One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government. The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny. When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance. In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers. The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975. “What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.” Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields. Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different. The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words. And then there are politics. “I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.” The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years. Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.” Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days, and Mr. Vagts, said it took several years before the dual-degree program had its first female student. Far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Obama Camp Pushes Romney to Disclose Finances
The president’s campaign and his surrogates are accusing the presumptive Republican nominee of hiding the sources of his multimillion-dollar fortune and of refusing to release multiple years of his tax returns. On Monday, they also mocked Mr. Romney’s weekend fund-raisers at glamorous estates in the Hamptons. In an interview with a New Hampshire television station on Monday, Mr. Obama added his voice to the criticism of his rival, saying that Americans should “know who you are and what you’ve done and that you’re an open book. And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.” Senior aides to Mr. Obama’s campaign say the intent is not to attack the rich, or even the fact of Mr. Romney’s wealth. Instead, the focus on Mr. Romney’s personal fortune is part of a broader plan, they say, to disqualify Mr. Romney’s economic credentials in the eyes of voters. “It’s about the fact that Governor Romney, who could be the first president in history to keep his finances offshore, has defied precedent and kept his tax returns secret even though they could prove whether or not he avoided paying taxes,” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. Amanda Henneberg, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, called questions about the Republican’s wealth an “unfounded character assault” and said it was “unseemly and disgusting.” The aggressive push by Democrats comes just days after another mediocre jobs report provided new ammunition for Mr. Romney’s criticism of the president’s economic policies. Just 80,000 jobs were added in June, capping the worst quarter since the summer of 2010 for job creation. Mr. Obama sought a quick change of subject on Monday with his call for an extension of middle-class tax cuts, saying that the fate of similar cuts for the wealthy would be resolved by voters in November’s election. “My opponent will fight to keep them in place,” he said. “I will fight to end them.” Meanwhile, the president’s advisers and allies are intensifying their focus on Mr. Romney’s financial holdings, seizing on reports by the news media that some of the Republican’s personal money is kept in overseas bank and investment accounts. The reports added new details about the status of Mr. Romney’s finances. The existence of a Swiss bank account was first disclosed in January, when Mr. Romney released his 2010 tax returns. Advisers have said the account was closed that year. But an article in Vanity Fair magazine published last week added new details about other holdings in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, which served as complex investment holdings for partnership income that Mr. Romney continued to receive for years after leaving Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded two decades ago. The article said Mr. Romney has financial interests of at least $30 million in 12 funds in the Cayman Islands. Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney’s campaign, said on Fox News Sunday that the Republican candidate “hasn’t paid a penny less in taxes by virtue of where these funds are domiciled.” He added, “His liability is exactly the same as if he held the fund investments directly in the U.S.” But that answer has not stopped Democrats and Mr. Obama’s campaign from attacking. The Democratic National Committee created a video on Sunday highlighting reports of bank accounts in offshore institutions. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Monday, Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign, bluntly accused the Republican candidate of not giving voters the information they need to make a decision about his wealth. “Release the tax returns,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Put all this to rest. If Mitt Romney is not hiding something in Bermuda and Switzerland and the Caymans, it will be in the tax returns.” Dan Senor, an adviser to Mr. Romney, on the same “Morning Joe” episode, said that Mr. Gibbs was being “stunningly dishonest” in his attacks. “The reason we know about these accounts, as Robert knows, is because they are in the tax returns that Mitt Romney released,” Mr. Senor said. The Obama campaign is walking a fine line — trying to make Mr. Romney seem out of touch while not appearing to question the value of being a wealthy businessman. That kind of message could backfire, especially with moderate voters in battleground states. “It’s not about wealth,” Mr. LaBolt wrote in an e-mail. “There have been other wealthy candidates, nobody is out to demonize wealth.” So far, Mr. Obama’s campaign has focused more directly on Mr. Romney’s role as a business executive, suggesting that his career was a boon to the wealthy and that he did not have the interests of workers at heart. Now, Democrats are hoping to contrast Mr. Obama’s refusal to extend tax cuts for the wealthy and Mr. Romney’s desire to cut taxes for people like him. Mr. Romney’s advisers believe that the effort will misfire. They argue that voters want the candidates to talk about how they will turn around the economy. Polling suggests they may be right. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in April found that 71 percent of those surveyed did not consider Mr. Romney’s wealth to be a major reason to support or oppose him. Among those who said it was a major factor in the decision, his wealth was more likely to be a negative. For the most part, Mr. Romney’s advisers intend to ignore the attacks on his personal wealth. On Monday, they focused on Mr. Obama’s renewed call to let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire. “Americans are struggling in a ‘zombie economy,’ and President Obama’s only answer is to pass one of the largest tax hikes in history,” Ms. Henneberg said.
Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.
Sidebar: An Unexpected Alliance in a Same-Sex Marriage Case
It is a rematch between the main lawyers in the health care case, and it replays some of the same themes. But now the issue is same-sex marriage. The question, again, is whether a federal law — this time the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA — passes constitutional muster. The law says the federal government must deny benefits to gay couples who are married in states that allow such unions. The law excludes same-sex spouses from benefits like Social Security payments, health insurance and burial services. “Until DOMA is repealed or invalidated,” explained Walter Dellinger, who was acting United States solicitor general in the Clinton administration, “no gay couple is fully married.” (It is worth pausing to point out what the new case is not about. It does not concern the law’s other main part, the one that says states need not recognize same-sex marriages from other states. It is also not about the more ambitious arguments made in a suit filed in California by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, which seeks to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.) The federal appeals court in Boston on May 31 struck down the part of the marriage law that concerns federal benefits, saying there was no good reason to treat some married couples differently from others. On June 29, Paul D. Clement, who had learned the day before that he had largely lost the health care case, was back at the Supreme Court. He asked the justices to hear an appeal from the Boston decision and uphold the marriage law. Four days later, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who had successfully defended the health care law, agreed that the new case warranted review. But he said the justices should strike down the marriage law. The appeals court ruling in Boston was largely based on equal protection principles. But there was a dash of federalism in it, too, one reminiscent of arguments in the health care case. Marriages have traditionally been governed by state law, Judge Michael Boudin wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the appeals court, raising federalism concerns that warranted a close look at whether the marriage law was justified. The trial judge, Joseph L. Tauro, had gone further, saying the marriage law overstepped Congress’s power to attach conditions to federal grants to states. For instance, Judge Tauro wrote, the Department of Veterans Affairs had threatened to take back some $19 million from Massachusetts if it allowed the burial of a veteran’s same-sex spouse in a cemetery that had been built and maintained with federal money. Most people did not take that part of Judge Tauro’s opinion very seriously, and the appeals court rejected it. But that was a month before the Supreme Court limited the health care law’s Medicaid expansion along similar lines. The important point about federalism, said Mr. Dellinger, the former Clinton administration lawyer, is that two interests that are sometimes at odds in cases about same-sex marriage line up here. “Gay rights and states’ rights are on the same side of the case,” he said. Mr. Verrilli, for his part, finds himself in an awkward position. It is ordinarily the job of the executive branch to defend laws enacted by Congress, and the Justice Department did defend the marriage law early in the Obama administration. Last year, though, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced an about-face, saying he and President Obama had concluded that the law was unconstitutional. The administration would continue to enforce the law, Mr. Holder said, but would no longer defend it in court. After the administration’s move, House Republicans intervened in the case to defend the law. They turned to Mr. Clement, who sometimes seems to be handling every important case on the Supreme Court docket. In his Supreme Court petition, Mr. Clement wrote that the justices should hear the case because legislators were not equipped to litigate. “The House has been forced into the position of defending numerous lawsuits challenging DOMA across the nation,” he said. “That is a role for which the Justice Department — not the House — is institutionally designed.” The seven same-sex couples and three surviving spouses actually challenging the law have yet to be heard from, and they will presumably urge the Supreme Court to deny review. But there is every reason to think the court will agree to hear the case, or a similar one from California, shortly after the justices return from their summer break, with arguments around January and a decision by June. Both sides will be looking for support in the principles that animated the health care decision. In his petition, Mr. Clement quoted an observation from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s touchstones, that “judging the constitutionality of an act of Congress is the gravest and most delicate duty that this court is called on to perform.” Mr. Verrilli went his adversary one better, actually citing the five-day-old health care decision, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, in what was probably its first appearance in a Supreme Court brief. In the health care case, Mr. Verrilli reminded the justices, they appointed lawyers to argue positions that neither party had embraced. In the marriage case, where both the plaintiffs and the Justice Department now agree that the law is unconstitutional, Mr. Verrilli said, it would similarly be sensible to allow Mr. Clement to have his say.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
In Framing Touchy Election Issues, Party Leaders Take Risks
