already building mail-order cabinets for Baruch-Lang speakers. It became the first headquarters for Acoustic Research. Mr. Kloss, who died in 2002, is credited with designing the production process for the AR-1 speaker and its successors, the AR-2 and the AR-3, which combined Mr. Villchur's woofer and tweeter models.

Among Mr. Villchur's duties was promoting the products. In the early 1960s he sponsored "live versus recorded" concerts around the country, including one in a recital room at Carnegie Hall and another at Grand Central Terminal. At the concerts, a string quartet would play a piece of music, then mime it as parts of a recording by the same quartet played through a pair of AR-3 speakers. The listeners were rarely able to detect the switchovers.

Mr. Villchur was president of Acoustic Research until 1967. After being bought by a series of manufacturers, the company went out of business in 2004. Its brand name was bought by the Audiovox Corporation.

Soon after leaving Acoustic Research, Mr. Villchur started the Foundation for Hearing Aid Research in Woodstock, where he developed a prototype of the multichannel compression hearing aid that has become an industry standard.

-- -- --

[and from Scott's News almost a decade ago...]

proud to be a techie-nerd: Henry Kloss moves on

Here's a toast to hi-fi legend Henry Kloss, who passed away January 31, 2002 at the age of 72.

As a music-loving student at MIT in the early 1950s, Henry Kloss was forever in search of loudspeakers that could reproduce the full frequency and dynamic range of an orchestra (at that time, the only good ones were huge and fit in theaters rather than homes, much less student apartments). After making a few of his own, he encountered Edgar Villchur, whose "acoustic suspension" design packed deep bass into a box that would fit on a bookshelf. None of the audio manufacturers were interested in it, so with $2000 of Villchur's money and $4000 raised from Kloss's friends, they formed a company called Acoustic Research and by 1954 were marketing the AR-1 loudspeaker -- which made "hi-fi" a household word . . . and which still sounds better than 98% of what you'll find for sale in the Best Buy audio aisle.

Kloss left AR and formed KLH, which made the first great FM table radio in 1960 (the Model 8), the first great transistorized portable phonograph in 1961 (the Model 11) and the first consumer tape recorder incorporating Dolby noise reduction (the Model 40) in 1968. By 1971 Kloss had left KLH and formed Advent, which in short order made the first hi-fi cassette recorder (the Model 200) and the first home video-projection TV. In 1988 he founded Cambridge SoundWorks, which found success selling hi-fi directly through company-owned stores. Most recently, Kloss was back to designing great radios for Tivoli Audio.

All of that stuff from all of those companies sounded and looked good. Kloss received an Emmy for his projection TV, and in 2000 the Consumer Electronics Association inducted him (along with Edison and Marconi and 47 others) into its ConsumerElectronics Hall of Fame.

But in truth that honor had already come way back in 1966, when the McAuley family bought a KLH Model 21 compact stereo system, which served us well for almost two decades -- I drove my mom nuts with it during the 1967-1971 psychedelic era, and honored Henry Kloss every day.

For more on Kloss, read John Schwartz's obit in the New York Times or Gary Krakow's thoughtul tribute on MSNBC . . . or better yet, listen to a segment on NPR's "All Things Considered."

Then think of that piece of music you love best, get out your favorite record/tape/CD/audioDVD/MP3 of it, and turn it up LOUD.

//Scott

###

Not such an odd couple after all... // Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth | The Economist

2011-10-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

"Both men realised that flowery speeches and lofty court rulings meant nothing without action." -- hard to believe that their time was less than 50 years ago.

---

(from http://www.economist.com/node/21532242 )

Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth

Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth, fighters for desegregation in America's South, died on September 18th and October 5th respectively, aged 85 and 89

Oct 15th 2011 | from the print edition

THE golden beaches at St Augustine in Florida, America's oldest city, stretch for 40 miles along the Atlantic, sloping gently into the blue, lazy surf. They seem the last possible place for a battle. But in the summer of 1964 the waves were full of Klansmen with wooden stakes and the beach beside the pier heaving with helmeted police, as a line of blacks in bathing gear tried to desegregate with a "wade-in" the warm, whites-only water.

Head of the Negro column, tall, lean, proud, unable to swim but not caring, flinging himself into the ocean as he flung himself at everything else, was Fred Shuttlesworth. He was a Baptist pastor from Birmingham, Alabama, loud with a country preacher's whooping and singing as the Spirit took hold of him, and fresh from turning that hard-coal, hard-heart city, the very cradle of segregation, into a model of change. He'd led hundreds of blacks to ride at the front of the buses, sit-in at segregated lunch counters, march through the streets, until city officials at last opened up the amenities to people of every race. When his NAACP chapter in Birmingham had been outlawed in 1956, he had come up instantly with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which did just the same thing. He never stopped organising the prophetic struggle, stoking the fire that no hoses or axes could put out, just as he was doing now, pushing the white racists of St Augustine farther into the sea.

His career as a trial lawyer had taught him never to rise to provocation. Calm reason was his stock in trade. Since arriving in the city from Daytona, he had meticulously kept a diary of everything he had done. This included prosecuting both Mr Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King for trespassing in the whites-only restaurant of the Monson Motor Lodge, where half a dozen other blacks had jumped into the pool and had acid poured on them by the owner. In court, though, Mr Warren had made a point of shaking King's hand, loudly saying how much he admired him; and even boasting that he had been in the civil-rights movement longer than King had, trying to integrate services in his home town of Greensboro, North Carolina.Watching him from the beach, deeply worried, was Dan Warren, the state attorney for the seventh judicial circuit in Florida. His job, to which he had just been appointed by the governor, was to keep the two sides apart and calm down the city, just now the most violent in America. On this day he had ordered the police to see that the blacks were allowed to swim.

Nothing, though, had truly prepared Mr Warren for St Augustine, where so many blacks had been arrested for street marching that they overflowed the county jail. As long as marches had been legal he had escorted them, and the sight of the marchers, weaving silently and in step through phalanxes of jeering whites, made the hairs on his neck stand on end. It reminded him—for his most dangerous action until then had been to join up, at 17, with a bomber squadron over Europe in 1943—of vulnerable aircraft flying into a hail of flak.

In Birmingham Mr Shuttlesworth knew that feeling all the time. He thrived on it. On Christmas Day 1956 his house had been dynamited under him, his mattress blown to pieces smaller than his fists, but under the Lord's everlasting arm he got no more than a bump on the head, and was hustling on the buses the next day. He was beaten with chains when he tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white school, his Bethel Church was bombed three times, and in 1963 police fire-hoses smashed him against a wall. Again, God said: "Not yet."

Darkness visible

He never protected himself, not with a gun, not even with a toothpick. He believed in confrontation, was arrested 35 times, and was rougher in his ways and words than ever King was, always nagging the leader to do more; he even alienated his own congregations, but he never dealt in violence. Prayer was his armament. For Mr Warren the enemy was largely invisible, Klansmen carrying out attacks by night, though he managed, for the first time, to prosecute a few. For Mr Shuttlesworth his nemesis was Bull Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, a low, rough, rasping man who used the Klan as well as dogs and billy-clubs, and made the Darkness visible for all to see.

Where both men came closest was in their attitude to the law. When the Supreme Court in 1954 announced the desegregation of America's schools Mr Shuttlesworth felt that he, the son of a sharecropper, stood equal in rights with any man. He expected the law henceforth to represent him; when he wanted an integrated police force, or access for blacks to the public parks, he sued the city of Birmingham, and each time he failed he sued again. Mr Warren, as a Southern lawyer, was convinced that America was a land of hypocrisy unless it protected black and white equally and alike. Both men realised that flowery speeches and lofty court rulings meant nothing without action.

On July 1st 1964 the wade-ins and marches in St Augustine were called off. They had had their effect. The next day, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Among the catalysts were two men who were hardly known outside their own cities; but who, one summer day, had gone down together to the ocean.

from the print edition | Obituary

THAT's why the called it the Newton... // Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

2011-10-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

In 1967, Dennis Ritchie became a second-generation employee at Bell Labs. (I suppose when your dad co-writes The Design of Switching Circuits, a little rubs off, and Ma Bell granted an interview.)

Though phone-company people would have told you otherwise at the time, Bell Labs v.1967 was no ivory tower for Ritchie.

He and others were busy at work building, oh... modern computing.

Specifically, Unix. And C. And the notion of a collaborative environment for both using computers and evolving them.

This was nothing short of revolutionary.

If you had a computer hardware design, you could port Unix to it with orders of magnitude less work than writing -- much less trying to sell -- a proprietary operating environment (goodbye, VMS and AIX -- and eventually DEC and Data General). And if you had a good software idea and the prescience to code in C, you could compile it to most any computer (I think he was talking about this when Larry Ellison called Oracle "promiscuous").

At the time, I doubt that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had even heard of -- let alone cared about -- the notion of software portability. But Jobs sure came around. Just five years after NeXT, Apple's Mac OS X -- with BSD Unix at its core -- was released, and the whole concept of Apple being the Land of Proprietary became an ironic contradiction.

Ritchie and Jobs had different personal styles (e.g., here's Ritchie's home page) and very likely different opinions of themselves. Both were geniuses. True to form, Ritchie slipped away from us on October 8 while we were all grieving the loss of Steve Jobs and pondering the future of computing.

Not to fear. Both these guys reminded us the importance of a solid foundations.

//Scott

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[from http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/ ]

Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

By Cade Metz
October 13, 2011 | 7:14 pm |

Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. (Photo: Courtesy of Bell Labs)

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won't match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.
And then some.
"When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn't even know who he is," says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bells Labs.
On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn't quite do justice to Ritchie's sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.
"Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX," Pike tells Wired. "The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.
"It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did."
Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. "Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible," says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
"Jobs' genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don't necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday."
From B to C
Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a "higher level" language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn't quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.
Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson's wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.
B was an interpreted language — meaning it was executed by an intermediate piece of software running atop a CPU — but C was a compiled language. It was translated into machine code, and then directly executed on the CPU. In those days, C was considered a high-level language. It would give Ritchie and Thompson the flexibility they needed, but at the same time, it would be fast.
That first version of the language wasn't all that different from C as we know it today — though it was a tad simpler. It offered full data structures and "types" for defining variables, and this is what Richie and Thompson used to build their new UNIX kernel. "They built C to write a program," says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later. "And the program they wanted to write was the UNIX kernel."
Ritchie's running joke was that C had "the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language." In other words, he acknowledged that C was a less-than-gorgeous creation that still ran very close to the hardware. Today, it's considered a low-level language, not high. But Ritchie's joke didn't quite do justice to the new language. In offering true data structures, it operated at a level that was just high enough.
"When you're writing a large program — and that's what UNIX was — you have to manage the interactions between all sorts of different components: all the users, the file system, the disks, the program execution, and in order to manage that effectively, you need to have a good representation of the information you're working with. That's what we call data structures," Pike says.
"To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consist and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. They needed a way to group all that data together, and they didn't have that with Fortran."
At the time, it was an unusual way to write an operating system, and this is what allowed Ritchie and Thompson to eventually imagine porting the OS to other platforms, which they did in the late 70s. "That opened the floodgates for UNIX running everywhere," Pike says. "It was all made possible by C."
Apple, Microsoft, and Beyond
At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world's universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s. "The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground … C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened," says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. "[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades."
As Pike points out, the data structures that Richie built into C eventually gave rise to the object-oriented paradigm used by modern languages such as C++ and Java.
The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published his research paper on the language, and five years later, he and colleague Brian Kernighan released the definitive C book: The C Programming Language. Kernighan had written the early tutorials for the language, and at some point, he "twisted Dennis' arm" into writing a book with him.
Pike read the book while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, picking it up one afternoon while heading home for a sick day. "That reference manual is a model of clarity and readability compared to latter manuals. It is justifiably a classic," he says. "I read it while sick in bed, and it made me forget that I was sick."
Like many university students, Pike had already started using the language. It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code. Among so many other things, the operating system gave rise to the modern open source movement. Pike isn't overstating it when says the influence of Ritchie's work can't be overstated, and though Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998, he still hasn't gotten his due.
As Kernighan and Pike describe him, Ritchie was an unusually private person. "I worked across the hall from him for more than 20 years, and yet I feel like a don't knew him all that well," Pike says. But this doesn't quite explain his low profile. Steve Jobs was a private person, but his insistence on privacy only fueled the cult of personality that surrounded him.
Ritchie lived in a very different time and worked in a very different environment than someone like Jobs. It only makes sense that he wouldn't get his due. But those who matter understand the mark he left. "There's that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants," says Kernighan. "We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders."
Additional reporting by Jon Stokes.

