Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that as much as 30% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores, setting off more contention in the nation's second-largest school system in the weeks before a critical Board of Education election.

Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage or expectation for how much standardized tests should count — and that test results should serve almost entirely as just one measure to improve instruction. Deasy, in contrast, has insisted that test scores should play a significant role in a teacher's evaluation and that poor scores could contribute directly to dismissal.

In a Friday memo explaining the evaluation process, Deasy set 30% as the goal and the maximum for how much test scores and other data should count.

In an interview, he emphasized that the underlying thrust is to develop an evaluation that improves the teaching corps and that data is part of the effort.

"The public has been demanding a better evaluation system for at least a decade. And teachers have repeatedly said to me what they need is a balanced way forward to help them get better and help them be accountable," Deasy said. "We do this for students every day. Now it's time to do this for teachers."

Deasy also reiterated that test scores would not be a "primary or controlling" factor in an evaluation, in keeping with the language of an agreement reached in December between L.A. Unified and its teachers union. Classroom observations and other factors also are part of the evaluation process.

But United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher expressed immediate concern about Deasy's move. During negotiations, he said, the superintendent had proposed allotting 30% to test scores but the union rejected the plan. Deasy then pulled the idea off the table, which allowed the two sides to come to an agreement, Fletcher said. Teachers approved the pact last month.

"To see this percentage now being floated again is unacceptable," the union said in a statement.

Fletcher described the pact as allowing flexibility for principals, in collaboration with teachers, first to set individual goals and then to look at various measures to determine student achievement and overall teacher performance.

"The superintendent doesn't get to sign binding agreements and then pretend they're not binding," Fletcher said.

When Deasy settled on 30%, his decision was in line with research findings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has examined teacher quality issues across the country. Some experts have challenged that work.

The test score component would include a rating for the school based on an analysis of all students' standardized test scores. Those "value-added" formulas, known within L.A. Unified as Academic Growth Over Time, can be used to rate a school or a teacher's effectiveness by comparing students' test scores with past performance. The method takes into account such factors as family income and ethnicity.

After an aggressive push by the Obama administration, individual value-added ratings for teachers have been added to reviews in many districts. They make up 40% of evaluations in Washington, D.C., 35% in Tennessee and 30% in Chicago.

But Los Angeles will use a different approach. The district will rely on raw test scores. A teacher's evaluation also may incorporate pass rates on the high school exit exam and graduation, attendance and suspension data.

Deasy's action was met Friday with reactions ranging from guarded to enthusiastic approval within a coalition of outside groups that have pushed for a new evaluation system. This coalition also has sought to counter union influence.

Elise Buik, chief executive of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said weighing test scores 30% "is a reasonable number that everyone can be happy with."

The union and the district were under pressure to include student test data in evaluations after L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled last year that the system was violating state law by not using test scores in teacher performance reviews.

A lawsuit to enforce the law was brought by parents in Los Angeles, with support from the Sacramento-based EdVoice advocacy organization.

If the "actual progress" of students is taken into account under Deasy's plan, "it's a historic day for LAUSD," said Bill Lucia, the group's chief executive.

All of this is playing out against the backdrop of the upcoming March 5 election. The campaign for three school board seats has turned substantially into a contest between candidates who strongly back Deasy's policies and those more sympathetic toward the teachers union. Deasy supporters praise the superintendent for measures they say will improve the quality of teaching. The union has faulted Deasy for limiting job protections and said he has imposed unwise or unproven reforms.

In the upcoming election, the union and pro-Deasy forces are matched head to head in District 4, with several employee unions behind incumbent Steve Zimmer and a coalition of donors behind challenger Kate Anderson.

Anderson had high praise for Deasy's directive, saying it struck the right balance and that teachers and students would benefit.

Zimmer said that although he understands that principals need guidance, "I worry about anything that would cause resistance or delay in going forward. I hope this use of a percentage won't disrupt what had been a collaborative process."

howard.blume@latimes.com

Read More..

The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Team Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."

The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.