At the White House, Mr. Obama announced his proposal of a one-year extension in the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, which threatened to put him at odds with some Democrats who have supported extending the cuts for everyone earning up to $1 million. While most party leaders fell into line with Mr. Obama’s message, several rank-and-file members said they remained opposed to any tax increases. The No. 2 House Democrat, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, indicated that he would be open to a $1 million income threshold, while Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat who is retiring at the end of this session of Congress, called that a bare minimum. “My druthers are to extend all of the tax cuts to continue the economic recovery,” he said. “But if this leads to a compromise, Congress should at least extend the cuts for everyone under $1 million.” At the same time, House Republicans forged ahead with their plans to vote on a repeal of Mr. Obama’s health care law, even as some members expressed unease about voting to abolish politically popular elements of the law. Others expressed fears that the Republicans would be hurt politically for appearing to refight the health care battles of two years ago, after the Supreme Court had upheld the law and many voters had moved on. The divisions underscored the stakes for the president and the Republicans as they battle for control of the political debate — each choosing as their weapon a complex public policy issue with broad ripple effects. With four months left until Mr. Obama and Congress face the voters, these choices have become even more fraught, as lawmakers worry about alienating people who like expanded health coverage or tax cuts. Mr. Obama, flanked by supporters chosen to represent the taxpayers who would benefit from his proposal, made the case that putting money in middle-class pockets would foster economic growth more than wealthy ones. “These tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth,” Mr. Obama said in a ceremony in the East Room. “We don’t need more top-down economics,” he said. “We have tried that theory. We have seen what happened. We can’t afford to go back to it.” He said 98 percent of households and 97 percent of small businesses would receive a tax cut under his plan. But Republicans said the president’s proposal would amount to a broad tax on small businesses because many business owners report their profits as personal income. While the fault lines between Republicans and Mr. Obama were clear, the president’s move provoked anxiety among some Democrats who either favor across-the-board tax relief or argue that putting the threshold for expiration at $1 million is more politically potent than $250,000. Mr. Obama may have added to that perception by campaigning for the Buffett Rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett — which would impose a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on anyone who earns $1 million or more. Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, reiterated his position that no income taxes should be raised, while Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of Mr. Obama’s toughest critics within his party, declared in a statement that “the people of West Virginia are tired of temporary solutions to our long-term problems.” Mr. Hoyer, speaking at the Center for American Progress, a research and advocacy group, reacted with ambivalence. He said he supported Mr. Obama’s $250,000 cutoff, but he added, “A million dollars will be, I think, a metaphor for Republicans who will not support increasing revenues on any persons in America, no matter how much they make.” White House officials, led by the chief of staff, Jacob J. Lew, began meeting with Democratic leaders last month to prepare them for Mr. Obama’s move, according to a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. At those meetings, a leading advocate of the $1 million cutoff, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, warned that Republicans had stoked concerns among middle-income voters that their taxes could increase next year. The $1 million threshold created a “bright line” that would decouple middle-class families from the truly rich, he said.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Democrats Want F.E.C. to Restrict Donor-Shielding Groups
The complaint by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee against Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Americans for Prosperity and the 60 Plus Association begins a new phase in the Democrats’ struggle to keep pace with Republicans since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. That decision cleared the way for unlimited campaign donations to a new breed of “super PACs” from corporations, unions and wealthy contributors. The complaint targets Republican-leaning “social welfare” organizations that have received or are requesting tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, which allows funding sources to be kept private. Such groups are prohibited from devoting themselves primarily to political activity, but Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, for instance, has conducted a $25 million advertising campaign that attacks President Obama on fiscal issues. Mr. Obama has inveighed against the influence of outside money on the political process, but his campaign has more recently signaled that donors should give to pro-Obama super PACs, which can run overtly political ads and must disclose donors. But Democratic groups in general have not kept pace in raising money, especially in Senate races, which have already attracted a barrage of negative Republican advertising. “Democrats are clearly struggling under the ocean of this outside influence,” a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee official said Sunday. Contending that the tax-exempt groups’ “major purpose is federal campaign activity,” the complaint says that the F.E.C. should regulate them as political committees and that their donors must be disclosed. “Respondents are raising and spending millions of dollars to accomplish their major purpose of influencing federal elections, while hiding their funding sources,” according to the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “By operating in secret, they have violated and continue to violate the Federal Election Campaign Act.” The F.E.C. is usually slow to respond to such complaints, and any action is unlikely to affect the 2012 election. But Democratic officials hope an F.E.C. investigation of the complaint will give pause to donors who wish to remain anonymous, or thwart the next group to come along. Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, said complaints that excluded Democratic groups doing “exactly as their center-right counterparts are publicity stunts to promote partisan causes and are not taken seriously by serious people.” The chairman of the 60 Plus Association, James L. Martin, said: “This isn’t about the law. It’s naked politics, pure and simple. They need to stop their whining and stop trying to achieve with lawyers what they can’t in the arena of public opinion.” Representatives of Americans for Prosperity did not return telephone calls or e-mails on Sunday. The complaint makes clear that the priority for Democrats is the Senate. Only a handful of defeats in November would hand Republicans control of the chamber and most likely all of Congress, since the Republican majority in the House appears firm. The complaint singles out a campaign by the 60 Plus Association, a conservative seniors’ organization, against Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio; a Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies advertising blitz against Senator Jon Tester of Montana; and Americans for Prosperity campaigns against former Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia and former Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, who are running for the Senate. Republicans, led by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, are growing more vocal in their defense of such groups. Senator McConnell has said the drive to force disclosure of donors is an effort by Democrats to bully Republican supporters into silence. “My concern is that selective disclosure would be used to harass people — think President Nixon and his ‘enemies list’ — who have participated in the political process or scare others from doing so,” Mr. McConnell wrote in USA Today last week. “I cannot support limiting the right of Americans to speak up.”
Friday, July 27, 2012
Indictment and Reward Revealed Over Operation Fast and Furious
The indictment, which was handed up by a federal grand jury in November, centers on a gunfight involving Border Patrol agents and bandits in Arizona near the border with Mexico on Dec. 14, 2010. One of the agents, Brian Terry, was fatally wounded, and it later emerged that two guns found at the scene had been bought by someone suspected of being a straw buyer for a smuggling network in the Operation Fast and Furious investigation. “Agent Terry served his country honorably and made the ultimate sacrifice in trying to protect it from harm, and we will stop at nothing to bring those responsible for his murder to justice,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. The existence of a sealed indictment and the identity of the defendant who is in custody, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, had already been made public. But the announcement on Monday disclosed the reward and the names of four fugitives — Jesus Rosario Favela-Astorga, Ivan Soto-Barraza, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes and Lionel Portillo-Meza — charged with crimes including first-degree murder, assault on a federal officer and conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery. The indictment contends that the men had illegally entered the United States from Mexico with a plan to “arm themselves with firearms” and use the weapons to rob drug traffickers of marijuana. Instead, the men got into a gunfight with four Border Patrol agents, including Agent Terry. Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, whose identity had previously been disclosed, was arrested on the night of the shooting. The indictment says he had previously been convicted of felony assault in Maricopa County, Ariz., in 2006, and it charges him with “possession of a firearm by a prohibited person” — a Romanian-made assault rifle and 25 rounds of ammunition. The court filing also charged a sixth man, Rito Osorio-Arellanes, in connection with the case, but only with conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery. It said he had been arrested on immigration charges by Border Patrol agents on Dec. 12, 2010. Federal officials said the indictment was being unsealed so public assistance could be sought in finding the other four defendants. A cousin of Mr. Terry, Robert Heyer, thanked officials in both the United States and Mexico for pressing forward with the investigation. “It has been a difficult 18 months for the family since Brian Terry was murdered in December of 2010, and today’s announcement provides hope that justice will eventually be served,” he said in a statement, adding, “It is the family’s hope that the unsealing of details in the case, the identification of the four fugitives and the issuance of reward monies will lead to the eventual capture of all individuals responsible for the murder of Agent Terry.” Operation Fast and Furious was an investigation by Arizona-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from late 2009 to early 2011 into a suspected gun-smuggling network linked to a Mexican drug cartel. Agents, seeking to build a bigger case, sometimes did not move swiftly to arrest suspected low-level “straw purchasers” for the network or to find a way to interdict their weapons. The agents eventually lost track of about 2,000 weapons bought by the suspects, many of which have not been recovered and are presumed to have reached criminal gangs in Mexico. It has since emerged that A.T.F. agents based in Arizona had used similar tactics — and lost track of weapons — in three previous gun-smuggling inquiries during the Bush administration. Last month, the Republican-led House voted to hold Mr. Holder in contempt of Congress because the Justice Department did not turn over documents related to the case. President Obama asserted executive privilege to block a Congressional subpoena. In the Terry family statement, its lawyer, Patrick McGroder, reiterated its call for the Obama administration to release the documents, saying that the family deserves “a full and thorough explanation of how Operation Fast and Furious came to be.”
Genetic Gamble: Genetic Test Changes Game in Cancer Prognosis
He sent her to Washington University in St. Louis, a three-hour drive from her sparsely furnished apartment in the working-class town of Sedalia, Mo.
And there, Ms. Caton, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, wife of a chicken factory worker, got almost incomprehensibly bad news. The growth was cancer, a melanoma, and it was so huge it filled her eyeball.
“Am I going to die?” Ms. Caton asked. “Is my baby going to have a mommy in five years?”
It is a question that plagues cancer patients. Doctors try to give survival odds based on a tumor’s appearance and size, but often that is just an educated guess.
But Ms. Caton had a new option, something that became possible only in this new genetic age. She could have a genetic test of her tumor that could reveal her prognosis with uncanny precision. The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 — roughly half of patients — is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.
No test has ever been so accurate in predicting cancer outcomes, researchers said.
The data from studies of the test are “unbelievably impressive,” said Dr. Michael Birrer, an ovarian cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I would die to have something like that in ovarian cancer.”
While for now the ocular melanoma test is in a class by itself, cancer researchers say it is a taste of what may be coming as they continue to investigate the genes of cancer cells. Similar tests, not always as definitive but nonetheless able to give prognostic information, are under development or starting to be used for other cancers, like cancers of the blood.
Having a prognosis allows people to plan their lives, but most do not want to know if they have a gene for an incurable, fatal illness, like Huntington’s disease or early onset Alzheimer’s.
The eye test raises a similar choice, with an added twist. This is not a test offered to healthy people, but to patients who have just gotten the news that they have cancer. The results will either give them reassurance that they will survive the cancer — or near certainty that they will die from it.