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Maus-over? / Art Spiegelman On The Future of the Book

2011-10-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks Art!

You're preaching to the choir here, but here's an amen just the same...

(from http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/49046-art-spiegelman-on-the-future-of-the-book.html)

Art Spiegelman On The Future of the Book
By Brian Heater
Oct 11, 2011

			\| Reader Comments 0

In an era for publishing so utterly defined by the race toward digital, Art Spiegelman's fixation with the book as an object has never once wavered—if anything, the years have seen his demands on publishers grow more complex, as evidenced by the 2009 release of Be a Nose, a collection of his sketchbooks published by McSweeney's, all reproduced in their original size, and bound loosely together by a cloth band.

This month Pantheon marks the release of MetaMaus, a Spiegelman-penned analysis of his Pulitzer Prize-winning, medium-defining 1992 classic, Maus, which finds the author once again reveling in the possibilities offered up by the format. This fact is immediately evident on the front cover, with a hole bore smack in the center, standing in for the eye of a drawing of Spiegelman himself as a cigarette smoking mouse. Behind it is a swastika, an image of Hitler as a cat at its center.

In fact, it was the author's fixation with format that served as the catalyst behind Maus's transformation from a self-contained three-page strip in a 1972 volume of Funny Animals to a two-volume work of sequential non-fiction that would utterly transform the way the world thought about comics as an artform.

PWCW sat down with Spiegelman to discuss the importance of physical media in an increasingly digital world.

PWCW: You're very interested in the book as a physical object. That's immediately clear with your new book. There's a hole in the center of the cover, and when you open it, there's a disc inside.

Art Spiegelman: Yes. You see the book through the disc.

PWCW: Is this your first foray into the digital realm?

SPIEGELMAN: I use digits for most of my comics making these days, and for designing the books themselves. The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them—the "physical book," a new phrase in our language—is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

I had a CD-ROM called The Complete Maus that came out back in '93 or '94. It was pretty amazing, even though I didn't attend much how it was made, because I didn't have to. Now I fully appreciate how good a job they did at Voyager, which was a cutting edge company. That was something that I always wanted to reconstruct after I found out A. how useful it was and B. how in-demand it was.

Even now, as I go to lecture, I come across a university every now and then that has someone who keeps their 1999 machine in shape, so that they can use the CD-ROM, because the language it was written in is now more difficult to decode than Aramaic. It couldn't be further away from something that anyone could use. Originally I was told that it could be mounted on another platform. That's gibberish. That has nothing to do with what can be done. What someone can do is re-write it the same way.

There's a Borges story about the guy who rewrote Don Quixote, word for word. Well, the first half of the DVD is sort of a recapitulation, using some of the same things that were in the first version, including the design architecture, making it available for now—and it's all done in state of the art 2002 technology. Because that, for the moment, is still stable, and it will remain stable for the next few years, while computers still have slots to put DVDs in.

The language it's written in, unlike the language that, say, the iPad is using, is really stable for a long time, which is maybe five years at the most, based on what we're going through in this highly accelerated era. It's been written in way that, our best guess is, it can accommodate what comes next like the cloud as ways of disseminating things like this.

But if it wasn't for this, I wouldn't have a digital component. I certainly haven't made comics directly for the iPad like Chris Ware has, recently.

PWCW: You clearly have an interest in technology—are you somewhat hesitant to embrace it with you work?

SPIEGELMAN: It's not hesitant. It's too soon. Right now anything made for the iPad is like performance art. I'm not interested in performance art. Comics are too hard to make to be done for such a passing blip. When it stabilizes, I'll look at it. Right now, I'm very happy to download a comic from the digital comics museum and put it on my iPad to read.

I always have been and will remain someone who loves real, 3D, substantial books. And I don't believe that it's a wistful, nostalgic interest like vinyl collectors. It's not the same thing.

PWCW: In the sense that it's not going away at the same rate?

SPIEGELMAN: It's not going away at the same rate, even though every publisher in America is absolutely panicked. But the business models are changing quick. On the other hand, I would suggest that one can approximate the sound of vinyl pretty closely. So, what one is collecting is a fetish object. The book has very specific qualities. Let's say in 2300 they discover the physical book, after having lived with the digital book for several hundred years. They'll be able to say, "Look at all the cool stuff you can have in a real book and how different it is." The differences are manifold.

You're talking to someone who uses both. I read Turgenieff on my iPhone. It's not like I'm a luddite about it at all, but there are real differences, and I think that those are significant ones. I think they'll give the real book a purchase in life. If the iPhone was invented first, you'd say, "Look, these work in different scales. Here's Little Nemo, and it works a lot better when it's not 6x9. And look, you work in spreads. And you can actually find things by physical memory."

And most importantly is the fact that one concentrates differently. What we're losing culturally the fastest, aside from natural resources and oil and the idea of democracy and social justice, is the ability to concentrate. I find now that when I read a physical book, I look in the upper right-hand corner to find out what time it is with my book. The confusion is universal. They both have real, positive things.

If you're going to visit and re-visit a book, it has more reason to be a real book, because of that ability to concentrate and that relationship that you build up with it, as opposed to the relationship that you build up with your screen, rewards replacement. Even on the iPad or the Kindle, you're rewarded for pressing a button—it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you're going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you're traveling, it's fine.

None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

PWCW: Do you feel that it's your place to help define the book as art?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I've been doing it for a lot longer than there have been iPads and Kindles. I continue to be really interested in it. The book is a beautiful thing. I remember years ago, hanging out on my roof with many famous authors. I was working on The Wild Party book for Pantheon, and I was trying to decide between three-piece binding and one-piece binding and whether or not to have a dust jacket on it. So, I talked to these writers and asked which they'd prefer, and they asked what three-piece binding was.

They didn't know. They didn't know what their book was. And there's no reason they should. I'm sure if you interviewed either of them, they would also talk about how important the book is as a book, because they, like I, grew up with the things, and yet, their stuff can relatively easily be transferred into the digital realm.

I've never met a cartoonist that didn't know what paper it's going to be printed on and what size it's going to be printed at. It's just built into the actual seeds of what you're working on. Sure it can be repurposed and adjusted if it has to be, but it's made with something in mind. It's built into the storytelling.

It's part of how I'm thinking when I make my books. I would say that even Maus itself came from a formal decision—not from "I'm going to tell the world about the holocaust," it came from "I want to see a book that's like the other books on my shelf and is big enough to need a bookmark." I had two possible ideas about how to proceed. One was Maus and the other was something called The Life in Ink that I abandoned.

The Maus one was harder, and I was turning 30 and figured that I should already not be able to trust myself, based on 60s rhetoric and certainly should be dead in a motorcycle accident, though I hadn't yet learned to ride a motorcycle, so I figured I'd just take the harder one on, and that wasMaus.

PWCW: Is it the cartoonist's role as a graphic designer that makes them more in tune with the book as a physical object?

SPIEGELMAN: Usually. Though, if you go back to Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy was made with a new-fangled knowledge of this book thing that he was working with—"We'll have pages that are blank and we'll have pages that look like end pages." Some writers have been. Others are doing their job delivering a story and cobbling sentences together, and actually, one could argue that it's nice to be able to choose your typeface, once you've paid Amazon for the file.

But I would say that it's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.

once a joke, now it's reality... // Brain linked to robotic hand; success hailed

2011-10-10T21:54:00.001-07:00

Wow. Video is here (http://bcove.me/2z3phn1v).

:) //S
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[from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11283/1181062-53.stm ]

Brain linked to robotic hand; success hailed

Monday, October 10, 2011

By David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Keith Srakocic // Assistant professor Jennifer Collinger, left, watches as quadriplegic research subject Tim Hemmes operates the mechanical prosthetic arm in a testing session at UPMC.

When it happened, emotions flashed like lightning.

The nearby robotic hand that Tim Hemmes was controlling with his mind touched his girlfriend Katie Schaffer's outstretched hand.

One small touch for Mr. Hemmes; one giant reach for people with disabilities.

Tears of joy flowing in an Oakland laboratory that day continued later when Mr. Hemmes toasted his and University of Pittsburgh researchers' success at a local restaurant with two daiquiris.

PG VIDEO

A simple act for most people proved to be a major advance in two decades of research that has proven to be the stuff of science fiction.

Mr. Hemmes' success in putting the robotic hand in the waiting hand of Ms. Schaffer, 27, of Philadelphia, represented the first time a person with quadriplegia has used his mind to control a robotic arm so masterfully.

The 30-year-old man from Connoquenessing Township, Butler County, hadn't moved his arms, hands or legs since a motorcycle accident seven years earlier. But Mr. Hemmes had practiced six hours a day, six days a week for nearly a month to move the arm with his mind.

That successful act increases hope for people with paralysis or loss of limbs that they can feed and dress themselves and open doors, among other tasks, with a mind-controlled robotic arm. It's also improved the prospects of wiring around spinal cord injuries to allow motionless arms and legs to function once again.

"I think the potential here is incredible," said Dr. Michael Boninger, director of UPMC's Rehabilitation Institute and a principal investigator in the project. "This is a breakthrough for us."

Mr. Hemmes? They say he's a rock star.

Reading brain signals

In a project led by Andrew Schwartz, Ph.D., a University of Pittsburgh professor of neurobiology, researchers taught a monkey how to use a robotic arm mentally to feed itself marshmallows. Electrodes had been shallowly implanted in its brain to read signals from neurons known to control arm motion.

Electrocorticography or ECoG -- in which an electronic grid is surgically placed against the brain without penetration -- less intrusively captures brain signals.

ECoG has been used to locate sites of seizures and do other experiments in patients with epilepsy. Those experiments were prelude to seeking a candidate with quadriplegia to test ECoG's capability to control a robotic arm developed by Johns Hopkins University.

The still unanswered question was whether the brains of people with long-term paralysis still produced signals to move their limbs.

ECoG picks up an array of brain signals, almost like a secret code or new language, that a computer algorithm can interpret and then move a robotic arm based on the person's intentions. It's a simple explanation for complex science.

Mr. Hemmes' name cropped up so many times as a potential candidate that the team called him to gauge his interest.

He said no.

He already was involved in a research in Cleveland and feared this project would interfere. But knowing they had the ideal candidate, they called back. This time he agreed, as long as it would not limit his participation in future phases of research.

Mr. Hemmes became quadriplegic July 11, 2004, apparently after a deer darted onto the roadway, causing him to swerve his motorcycle onto gravel where his shoulder hit a mailbox, sending him flying headfirst into a guardrail. The top of his helmet became impaled on a guardrail I-beam, rendering his head motionless while his body continued flying, snapping his neck at the fourth cervical vertebra.

A passer-by found him with blue lips and no signs of breathing. Mr. Hemmes was flown by rescue helicopter to UPMC Mercy and diagnosed with quadriplegia -- a condition in which he had lost use of his limbs and his body below the neck or shoulders. He had to learn how to breathe on his own. His doctor told him it was worst accident he'd ever seen in which the person survived.

But after the process of adapting psychologically to quadriplegia, Mr. Hemmes chose to pursue a full life, especially after he got a device to operate a computer and another to operate a wheelchair with head motions.

Since January, he has operated the website -- www.Pittsburghpitbullrescue.com -- to rescue homeless pit bulls and find them new owners.

The former hockey player's competitive spirit and willingness to face risk were key attributes. Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, the UPMC neurosurgeon who would install the ECoG in Mr. Hemmes' brain, said he had strong motivation and a vision that paralysis could be cured.

Ever since his accident, Mr. Hemmes said, he's had the goal of hugging his daughter Jaylei, now 8. This could be the first step.

"It's an honor that they picked me, and I feel humbled," Mr. Hemmes said.

Mental gymnastics

Mr. Hemmes underwent several hours of surgery to install the ECoG at a precise location against the brain. Wires running under the skin down to a port near his collarbone -- where wires can connect to the robotic arm -- caused him a stiff neck for a few days.

Two days after surgery, he began exhaustive training on mentally maneuvering a computer cursor in various directions to reach and make targets disappear. Next he learned to move the cursor diagonally before working for hours to capture targets on a three-dimensional computer.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed the trial to last only 28 days, when the ECoG is removed. The project, initially funded by UPMC, has received more than $6 million in funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

Initially Mr. Hemmes tried thinking about flexing his arm to move the cursor. But he had better success visually grabbing the ball-shaped cursor to throw it toward a target on the screen. The "mental eye-grabbing" worked best when he was relaxed.