Teams of three from Finland, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. were selected from more than 40 applicants for the inaugural Carve Tahoe, a five-day competition to hew works of art from 14-foot-high, 20-ton blocks of snow. But despite the bad snow, the teams rely on decades of experience, handcrafted tools, and creative techniques to fashion their massive sculptures. The team members are sculptors and artists and designers, but also doctors and lawyers. Though they spend weeks each year carving, nobody makes a living doing it.

“Everyone seems to have their own method of doing things,” says Team Wisconsin’s Mark Hargarten. “It’s amazing how different they are.”

The Wisconsin team uses a grid system for their carving — a Native American wearing an eagle costume, its feathers turning to flames, called “Dance of the Firebird.” The polyurethane model they built is scaled so 1/2 inch equals one foot on the finished snow sculpture. They cut a copy of the model in four, and covered each section with clay, sectioned in 1/2 inch increments. They etch corresponding lines in the snow, one foot to a side, and they peel off one piece of clay, carve the part of the sculpture they can see, and move on to the next.

“You never get lost using the method,” says Dan Ingebrigtson, a professional sculptor from Milwaukee. “Three or four guys can work from different angles, and meet in the middle.”

Wisconsin’s got several other strategies behind their carving as well. From the south, it looks like they haven’t even started; they left the southern side of the block intact to protect the rest of it from the sun, and the wall has been decimated by the heat. More than 20 percent of its thickness has melted by Sunday night, three days in. After the sun goes down, the team is hollowing out the interior of the structure, so it will freeze faster overnight.

Other teams are relying on nighttime freezing as well. A team partly from the U.S. and partly from Canada carves spires from blocks they removed from the sculpture, and plans to attach them to the top of their sculpture, “The Stand,” which incorporates four interwoven trees. They’ll use melty snow pulled from the middle of the block right when the sun goes down to cement the tops onto the trees, says team member Bob Fulks from the top of a stepladder as he cuts away at the sculpture with an ice chisel.

Fulks’ team is leaving Tahoe after the competition to go straight to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, for another competition, where he anticipates no problems with warm weather.

“It’s a good gig, you can travel all over the world doing it,” he says. “You go around and see the same people.”

Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.

“We’ve sculpted with almost everybody here before,” says Team Idaho-Dunham’s Mariah Dunham, who is working on “Sweet House (of Madness)” with her mother, Barb. The creation is a beehive, with the south side as the exterior, and the north side (intentionally placed out of the sun) as a representation of the comb, including hexagonal holds that perforate all the way to the hollow interior.

Though Carve Tahoe is new, snow carving is not. Many of the sculptors have been at it for more than 20 years, traveling around the world and meeting and competing against many of the same people — though each competition demands unique new designs from all the sculptors. Kathryn Keown discovered snow carving while Googling something completely different, and decided she wanted to host an international event.

“First we fell in love with the sculptures, then we fell in love with the sculptors,” says Keown, who founded the competition with Hub Strategy, the ad agency where she works.

Keown contacted several ski areas before Northstar, but the resort was on board right away; its owner, Vail Resorts also owns Breckenridge, where one of the biggest and most prestigious snow carving competitions is held.

But Keown wanted to commit to the design of the competition, not just the sculptures. Applicants submitted their designs last summer, and Keown enlisted Lawrence Noble, chair of the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University to help choose modern, complex, realist designs. She wanted no artsy, kitschy snowmen.

Then she chose a design-friendly logo and judges. In addition to Noble, the panel of judges features a sushi chef from Northstar, two interior designers, a photographer from nearby Squaw Valley, and Bryan Hyneck, vice president of design at Speck, which makes cases for mobile devices and was one of the event’s sponsors.

“The level of complexity and sophistication in this type of sculpture is just amazing,” says Hyneck, who has judged industrial and graphic design competitions, but never snow carving. “It’s amazing how organic some of the shapes can be.”

As a judge, Hyneck says he’ll focus on the craft and the execution of the sculptures, and how the sculptors use particular techniques to take advantage of the snow’s properties. But he adds that subject matter, point of view, message, and relationship to a theme are all important points as well.