Can patients in the throes of getting this terrifying news really make an informed choice about whether they want the test? Are they able to understand at such a fraught time that, for now at least, there is nothing that can save them if they get the bad prognosis?
Some doctors do not offer the test, reasoning that there is little to be gained.
But other doctors, including J. William Harbour of Washington University, who developed the test (but does not profit from its use), encourage patients to have it. And probably because of the way he describes it, Dr. Harbour says his patients almost always want it.
Ms. Caton was no exception. Without the test, doctors would have had to guess her outcome based on the size of her tumor. And the conventional wisdom is that people with growths as large as hers have a slim chance of surviving. But perhaps, her doctors hoped, the genetic test would come up with a different answer.
Heralding the Future
Dr. Harbour, a genial and burly man with salt-and-pepper hair, has a way about him that relaxes patients, makes them feel everything will be O.K.
“I give them as much information as I think they can handle,” Dr. Harbour says.
And he’s an optimist. The ocular melanoma test is just the beginning, he believes, of a new understanding of that cancer — and perhaps other cancers as well — and why they spread.
About 2,000 people a year, or about 5 percent of melanoma patients, have ocular melanoma, a tumor of the dark brown melanocytes that form a sheet much like a photographer’s backdrop behind the retina. Those with very large tumors are most likely to have a bad prognosis, but patients with small tumors also can have the deadly type.
Often there are no symptoms; the tumor may be discovered by an ophthalmologist during a routine exam. Other patients, though, lose vision or see flashing lights or a sea of floaters in an eye, all signs of damage to the retina as the tumor encroaches.
Most get radiation, a highly radioactive disc placed on the surface of the eye that destroys the tumor in a few days and then is taken out. But those with huge tumors, like Ms. Caton, must have their eye removed.
Ocular melanoma specialists had long noticed that some patients did well and the rest did not, but Dr. Harbour wanted to know why.
And there, Ms. Caton, mother of a 2-year-old daughter, wife of a chicken factory worker, got almost incomprehensibly bad news. The growth was cancer, a melanoma, and it was so huge it filled her eyeball.
“Am I going to die?” Ms. Caton asked. “Is my baby going to have a mommy in five years?”
It is a question that plagues cancer patients. Doctors try to give survival odds based on a tumor’s appearance and size, but often that is just an educated guess.
But Ms. Caton had a new option, something that became possible only in this new genetic age. She could have a genetic test of her tumor that could reveal her prognosis with uncanny precision. The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 — roughly half of patients — is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.
No test has ever been so accurate in predicting cancer outcomes, researchers said.
The data from studies of the test are “unbelievably impressive,” said Dr. Michael Birrer, an ovarian cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I would die to have something like that in ovarian cancer.”
While for now the ocular melanoma test is in a class by itself, cancer researchers say it is a taste of what may be coming as they continue to investigate the genes of cancer cells. Similar tests, not always as definitive but nonetheless able to give prognostic information, are under development or starting to be used for other cancers, like cancers of the blood.
Having a prognosis allows people to plan their lives, but most do not want to know if they have a gene for an incurable, fatal illness, like Huntington’s disease or early onset Alzheimer’s.
The eye test raises a similar choice, with an added twist. This is not a test offered to healthy people, but to patients who have just gotten the news that they have cancer. The results will either give them reassurance that they will survive the cancer — or near certainty that they will die from it.
Can patients in the throes of getting this terrifying news really make an informed choice about whether they want the test? Are they able to understand at such a fraught time that, for now at least, there is nothing that can save them if they get the bad prognosis?
Some doctors do not offer the test, reasoning that there is little to be gained.
But other doctors, including J. William Harbour of Washington University, who developed the test (but does not profit from its use), encourage patients to have it. And probably because of the way he describes it, Dr. Harbour says his patients almost always want it.
Ms. Caton was no exception. Without the test, doctors would have had to guess her outcome based on the size of her tumor. And the conventional wisdom is that people with growths as large as hers have a slim chance of surviving. But perhaps, her doctors hoped, the genetic test would come up with a different answer.
Heralding the Future
Dr. Harbour, a genial and burly man with salt-and-pepper hair, has a way about him that relaxes patients, makes them feel everything will be O.K.
“I give them as much information as I think they can handle,” Dr. Harbour says.
And he’s an optimist. The ocular melanoma test is just the beginning, he believes, of a new understanding of that cancer — and perhaps other cancers as well — and why they spread.
About 2,000 people a year, or about 5 percent of melanoma patients, have ocular melanoma, a tumor of the dark brown melanocytes that form a sheet much like a photographer’s backdrop behind the retina. Those with very large tumors are most likely to have a bad prognosis, but patients with small tumors also can have the deadly type.
Often there are no symptoms; the tumor may be discovered by an ophthalmologist during a routine exam. Other patients, though, lose vision or see flashing lights or a sea of floaters in an eye, all signs of damage to the retina as the tumor encroaches.
Most get radiation, a highly radioactive disc placed on the surface of the eye that destroys the tumor in a few days and then is taken out. But those with huge tumors, like Ms. Caton, must have their eye removed.
Ocular melanoma specialists had long noticed that some patients did well and the rest did not, but Dr. Harbour wanted to know why.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Tulelake Journal: Japanese-American Pilgrimage to Internment Camp — Tulelake Journal
Nearly 400 Japanese-Americans journeyed from June 30 to July 3 to this remote corner of California, where 18,789 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II. The turnout was one of the highest ever for the four-day pilgrimage, which occurs every other year around the Fourth of July, organizers said. They surmise that as the number of the camp’s survivors dwindles, there is a growing urgency to understand — and reinterpret — what has been a hidden subchapter in America’s history.
Of the 10 internment camps in which about 120,000 Japanese-Americans were confined during the war, it was Tule Lake that held those branded “disloyal,” the ones who answered “no” to two critical questions in a loyalty test administered by the federal government.
After the end of the war, the no-noes, as they were known, not only struggled to find a place in mainstream society, but also were regarded with suspicion by other Japanese-Americans, whose pledge of undivided loyalty and search for larger acceptance could have been threatened by the no-noes.
For decades, the no-noes themselves never explained what lay behind their answers. Most, in fact, never spoke about Tule Lake at all.
“I came here because I want to know why my parents told me never to talk about Tule Lake,” said James Katsumi Nehira, 68, who was riding a bus on a tour here with his daughter, Cherilyn, 37. “They were ostracized and ashamed they were in Tule Lake. I never talked about it. I honored my dad’s wishes until he passed away.”
But in recent years, former detainees have begun speaking during the pilgrimages about why they, or more likely their parents, chose not to answer “yes.” Their stories, as they have filtered out of this small circle into the wider Japanese-American community, have added layers of complexity to the long-held view of the no-noes as simply disloyal troublemakers.
In early 1943, about a year after Japanese-Americans were rounded up into the camps, the American authorities, seeking Japanese language speakers in the military, distributed a loyalty questionnaire to all adults. Question No. 27 asked draft-age men whether they were willing to serve in the armed forces. No. 28 asked whether detainees would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States” and “forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government.”
Anything except a simple “yes” to the two questions meant relocation to Tule Lake, which became the most heavily guarded of the camps. Army tanks were stationed here, reinforcing the security provided by 28 guard towers and a seven-foot-high barbed wire fence.
Osamu Hasegawa, 90, recalled that his parents answered “no” after a heated family debate. Because his parents were born in Japan — Japanese immigrants were not allowed to become American citizens until 1952 because of discriminatory immigration laws — they feared that forswearing allegiance to the country of their birth would render them stateless while Mr. Hasegawa and his American-born siblings remained in the United States.
After his parents answered “no,” Mr. Hasegawa became one of the nearly 6,000 Japanese-Americans at Tule Lake to renounce their American citizenship.
“They wanted to go back to Japan to keep the family together,” Mr. Hasegawa said.
Most of the family went to Japan. But his older brother Hiroshi, who had tried to persuade his parents to answer “yes,” remained, eventually joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Army’s famed Japanese-American unit.
Like most who went to Japan, Mr. Hasegawa and his family regained their citizenship, and they returned to the United States after 11 years. But relations between the brothers remained strained for decades.
“They reconciled only two years ago at the last pilgrimage here,” said Carol Hasegawa, the daughter of Hiroshi, who died shortly after the reconciliation.
Of the 10 internment camps in which about 120,000 Japanese-Americans were confined during the war, it was Tule Lake that held those branded “disloyal,” the ones who answered “no” to two critical questions in a loyalty test administered by the federal government.
After the end of the war, the no-noes, as they were known, not only struggled to find a place in mainstream society, but also were regarded with suspicion by other Japanese-Americans, whose pledge of undivided loyalty and search for larger acceptance could have been threatened by the no-noes.
For decades, the no-noes themselves never explained what lay behind their answers. Most, in fact, never spoke about Tule Lake at all.
“I came here because I want to know why my parents told me never to talk about Tule Lake,” said James Katsumi Nehira, 68, who was riding a bus on a tour here with his daughter, Cherilyn, 37. “They were ostracized and ashamed they were in Tule Lake. I never talked about it. I honored my dad’s wishes until he passed away.”
But in recent years, former detainees have begun speaking during the pilgrimages about why they, or more likely their parents, chose not to answer “yes.” Their stories, as they have filtered out of this small circle into the wider Japanese-American community, have added layers of complexity to the long-held view of the no-noes as simply disloyal troublemakers.
In early 1943, about a year after Japanese-Americans were rounded up into the camps, the American authorities, seeking Japanese language speakers in the military, distributed a loyalty questionnaire to all adults. Question No. 27 asked draft-age men whether they were willing to serve in the armed forces. No. 28 asked whether detainees would “swear unqualified allegiance to the United States” and “forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government.”