Soon he was capturing 15 of 16 targets and sometimes all 16 during timed sessions. The next challenge was moving the robotic arm with his mind.

The same mental processes worked, but the arm moved more slowly and in real space. But time was ticking away as the experiment approached its final days last month. With Mr. Hemmes finally moving the arm in all directions, Wei Wang -- assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Pitt's School of Medicine who also has worked on the signalling system -- stood in front of him and raised his hand.

The robotic arm that Mr. Hemmes was controlling moved with fits and starts but in time reached Dr. Wang's upheld hand. Mr. Hemmes gave him a high five.

The big moment arrived.

Katie Schaffer stood before her boyfriend with her hand extended. "Baby," she said encouraging him, "touch my hand."

It took several minutes, but he raised the robotic hand and pushed it toward Ms. Schaffer until its palm finally touched hers. Tears flowed.

"It's the first time I've reached out to anybody in over seven years," Mr. Hemmes said. "I wanted to touch Katie. I never got to do that before."

"I have tattoos, and I'm a big, strong guy," he said in retrospect. "So if I'm going to cry, I'm going to bawl my eyes out. It was pure emotion."

Curing paralysis

Mr. Hemmes said his accomplishments represent a first step toward "a cure for paralysis." The research team is cautious about such statements without denying the possibility. They prefer identifying the goal of restoring function in people with disabilities.

"This was way beyond what we expected," Dr. Tyler-Kabara said. "We really hit a home run, and I'm thrilled."

The next phase will include up to six people tested in another 30-day trial with ECoG. A year-long trial will test the electrode array that shallowly penetrates the brain. Goals during these phases include expanding the degrees of arm motions to allow people to "pick up a grape or grasp and turn a door knob," Dr. Tyler-Kabara said.

Anyone interested in participating should call 1-800-533-8762.

Mr. Hemmes says he will participate in future research.

"This is something big, but I'm not done yet," he said. "I want to hug my daughter."

David Templeton: dtempleton@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.
First published on October 10, 2011 at 12:00 am
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11283/1181062-53.stm#ixzz1aRfram3i

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River on fire? // Fire - cdespinosa's posterous

2011-09-29T08:46:00.001-07:00

See below for CDEspinosa's thoughtful take on the implications of the $200 Kindle Fire.

Of course this gadget is no "iPad killer" (as the consumer/Luddite media is "analyzing" endlessly).

But what consumers get for their two hundred bucks is access to the classics -- the story of the Trojan Horse, to be specific -- and on an ongoing basis.

Of course, we are all aware (though it's not always not top of mind) that Amazon knows everything about what and how we read on our Kindles -- they have always been two-way devices, though the Amazon upstream has been largely ignored.

But now -- presuming the Silk browser isn't too lame for practical use -- the upstream will include your Web browsing choices, clicks, and text.

Of course, the Big A promises to anonymize all that stuff -- along with your username/passwords, outgoing Web email addresses, etc. on the way up the EC2 river, all in the convenient context of "simplified" downstream data. (Yes, you can turn off the caching; I am sure it's about as easy as fixing Facebook privacy.)

It's as if the Trojan Horse got delivered COD. Brilliant!

(from http://cdespinosa.posterous.com/fire)

Fire

I don't comment on Apple products or development here, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the Amazon Fire announcement today, and it has nothing to do with the iPad.

Lost in the "Is it an iPad Killer?" hype is the audacious introduction of the Silk browser. Under the guise of increasing speed (on WiFi; there is no 3G Fire where download speed would be a larger issue), Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google.

The "split browser" notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon's servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon's opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they're being offered there. What's more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they're getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon's Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

And all of this on Google's dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don't use Google's web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn't see the actual user behavior. Google's whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon's intermediation.

Fire isn't a noun, it's a verb, and it's what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

(9/28 8:45 PST Removed "privacy and." The piece is about data mining and aggregation, there's no argument about privacy concerns at all, but people are reading that into it.)

tastes like chicken? // Sacto 9-1-1: Sacramento PD: Man arrested for chomping on snake

2011-09-06T16:44:00.001-07:00

It has been a bit since I have posted to Scott's News, but it seems that our bizarro fellow citizens in the Great Valley have been hard at it, concocting some news...

What's for dinner?

good night nurse...//Scott

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[from http://blogs.sacbee.com/crime/archives/2011/09/sac-pd-man-arre-1.html ]

September 2, 2011

Sacramento PD: Man arrested for chomping on snake

A Sacramento man has been taken into custody for allegedly taking big bites out a pet python, which was reported recovering after surgery.

David Elmer Senk, 54, was booked into Sacramento County Jail on suspicion of unlawfully maiming/mutilating a reptile. Bail was set at $10,000.

Sacramento police were called to the 3600 block of Marysville Boulevard in Del Paso Heights about 6:30 p.m. Thursday on a call about a man who had been assaulted and was not responsive. When they arrived, they found Senk.

While speaking with Senk (photo below), a citizen got the officers' attention and told them that Senk had just taken two large bites out of their small live python. Animal control was called to the scene and Senk was taken to jail. The snake was not in good condition when handed over to animal control officers, police said.

However, she was reported on the mend today.

"She's doing well," said Gina E. Knepp, acting animal care services manager for the City of Sacramento. "We did surgery on her last night and I think we saved her life."

The snake is being treated after receiving stitches. The python lost a couple of ribs, Knepp said.

The snake is drinking a lot of water and receiving antibiotics.

Police said that Senk was "an acquaintance" of the snake owner. Senk allegedly asked to hold the snake and then bit into the reptile twice.

Photos of snake courtesy of Gina E. Knepp/City of Sacramento.

reverse Polish valuation... // Daring Fireball: A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm and Is Getting Out of the PC Business

2011-08-21T15:35:00.000-07:00

See below from John Gruber. Who needs corporate espionage from China when we have bosses like this soiling the punchbowl more or less annually?

Speaking of soil, there's no need to till the garden next to that famous H-P garage at 367 Addison in Palo Alto; Dave and Bill do that just by spinning in their graves...

//S
---
[from http://daringfireball.net/2011/08/hp_apotheker ]

A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm and Is Getting Out of the PC Business

Sunday, 21 August 2011

HP acquired Palm at the end of April 2010, for $1.2 billion. HP's CEO was Mark Hurd.

Three months later, in early August, Mark Hurd was forced to resign over that scandal with forged expenses and lies about his lady friend.

HP then named Léo Apotheker president and CEO on 30 September 2010.

The thing is, Apotheker's relevant experience was serving as CEO of SAP. What's SAP? SAP is an enterprise software and consulting company. Honestly, we all should have seen this coming. You don't bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn around a PC and device maker. You bring in an enterprise consulting guy to turn a PC and device maker into an enterprise consulting company.

Palm wasn't Apotheker's acquisition. It was Hurd's. And the PC business wasn't why Apotheker took the job. Apotheker's acquisition was announced this week, coincident with the news that HP wants out of the PC and device business: Autonomy — a company I'd never heard of before but which more or less sounds like a rival to SAP.

I suppose Apotheker gave the Palm/WebOS guys a chance, and let them get the TouchPad on the market. But apparently their chance was a one-strike-and-you're-out opportunity to gain traction in the market immediately. But the TouchPad didn't get any traction immediately, so, boom, that's it, Apotheker is done with them. Apotheker simply never had any interest in the consumer market or product development. My guess is that he planned on getting HP out of the hardware business all along, and Palm, at best, was an afterthought. If he'd been named HP's CEO six months earlier, they never would have acquired Palm in the first place.

###

standby: your man... // Britain's phone-hacking scandal: Wider still and wider | The Economist

2011-07-21T12:19:00.001-07:00

Beyond the pie-throwing circus in London this week is a fascinating story of vulnerable politicians and enterprises -- see below.

But I am personally troubled by how I possibly missed noticing Mr. Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng before this week. I must be slipping.
I guess I could be forgiven skipping the social and movie-premiere photos.

Fortunately, we news hounds were alerted visually during the hearing to her important behind-the-scenes position at News Corp, though she didn't speak.

But actions speak for themselves, and we all got to see what family loyalty -- however new -- is all about.

Control room: cue the Tammy Wynette, please!

cheerio//Scott

P.S. Technical note: Let's not call it "phone hacking" when much of the voicemail access was gotten by using default PINs... d'oh!
P.P.S. I would be remiss not to report that assailant Jonnie Marbles was taken into custardy by the beleageured Metropolitan Police, and allowed only one foam call.

---
[from http://www.economist.com/node/18988600?fsrc=nlw|wwp|07-21-11|politics_this_week ]

Britain's phone-hacking scandal

Wider still and wider

Britain's prime minister appears to have saved his skin. But News Corporation is still vulnerable to revelations on both sides of the Atlantic

Jul 21st 2011 | from the print edition

JUST two months ago, David Cameron was a prime minister in his pomp: triumphant in a referendum that rejected voting reform and magisterially untroubled by his Labour opponent, Ed Miliband. On July 18th he was asked by a journalist whether he would consider resigning. For all that British public life is being ravaged by allegations of voice-mail-hacking and police-bribing at the News of the World, his hiring in 2007 of Andy Coulson, a former editor of the tabloid who was arrested over those activities earlier this month, is likely to prove foolish rather than fatal. That the question was even raised, however, is a mark of how the scandal has burgeoned in recent weeks.

After a fortnight in which Mr Miliband made the running, Mr Cameron fought back strongly in the House of Commons on July 20th. As well as announcing the details of a forthcoming inquiry into hacking, the police and the media, he said he would apologise if it turned out that Mr Coulson had lied when he told him, Parliament and others that he had not known of the dark practices taking place under his editorship. Mr Cameron was also persuasive in defending the decision of his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, to ask the Metropolitan Police not to inform the prime minister of details of its hacking investigation last year.

The Met, for its part, is undergoing as much upheaval (see article) as News International (NI), which owned the now-defunct newspaper. Scotland Yard is accused of, at best, sloppiness in not investigating the hacking scandal more thoroughly when it first broke in 2005. On July 17th Sir Paul Stephenson resigned as the commissioner of the Met after revelations of the close links between Scotland Yard and NI: in particular the fact that Neil Wallis, a former executive editor of the News of the World, served the Met as a part-time media adviser in 2009 and 2010. (Mr Wallis, who was arrested in connection with phone-hacking on July 14th, also provided unpaid and informal advice to Mr Coulson while the latter was working for Mr Cameron.) The next day John Yates, the assistant commissioner at the Met who had been criticised for not re-opening the investigation in 2009, also stood down.

It is an improbable scandal that features Rupert Murdoch's humbling at the hands of Parliament as one of its dullest chapters. But compared with the perils faced by the prime minister and the decapitation of the world's oldest police force, the interrogation of the head of News Corporation (NI's parent company) by a committee of MPs on July 19th was dry stuff. Little was extracted from the laconic octogenarian other than the impression that his grip of detail in some corners of his media empire is less than vice-like. Also questioned were his son, James, who runs the Asian and European bits of News Corporation, and Rebekah Brooks, another former News of the World editor who resigned as chief executive of NI on July 15th. They were more loquacious, but still constrained by the ongoing criminal investigation into the matter. In the end, the showdown between the masters of the media universe and the Mother of Parliaments will be mostly remembered for the slapstick of a foam-pie assault on the elder Murdoch.

Mrs Brooks's resignation had been widely demanded since the revelation on July 4th that the phone-hacking in 2002 of a missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, who was eventually found murdered, had happened on her watch. She was joined in her departure by Les Hinton, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal (another newspaper in the Murdoch stable) who ran NI between 1997 and 2005. On July 18th Sean Hoare, a former News of the World journalist who had helped to expose the scale of the newspaper's misdeeds, was found dead. Police describe his death as "non-suspicious".

Things could get worse for Mr Cameron. If Mr Coulson is charged and prosecuted, questions about his judgment will return in force. There could be further revelations about exactly what he knew of his recruit's shady past, and when. There were also chinks in his broadly impressive Commons performance on July 20th that could hint at trouble to come: he was ambiguous about whether he had ever discussed News Corp's now-abandoned bid for total control of BSkyB, a broadcaster it already part-owns, during private conversations with Mrs Brooks. Even his friend, George Osborne, is mired, as the chancellor of the exchequer is thought to have recommended Mr Coulson to the Tory leader in 2007. For perhaps the first time since the coalition was formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in 2010, Nick Clegg, the unpopular Lib Dem deputy prime minister, has less to worry about than his Tory colleagues. His party has never been close to the Murdoch empire.