“Anybody that is really going to push the limits of the capabilities of the media is going to get a lot of my attention,” he says.

For some, like the Germans, that means suspending massive structures made completely of snow. Their sculpture, titled “Four Elements”, features four large spires encircled by a tilted disc. Despite a trickle of melted snow dripping off the bottom edge, one — or even two — of the German carvers frequently stand atop the sculpture, using saws or chisels to shape the towers.

Sunday evening, after the sun has gone down and the temperature dropped, Josh Knaggs, bearded, with a cigarette in his mouth, is sitting in the curve made by the largest bear from the Team Idaho-Bonner’s Ferry sculpture, “Endangered Bears.” Wearing a blue event-issued jacket, he’s brushing out the hollow loop made by mama and papa bear.

Three days later, the judges award Knaggs and his team third prize, with Japan’s modern work, “Heart to Heart” coming in second and Germany’s gravity-defying “Four Elements” taking first. The teams disperse, and after a few more sunny days, Northstar tears down the structures before they get too soft and fall — all except the German piece, which can’t bear its own weight and collapses after judging is complete. But the ephemeral nature of the snow is part of what attracts the competitors.

“It’s for the moment, and it’s a beauty all in itself, creating something that’s gonna be disappearing, you know, it’s okay that it disappears,” says Team Truckee’s Ira Kessler. “We are making it for the moment.”

All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck

Read More..

Kate Upton says body shut down after Antarctic bikini shoot

(Reuters) – Swimsuit model Kate Upton said on Tuesday her body shut down after she posed in a skimpy bikini in Antarctica for Sports Illustrated magazine.

Upton, wearing only a white bikini bottom and an unzipped white parka, was picked as the cover girl for the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, unveiled on Monday, for the second consecutive year.

“It was freezing,” Upton, 20, told NBC’s morning TV show “Today” on Tuesday. “I’m from Florida, so it wasn’t easy for me.

“When I came back, I was losing my hearing and eyesight. My body was shutting down because it was working so hard to keep me warm.”

Upton joins celebrity models including Elle Macpherson, Christie Brinkley and Tyra Banks to appear more than once on the swimsuit issue‘s cover.

M.J. Day, a senior editor for Sports Illustrated, told Reuters that Upton braved temperatures as low as 24 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 Celsius) and wind chills as low as -20 Fahrenheit (-29 Celsius).

“We should name a passageway after her down there,” said Day, who accompanied Upton on the frigid shoot. “She braved six days in a bikini while we were head-to-toe in jackets … No one will ever accuse her of being a whiny model, ever.”

This year’s 17 models were part of photo shoots that stretched across all seven continents.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey in Los Angeles; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Mohammad Zargham)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Kate Upton says body shut down after Antarctic bikini shoot
Url Post: http://www.news.fluser.com/kate-upton-says-body-shut-down-after-antarctic-bikini-shoot/
Link To Post : Kate Upton says body shut down after Antarctic bikini shoot
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

As Jax Mariash went under the tattoo needle to have “Livestrong” emblazoned on her wrist in bold black letters, she did not think about Lance Armstrong or doping allegations, but rather the 10 people affected by cancer she wanted to commemorate in ink. It was Jan. 22, 2010, exactly a year since the disease had taken the life of her stepfather. After years of wearing yellow Livestrong wristbands, she wanted something permanent.

A lifelong runner, Mariash got the tattoo to mark her 10-10-10 goal to run the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 10, 2010, and fund-raising efforts for Livestrong. Less than three years later, antidoping officials laid out their case against Armstrong — a lengthy account of his practice of doping and bullying. He did not contest the charges and was barred for life from competing in Olympic sports.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Mariash, of Wilson, Wyo., said of the antidoping officials’ report, released in October, and Armstrong’s subsequent confession to Oprah Winfrey. “When I look at the tattoo now, I just think of living strong, and it’s more connected to the cancer fight and optimal health than Lance.”

Mariash is among those dealing with the fallout from Armstrong’s descent. She is not alone in having Livestrong permanently emblazoned on her skin.