Anything except a simple “yes” to the two questions meant relocation to Tule Lake, which became the most heavily guarded of the camps. Army tanks were stationed here, reinforcing the security provided by 28 guard towers and a seven-foot-high barbed wire fence.
Osamu Hasegawa, 90, recalled that his parents answered “no” after a heated family debate. Because his parents were born in Japan — Japanese immigrants were not allowed to become American citizens until 1952 because of discriminatory immigration laws — they feared that forswearing allegiance to the country of their birth would render them stateless while Mr. Hasegawa and his American-born siblings remained in the United States.
After his parents answered “no,” Mr. Hasegawa became one of the nearly 6,000 Japanese-Americans at Tule Lake to renounce their American citizenship.
“They wanted to go back to Japan to keep the family together,” Mr. Hasegawa said.
Most of the family went to Japan. But his older brother Hiroshi, who had tried to persuade his parents to answer “yes,” remained, eventually joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Army’s famed Japanese-American unit.
Like most who went to Japan, Mr. Hasegawa and his family regained their citizenship, and they returned to the United States after 11 years. But relations between the brothers remained strained for decades.
“They reconciled only two years ago at the last pilgrimage here,” said Carol Hasegawa, the daughter of Hiroshi, who died shortly after the reconciliation.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Obama Trails Romney Again in Battle for Campaign Cash
Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee easily outraised the formidable Obama money machine for the second month in a row. A nonstop schedule of high-dollar events around the country brought in $106 million during June to Mr. Obama’s $71 million, giving him and his party four times the cash on hand that it had just three months ago. Mr. Obama’s fund-raising deficit in part reflects how steeply the terrain has shifted since 2008, when many Republican donors embraced the candidate and his campaign raised millions of dollars from Wall Street and other traditionally right-leaning industries. Now those donors are swinging hard back to the Republican Party — and to Mr. Romney, whose promise to curtail regulation and cut taxes has helped draw a torrent of five-figure checks. In a worrisome development for the Obama campaign, Mr. Romney, who until now has been heavily dependent on donors giving the maximum federal contribution, also showed success in June drawing small donors, a traditional strength of the Obama campaign. Reflecting the intensifying general election matchup with Mr. Obama and conservative anger over the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the president’s signature health care law, Mr. Romney raised about a third of his total in checks of under $250, officials said on Monday. Mr. Romney and the R.N.C. now have about $160 million in cash. “This month’s fund-raising is a statement from voters that they want a change of direction in Washington,” Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s finance chief, said in a statement. Mr. Romney’s surge puts him on track to raise the $800 million his campaign and the Republican National Committee hope to bring in by Election Day, leaving the real possibility that Mr. Obama could be outspent despite the advantages of incumbency. And with political reality reasserting itself on Mr. Obama, he is being forced to rely more heavily on traditional Democratic constituencies, like Hollywood, labor unions and gay donors, as well as his own millions of small donors. “It’s the perfect storm for Republicans,” said R. Donahue Peebles, a New York businessman who has raised more than $100,000 for Mr. Obama. “Republicans and independents who supported the president financially thought they would see a change in how Washington worked. What they see now, and it’s not necessarily the president’s fault, is a lot of partisanship in Washington and a struggling economy.” Mr. Obama, who reported about $109 million in cash in the bank at the end of May, has been significantly outspending Mr. Romney on advertising in swing states. But Mr. Romney’s fund-raising successes are being matched by Republican-leaning outside groups, who are barraging the airwaves with anti-Obama advertisements that the president’s campaign has been forced to spend its own money to match. On Monday, the biggest of the “super PACs,” American Crossroads, announced a $40 million, nine-state fall ad campaign against Mr. Obama, coming on top of a $25 million spree by an affiliate that will run through Labor Day. Mr. Obama easily outraised Mr. Romney through much of the last year, as Mr. Romney fought for the Republican nomination and Mr. Obama exploited his incumbency to raise large checks in conjunction with the Democratic National Committee. And newly minted nominees typically take in huge influxes of cash as major donors come off the sidelines at the end of a nominating fight, as John Kerry did during the early months of the 2004 general election campaign against George W. Bush. Come November, the final tally between the two candidates could be close to a draw. Yet money flooding into Mr. Romney’s campaign suggests that even Mr. Obama — the most prodigious fund-raiser to date in political history — can be beaten. And Democratic-aligned outside groups, including those investing heavily in races for the House and the Senate, are far behind their Republican counterparts in raising and spending money. All told, Republican candidates, party committees and outside groups have spent $269 million on broadcast advertising, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, compared with $133 million for the Democratic side. Those totals do not included tens of millions of dollars that Mr. Obama invested early in the cycle on data mining, technology and campaign infrastructure, efforts Mr. Romney is now seeking to match on the fly. Mr. Obama is being outraised despite a more intense fund-raising schedule than any of his predecessors: He was scheduled to hold two events on Monday in Washington, bringing the total to 174 fund-raisers since formally beginning his re-election campaign last year, according to CBS News. Mr. Obama sought to rally supporters on Monday with a blunt e-mail from Ann Marie Habershaw, the campaign’s chief operating officer. “We could lose if this continues,” Ms. Habershaw warned. Several top Obama donors said privately that Mr. Obama’s attacks on Mr. Romney’s private equity career, the president’s handling of White House relations with business leaders and his criticisms of tax rates for the wealthy had made it harder for some of his allies to raise money on Mr. Obama’s behalf from the financial sector and other industries. “He will not have the same level of support from the business community as last time — either in endorsements, money or support,” said one Obama backer who declined to be identified because of his relationship with the campaign. “That’s clear.” Mr. Peebles, the Obama fund-raiser, echoed objections among some other Democrats, many with ties to the financial industry, over what he said were unreasonable attacks on the wealthy by the Obama campaign. “I just got back from Rhode Island on my boat,” Mr. Peebles said, referring to criticism of Mr. Romney’s much-photographed vacation boating last week on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee. “I can hold 12 people on my boat. I don’t feel that I’m out of touch with Americans or that I am a bad person. I find it offensive, and I’m a supporter.”
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Drilling for Natural Gas Under Cemeteries Raises Concerns
But Mr. Young’s relatives wonder how restful his final resting place has become. Thousands of feet beneath the cemetery, a company has been drilling for natural gas using the controversial technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. “I would imagine that drilling and fracking and all that vibration is bound to cause some damage,” Mr. Young’s son, Don, said of the 134-year-old Handley Cemetery. “But who’s going to dig up their dead relatives to see if there’s a crack in the casket? What’s being done to Fort Worth in general, whether it’s to the living or the dead, it’s immoral.” Mr. Young, 60, has been a longtime critic of fracking, which has proliferated in the Barnett shale formation that runs underneath the Fort Worth area. He also is the founder of a group called Fort Worth Citizens Against Neighborhood Drilling Operations. His concern is shared by others in both rural and urban parts of Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where drilling for natural gas beneath homes, parks, churches, schools and even cemeteries has become commonplace. The fracking process, in which sand, water and chemicals are injected deep underground at high pressure to extract natural gas from rock formations, has been criticized by environmentalists and others who worry about its effects on groundwater and residents’ health. Cemetery owners lease their mineral rights to oil and gas companies to allow fracking, earning money that many have used to refurbish and maintain their grounds, fencing, sanctuaries and roads. Cemetery managers and oil and gas company executives said that fracking, because it occurred at roughly 7,000 feet to 8,000 feet below ground, did not damage graves. And because of advances in horizontal drilling, they said, the wells and other equipment can be located more than a mile away to avoid disrupting the serene atmosphere of the cemetery. “I’m sure there’s a number of cemeteries across the United States that lease their mineral rights, just like people lease their mineral rights for their farm or home,” said Jon Stephenson, secretary of the Texas Cemeteries Association, which released a statement on Friday expressing support for cemeteries that chose to explore their natural gas options. “The drilling itself is not going to occur in the center of an active cemetery. It’s going to occur off the property. You do this to reap the financial benefits. It’s the same reason anyone else would.” Chesapeake Energy, the second-largest natural gas producer in the country, has worked with more than a dozen cemeteries in the Fort Worth region and has drilled directly beneath many of them at depths of more than a mile and a half, company executives said. The company drilled six wells about 1,700 feet from the tombstones at Greenwood Memorial Park and 10 wells about 1,800 feet from the grave sites at Mount Olivet Cemetery. Company officials said that they had not received any complaints from relatives about graves being disturbed, but that they did get several calls from family members of those buried at Greenwood asking if they could collect mineral-right royalties from their loved one’s burial plot. “Chesapeake Energy takes great pride in our neighbor relations — whether those neighbors are families, schools, hospitals or cemeteries — and treats each with the respect and sensitivity they deserve,” said Julie H. Wilson, the company’s vice president for urban development. “Some of our own family members are buried in these cemeteries or live near them.” But antifracking activists, lawyers and environmental scientists said that while there might be nothing legally wrong with fracking underneath cemeteries, they were uncomfortable with the practice, arguing that it raised spiritual and moral questions and illustrated a callousness in the desire to drill for natural gas anywhere at any time. In 2010, Pittsburgh became the first city in Pennsylvania to ban natural gas drilling, in part after an outcry over a decision by the Catholic Cemeteries Association of the Diocese of Pittsburgh to lease mineral rights under nearly a dozen of its cemeteries, including one where three former Pittsburgh mayors are buried. “I could see how people could be deeply offended by this, even if it didn’t cause any problems,” said Robert B. Jackson, an environmental sciences professor at Duke University, who is a fracking expert and the director of the university’s Center on Global Change. “If something goes wrong in a farmer’s field in Pennsylvania, that’s one thing. But what if something goes wrong in a cemetery? It seems like at some point you have to draw a line. I can see the signs now: ‘Rest in peace means no lease.’ ” In Fort Worth, Quicksilver Resources has been fracking underneath Handley Cemetery and nearby Handley Hill, a historic African-American cemetery. “The fracking activity is occurring at a depth of between 7,000 and 8,000 feet,” said Stephen Lindsey, a Quicksilver spokesman. “There is no surface or subsurface disturbance that has or will impact the cemetery location.” Quicksilver and Exelon Generation, which runs a nearby gas power plant, helped to restore the two-acre Handley Hill cemetery by paying for a new wrought-iron fence. The cemetery was rededicated on Memorial Day in 2007. “When the church was approached to lease the mineral rights to Quicksilver, the question that myself and the congregation had was, would this be a disturbance for those resting in the cemetery?” said the Rev. Bruce D. Datcher, pastor of Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, which has owned the Handley Hill Cemetery for more than 100 years. “We have not had one problem.”