Dread of paralysis

But for all the career carnage on show elsewhere, the tangible political damage wrought by the scandal has been slight so far. An Ipsos MORI poll published on July 20th showed the Tories down by a significant but hardly irretrievable five percentage points over the past month, with the prime minister's personal ratings also dented to the benefit of Mr Miliband. Government and opposition MPs report indifference to the scandal among their constituents, who are far more concerned about public services and the economy, and who are becoming cynical about all newspapers. On July 20th the New York Times reported allegations by five former journalists of phone-hacking at another British Sunday paper. Eyebrows failed to rise.

A more realistic dread for Mr Cameron than an outright breakdown of trust with his electorate is that the hacking furore will paralyse public life for an indefinite period. The prime minister had to cut short a trip to Africa to take charge at home. Parliament, due for its summer recess, was recalled for a day. Mr Cameron's unveiling of his white paper on public-service reform on July 11th was ignored. In Sir Paul and Mr Yates, Britain has lost an acclaimed Met commissioner and its most senior counter-terror officer, just a year before the Olympic games turns London into an even bigger terrorist target than usual. The broad inquiry launched by Mr Cameron, led by Lord Justice Leveson and featuring former journalists and media regulators, could bog government down for months. Criminal trials of the main actors, such as Mr Coulson, could do the same.

The hacking scandal is often compared to Tony Blair's embarrassment in 1997 over a donation his Labour Party had received from Bernie Ecclestone, a motor-racing magnate. But it is different in two important respects. First, the Ecclestone affair was a short, sharp shock for Mr Blair. The hacking scandal has already lasted longer, and will go on. A more appropriate parallel from the Blair years might be the inquiry into the death of the government scientist, David Kelly, in 2003, in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This gradually sapped the government's energy. Mr Cameron, who is trying to reshape the British state as well as eliminate its structural fiscal deficit by 2015, cannot afford such enervating distractions.

The other difference, however, is that Mr Cameron has never been quite as popular or as saintly-seeming as Mr Blair was before the Ecclestone scandal. As a result, his fall is less steep. Slickness, evasiveness and proximity to media elites have always been part of the Cameron brand—he spent seven years as a public-relations adviser, after all. That voters probably had lower ethical expectations of him to begin with could, perversely, help him now.

Corruption's trackers

At the committee hearings Rupert Murdoch seemed old and out of touch (he has seemed so for years, but now it was obvious to everyone) while his son James seemed slicker and more assured. The young Murdoch's position, very wobbly a week ago, now appears much stronger. He is not safe from further allegations of wrongdoing and cover-up at NI, such as compensation paid to victims of hacking and the payment of legal fees of a convicted felon, Glenn Mulcaire. But the contrast between father and son was striking.

For investors this is a good sign. For some time they have believed two things: first, that newspapers are inherently a worse business than film, broadcast television or pay-television; and second, that Rupert Murdoch has lost his touch. He has been associated with a string of bad decisions and bad deals in the past ten years, culminating with the acquisition of Dow Jones for $5.6 billion in 2007. This week several influential Wall Street analysts argued that Rupert Murdoch's apparent weakness, and problems at the newspaper division, presage a move away from newspapers. To them, that is a buy signal. The markets seemed to agree on July 19th, with News Corporation stock up by 5% in the wake of the Murdochs' appearance before the committee. Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Nomura, separated News Corporation into three hypothetical companies: a good one, based on television; a bad one, which makes films; and a downright toxic one, which runs newspapers. He suggests investors focus on the former.

Against this must be set the growing threat of legal action, both in Britain and elsewhere. On July 19th Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who now works for NI, told a parliamentary committee that e-mails in the possession of the News of the World contained "blindingly obvious" evidence of payments to police officers. If the paper did pay coppers for information it could spur a prosecution under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The act, which has been on the books since 1977, has teeth; in 2008 it imposed a settlement of $800m, its biggest ever, on Siemens, Europe's largest engineering company, for paying bribes to governments round the world.

The FCPA was not written to punish crimes such as paying police officers for information. It was devised to punish the giving of bribes for obtaining or retaining business abroad. But in recent years the law's reach has greatly expanded, points out Mike Koehler, who follows the subject at Butler University. It has been invoked in a case involving the bribery of an Iraqi police officer. An American court has ruled that payments to a foreign official to reduce taxes and customs duties could be a violation of the FCPA.

In truth, nobody knows how powerful the FCPA is. Most laws lead to prosecutions, convictions and appeals: over time, a body of case law builds up and judges smooth the rough edges. This has not happened to the FCPA. So hefty are the consequences for a company found guilty under the law, and so averse are companies to legal risk-taking, that virtually all firms co-operate with investigators. Only two cases involving corporate defendants have been tried in court.

Far from being smoothed, the FCPA has added sharp edges over time as more and more companies agree to co-operate with investigators over increasingly trivial offences. It is not merely that the FCPA means what its enforcers say it means. In effect, the law means what companies fear the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may come to believe it means. The law's reach is spreading like spores in the air, fanned by corporate paranoia.

If the allegations about payments to police officers stand up, News Corporation could decide to pre-empt an outside investigation by doing one of its own. Other firms have voluntarily brought evidence of bribery and dodgy record-keeping in their companies to the Department of Justice and the SEC. The federal agencies, which have only a handful of FCPA investigators, have mostly allowed them to get on with it, provided the companies share their findings. Such reviews are rarely limited to one country: the Department of Justice and the SEC tend to demand that firms prove no bribery has taken place anywhere in the world. It can be a long, costly process even before fines are imposed.

Another possibility is that America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could strip News Corporation of its broadcast TV licences. There is a precedent, points out Rebecca Arbogast of Stifel Nicolaus, an investment bank. RKO, a subsidiary of a tyre company, was denied a licence in 1980 on the ground that it had withheld knowledge of bribery by its parent in Chile. Yet that case was something of a high-water mark for the commission. These days it generally refuses licences only when a company is found to have lied to it. The FCC's chairman, Julius Genachowski, seems in no hurry to review Fox's licences. A British media outfit doing unpleasant things to British people in Britain is probably not enough to force the FCC's hand, reckons Ms Arbogast.

The Digger in America

Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation are viewed differently in America from the way they are seen elsewhere. In Britain—and Australia—Mr Murdoch is a press baron, a manipulator of politicians, a kingmaker. MPs besieged him with questions on July 19th when he told them that he often entered the prime minister's residence through the back door (under Mr Blair, though, he had entered by the front). News Corporation also looms far bigger than any other media company in Britain, and Mr Murdoch is the symbol of commercial media power.

In America, by contrast, News Corporation is one of five big TV-oriented media firms: the others are Comcast, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom. It is known more for "American Idol" and "House" than for newspapers. Since 2007 News Corporation has owned the Wall Street Journal, America's biggest-selling paper. But the Journal was editorially conservative long before Mr Murdoch took it over. The firm's only other major newspaper, the New York Post, sells just 523,000 copies on weekdays—less than one-fifth of Britain's Sun—and is read in a Democratic enclave, which saps its influence.

As garish, but less influential

News Corporation does, however, own the most polarising cable network in the country: the Fox News Channel. This is adored by conservatives and loathed by liberals. Despite drawing only about 3m viewers each evening ("American Idol" gets 15m) the channel is commonly accused of poisoning political discourse in the country. Together with the liberal MSNBC, it has certainly helped to entrench political partisanship and enforce ideological purity in the two major parties.

Liberals would do almost anything to bring down the Fox News Channel. Since the British phone-hacking scandal intensified, online outfits like Media Matters and the Daily Kos have made heroic efforts to draw a thread between the channel and the British newspaper. (A sample headline from the Daily Kos: "US and British News Corp outlets share similarities in agendas, practices".) They happily cite a recent story in the New York Times, which identifies a common pattern in the News of the World affair and a scandal involving News Corporation's marketing division that led to a large payout by the company.

Few outside the liberal blogosphere are buying it. Republican politicians do not pore over liberal blogs, and they regard the New York Times as biased to the left. So far, those who have spoken publicly on the issue have distinguished between the British newspaper division and the America-based company. Rudolph Giuliani, a moderate Republican and former mayor of New York, called Rupert Murdoch "a very honourable, honest man".

In Britain, the real commercial damage to News Corporation from the phone-hacking scandal took place only after the Conservative Party turned against the company. As soon as Mr Cameron suggested that News Corporation should reconsider its bid for BSkyB, the deal was as good as dead. This is probably true of America too. If there is an outrage of the Milly Dowler sort that inflames public opinion, the political calculus around News Corporation could change quickly and decisively. And if the politics changes, so, probably, will the regulatory framework.

The potential for such a shift lies in the claim, made by Britain's Daily Mirror, that relatives of the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks had their mobile phones hacked by the News of the World. If that were proved, it could well tip the balance in America with extremely destructive implications for News Corporation. The allegations have not been proved; indeed, the Washington Post has attacked the Daily Mirror for sloppy reporting, and Rupert Murdoch told the parliamentary committee that he did not believe the FBI had found any evidence of such hacking. But the police still have to contact thousands of people on Mr Mulcaire's list, and it is not hard to imagine the possibility that they could be speaking to an American or two.

Freedom, accountability, plurality

Whatever the fallout across the Atlantic, the Milly Dowler hacking revelations have changed British political attitudes to media regulation with startling rapidity. Freed from NI's grip, at least temporarily, politicians now seem minded to prevent any media company from acquiring the sort of power that News Corporation had acquired in Britain. There has been talk of reintroducing foreign-ownership laws, and also of tightening media plurality laws so as to make it a continuing test, applied as companies grow and acquire market share, not just when they merge or acquire each other. On July 14th Mr Clegg laid down three principles of "freedom, accountability and plurality", and declared that "diversity of owners is an indelible liberal principle, because a corporate media monopoly threatens a free press almost as much as a state monopoly does."

As well as changing Britain's media, the scandal has provided insights into its prime minister. Mr Cameron has been mocked for his crisis management, but this misses the point. He generally thrives in a crisis; his Commons performance was not the only backs-to-the-wall triumph in his career. But his complacency—the dark side of his vast self-belief—makes him hopeless at avoiding crises in the first place. This year he has ditched bad or unpopular policies on health care and crime that were cooked up while he was paying scant attention last year. Similarly, he probably hired Mr Coulson not through any amoral calculation but because he did not think through the risks involved. He, like NI, the Met and so many others, has much to learn from his brush with political mortality.

###

Written on the wind... // Ancient audio: The written sound | The Economist

2011-07-12T23:16:00.001-07:00

Lends new meaning to hearing it through the grapevine...

( from http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/07/ancient-audio )

Science and technology

Babbage

Ancient audio

The written sound

Jul 12th 2011, 18:48 by G.F. | SEATTLE

IN FEBRUARY 2006 a news report echoed around the internet, purporting to play back 6,500-year-old voices and other sounds from a clay pot. The pot allegedly had waveforms etched into a groove as a potter incised a line with a stylus while the pot spun. It turned out to be Belgian television's offering for April fool's the previous year. But Patrick Feaster's rendition of 1,000-year-old audio is no jape. In May he regaled the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections with the latest in what he dubs paleospectrophony.

It was only with Thomas Edison's invention and commercialisation of the phonograph in the late 19th century that etching transient sounds reliably in solid matter for future aural reproduction became possible. Earlier efforts involved trying to capture noises on paper, by hand or using various contraptions. Back then sound scribes reasoned that if they transcribed audio in the right way, others would be able to replay it in their heads, says Dr Feaster, just as trained musicians look at a score and hear the music. It did not work out that way. Most human brains are not, it seems, quite plastic enough to make the leap from a visual representation to an aural one.

Dr Feaster has been working for years to recover sounds from early attempts to transcribe them in tangible form. He and his colleagues have discovered troves of pre-Edison sound writings, and developed new techniques that ease the translation of assorted squiggles into recognisable noises. Take phonautograms, churned out by a device called, logically, a phonautograph. Invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, it took sound carried through a horn and moved a stylus to draw a waveform in lampblack, a sort of powdered pigment, onto paper or glass. This is more or less how modern equipment captures sound, but the variation and fidelity of the phonautograph necessarily produced poor recordings. The results are nonetheless recognisable noises. (It was not until the invention of the spectrogram during the second world war that both pitch and intensity—ie, the sound waves' frequency and their amplitude—could be captured in a form that could be interpreted visually.)