Now the tattoos are a complicated, internationally recognized symbol of both an epic crusade against cancer and a cyclist who stood defiant in the face of accusations for years but ultimately admitted to lying.

The Internet abounds with epidermal reminders of the power of the Armstrong and Livestrong brands: the iconic yellow bracelet permanently wrapped around a wrist; block letters stretching along a rib cage; a heart on a foot bearing the word Livestrong; a mural on a back depicting Armstrong with the years of his now-stripped seven Tour de France victories and the phrase “ride with pride.”

While history has provided numerous examples of ill-fated tattoos to commemorate lovers, sports teams, gang membership and bands that break up, the Livestrong image is a complex one, said Michael Atkinson, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who has studied tattoos.

“People often regret the pop culture tattoos, the mass commodified tattoos,” said Atkinson, who has a Guns N’ Roses tattoo as a marker of his younger days. “A lot of people can’t divorce the movement from Lance Armstrong, and the Livestrong movement is a social movement. It’s very real and visceral and embodied in narrative survivorship. But we’re still not at a place where we look at a tattoo on the body and say that it’s a meaningful thing to someone.”

Geoff Livingston, a 40-year-old marketing professional in Washington, D.C., said that since Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey, he has received taunts on Twitter and inquiries at the gym regarding the yellow Livestrong armband tattoo that curls around his right bicep.

“People see it and go, ‘Wow,’ ” he said, “But I’m not going to get rid of it, and I’m not going to stop wearing short sleeves because of it. It’s about my family, not Lance Armstrong.”

Livingston got the tattoo in 2010 to commemorate his brother-in-law, who was told he had cancer and embarked on a fund-raising campaign for the charity. If he could raise $5,000, he agreed to get a tattoo. Within four days, the goal was exceeded, and Livingston went to a tattoo parlor to get his seventh tattoo.

“It’s actually grown in emotional significance for me,” Livingston said of the tattoo. “It brought me closer to my sister. It was a big statement of support.”

For Eddie Bonds, co-owner of Rabbit Bicycle in Hill City, S.D., getting a Livestrong tattoo was also a reflection of the growth of the sport of cycling. His wife, Joey, operates a tattoo parlor in front of their store, and in 2006 she designed a yellow Livestrong band that wraps around his right calf, topped off with a series of small cyclists.

“He kept breaking the Livestrong bands,” Joey Bonds said. “So it made more sense to tattoo it on him.”

“It’s about the cancer, not Lance,” Eddie Bonds said.

That was also the case for Jeremy Nienhouse, a 37-year old in Denver, Colo., who used a Livestrong tattoo to commemorate his own triumph over testicular cancer.

Given the diagnosis in 2004, Nienhouse had three rounds of chemotherapy, which ended on March 15, 2005, the date he had tattooed on his left arm the day after his five-year anniversary of being cancer free in 2010. It reads: “3-15-05” and “LIVESTRONG” on the image of a yellow band.

Nienhouse said he had heard about Livestrong and Armstrong’s own battle with the cancer around the time he learned he had cancer, which alerted him to the fact that even though he was young and healthy, he, too, could have cancer.

“On a personal level,” Nienhouse said, “he sounds like kind of a jerk. But if he hadn’t been in the public eye, I don’t know if I would have been diagnosed when I had been.”

Nienhouse said he had no plans to have the tattoo removed.

As for Mariash, she said she read every page of the antidoping officials’ report. She soon donated her Livestrong shirts, shorts and running gear. She watched Armstrong’s confession to Winfrey and wondered if his apology was an effort to reduce his ban from the sport or a genuine appeal to those who showed their support to him and now wear a visible sign of it.

“People called me ‘Miss Livestrong,’ ” Mariash said. “It was part of my identity.”

She also said she did not plan to have her tattoo removed.

“I wanted to show it’s forever,” she said. “Cancer isn’t something that just goes away from people. I wanted to show this is permanent and keep people remembering the fight.”

Read More..