Cell Carriers See Rise in Requests to Aid Surveillance
The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests. The reports also reveal a sometimes uneasy partnership with law enforcement agencies, with the carriers frequently rejecting demands that they considered legally questionable or unjustified. At least one carrier even referred some inappropriate requests to the F.B.I. The information represents the first time data have been collected nationally on the frequency of cell surveillance by law enforcement. The volume of the requests reported by the carriers — which most likely involve several million subscribers — surprised even some officials who have closely followed the growth of cell surveillance. “I never expected it to be this massive,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who requested the reports from nine carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, in response to an article in April in The New York Times on law enforcement’s expanded use of cell tracking. Mr. Markey, who is the co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, made the carriers’ responses available to The Times. While the cell companies did not break down the types of law enforcement agencies collecting the data, they made clear that the widened cell surveillance cut across all levels of government — from run-of-the-mill street crimes handled by local police departments to financial crimes and intelligence investigations at the state and federal levels. AT&T alone now responds to an average of more than 700 requests a day, with about 230 of them regarded as emergencies that do not require the normal court orders and subpoena. That is roughly triple the number it fielded in 2007, the company said. Law enforcement requests of all kinds have been rising among the other carriers as well, with annual increases of between 12 percent and 16 percent in the last five years. Sprint, which did not break down its figures in as much detail as other carriers, led all companies last year in reporting what amounted to at least 1,500 data requests on average a day. With the rapid expansion of cell surveillance have come rising concerns — including among carriers — about what legal safeguards are in place to balance law enforcement agencies’ needs for quick data against the privacy rights of consumers. Legal conflicts between those competing needs have flared before, but usually on national security matters. In 2006, phone companies that cooperated in the Bush administration’s secret program of eavesdropping on suspicious international communications without court warrants were sued, and ultimately were given immunity by Congress with the backing of the courts. The next year, the F.B.I. was widely criticized for improperly using emergency letters to the phone companies to gather records on thousands of phone numbers in counterterrorism investigations that did not involve emergencies. Under federal law, the carriers said they generally required a search warrant, a court order or a formal subpoena to release information about a subscriber. But in cases that law enforcement officials deem an emergency, a less formal request is often enough. Moreover, rapid technological changes in cellphones have blurred the lines on what is legally required to get data — particularly the use of GPS systems to identify the location of phones. As cell surveillance becomes a seemingly routine part of police work, Mr. Markey said in an interview that he worried that “digital dragnets” threatened to compromise the privacy of many customers. “There’s a real danger we’ve already crossed the line,” he said. With the rising prevalence of cellphones, officials at all levels of law enforcement say cell tracking represents a powerful tool to find suspects, follow leads, identify associates and cull information on a wide range of crimes. “At every crime scene, there’s some type of mobile device,” said Peter Modafferi, chief of detectives for the Rockland County district attorney’s office in New York, who also works on investigative policies and operations with the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The need for the police to exploit that technology “has grown tremendously, and it’s absolutely vital,” he said in an interview. The surging use of cell surveillance was also reflected in the bills the wireless carriers reported sending to law enforcement agencies to cover their costs in some of the tracking operations. AT&T, for one, said it collected $8.3 million last year compared with $2.8 million in 2007, and other carriers reported similar increases in billings.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Wisconsin Nude Beach Draws opposition
And yet for decades, nudists have basked on Mazo Beach, a secluded sandbank on the lower Wisconsin River about 30 miles northwest of Madison. With estimates as high as 70,000 visitors a year, the spot, which is owned by the state, has become one of the largest nude beaches in the country that is not on a coastline, weathering angry protesters, conservative politicians and wary neighbors along the way. “We especially warn our Girl and Boy Scout groups,” said Scott Teuber, a canoe and kayak rental company owner in Sauk City, who tells such customers to stay on the far side of the river when floating past the beach. Sunbathers here have become particularly worried about their reputation recently, after a wave of X-rated arrest reports led the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to announce that it was closing public access to 68 acres of forest surrounding the beach in an effort to crack down on sex in the woods. Some nudists — who call themselves “naturists” — fear that such conduct could taint years of cooperation with the state and put their clothing-optional status in jeopardy. “If someone is misbehaving, we really want them to stop,” said Nicky Hoffman, head of the Naturist Society, a nudist organization based in Oshkosh, Wis. “It ruins it for everybody.” The state has long been trying to stop both drugs and sex at Mazo Beach, a problem that grew in the mid-1990s as word of the beach spread across the then-fledgling Internet, according to Jeremy Plautz, a state conservation warden in the area. In 1999, the Natural Resources Department drove out people who were living in tents on the beach and established a curfew, setting the beach’s hours at 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. It also installed a parking lot and a gate at the top of a gravel road leading down to the river, forcing visitors to walk or bike about a mile before they could undress by the water. But that was not enough for some of those who objected to the nudists. A pastor led protests in the beach parking lot. Republicans lawmakers tried banning nudity on state-owned land, but the effort fizzled. Although it is a misdemeanor in Wisconsin to “publicly and indecently” expose one’s genitals, a succession of state and county officials have taken the position that mere nudity is not enough to warrant prosecution at Mazo Beach unless there is some other disorderly or lascivious conduct involved. This year was not the first time the state closed some of the woods near the beach to separate the lewd from the simply nude; in 2007, it made 13 acres off limits. Now, with problems persisting, it has added two part-time deputy wardens and increase patrols at the beach after a rise in arrest numbers last summer suggested that the problems might be getting worse. Citing a heavy workload and a small staff, Mr. Plautz said Mazo Beach was patrolled just 32 times from 2007 to 2011. Even so, last year alone, the agency arrested 42 people for drugs and sexual activity in just nine days of patrolling the area, up from 15 arrests during six days in 2010. There have been at least six citations so far this year. Even as clothing-optional resorts and cruises gain popularity, it has gotten harder to find nude beaches on public land in the United States over the past 20 years, with some people being given tickets for nudity in places like New Jersey, California, Florida and Hawaii. In such cases, lewd behavior is often cited, said Bob Morton, the Texas-based executive director of the Naturists Action Committee, the legal arm of the Naturists Society. “That is the excuse that authorities have used, whether it’s real or not,” he said. While the state has made no imminent threat to shut down Mazo Beach, some of its visitors worry about what would be lost if it ever did close. On a recent Friday, parents with children and middle-aged skinny-dippers extolled the freedom and nostalgia of sunbathing nude, the exhilaration of connecting with nature au naturel. Claudette Richards, 58, who has been coming to Mazo Beach for nearly all her life, said it was a place where she had found body acceptance, including after she had a mastectomy. “It’s a place to be who I am,” she said, sitting in the sand, the scars from her surgery exposed to the open air.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Phoenix Journal: Tortilla Factory Offers a Satisfying Parade, in Corn and Flour
The lag time from production line to shelf is negligible, the seconds it takes to extend an arm and drop the packed tortillas onto a table. Some shoppers pick their tortillas based on temperature: the warmer they feel, the fresher they are. Others lob questions to the men and women on the factory floor — “Was this really made today?” The operation is as unusual as it is entertaining, like watching oranges being picked, squeezed and bottled right before the eyes. It unfolds daily, over back-to-back eight-hour shifts at a market named Ranch, but nicknamed “rancho” by the Hispanics who make up the bulk of its clientele. “Can I have three pounds of masa?” Abigail Tome, 25, asked one of the factory’s workers, who handed her a bag of dough made of soaked and ground corn, which is used for tortillas and also other foods, like tamales. It is similar to the dough she used to make at home when she lived in Veracruz, Mexico, and still had time to make tortillas from scratch, Ms. Tome said. It is just made faster, though, because of the machines and the many hands the factory has to mix it up. Tortillas are a Mexican staple of transnational appeal here, bridging divisions carved by Arizona’s tough stance on immigration and reaching far beyond Latin American borders. The factory, at the Ranch Market store on North 16th Street, employs a pair of Iraqi refugees to whom flour tortillas have become a replacement for the flat bread known as khubz. There are also Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and, of course, Mexicans manning the machines like the rounder, which turns the masa into balls that are then pressed and cooked in 500-degree ovens at a rate of eight dozen disks a minute. Refugees from Somalia buy Ranch Market tortillas as a substitute for a pancake-like bread called canjeelo. Koreans have taken to using them to wrap pieces of spicy barbecued pork, like a taco. Foodies like them because they are the closest thing to an authentic tortilla that they can find at a supermarket here. “I’ve never been to Mexico, but whenever I think of how homemade tastes, I think of this stuff,” said Bryan Davis, 28, placing a pack of fresh tortillas in his shopping basket. Among Mexicans, tortilla allegiances vary based on the length of time they have lived in this country and where in Mexico they come from. Jose Loera, senior director of the tortilleria, as the factory is known, said those from the south prefer corn over flour, a favorite of northern Mexicans like himself. New immigrants regardless of precedence often stick with corn, Mr. Loera said, perhaps because it is the type of tortilla most often made at home. But it does not take long until they change allegiances, he said. Flour tortillas last longer in the fridge and they are more malleable, suiting tacos, quesadillas, burritos and its American equivalent, the wrap. There are seven Ranch Markets here, as well as two apiece in New Mexico and El Paso. Each has its own tortilla factory, which altogether produce 2.2 million tortillas a week, of various flavors — like spinach, wheat, spicy tomato and chili — and sizes. The store on North 16th Street is the only one whose factory produces both corn and flour tortillas, in a nod to the diversified public it serves. At one point, it churned out cactus tortillas called nopalitos, after the cactus leaf that was its main ingredient, the nopal. The leaves were too fibrous, though, and just would not stick to the dough, so they were discontinued. The factory also gave up on producing blue-corn tortillas, which Mr. Loera said are very popular in the Ranch Market store in Albuquerque. “In Arizona,” he went on, “tortilla is something that’s either yellow or white.”