In 2008 Dr Feaster joined forces with audio expert David Giovannoni and scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to decipher one of Scott de Martinville's better preserved phonautograms. They used a process the lab had developed for teasing sounds out of the recorded grooves made in fragile wax records or broken disks from digital photos or scans of high-resolution pictures rather than by physical contact.

The recording, labelled as that of a song called "Au Clair de la Lune" and made in 1860, was tracked down in France by Mr Giovannoni. And indeed, after feeding it into their system, the researchers heard what sounded like a young girl singing. In all likelkihood, it was the earliest recognisable recording of the human voice ever to be played back.

Later it transpired that the signature of the tuning fork, often recorded alongside audio in phonautograms for reference, and which helped the modern decryption efforts along substantially, had been misinterpreted. Dr Feaster now thinks that the ditty was intoned by a man, almost certainly de Martinville himself, who sung it slowly to ensure that the resulting longer waveforms were easier to examine.

Since that work Dr Feaster has moved on to another, simpler technique. He discovered that a software program designed to extract audio from recordings made for early talkies works nearly perfectly for the sort of waveforms he has uncovered. This method might eventually allow another 50 phonautograms to be retrieved. It has also allowed him to step back even further in time, and to examine more primitive methods of representing sound on paper.

Dr Feaster has taken to scouring Google Books and other sources for transcriptions of sounds, seen as historical oddities and often ignored. The earliest waveform he has found dates back to 1806, but he has unearthed even older transcriptions created using different methods. One such, discovered in a text from 1677, depicts sounds as a series of dots plotted against time and musical harmonics. Another, from the 10th century (a 13th century example is pictured), represents melodies as a series of lines indicating the tone in which a given voice should sing. Dr Feaster thinks that his digital technique provides a decent rendition of those ancient recordings (some are available on his website, Phonozoic). As a result, the definition of what has hitherto been considered sound transcription may need to be remastered, too.

---

grew trit... // The wrong John Wayne - Washington Times

2011-06-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Everyone is so unfair to poor Michelle Bachmann -- maybe she was just watching this video instead of this promo for Gunsmoke. I mean, we have all mixed stuff up, right?

---
[from http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2011/jun/27/the-wrong-john-wayne/ ]

The wrong John Wayne

437 Comments and 1307 Reactions|Tweet|Share|Email|More

by Stephen Dinan

Published on June 27, 2011

Rep. Michele Bachmann kicked off her presidential campaign on Monday in Waterloo, Iowa, and in one interview surrounding the official event she promised to mimic the spirit of Waterloo's own John Wayne.

The only problem, as one eagle-eyed reader notes: Waterloo's John Wayne was not the beloved movie star, but rather John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer.

Mrs. Bachmann grew up in Waterloo, and used the town as the backdrop for her campaign announcement, where she told Fox News: "Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too." (Someone has already posted the clip to YouTube under the name BachmannLovesGacy)

John Wayne, the movie legend, is in fact from Iowa and the John Wayne birthplace is a celebrated landmark — only it's in Winterset, which is a nearly three hour drive away from Waterloo.

Gacy, though, had his first taste of the criminal life in Waterloo, where he lived for a short time, and where he had his first criminal conviction for an attempted homosexual assault, which landed him in prison for 18 months.

He would move back to Illinois, where his killing spree started, and lasted about six years. In 1980 he was convicted on 33 counts of murder, and was executed in 1994.

- - - - -

UPDATE:

The Bachmann campaign sent this explanation: "John Wayne is from Iowa, his parents lived in Waterloo."

And indeed his parents did in fact live briefly in Waterloo — in fact, according to "Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne," it's where they met. But soon after their marriage they moved to Winterset, where Wayne was born.

It's also worth noting that Mrs. Bachmann herself is no stranger to the actor. In the run-up to her campaign announcement she gave an interview to NewsMax.com in which she talked about him as a symbol of a good time in the country's history.

"We're seeing the nation move into decline. I'm not willing to do that. I'm not satisfied. I grew up with John Wayne's America. I was proud that you grew up in John Wayne's America: Proud to be an American, thrilled to be a patriot," she said.

###

Java man! // » USF study: Mystery ingredient in coffee boosts protection against Alzheimer’s disease

2011-06-24T13:51:00.001-07:00

Vindicated! Caffeinated! Gimme a double shot!

And turn up the music -- it doesn't matter whether it's Sinatra or the Arrogant Worms, just as long as it's about coffee!

...You date a girl and find out later
She smells just like a percolator
Her perfume was made right on the grill
Why, they could percolate the ocean in Brazil

Now, let's go do some coding in Java... //Scott

--
[from http://hscweb3.hsc.usf.edu/health/now/?p=19816 ]

USF study: Mystery ingredient in coffee boosts protection against Alzheimer's disease

June 21, 2011 @ 9:14 am · Filed under Alzheimer's and Neurosciences, Research Really Matters, USF Health News

A USF study indicates an unidentified coffee component combined with caffeine increases a growth factor that counters Alzheimer's disease pathology and improves memory in mice

Tampa, FL (June 21, 2011) – A yet unidentified component of coffee interacts with the beverage's caffeine, which could be a surprising reason why daily coffee intake protects against Alzheimer's disease. A new Alzheimer's mouse study by researchers at the University of South Florida found that this interaction boosts blood levels of a critical growth factor that seems to fight off the Alzheimer's disease process.

The findings appear in the early online version of an article to be published June 28 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Using mice bred to develop symptoms mimicking Alzheimer's disease, the USF team presents the first evidence that caffeinated coffee offers protection against the memory-robbing disease that is not possible with other caffeine-containing drinks or decaffeinated coffee.

Previous observational studies in humans reported that daily coffee/caffeine intake during mid-life and in older age decreases the risk of Alzheimer's disease. The USF researchers' earlier studies in Alzheimer's mice indicated that caffeine was likely the ingredient in coffee that provides this protection because it decreases brain production of the abnormal protein beta-amyloid, which is thought to cause the disease.

Lead authors Chuanhai Cao, PhD, and Gary Arendash, PhD

The new study does not diminish the importance of caffeine to protect against Alzheimer's. Rather it shows that caffeinated coffee induces an increase in blood levels of a growth factor called GCSF (granulocyte colony stimulating factor). GCSF is a substance greatly decreased in patients with Alzheimer's disease and demonstrated to improve memory in Alzheimer's mice. A just-completed clinical trial at the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Institute is investigating GCSF treatment to prevent full-blown Alzheimer's in patients with mild cognitive impairment, a condition preceding the disease. The results of that trial are currently being evaluated and should be known soon.

"Caffeinated coffee provides a natural increase in blood GCSF levels," said USF neuroscientist Dr. Chuanhai Cao, lead author of the study. "The exact way that this occurs is not understood. There is a synergistic interaction between caffeine and some mystery component of coffee that provides this beneficial increase in blood GCSF levels."

The researchers would like to identify this yet unknown component so that coffee and other beverages could be enriched with it to provide long-term protection against Alzheimer's.

Caffeinated vs. Decaffeinated Compared

In their study, the researchers compared the effects of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee to those of caffeine alone. In both Alzheimer's mice and normal mice, treatment with caffeinated coffee greatly increased blood levels of GCSF; neither caffeine alone or decaffeinated coffee provided this effect. The researchers caution that, since they used only "drip" coffee in their studies, they do not know whether "instant" caffeinated coffee would provide the same GCSF response.

The boost in GCSF levels is important, because the researchers also reported that long-term treatment with coffee (but not decaffeinated coffee) enhances memory in Alzheimer's mice. Higher blood GCSF levels due to coffee intake were associated with better memory. The researchers identified three ways that GCSF seems to improve memory performance in the Alzheimer's mice. First, GCSF recruits stem cells from bone marrow to enter the brain and remove the harmful beta-amyloid protein that initiates the disease. GCSF also creates new connections between brain cells and increases the birth of new neurons in the brain.

"All three mechanisms could complement caffeine's ability to suppress beta amyloid production in the brain" Dr. Cao said, "Together these actions appear to give coffee an amazing potential to protect against Alzheimer's — but only if you drink moderate amounts of caffeinated coffee."

Although the present study was performed in Alzheimer's mice, the researchers indicated that they've gathered clinical evidence of caffeine/coffee's ability to protect humans against Alzheimer's and will soon publish those findings.

How Many Cups?

Coffee is safe for most Americans to consume in the moderate amounts (4 to 5 cups a day) that appear necessary to protect against Alzheimer's disease. The USF researchers previously reported this level of coffee/caffeine intake was needed to counteract the brain pathology and memory impairment in Alzheimer's mice. The average American drinks 1½ to 2 cups of coffee a day, considerably less than the amount the researchers believe protects against Alzheimer's.

"No synthetic drugs have yet been developed to treat the underlying Alzheimer's disease process" said Dr. Gary Arendash, the study's other lead author. "We see no reason why an inherently natural product such as coffee cannot be more beneficial and safer than medications, especially to protect against a disease that takes decades to become apparent after it starts in the brain."

The researchers believe that moderate daily coffee intake starting at least by middle age (30s – 50s) is optimal for providing protection against Alzheimer's disease, although starting even in older age appears protective from their studies. "We are not saying that daily moderate coffee consumption will completely protect people from getting Alzheimer's disease," Dr. Cao said. "However, we do believe that moderate coffee consumption can appreciably reduce your risk of this dreaded disease or delay its onset."

The researchers conclude that coffee is the best source of caffeine to counteract the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's because its yet unidentified component synergizes with caffeine to increase blood GCSF levels. Other sources of caffeine, such as carbonated drinks, energy drinks, and tea, would not provide the same level of protection against Alzheimer's as coffee, they said.

Potential Cognitive Benefits of Natural Ingredients

Coffee also contains many ingredients other than caffeine that potentially offer cognitive benefits against Alzheimer's disease. "The average American gets most of their daily antioxidants intake through coffee," Dr. Cao said. "Coffee is high in anti-inflammatory compounds that also may provide protective benefits against Alzheimer's disease."

An increasing body of scientific literature indicates that moderate consumption of coffee decreases the risk of several diseases of aging, including Parkinson's disease, Type II diabetes and stroke. Just within the last few months, new studies have reported that drinking coffee in moderation may also significantly reduce the risk of breast and prostate cancers.

"Now is the time to aggressively pursue the protective benefits of coffee against Alzheimer's disease," Dr. Arendash said. "Hopefully, the coffee industry will soon become an active partner with Alzheimer's researchers to find the protective ingredient in coffee and concentrate it in dietary sources."

Alzheimer's Disease Epidemic Calls for Preventive Measures

New Alzheimer's diagnostic guidelines, now encompassing the full continuum of the disease from no overt symptoms to mild impairment to clear cognitive decline, could double the number of Americans with some form of the disease to more than 10 million. With the baby-boomer generation entering older age, these numbers will climb even more unless an effective preventive measure is identified.

"Because Alzheimer's starts in the brain several decades before it is diagnosed, any protective therapy would obviously need to be taken for decades," Dr. Cao said. "We believe moderate daily consumption of caffeinated coffee is the best current option for long-term protection against Alzheimer's memory loss. Coffee is inexpensive, readily available, easily gets into the brain, appears to directly attack the disease process, and has few side-effects for most of us."

According to the researchers, no other Alzheimer's therapy being developed comes close to meeting all these criteria.

"Aside from coffee, two other lifestyle choices — physical and cognitive activity — appear to reduce the risk of dementia. Combining regular physical and mental exercise with moderate coffee consumption would seem to be an excellent multi-faceted approach to reducing risk or delaying Alzheimer's," Dr. Arendash said. "With pharmaceutical companies spending millions of dollars trying to develop drugs against Alzheimer's disease, there may very well be an effective preventive right under our noses every morning – caffeinated coffee."

This USF study was funded by the NIH-designated Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and the State of Florida.

Article citation:
Caffeine Synergizes with Another Coffee Component to Increase Plasma GCSF: Linkage to Cognitive Benefits in Alzheimer's Mice; Chuanhai Cao, Li Wang, Xiaoyang Lin, Malgorzata Mamcarz, Chi Zhang, Ge Bai, Jasson Nong, Sam Sussman and Gary Arendash; Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 25(2), June 28, 2011.

About USF Health
USF Health is dedicated to creating a model of health care based on understanding the full spectrum of health. It includes the University of South Florida's colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Public Health and Pharmacy, the School of Biomedical Sciences and the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences; and the USF Physician's Group. Ranked 34th in federal research expenditures for public universities by the National Science Foundation, the University of South Florida is a high impact global research university.

About the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease is an international multidisciplinary journal to facilitate progress in understanding the etiology, pathogenesis, epidemiology, genetics, behavior, treatment and psychology of Alzheimer's disease. The journal publishes research reports, reviews, short communications, book reviews, and letters-to-the-editor. Groundbreaking research that has appeared in the journal includes novel therapeutic targets, mechanisms of disease and clinical trial outcomes. The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease has an Impact Factor of 3.82 according to Thomson Reuters' 2010 edition of Journal Citation Reports. It is ranked #19 on the Index Copernicus Top 100 Journal List. The Journal is published by IOS Press (http://www.iospress.nl).

Media contacts:
Gary Arendash, PhD, Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, arendash@cas.usf.edu or (813) 732-9040
Chuanhai Cao, PhD, USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Institute, ccao@health.usf.edu or (813) 396-0742

###

Gordon Ramsay aghast at 'Lady Victoria's' treatment at Gjelina - latimes.com

2011-06-02T22:11:00.001-07:00

I haven't been to Gjelina -- want to join our party?

My idea is that we'll go there and and order a chicken salad sandwich, just like Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Who wants to be Jack, and who wants to be camera operator?

hold the chicken//Scott

[from http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dailydish/2011/06/chef-gordon-ramsay-aghast-at-lady-victorias-treatment-at-gjelina.html ]

Food

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Gordon Ramsay aghast at 'Lady Victoria's' treatment at Gjelina

Gjelina is serious about its "no substitutions" policy. Even if you are chef Gordon Ramsay and you're dining with Victoria Beckham. Listen to this story and you can decide whether the restaurant went too far, or whether Beckham was asking for too much:

Ramsay said he was practically speechless -- imagine that -- when he found himself at Gjelina in Venice on Tuesday dining with the heavily pregnant Posh and the waiter wouldn't accommodate her special order. "I couldn't believe it," he said.

Posh is eight months pregnant with her fourth child with soccer great David Beckham, and the couple are close friends with Ramsay. (David Beckham and Ramsay sat together courtside for one of the Lakers-Mavericks games.) Ramsay said that Victoria Beckham ordered the smoked trout salad and asked for it plain, unadorned, with the dressing on the side. According to the menu, the dish is normally served with grapefruit, avocado, red onion and lemon, and that combo was apparently a bit too much for the ready-to-give-birth-at-any-minute Beckham.

The restaurant's response? Ramsay says they refused to make the change.

Speaking with the media on the eve of Season 2 of "MasterChef," which begins Monday night, Ramsay said he had trouble believing that such a simple request was asking too much of the kitchen. What do you think, dear reader? If you are paying good money for your meal, should you be allowed to ask for something on the side? Or does the chef and the restaurant have the right to reject such requests?

"The lady's pregnant!" Ramsay said. "No one is asking to be fussy.... I still think that's the customer's prerogative.... It was a sour note. I don't think customers should be treated that way. That might not be the way I choose to eat it, but that's what the customer wants."

He added that he had an overall positive impression of the restaurant -- "the place is great" -- but added: "I don't know, times are tough out there. You have to show a touch of sensitivity."

Ramsay -- who refers to Victoria Beckham as "Lady Victoria" -- said he did not know who was running the kitchen at the time, or whether chef Travis Lett was in the house.

I contacted Gjelina for their side of the story. When the manager, who identified himself as Fran, came to the phone, I explained why I was calling and asked about the Beckham encounter. There was a long silence, before he said: "So you would like to know about our 'no substitutions' policy?"

Sure, I said, tell me all about the policy.

"It's clearly stated on the menu." And then he added, "Have a nice day," and hung up.

So much for sensitivity.

Gjelina's menu clearly states the following: "Changes & modifications politely declined."

And they are not joking.

--Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch

Photo credit: Mark Ralston / AFP/Getty Images

###

Eclipse/Vax: Remembering Tom West and Data General

2011-05-30T09:24:00.001-07:00

Tracy Kidder's terrific Soul Of A New Machine showed the larger world what folks on Route 128 and in Silicon Valley already knew: engineers are dreamers, poets, visionaries.

Tom West was a brilliant and tough engineer, but will be best remembered for his pinball-game notion of engineering as performance -- that success means you get to play again.

---

(from http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/05/24/tom_west_obit/)

Data General's Tom West dies

The man who put the soul into a new machine

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Enterprise, 24th May 2011 09:26 GMT

Obit Tom West, who created Data General's Eclipse 32-bit mini and was immortalised in Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Soul Of A New Machine, has died.

Credited with helping to save Data General (DG) after DEC announced its VAX supermini in 1976, Joseph Thomas West III was born on 22 November 1939 and died at his home on 19 May 2011, aged 71. It is thought that he suffered a heart attack.

West was the son of a business executive, and the family moved quite often - he attended four schools and then studied at Amherst College.

He was a folk singer towards the end of the 1950s and worked at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, before returning to Amherst and gaining a bachelor's degree in Physics. He continued working at the Smithsonian, going to other observatories and ensuring that the time was precisely synchronised.

West then joined the RCA corporation and learned about computers, being largely self-taught, and then joined Data General and worked his way up the engineering ladder.

DEC shipped its VAX 32-bit supermini in 1978. This was in the era well before Intel's X86 desktops and servers swept the board, when real computer companies designed their own processors. The 16-bit minicomputer era had boomed and DEC was the number one company. DG was the competitive number two sometimes known as 'the bastards' after a planned newspaper ad that never ran, and was a Fortune 500 company worth $500m. But 16-bit minis were running out of address space (memory capacity) for the apps they wanted to run.

The Eagle skunkworks

DG launched its own 32-bit supermini project known as Fountainhead. It wasn't ready when DEC shipped the VAX 11/780 in February 1978 and suffered from project management problems, so it is said. West, far from convinced that Fountainhead would deliver the goods, started up a secret back-room or skunkworks project called Eagle to build the Eclipse MV/8000, a 32-bit extension of the 16-bit Nova Eclipse mini.

He staffed it with an esoteric mixture of people, some of them recent college graduates, and motivated them not with cash, shares or external incentives but by the sheer difficulty of what they were trying to do. It was described as pinball game management. If you got to succeed with this project or pinball game the reward was that you got to work on the next, more difficult pinball game.

Towards the end of 1979 it became clear that West's team was going to bring its project to fruition before Fountainhead. DG customers were increasingly buying DEC VAXs and DG, running out of cash, experienced tense internal competition as the Fountainhead and Eagle development teams fought for limited development funding. The 16-bit Eclipse was a problem-strewn product and its reputation was bad. Nevertheless West's decision to extend the Eclipse architecture and his intense management style proved to have the edge over Fountainhead.

West's skunkwork staff knew that were working at the frontiers of supermini development, and the organisation, atmosphere and personalities of the protagonists were captured by Kidder in his book. One of the most memorable characters was the man responsible for the microcode who produced nothing for weeks and then, in an outstanding burst of concentrated creativity, produced it all in a very short time.

The MV/8000 was launched in 1980 and fuelled a turnaround in DG's revenues. It was hailed as miraculous and West became an engineering god who could do no wrong. Unfortunately, he never again achieved this level of success, and the Eagle project proved to be his finest work. MV/8000 sales roared ahead and DG passed a billion dollars in annual sales in 1984.

But the workstation era, started and boosted by Sun and Apollo, passed DG by. So too did the PC, with the DG-1 PC being a poor product, and the firm on a downwards track. Microcomputers entered the supermini market - remember MicroVAX? - and DG found it could no longer afford to develop its next-generation processors, not having the revenue strength of DEC.

Killing his own creation

West helped author a report in 1988 recommending that DG should develop hardware systems using commodity microcomputers, instead of building its own proprietary processor, to run Unix better than anybody else. In other words he was responsible for giving life to the MV/8000 and now proposed killing it. DG CEO Edson De Castro agreed with the proposal and the MV line was run down.

A Motorola 88000 product line called AViiON was started up; it ran Unix and therefore all Unix apps that could run on the 88000 processor. Some say that West saved DG's bacon a second time by killing off his own MV/8000 creation and moving to the 88000.

Over time it became apparent that the 88000 was not succeeding against Intel's X86 line of processors, and Motorola killed it off. DG transitioned to the X86 but wasn't able to differentiate its hardware enough and sales revenues fell.

A high-availability storage array was created to run with it the AViiON, and then with other DG computers. It became branded CLARiiON, and was the reason EMC bought the much weakened DG in 1999. CLARiiON arrays have survived to this era, only being replaced by the VNX [1] line earlier this year.

Missing the networked desktop

From a personality point of view West was seen as aloof, passing people in DG's corridors without acknowledging them. It's been said that this attitude permeated DG and it wasn't that good at internal communications. West was seen as a rackmount minicomputer and then microcomputer man. He would be called a server guy today. Back then it seemed he thought workstations and networks, other than networks bringing clients to his MV/8000 and then AViiON systems, were minor irrelevancies, and destined to stay that way.

So DG didn't seriously get into workstations, even though one El Reg correspondent said: "DG developed an 88000-based DG-UX workstation codenamed Maverick that blew the doors off the then-current flavour of Sun, but Tom had it killed."

He was also thought to have a less than stellar record with networking - this was long before Cisco was rampantly dominant - and DG could have had a router offering to go with its bridges, terminal servers and hubs, but it couldn't settle on a protocol stack, TCP/IP then not being dominant. No DG router emerged, and one view is that West effectively had DG's networking products killed off and thrown away.

DG development teams not favoured by West became, it's said, quite bitter about being kept outside the magic circle. This has been said about the workstation, networking, disk, tape and printer groups. But times were hard at DG, with development funds in short supply, and West bestrode the development effort like DG's in-house colossus. His computer projects got the lion's share of the funds. Regrettably, though, he did not see the era of client:server computing and distributed desktops and that blind spot helped cause DG's demise.

Our correspondent said: "There were a lot of 'Tom Wests' in the Massachusetts minicomputer world toward the end, and not all of them worked at DG - or DEC. The failure to see that that which had worked marvellously well for 20 years was now irrelevant was endemic to the industry, and the people who couldn't see beyond their noses killed the whole Rt. 128 scene dead."

West saved DG

The straight truth is that "without Tom West driving the development of the MV/8000 there would have been no MV/8000, and DG would have died altogether circa 1980." Because of Kidder's book West became, for a while, the most famous computer engineer in the world.

He deserved that accolade and, with the MV/8000 skunkworks led a group of people, many of whom would have been classed as no-hopers, to produce a machine absolutely crucial to DG's future. It was his finest hour and a triumph. Read Kidder's book if you can find it, if only for nostalgia. We won't experience those days again.

West retired in the late 1990s and spent part of his time sailing. He is survived by two daughters, two ex-wives and a sister. ®

###

who needs linearity? // Whoa! Apple Patent Confirms iTunes Cloud Media Services - Patently Apple

2011-05-19T11:35:00.001-07:00

Very, very clever -- guess that's why they said to stay awake in those science classes...

---
[from http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/05/whoa-apple-patent-confirms-itunes-cloud-media-services.html ]

May 19, 2011

Whoa! Apple Patent Confirms iTunes Cloud Media Services

In January we pointed to a possible HP music cloud service that could debut with their future TouchPad tablet due to their 3par acquisition. Such a service had the potential of upsetting Apple's iTunes kingdom. Then word broke in April that Apple was acquiring iCloud followed by news in May that Apple signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and others. Today, a new Apple patent application dating back to Q4 2009 shows that Apple has been working on a cloud based media service for some time. Apple's patent details a very unique approach to cloud based services using iTunes which they describe as being "seamless and invisible to the user."

The Problems with Today's Stored & Streaming Media Systems

Many electronic devices could play back one or more types of media items such as audio or video files. The device could locally store media files in storage (e.g., on a hard drive or in a solid state drive). To play back locally stored media items, the electronic device could retrieve the locally stored media and direct it to a playback process.

As another example, the device could stream media files from a remote source (e.g., a content server operated by a content generator or a content sales point). To play back a remote media files, the electronic device could direct communications circuitry to establish a communications path with the remote content source. Once the communications path has been established, the content source could provide the requested media item to the device. Once the device has locally cached a sufficient amount of the media item, the electronic device could begin streamed media playback.