House Panel Appointed in Ethics Inquiry Into Nevada Lawmaker
The move by the ethics committee suggests that a preliminary investigation found at least some evidence of wrongdoing. This is only the second time in nearly two years that the committee has formally opened a full, new investigation into a sitting House member. Ms. Berkley’s campaign said in a statement released late Monday that she welcomed the deeper inquiry and remained confident that she would be cleared. “Congresswoman Berkley’s one and only concern was for the health and well-being of Nevada’s patients,” said her campaign manager, Jessica Mackler. But Republicans in Nevada said this could be a deciding factor for Ms. Berkley, a Democrat, in her intensely competitive election contest against Senator Dean Heller, a Republican former House member who was named to the seat after Senator John Ensign resigned in 2011 under his own ethical cloud. “This will put that extra little doubt in the minds of swing Democrats and independents that Berkley needs to win,” said Ryan Erwin, a Republican political consultant in Nevada. “Because as much as she doesn’t want to talk about this, it smells bad.” Ms. Berkley has been accused of wrongly intervening with Medicare officials in 2008 after they threatened to close a troubled kidney transplant center in Las Vegas where her husband’s kidney-care practice served as consulting physicians. Ms. Berkley over the last five years has also played a leading role in the House in pushing an agenda advocated by the Renal Physicians Association, while her husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, served as a national leader in the group. That included appealing to House colleagues to prevent cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors like her husband who perform dialysis. The investigation was started last year after an article in The New York Times examined the overlap between Ms. Berkley’s actions in Washington and her husband’s business affairs. The article noted that the contract between Dr. Lehrner’s medical practice and the kidney transplant center, University Medical Center, was expanded to a $738,000-a-year deal after the transplant center was saved. Ms. Berkley has argued that she is an advocate for kidney care patients in her home state. She also noted that she was joined by other members of the Nevada Congressional delegation, including Mr. Heller, in objecting to the planned shutdown in 2008 of Nevada’s only kidney transplant center. Federal officials ultimately allowed the transplant center to remain open, and conditions at the center, where a number of deaths had occurred, have since improved. The ethics committee first disclosed in March that it was looking into the allegations against Ms. Berkley, based at least in part on a referral it had received from the Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent body that serves as the equivalent of a grand jury on Capitol Hill. The case has already drawn attention in the Nevada Senate race. In the last month, American Crossroads, a leading conservative “super PAC,” broadcast a television advertisement questioning Ms. Berkley’s ethics, which was followed up by an advertisement by the Berkley campaign rejecting the charges. The ethics committee, which voted unanimously for the full investigation, is unlikely to comment further for several months and perhaps not until after Election Day; inquiries typically take more than six months, and in some cases, more than a year. In this case, four House members have been appointed to a special committee that will examine the allegations, with Representative K. Michael Conaway, Republican of Texas, serving as chairman. The committee’s jurisdiction will end when Ms. Berkley leaves the House, as she will do by the end of this year, either to join the Senate or to begin at least a temporary retirement from politics. Dan Schwager, chief counsel for the ethics committee, declined to predict how long this inquiry might take. A statement issued by the ethics committee also emphasized that its decision does not mean it has reached any conclusions about wrongdoing. “The Committee notes that the mere fact of establishing an investigative subcommittee does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred,” the statement said. The only other appointment of an investigative subcommittee involved Representative Laura Richardson, Democrat of California, who is being investigated based on allegations that she used House resources for personal purposes, or to help with her re-election campaign. That committee, created in November 2011, is still looking into the matter.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
The Choice Blog: Counselor's Calendar | July Checklist for Seniors
Timely advice from experts for students who want to stay on track during the college admissions process.
In March, The Choice introduced a series called Counselor’s Calendar, to keep students on track as they wrangle with the admissions process.
This installment focuses on the class of 2013, who will submit their college applications in a few months. (Rising juniors, your work is just beginning. We published your July checklist on Monday.) We’ve asked Ann E. Selvitelli, the director of college counseling at
Suffield Academy in Suffield, Conn., for some advice on what the members of the class of 2013 should be doing as they prepare for college. — Daniel E. Slotnik
Rising seniors, here is your college admissions checklist:
SENIORS…yes, Class of 2013, your time has come! You are now officially seniors and are readying yourselves for your final year of high school. Along with the excitement of being the academic, athletic, and social leaders of your school comes a nervousness incited by unanswered questions: “Where should I apply to college? Where will I be a year from now? Do I even want to go to college?” Take a deep breath, trust yourself, and ask for help! Here are some tips to get you started this month:
Talk to Your Parents (Really)
I find one of the biggest stressors throughout the college search is communication between the student and his or her parents. Ironically, the ones who love you the most and brought you into this world are very often the same ones who make you want to run away and never discuss college again.
Try designating one day of the week when talking about college is fair game. On that day you and your parents set aside some time to answer each others’ questions and have frank discourse on how your college search is going. Perhaps you leave the “meeting” with to-do lists for each of you. Mom, you will register me for the September ACT and October SAT. Son, you promise to research three colleges your parents would like you to consider closer to home. You get the idea. Parents will relax because the college search is underway, and seniors can rest assured that they will not be peppered with college questions every waking moment. It’s a win-win.
One last note: if you and your parents haven’t talked about how college tuition will be paid, this needs to be an immediate and honest conversation ASAP. If you need help figuring out what you can afford, see finaid.org and thecollegesolution.com.
Summer Reading (and I Don’t Mean Facebook)
Most high schools have a required summer reading list over the summer. I know this because my school does — heck, even my rising kindergartener has one! Here’s the upside: reading can naturally improve your test scores, so make sure you not only do your assigned reading but also read other things of interest to you. If holding a paperback is not your favorite thing, try downloading a summer read onto your iPad or e-reader of choice. And since I know you won’t be ditching your Facebook accounts any time soon, here’s another quick tip for you: it’s time to give your profile a fresh look. A good rule of thumb is that any picture or posting you wouldn’t be comfortable showing to your grandparents (or an admissions officer reading your application) should be taken down. Remember, college admissions officers are savvy and social media is a fun and effective means for them to check you out. Check those privacy settings as well.
Your “Un”-Common Application
The Common Application will open their 2012-2013 online application on August 1, 2012, but there is a paper version available for download now. The application is accepted by over 450 colleges and universities, so there is a pretty good chance you will be using it at least once. If not, it still asks for the same information collected on other applications. Print out a paper copy and start collecting information for the biographical sections. Trust me, you do not want to wake up your parents on November 1st at 11:45 p.m. to ask them what year they graduated from college or what they actually do for a living.
In an ideal world you don’t want to be filling out any part of your college applications at the last minute. Give yourself the gift of time for the fall by getting as much done as possible this summer. Every year, seniors lament frittering away their summertime instead of using it to get a head start. Starting early also gives you time to start working on your college essay. There is the main “personal statement,” but also be on the lookout for those sneaky essays that creep onto a “Supplemental Form” required by some colleges. Anything you can do to be organized before the first school bell rings this fall is a tremendous gift to yourself. You are worth it!
Take Charge
Ever feel like your life is running on autopilot? Do your parents suggest questions to ask on college tours and create outlines of possible essays while you glumly acquiesce? Or are you just so nervous about this whole process that you feel like you are standing in glue, daunted by the college choices in front of you?
Remember this: you are the one going to college. It needs to be a college that fits you. One where you can study what you want, how you want, with the types of people you enjoy and where you can pursue activities you already love and discover others that you will. Jump into the driver’s seat today! It is okay to have co-pilots; in fact, you should. Your parents and guidance or college counselor are there for you, as are your friends. But again, this is about you. Form your own opinions, do your research, ask questions that are important and ignore those that seem rote. Don’t judge one college based on one tour guide or your mother’s friend’s boyfriend’s opinion on a college he knew someone attended in 1991. This is your journey. Get out a pencil and start your own road map.