These approaches, however, may have limitations. In particular, an electronic device could have a limited amount of available storage, which may be exceeded by the user's media library. The user may then be prevented from storing the entire library on the electronic device. This may force the user to select only a subset of the library, and may in turn cause the user to rarely listen to or forget about media items of the user's media library.

Similarly, streaming media could have limitations. In particular, the electronic device could require an active communications path with a content source. In addition, the electronic device may not begin playback until at least the beginning of the media items has been cached. When the electronic device is unaware of the next media item to play back, the electronic device could require undesired pauses between media items. Similarly, when a user skips to a different media item for playback, the electronic device could require a pause during which no media item is played back as the new media item is streamed to the device. This may limit the user's ability to enjoy the user's media library and the user's electronic device.

Apple's Unique Cloud Solution

Apple's patent and invention is directed to locally storing portions of a media item that is streamed to an electronic device. In particular, Apple's invention is directed to locally storing an initial portion of a media item from a user's library, and requesting a stream of the remaining portion of the media item upon starting local playback of the initial portion.

The media items owned or accessible by a user could be stored in a user's media library. The media library could be stored on any suitable device, including for example on a host device, on a remotely accessed server, in a cloud, or in any other suitable location. The user could store at least some media items of the library on an electronic device so that the user could locally play back the media items. The electronic device could include communications circuitry for remotely connecting to the media library and stream media items to the user's device.

An iTunes Based Cloud Service

In some embodiments, the electronic device could remotely connect to the user's library. In some embodiments, the electronic device could instead or in addition connect to a content source such as (e.g., a content generator or a content point of sale – which could be associated with Apple's iTunes and others like Amazon) to stream the media items. To ensure that devices could only stream media items that the user has purchased or to which the user otherwise has legal access, the content source could require an authentication scheme (e.g., a username and password, or a secure token). In some embodiments, the streamed media items could instead or in addition include missing elements that an electronic device must retrieve and locally store from the user's media library (e.g., remove 3 seconds of every 10 seconds of a media item, such that the missing 3 seconds are retrieved and locally stored on the device from a user's media library).

Stored and Cloud Media in Sync

The electronic device could receive and locally store initial portions of media items in the electronic device. When a user then instructs the device to play back a media item, the electronic device could initiate playback of the locally stored portion of media item while requesting a stream from the user's media library for the remaining portion of the media item. The duration of the initial portion of the media item could be selected such that a sufficient amount of the remaining portion of the media item stream could be received and cached by the time playback of the initial portion is completed. This could allow the device to seamlessly switch playback from the initial portion to the streamed remaining portion of the media item.

Overview of the Cloud System

According to Apple's patent, the user's media library could be hosted by another device, and particular media items of the user's library synched to the electronic device. Apple's patent FIG. 2 shown below is a schematic view of an illustrative communications system including an electronic device and a host device.

Communications system 200 may include electronic device 202, such as an iPhone or iPad 3G, and communications network 210 which the electronic device may use to perform wired or wireless communications with other devices within the communications network.

Host device 220 may include any suitable type of device operative to host a media library and provide media files to an electronic device. For example, the host device may include a computer (e.g., a desktop or laptop computer), a server (e.g., a server available over the Internet or using a dedicated communications path), a kiosk, or any other suitable device. The host device may transfer media files of a media library to an electronic device using any suitable approach. In some embodiments, the host device could run an application dedicated to providing a communications interface between the host device and the electronic device (e.g., iTunes, available from Apple Inc.).

The user's media library could be stored on any suitable device. In some embodiments, the media library could be stored entirely or in part in a host device. Alternatively, the media library could be stored entirely or in part in a content source. The content source 230 could include any suitable device accessible to one or both of electronic devices and host device within communications network. In some embodiments, the content source could include a cloud in which the user's media library is stored. The transition from the locally stored portion and the streamed media could be seamless and invisible to the user.

A Future View of iTunes App with Sync Partial Music Option

In some embodiments, the user will be able to enable a partial storage/streaming option on their iTunes application as shown below in patent FIG. 3. Noteworthy is patent point and option # 340 which illustrates a selectable box 342 associated with storing only portions of a media item. In particular, in response to receiving a user selection of box 342, iTunes could select segments of each media item corresponding to the user's selection criteria to store on the electronic device. The host device could select segments of any suitable length, and at any suitable position within the media item for local storage. For example, the media segments or portions could be selected from the beginning of a media item (e.g., the first 30 seconds of a song).

Apple also notes that the user will be able to enter the speed of the network they're using and the patent points to 3G, WiFi and believe it or not 5G which is quite the leap.

Built-in Security

To prevent unauthorized streaming from a user's media library, Apple states that a user will be able to define one or more security schemes for the library. In some embodiments, the user will be able to establish an authentication scheme for ensuring that only devices owned by the user and authorized by the user.

For example, the media library could require a user name and password combination from the electronic device before providing a media stream. In particular, a user could enter a username and password associated with the media library, which could be checked against a database of authorized usernames and passwords (e.g., username and password combinations for each member of a family).

As another example, the media library could provide a media stream to all requesting devices, but encrypt the transmitted media stream using a key that is known only to the user of the electronic device. To avoid denial-of-service type issues, where many unauthorized requests overwhelm the media library, the media library may request and require a response from the electronic device, where the response is a string or other information from the encrypted media stream. The media library and electronic device could use combinations of these or any other suitable authentication or securing scheme to ensure that only the user can access his remote media library.

Media Item Data Structure for the Cloud

Apple's patent FIG. 4 is a schematic view of an illustrative media item data structure having several discontinuous locally stored segments. Media item 400 could be partially stored on the user's electronic device, and partially streamed upon a user request.

In one implementation, the media item could include several discontinuous segments (see patent points # 410 above) that are locally stored on the device, and intermediate segments (see patent points # 420 above) that are streamed between discontinuous segments. The electronic device could stream and cache segments 420 such that the device seamlessly switches playback between segments 410 and 420.

The particular portions of the media item that are locally stored (e.g., single segments 410) could be selected using any suitable approach. In some embodiments, the electronic device could store only a single segment from the beginning of media item. As another example, the electronic device could include segments at regular intervals or important portions of the media item (e.g., to provide an authentication scheme).

The Cloud Service Covers Books & Bookmarks as Well

As still another example, the electronic device could include segments 410 starting at or including markers 430 within the media item. In particular, each marker 430 could indicate a chapter marker in an audio book, or other moment to which a user could skip media playback. By providing a segment that includes the marker (e.g., locally storing portions of the media item before and after the marker), a user could skip to a marked playback position and immediately begin playback from the marked position.

Music Cloud Service Flowcharts

Apple's patent FIG. 8 is a flowchart of an illustrative process for generating locally stored portions of a media item; in patent FIG. 9 we see a flowchart of an illustrative process for authenticating a request for a stream received by a media library.

Apple credits Benjamin Rottler and Allen Haughay (who worked on Apple's recent patent relating to High Octane iTunes App for Ping) as the inventors of patent application 20110118858, originally filed in Q4 2009.

Notice: Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent application should be read in its entirety for further details. Patents shouldn't be digested as rumors or fast-tracked according to rumor time tables. Apple patents represent true research that could lead to future products and should be understood in that light. About Comments: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit comments.

###

nice tone... // David Mason dies at 85; 'Penny Lane' trumpeter

2011-05-10T00:36:00.000-07:00

I learned two big things in 1967:

The Beatles were a really, really, really special band.
Our dad, the presumably square David McAuley, was very hip.

That the two facts were related centered around David Mason, a man whose name I didn't know until today.

A few months after we kids went all nuts for Sergeant Pepper's in mid-June of 1967 -- heck, the Garman kids moved their dad's monster Altec speakers to the patio and cranked it up so we could feel the bass underwater in their pool all afternoon -- Dad semi-casually mentioned that he had heard "Penny Lane" on the radio and was very impressed.

"That's an interesting composition," he said, "and musically well thought out."

Validated, I must have thought at some level, because for several years I would bring him what I considered "musically serious pop" like a cat brings offerings of dead birds. He humored me as I spun H.P. Lovecraft, Procol Harum, and It's a Beautiful Day (somehow I had the sense to spare him The Moody Blues). And I ended up loving string quartets and Renaissance horn music. Win win.

So thank you, David Mason -- you and David McAuley would have gotten on well. Miss you.

//Scott

---
[from http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/07/local/la-me-david-mason-20110507]

David Mason dies at 85; 'Penny Lane' trumpeter

Paul McCartney saw classical musician David Mason playing the trumpet on Bach's 'Brandenburg' Concerto No. 2 in F Major on television in 1967. The next day, producer George Martin recruited him to play on 'Penny Lane.'

May 07, 2011 | By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times

David Mason, a classical musician best known for his distinctive piccolo trumpet solo on the Beatles' recording of "Penny Lane," has died. He was 85.

Mason died April 29 after a brief battle with leukemia, according to the All Music online database.

The Beatles' Paul McCartney was looking to embellish "Penny Lane" when he saw Mason on television playing the trumpet on Bach's "Brandenburg" Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Mason often recalled.

The next morning, producer George Martin recruited Mason to record with the Fab Four.

"I did not even know who the Beatles were when I was asked to do a recording session with them," Mason told England's Bath Chronicle in 2003. "For me it was just another job."

He came to the 1967 session with nine trumpets and "by a process of elimination" settled on the B-flat piccolo trumpet for the high-pitched solo, he later said.

No music was written ahead of time. Instead, McCartney sang what he wanted to hear, Martin wrote out the notes and Mason played them.

"The actual recording was done quite quickly," Mason said in the 1989 book "The Beatles Recording Sessions." "They were jolly high notes, quite taxing, but with the tapes rolling we did two takes as overdubs on top of the existing song."

While some books reported that his contributions to "Penny Lane" were speeded up post-recording, Mason insisted that was not the case. He offered as proof his ability to "still play those same notes on the instrument along with the record," he said in the book.

For the recording session, he was paid a one-time fee of about $45.

He also contributed to several other Beatles' songs recorded in 1967: "A Day in the Life," "Magical Mystery Tour" and "All You Need Is Love."

Born in London in 1926, Mason studied at London's Royal College of Music and was a trumpet professor at the school for 30 years.

He eventually was principal trumpet for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the New Philharmonia Orchestra, Covent Garden Opera and the English Chamber Orchestra.

"I've spent a lifetime playing with top orchestras," he said in the recording sessions book, "yet I'm most famous for playing on 'Penny Lane'!"

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

###

Max headroom? // Max Mathews, Father of Digital Synthesis, Computer Innovator, Dies at 84

2011-04-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

Unlike the Moog or Arp or Buchla, there was no Max synthesizer -- but Max Mathews influenced them all.

In the mid-1960s we science nerds at Sylvan School (were there really more than one of us?) thrived on the outputs of Bell Labs, one of which was a kit called "From Sun to Sound" -- incorporating a solar cell and a transistor and a wind-it-yourself inductor into a (very) primitive synthesizer. Capacitance was provided by the player's skin, and the thing made some great bleats.

It came with a lame little earphone, so I improved the community experience by jacking the instrument into our old-but-powerful Magnavox record player. As I recall, requests came in from the 416 Robin Hood household and beyond...

The kit was 100% analog, but it came with a floppy vinyl record demonstrating what could be done with digital computers. It was only today that I learned that "Daisy" was the work of Max Mathews -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoqEC2mLYyE

Today there is no singular place of innovation like Bell Labs. Let's hope the kids are still tinkering...

Here's to you, Max; thanks for your work.

//Scott

---

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2011/04/max-mathews-father-of-digital-synthesis-computer-innovator-dies-at-84/

APR 222011

Max Mathews, Father of Digital Synthesis, Computer Innovator, Dies at 84

BY PETER KIRN

Max Mathews is best known for his involvement in the debut of digital synthesis, but he contributed much more. His Radio Baton predicted gestural controllers that arrived much later from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and it may be his code design ideas that outlast even the memory of the computer's first musical utterances. Photo CC-BY-NC-SA) Rainer Kohlberger.

Max Mathews, the man who literally first gave voice to computer music, died yesterday at age 84. I can only offer my heartfelt condolences to Max's friends and family.

Max was the man present at the moment when the very subject matter of this site was born. An IBM 704 playing his 17-second composition marked the first genuinely digital synthesis of music on a computer.

Max's achievements, though, go beyond that initial breakthrough:

Digital synthesis of music.
The Music 1 software demo on an IBM 704 in New York City was the first computer music performance. While not real-time, and while Mathews himself says "the timbres and notes were not inspiring," it was a stunning proof of concept.