How far ahead are you on your applications? How responsible have you been in your college search? Let us know in the comment box below.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Grueling Course for Marine Officers Will Open Its Doors to Women
The captain handed the lieutenant a sheet of paper. “Write your name and the time on this card,” the captain said. “You have five minutes to take this portion of the test. Do not use any reference materials. When you are done, return this card to that captain” — he nodded to a huge, tattooed man a few yards away — “and he will tell you what to do next. Begin.” The lieutenant dropped to the dirt beside other sweaty young officers and removed a pen from his soggy uniform. Another officer, his time up, approached the second captain, who took the card, expressed disgust that the lieutenant had not written his name at its top and pointed him to a laminated sheet of paper displaying a grid coordinate. That coordinate was where the lieutenant was expected for the test’s next stage. When the lieutenant plotted it on his map, he saw that like many of the preceding stations, it was miles away. He shouldered his pack, slung his rifle and began to jog. The temperature hovered near 100 degrees. This was one sequence in the Combat Endurance Test, the opening exercise in the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course — one of the most redoubtable male-only domains in the American military. And this session of the course could be the last male-only class. Beginning in September, the corps says, female officer volunteers will participate here, part of a study to gauge the feasibility of allowing female Marines to serve in more extensive combat roles. Col. Todd S. Desgrosseilliers, the commander of the Basic School, which oversees the course, said he had no special concerns as the course prepares to accept women. “Nothing more so with women than with men,” he said. “We expect them to be fit enough to go through the course when they get here, just like the men are.” The 86-day course, which meets four times a year, is called the corps’ most grueling school by its instructors and is intended to screen and train potential infantry officers. Its students are volunteers selected from lieutenants who have completed Officer Candidates School and the six-month Basic Officer Course, which trains all Marine lieutenants to lead provisional infantry platoons and in leadership, tactics, fitness and weapons. That school has been coed for decades. The experiment at I.O.C. could take a year or more; to obtain a statistically meaningful sample, the corps hopes to observe 92 female lieutenants in coming iterations and then, with information gathered from other studies and surveys, make recommendations about women’s service in so-called combat arms. The Marine Corps does not expect a flood of women to volunteer for the course, though more than one has for the next round. Women make up only 6 percent of the Marine ranks, and the school’s nature deters many Marines, no matter their gender. (This reporter graduated from the course in 1988; on the first day, a lieutenant regarded by instructors and peers as one of the most fit students suffered a heart attack and died.) The current course begins with the Combat Endurance Test, which was added in the 1990s. Last week’s test began in a classroom after midnight. A captain addressed 96 students, each sitting beside a mock M-16A2 rifle (real rifles are not issued until after the first test) and a backpack loaded with food and equipment. “Notebooks away,” the captain said. “No notes.” From this moment on, the captain said, for an amount of time unknown to the students, they would be continuously evaluated. Students who failed would be assigned a noninfantry job. After a lieutenant completed each leg of the test, the captain said, there would be another instructor who would explain the next task. The test was timed, but the lieutenants would not know how much time was allowed for many events, or over all. This uncertainty was intended to force every student to go as fast as he could, never knowing how much energy and food to conserve. No one was to help anyone else, the captain said. Speaking was forbidden, except when addressing instructors, with one exception. “If you are injured at any time, it is the only time you will talk to another Marine,” he said. “Legitimately injured,” he added, “As in, ‘I have a bone sticking out of my leg.’ ”
Bits Blog: No 'Death Spiral' for RIM, Chief Executive Says
Geoff Robins/ReutersThorsten Heins, chief of Research In Motion.
OTTAWA — The share price of Research In Motion is down by about 95 percent, and the company posted a $512 million quarterly loss last week before announcing a delay in a new phone on which it has staked its future. But in a radio interview on Tuesday morning, Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of the BlackBerry maker, said “there’s nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now.”
After last week’s announcement of the worse-than-expected financial results and the delay of the new BlackBerry 10 line to 2013, several analysts questioned RIM’s ability to stay in business. But during the interview, with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Heins rejected that analysis as well as suggestions that his optimistic outlook is disconnected from reality.
“This company is not ignoring the world out there nor is it in a death spiral,” he said. “Yes, it is very, very challenged at the moment, specifically in the U.S. market.” He added, “The way I would describe it: This company is really in the middle of a transition. We know what we’re doing; we’re executing on our programs.”
Mr. Heins also announced last week that RIM would lay off about 5,000 of its 16,500 employees. While he said the layoffs would have no impact on the introduction of BlackBerry 10 — a phone and operating system that RIM hoped would again make it an effective competitor in the smartphone market — there were widespread concerns that employees involved in that project would view RIM as a lost cause and start looking for work elsewhere.
This is the second major delay in the introduction of BlackBerry 10. The announcement contradicted earlier, unqualified assertions from Mr. Heins that production of the new phones was on schedule and that they would be released on time.
In the radio interview, Mr. Heins, a former Siemens executive who ran RIM’s handset business until January, blamed the delay on the sheer volume of software that must be processed by RIM’s development group — the same reason he stated in the announcement last week. But he offered no explanation for why that burden was not apparent earlier this year.
“Software development is always a huge task,” he said.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Palo Alto High School Club Fosters Would-Be Tech Moguls
But Mr. Slipper is optimistic. He should be. He’s just 18, a founding member of the Paly Entrepreneurs Club, an extracurricular group at the local high school that sprang into existence last September — the brainchild of about a dozen students committed to inventing the future. “I want to build something that is tied to what is happening next,” he said. While budding moguls in high school clubs like the Future Business Leaders of America invest make-believe money in the stock market or study the principles of accounting, the Entrepreneurs Club members have a distinctly Silicon Valley flavor: they want to create start-ups. They have met weekly during the school year to discuss their ventures and ideas, explore matters like money-raising strategies and new markets, and host guest speakers. Once, they held a Skype chat with a software engineer in Sweden who described the intricacies of running an online music business. Founding a company in high school is “a great opportunity,” said Vincent Gurle, 18. Later in life, “if you fail at business you might have to go live with your parents,” he said. “But we’re already doing that.” Mr. Gurle, who will attend the University of California, Santa Cruz in the fall, started a business last year aimed at supplying students to companies as software testers. It sputtered when he could not find enough companies interested in buying the service. He counts the effort a success anyway, he told the club at a recent meeting, figuring that the people he met will remember him when he returns with his next idea. Now he is learning how to program for Microsoft’s new mobile operating system. Club members have been working on projects like a social network to help teenagers quickly organize study groups and a trading network for Bitcoin, a virtual currency. They have brainstormed ideas for mobile geolocation games and new kinds of grocery store scanners. At a recent meeting, about a dozen boys gathered in an empty economics classroom at Palo Alto High, known as Paly. The demographic somewhat reflects Silicon Valley, too; there were no girls, though all the boys say they wish some would join their club. There also were few laptops or even tablets in the room, befitting a post-PC world. All the boys had their work on paper or smartphones. They passed these around to show off their latest concepts. Mr. Slipper, who plans to attend the University of California, Santa Barbara in January after a stint in R.O.T.C. boot camp, demonstrated his video-sharing app, speaking quickly so as to leave time for everyone to talk about their ideas before the lunch bell rang. “The syntax wasn’t hard,” he said, explaining the coding involved. “Objective C in the iOS framework took me about two weeks to learn. I’ve modeled the business on Instagram, leveraging speed and ease of loading.” Sympathetic young heads nodded. “How will you protect your intellectual property?” asked Aaron Bajor, 18, one of the group’s founders. He was waiting to discuss a diagram of his own project, a social network for entrepreneurs entering college. “Someone can always copy your idea, but that will be half-baked,” Mr. Slipper said confidently. “It’s not theirs.” James Maa, another club founder, was up next to discuss his project, the study group social network. “We’re not out in public yet,” he said, apologetically. Mr. Maa, 18, plans to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall. His social life, which included attending many events for start-ups, had gotten in the way of building the network, which he calls Bubble. Not everyone had a project to present, and that was acceptable.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
DealBook: Yahoo and Facebook Settle Patent Lawsuits
Yahoo and Facebook agreed on Friday to settle a legal fight over their patent holdings, ending what was shaping up to be one of the nastier court battles in Silicon Valley in recent memory.
Under the terms of the pact, the two companies will expand an existing partnership, including a deeper integration of Facebook’s tools into Yahoo’s content pages.
The two companies have also agreed to cross-license all their patent holdings, which would keep either side from suing the other over intellectual property issues in the future, a person close to one of the companies said.
What the agreement does not include is any sort of cash payout by Facebook, a win for the company.
The pact is intended to heal a rift between two companies that less than a year ago had begun an extensive collaboration. As part of the agreement, Yahoo and Facebook have agreed to work together to promote big events, hoping to draw increased advertising revenue.
“We are looking forward to building on the success we have already seen to provide innovative new products and experiences for both consumers and sponsors,” Ross B. Levinsohn, Yahoo’s interim chief executive, said in a statement. “Combining the premium content and reach of Yahoo as the world’s leading digital media company with Facebook provides branded advertisers with unmatched opportunity.”
Patents have increasingly become a focal point as companies like Apple and Eastman Kodak have turned to suing rivals over intellectual property claims. But such moves are often frowned upon within Silicon Valley. Yahoo took many by surprise earlier this year when it threatened to sue Facebook, claiming that it had violated some of its oldest Web technologies. Yahoo filed suit in March, citing 10 patents in particular.
Several technology commentators criticized Yahoo as a “patent troll” that was simply seeking a big payday.
Analysts also expressed surprise, given that Yahoo’s use of Facebook tools appeared to have improved its own business. Integrating Facebook’s news activity feature into Yahoo pages, for instance, tripled Yahoo’s traffic from Facebook between September and December of 2011.
At the time, Yahoo argued that it was simply trying to protect its intellectual property.
Facebook countersued in April, claiming that Yahoo had breached some of its own patents, some of which the company had purchased.
Yahoo’s original legal campaign was masterminded by Scott Thompson, then the company’s chief executive. The lawsuit was filed at a particularly delicate time for Facebook: about two months before the company was set to go public.