The computer sings.
Mathews' arrangement of "Daisy Bell," for a computer-synthesized voice developed by a Bell Labs team led by John Kelly, was the first "singing" digital computer. The event found its way into pop culture via Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Computer music in code.
Computer tech is supposedly fleeting, but Mathews' original work on the Music I – Music V series was the direct basis for languages like Csound and Cmix, used today. (Csound apparently even found its way onto a popular karaoke machine.) The basic notions of scores and instruments, the fundamental assumptions of the language, and the essential designed features all remain visible in today's languages. Mathews indirectly influenced every other music language since. He is the namesake of Miller Puckette's "Max," a reference to the timing techniques used in what is now Max/MSP, which were modeled on techniques designed by Mathews. That means that there's something of Max's thinking in Max/MSP, Jitter, Pd, GEM, Max for Live, and others.

Innovation in gestural control.
Before the Wii remote and Microsoft Kinect would come to change popular ideas about gestural control of computers, Mathews' Radio Baton explored similar spatial manipulation in musical performance. Add to that involvement with research and events like the "New interfaces for musical expression" conference, and Max has had a profound impact on the exploration of novel control.

Max was warm, witty, and insightful in every encounter I had with him, going on to continue to inspire colleagues and students through his late years. He played a role not only in our narrowly-appreciated realm of computer music, but the history of the computer itself.

There's really too much to say; let us know if you have comments for CDM or contact us directlyand I hope to put together something more detailed by next week.

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Radical forgiveness - chicagotribune.com

2011-04-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

Remembering the basis of Christianity on this Easter eve...

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[from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-forgiveness-story-gallery,0,2851990.storygallery ]

Radical forgiveness

Their loved ones were murdered. Suddenly. Horrifically. Needlessly. Yet none of them wanted the killers to die too.

Inspired by their Christian faith, they fought capital punishment in Illinois, and on March 9, they saw that goal fulfilled and the death penalty abolished.

Christians view Easter's triumph of life over death as a particularly poignant reminder of what Christ's resurrection means for humanity, the scope of God's love and our own capacity for forgiveness.

But the journey has not been the same for everyone. One woman has finally summoned the strength to utter the name of the man who killed her sister 21 years ago and pray for him on Easter for the first time. Another woman, remembering the childhood lessons of Easter, immediately forgave her father's killers, but she can't forgive God six years after the murder.

--Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter

Twitter @TribSeeker

Related
PHOTOS: Forgiving their relatives' killers

April 23, 2011

'Safe in God's arms'

Jeanne Bishop

On Palm Sunday, April 8, 1990, Jeanne Bishop was standing in the aisle of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, holding a palm and a choir folder when the call came in that her sister Nancy, brother-in-law Richard and their unborn child had been slain by an armed intruder.

April 23, 2011

'So much doubt'

Hannah Yoo

Hannah Yoo isn't sure her father went to heaven. She scorns God for that uncertainty — if there is a God. She's not even sure about that anymore.

April 23, 2011

'Coming back to life'

Gail Rice

Gail Rice lost her brother Bruce VanderJagt to 10 shots in the head and torso with an assault rifle on Nov. 12, 1997, in Denver. But when Rice became a voice against the death penalty, she eventually lost a close bond with his wife and daughter.

April 23, 2011

'God's business'

Roger Nelson

The Rev. Roger Nelson lost his father, Ronald, when a crack addict shot him in the chest in the parking lot of Roseland Christian Ministries Center in Chicago after Sunday services. It was broad daylight on St. Patrick's Day 26 years ago.

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statue of fibberty? // Statue of Liberty stamp error: Las Vegas replica honored instead | NJ.com

2011-04-21T12:31:00.001-07:00

Dear reader --

I tried to send this to you...
...but the post office has this rule against sending arms through the mail...

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[from http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2011/04/statue_of_liberty_stamp_error.html ]

Statue of Liberty stamp error: Las Vegas replica honored instead

Published: Friday, April 15, 2011, 2:49 PM Updated: Friday, April 15, 2011, 2:58 PM

By Anthony Venutolo/The Star-Ledger

USPS // The Lady Liberty adorning a new U.S. stamp is not the neoclassical icon on Liberty Island in New York Harbor but the replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Talk about screw ups. The Statue of Liberty pictured on a new U.S. stamp is not the neoclassical icon on Liberty Island in New York Harbor but the replica at the New York New York Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada.

While the popular magazine Linn's Stamp News caught the error, the suits at the Postal Service seem very nonchalant about the situation. "We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway," said United State Postal Service spokesman Roy Betts. So how was the image even chosen? The USPS picked the image from a photo service.

The big difference between the lovely lady in the harbor and her Sin City counterpart is namely size. The Vegas replica stands at only half of the original's 151 feet. What's more, the New York New York Lady Liberty has different hair and better-defined eyes.

A spokesman for MGM Resorts (who owns New York New York) tells Time that they are "honored" by the stamp.

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That little tramp! / Police: New bride, fake preacher stole from Rock Hill man

2011-04-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

dear language mavens --

See below, and note spelling of "Chaplin" -- such a small difference between the truly reverent and the Little Tramp!

I bet he will watch those A's now.../S

[from http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/04/13/v-print/2220427/police-new-bride-fake-preacher.html ]

Printed from the Charlotte Observer - www.CharlotteObserver.com

Posted: Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2011

Police: New bride, fake preacher stole from Rock Hill man

By Nicole Smith

Published in: Crime & Justice

Related Images

ROCK HILL Wedded bliss didn't last long for a Rock Hill man.

A 58-year-old called police Tuesday, saying he believes a woman he met and married Saturday and the preacher who married them stole $600 from him, according to a Rock Hill police report.

Just after 7 p.m. Saturday the man called a friend to ask if he "knew any girls that he could meet for companionship," according to the report. His friend introduced him to a woman at a Riverview Road motel, and they called a man who claimed to be a reverend with Rock Hill Chaplin Services to marry them.

The reverend charged a $100 fee to perform a ceremony, according to the report.

After the ceremony, the man said he went to the store. When he returned, $600 that he had hidden under the television was gone and so was his new bride.

The man believes the reverend and woman took his money.

He hasn't been able to find the woman that he supposedly married, according to the report.

There is no listing for a Rock Hill Chaplin Services.

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I see money growing on trees... // In Motion Defending Bonuses, Borders Sees $1.5 Billion Company

2011-04-13T09:18:00.001-07:00

When I read the publishing news, why do I think I am watching this scene in The Sixth Sense?

Cole Sear: I see dead people.
Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]
Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
[Cole nods]
Malcolm Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?
Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.

Hmm...

I gotta go. My marketing VP wants a raise to a half-mil, for publicity we might get. All publicity is good publicity, right?

--good night nurse//Scott

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http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/46857-in-motion-defending-bonuses-borders-sees-1-5-billion-company.html

Home -> Industry News -> Bookselling
In Motion Defending Bonuses, Borders Sees $1.5 Billion Company
by Jim Milliot
Apr 13, 2011

In a motion defending its decision to recommend as much as $8.3 million in bonuses and other payouts to top and key Borders Group executives, a partner with the compensation services firm Mercer said that when Borders emerges from bankruptcy it expects to have annual revenue of $1.5 billion. The projection was used to justify the awards package, with Mercer saying that the cost of the package as a percentage of post-bankruptcy sales for Borders is .56%, just slightly above the median of .47% of comparable companies that have gone through the bankruptcy process.

The proposed bonus plan has been challenged by the unsecured creditors committee, partially on the grounds that the plan is premature, and a hearing on the matter is set for tomorrow, April 14.

The Mercer partner, John Dempsey, said quick action is needed because if retailers are to survive a Chapter 11, they must move quickly to emerge from the process. With that in mind, the bonus plan was designed to create incentives for restructuring quickly with no rewards if Borders is forced to liquidate. The proposed plan is consistent with recent bankruptcies and is designed to create a competitive pay scale for critical Borders employees, Dempsey said.

Mercer notes that over that last two years, Borders has reduced its headcount by 55% and during that period over 85 directors and officers have left the company and that 70% of the 17 executives recommended to receive the bulk of the payout have been with the company less than 18 months. Without incentives, Mercer argues, it would be difficult to retain people "whose future careers and reputations are less directly linked to Borders' survival, but who are critical to that survival." As for the need to give bonuses to the directors who oversee the day-to-day operations, Mercer said it would be impossible to replace any who left the company, leaving Borders with leadership and talent gaps.

The filing lists the base salaries of the top five executives and the bonuses they are eligible for over a period of time. CEO Mike Edwards base is $750,000; CFO Scott Henry has a base of $600,000; CMO Michele Cloutier $500,000; evp of store operations James Frering $350,000 and human resources svp Rosalind Thompson $275,000.

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Scott's News

fyi // Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory | The Authors Guild Blog

Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory

Showing 13 comments

Season of hope... // Thirty years of a disease: The end of AIDS? | The Economist

The end of AIDS?

"impossible!" // Publishers Challenge Audience Report | Adweek

Publishers Challenge Audience Report

Fail of the Year? / The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained - NYTimes.com

The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained

d'oh! // Swearing is good for you (unless you're like Gordon) - Science - News - The Independent

Swearing is good for you (unless you're like Gordon)

Study reveals that cursing can relieve pain – but only when practised in moderation

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving ‘Oz’ Munchkins, Dies at 93 - NYTimes.com

Karl Slover, One of the Last Surviving 'Oz' Munchkins, Dies at 93

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Zynga to employees: Give back our stock or you'll be fired | The Digital Home - CNET News

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built to last... // Larry Haun (1931-2011) - Fine Homebuilding

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(acoustic) suspension of disbelief // Edgar M. Villchur, Hi-Fi Innovator, Dies at 94

Edgar M. Villchur, a Hi-Fi Innovator, Is Dead at 94

By DENNIS HEVESI

proud to be a techie-nerd: Henry Kloss moves on

Not such an odd couple after all... // Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth | The Economist

Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth

Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth, fighters for desegregation in America's South, died on September 18th and October 5th respectively, aged 85 and 89

THAT's why the called it the Newton... // Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

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once a joke, now it's reality... // Brain linked to robotic hand; success hailed

River on fire? // Fire - cdespinosa's posterous

tastes like chicken? // Sacto 9-1-1: Sacramento PD: Man arrested for chomping on snake

September 2, 2011

reverse Polish valuation... // Daring Fireball: A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm and Is Getting Out of the PC Business

A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm and Is Getting Out of the PC Business

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standby: your man... // Britain's phone-hacking scandal: Wider still and wider | The Economist

Britain's phone-hacking scandal

Britain's prime minister appears to have saved his skin. But News Corporation is still vulnerable to revelations on both sides of the Atlantic

Written on the wind... // Ancient audio: The written sound | The Economist

Science and technology

Ancient audio

The written sound

grew trit... // The wrong John Wayne - Washington Times

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Java man! // » USF study: Mystery ingredient in coffee boosts protection against Alzheimer’s disease

Gordon Ramsay aghast at 'Lady Victoria's' treatment at Gjelina - latimes.com

The inside scoop on food in Los Angeles

Gordon Ramsay aghast at 'Lady Victoria's' treatment at Gjelina

Eclipse/Vax: Remembering Tom West and Data General

Data General's Tom West dies

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West saved DG

Links

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who needs linearity? // Whoa! Apple Patent Confirms iTunes Cloud Media Services - Patently Apple

May 19, 2011

Whoa! Apple Patent Confirms iTunes Cloud Media Services

nice tone... // David Mason dies at 85; 'Penny Lane' trumpeter

David Mason dies at 85; 'Penny Lane' trumpeter

Paul McCartney saw classical musician David Mason playing the trumpet on Bach's 'Brandenburg' Concerto No. 2 in F Major on television in 1967. The next day, producer George Martin recruited him to play on 'Penny Lane.'

Max headroom? // Max Mathews, Father of Digital Synthesis, Computer Innovator, Dies at 84

Radical forgiveness - chicagotribune.com

Radical forgiveness

statue of fibberty? // Statue of Liberty stamp error: Las Vegas replica honored instead | NJ.com

Statue of Liberty stamp error: Las Vegas replica honored instead

Published: Friday, April 15, 2011, 2:49 PM Updated: Friday, April 15, 2011, 2:58 PM

That little tramp! / Police: New bride, fake preacher stole from Rock Hill man

Police: New bride, fake preacher stole from Rock Hill man

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I see money growing on trees... // In Motion Defending Bonuses, Borders Sees $1.5 Billion Company