In 2003, Yahoo acquired Overture, a search advertising technology company that had sued Google over patent issues. Yahoo settled the fight the next year, collecting 2.7 million shares from Google before the search giant went public.
But Facebook was prepared to wage a long and costly fight to protect itself against Yahoo’s lawsuit, people close to the company have said.
Settlement talks began shortly after the resignation of Mr. Thompson in May, following the revelation that his academic credentials had been misstated. Soon after becoming interim chief executive, Mr. Levinsohn contacted Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, to begin negotiating a truce, according to people briefed on the matter.
Among Mr. Levinsohn’s concerns was that the patent fight was a distraction from the company’s focus on turning itself around, these people said.
The two sides spent several weeks working on the outlines of a potential agreement, including at the sidelines of the AllThingsD conference in May, these people said.
On Friday, Yahoo’s board — including directors who previously supported the company’s lawsuit — unanimously approved the settlement, one of the people briefed on the matter said.
“I’m pleased that we were able to resolve this in a positive manner and look forward to partnering closely with Ross and the leadership at Yahoo,” Ms. Sandberg said in a statement.
“Together, we can provide users with engaging social experiences while creating value for marketers.”
Shares of Yahoo dipped slightly on Friday, to $15.78, while those of Facebook rose nearly 1 percent, to $31.73.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Less Flailing, More Precision: The Joy of Joysticks
It looks good in commercials and appeals to the millions who want nothing to do with standard video game controllers, those complicated contraptions covered in buttons and joysticks. But there are players who have resisted touch-screen and motion-control gaming, preferring the precision of two-handed controllers, first on Ataris, then Nintendos and today on Xboxes and PlayStations. And the start of the next gaming-console generation, kicking off later this year with Nintendo’s Wii U, may give these players something to cheer about: Nintendo, which stripped down the controller by introducing the one-handed Wii remote in 2006, will feature a more conventional two-handed device called the GamePad. Even without Nintendo’s move, though, game creators have come to recognize that despite all of the futurist buzz about motion-control gaming, there are some things the old standard controller does better. Drew Skillman, who makes motion-controlled games for the Microsoft Kinect system at Double Fine Productions in San Francisco, readily acknowledges the virtues of the controller. It is preferable, he said, “if your definition of a good game is one that is incredibly responsive and fast-paced and lets you directly — from your brain through your hands — direct a character to make it do very precise motions.” All those joysticks and buttons are good for that. The controller, Mr. Skillman said, is the violin for “gaming’s real virtuosos.” To devotees of the controller, many of the popular new gaming models are celebrations of slop. And they’re right. Finger swipes, hand waves or voice commands are less precise. They are video gaming’s version of steering a car by tilts of the driver’s head and being able to accelerate only with vocal commands to “speed up.” Unlike, say, reading a book, in which the mechanics of tracking your eyes across a page of printed words has generally been accepted as the ideal from the beginning, in gaming it’s an open question as to which way is better for the player to interact with the virtual world created. (The controller fan’s lament, for example, echoes earlier complaints by computer-game players who scorned game systems and their controllers, instead championing the precision offered by a mouse and a keyboard.) But an increasingly complicated controller has become as intimidating to those who have neither the time nor the zeal to learn to play it as an actual violin is to nonmusicians. A modern controller is made to be held inside a gamer’s loose cradle of thumbs, forefingers and middle fingers, all poised to respond rapidly. A newcomer could be forgiven for looking at it and not even wanting to touch it. “If you put a controller and a tarantula on a table, and you ask my mom to pick one up, I’m not sure which one she would choose,” said Nathan Martz, one of Mr. Skillman’s colleagues at Double Fine. Both the Wii system with its elegant remote and Microsoft’s more recent no-controller Kinect have sold tens of millions, largely to casual players. A problem, however, is that the motion-controller revolution has been accompanied by a paucity of excellent games. The best-reviewed games have been those that require standard controllers, like Batman: Arkham City from last year and the old classic Super Mario Bros., with bad guys and obstacles that require players to react at the speed of thought. A player with a controller can easily understand what he or she has done wrong when pressing a button too late. Motion-control games, meanwhile, have tended to be jolly, party-oriented amusements that register a dance step or an arm wave. A player has a hard time telling why that hand wave wasn’t picked up by the sensor. Was it too slow? Too fast? Not high enough? “In the current state of motion-control gaming, I don’t even know if it’s fair to say you have the ability to create games that rival what you might do with a controller-based game,” Mr. Skillman said, though he added that future iterations of systems like the Kinect should allow for more precise control. He and Mr. Martz have found success by gearing their studio’s Kinect games — the “Sesame Street”-based Once Upon a Monster and the goofball Happy Action Theater, for which a sequel is being made — toward children and, to be blunt, people who may have had a bit to drink. Such audiences don’t mind slightly delayed response times if they can control a game by flailing around. The games de-emphasize winning and losing and instead encourage physical playfulness. There is something to be said for technology that allows different people to wave their hands differently rather than forces everyone to press a button the same way. On the other hand, it’s also good to have a violin that plays the string you bowed and not the one next to it. Gamers and game makers have found that precision still has its value. It’s an idea that Nintendo seems to have come back around to. When the Wii U is released in late 2012, it will support motion-controlled Wii remotes. But its centerpiece controller, the GamePad, has a large touch screen surrounded by 2 joysticks, 10 buttons and 4 triggers. It’s a spider. The controller, ever so slowly, is crawling back.
Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming Web site Kotaku.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Prototype: In a Fisher-Price Lab, Apps Are Child’s Play - Prototype
It’s well known that children are quick to learn new technology. But 6-month-olds? How did the idea arise for a toy that allows its user to gnaw on its brightly colored handles and drool on its protective screen, while also manipulating apps for counting and singing? At Fisher-Price, such products result from a process known as spelunking, which in its literal sense means to explore caves. But in the realm of toy making, it refers to the simple act of watching children play. A similar process is alive and well at other companies, like LeapFrog, maker of the LeapPad, a touchscreen tablet for children as young as 3; and at Hasbro and Crayola, which have partnered with digital media companies to create apps for very young children. At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps, different types of products,” said Deborah Weber, senior manager of infant research. Her job, she said, is to “understand the ages and stages of babies — what they can and can’t do, what their interests are, and the growing needs of families today.” Spelunking has been around since the Fisher-Price PlayLab was formed in 1961, the same year that bricks made by a Danish company called Lego made their American debut. In its earlier days, the lab was filled with toys like a googly-eyed rotary phone known as the Chatter Phone, and the Corn Popper, a kind of mini-lottery machine on wheels. Today, the lab, located at the Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., looks more like an Apple store. But instead of adults and teenagers, there are infants staring into computer screens, and parents and toddlers are passing iPads back and forth. The setting is similar at LeapFrog’s Kid Lab in Emeryville, Calif., where digital devices and apps are tested by children who both have and haven’t had regular exposure to computers. “Two years ago, it was harder to find kids who had used an iPhone or an iPad at home,” said Alissa McLean, a senior researcher in LeapFrog’s user experience group, which examines how children interact with online content and computers. “Now it’s not hard at all.” “We used to talk about kids being the first generation of digital natives,” said Jason Root, chief content officer at the Ruckus Media Group, which has partnered with companies like Hasbro to create storybook apps. “Now we have a generation of newborns who are going to be weaned on touch devices.” At Fisher-Price, Ms. Weber said, “We see 6-month-olds batting at the screen, 9-month-olds swiping, and 12-month-olds pointing out objects to see.” Observations like these are passed along to toy producers and industrial designers, resulting in products like the iPad case and the Laugh & Learn Apptivity Monkey, which comes out in August. The Apptivity Monkey would pass for just another stuffed animal if it didn’t have a thick, plastic iPhone case attached to its belly; the front of the case is made of see-through plastic. An iPhone can be placed inside, and a child can play apps on it, either by pressing on the iPhone directly or on the monkey’s paws, which interact with an array of alphabet and singing apps. The monkey is big enough and soft enough so that the iPhone can sustain even major tumbles, Fisher-Price asserts. But the iPhone is not included. So doesn’t that make for a pretty expensive toy? Maybe not. When Kathleen Kremer, another spelunker who is the company’s senior manager of user experience, was observing how preschool-aged children played with their parents’ iPhones and iPods, she stumbled on the “pass-back factor.” “People are now on their second-generation iPad or second iPhone, so what they typically do with the old one is give it to their child, so the kids actually have ownership of these devices,” she said. She has also studied diaries and scrapbooks that parents were asked to keep, documenting their children’s behavior. Because of the pass-back factor, the new Kid Tough Apptivity Case — similar to the Laugh & Learn product, but designed for older children — is made to fit all generations of the gadgets, Ms. Kremer said. Innovations like this are fueling the digital toy trend, according to Lisa Harnisch, senior vice president and general merchandising manager at Toys “R” Us. Last year, she said, the trend in children’s apps and app-related products “really started to heighten and explode.” Indeed, in the last year, there have been nearly three million downloads of Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn apps. By year-end, LeapFrog expects to have 325 apps at its online App Center, double the number at the end of 2011. Not everyone sees this as a justification to ply infants with computers. “Infants learn best from real people and playing with real toys,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the author of “Baby 411.” “They learn how to communicate, how to engage with others and how to problem-solve using their five senses. While technology can offer a virtual way to learn some of these skills, they will never replace the value of interacting with humans or being able to manipulate and play with toys in one’s hands.” In any case, it might be too late to stop an 18-month-old from discovering the joys of Netflix — selecting a movie or TV show to watch, or rewinding and replaying a favorite scene — something that Ms. Kremer has come across in her field research. “It was pretty remarkable that she could master all those different steps,” she said of the tech-savvy toddler. “The motivation was there.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)