The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Wu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »

HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

Many families in the West sacrifice to put their children through school, saving for college educations that they hope will lead to a better life. Few efforts can compare with the heavy financial burden that millions of lower-income Chinese parents now endure as they push their children to obtain as much education as possible.

Yet a college degree no longer ensures a well-paying job, because the number of graduates in China has quadrupled in the last decade.

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. For nearly two decades, they have lived in a cramped and drafty 200-square-foot house with a thatch roof. They have never owned a car. They do not take vacations — they have never seen the ocean. They have skipped traditional New Year trips to their ancestral village for up to five straight years to save on bus fares and gifts, and for Mr. Wu to earn extra holiday pay in the mines. Despite their frugality, they have essentially no retirement savings.

Thanks to these sacrifices, their daughter, Wu Caoying, is now a 19-year-old college sophomore. She is among the growing millions of Chinese college students who have gone much farther than their parents could have dreamed when they were growing up. For all the hard work of Ms. Wu’s father and mother, however, they aren’t certain it will pay off. Their daughter is ambivalent about staying in school, where the tuition, room and board cost more than half her parents’ combined annual income. A slightly above-average student, she thinks of dropping out, finding a job and earning money.

“Every time my daughter calls home, she says, ‘I don’t want to continue this,’ ” Mrs. Cao said. “And I say, ‘You’ve got to keep studying to take care of us when we get old’, and she says, ‘That’s too much pressure, I don’t want to think about all that responsibility.’ ”

Ms. Wu dreams of working at a big company, but knows that many graduates end up jobless. “I think I may start my own small company,” she says, while acknowledging she doesn’t have the money or experience to run one.

For a rural parent in China, each year of higher education costs six to 15 months’ labor, and it is hard for children from poor families to get scholarships or other government financial support. A year at the average private university in the United States similarly equals almost a year’s income for the average wage earner, while an in-state public university costs about six months’ pay, but financial aid is generally easier to obtain than in China. Moreover, an American family that spends half its income helping a child through college has more spending power with the other half of its income than a rural Chinese family earning less than $5,000 a year.

It isn’t just the cost of college that burdens Chinese parents. They face many fees associated with sending their children to elementary, middle and high schools. Many parents also hire tutors, so their children can score high enough on entrance exams to get into college. American families that invest heavily in their children’s educations can fall back on Medicare, Social Security and other social programs in their old age. Chinese citizens who bet all of their savings on their children’s educations have far fewer options if their offspring are unable to find a job on graduation.

The experiences of Wu Caoying, whose family The New York Times has tracked for seven years, are a window into the expanding educational opportunities and the financial obstacles faced by families all over China.

Her parents’ sacrifices to educate their daughter explain how the country has managed to leap far ahead of the United States in producing college graduates over the last decade, with eight million Chinese now getting degrees annually from universities and community colleges.

But high education costs coincide with slower growth of the Chinese economy and surging unemployment among recent college graduates. Whether young people like Ms. Wu find jobs on graduation that allow them to earn a living, much less support their parents, could test China’s ability to maintain rapid economic growth and preserve political and social stability in the years ahead.

Leaving the Village

Read More..

'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius weeps as he faces murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee revered in South Africa for overcoming his disability to compete in the London Games last year, wept in court Friday as he faced a murder charge in connection with the fatal shooting of his girlfriend.

During the proceedings in Pretoria, Gerrie Nel, one of the National Prosecuting Authority’s most senior advocates, said he would argue the killing of model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp was premeditated murder, the most serious category of offense under South African law.

Nel is known for prosecuting high-profile cases, including winning the conviction of former police chief and Interpol boss Jackie Selebi on corruption charges.

Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses to compete, did not enter a formal plea and was remanded into custody at Brooklyn police station in Pretoria until Tuesday, when his bail application is to be heard.

Under South African law, a suspect charged with such a high-level offense would have to prove exceptional circumstances to be granted bail.

In a packed courtroom, members of Pistorius' family struggled to pass through a media scrum and to find seats. The hearing coincided with "Black Friday," a day when people were being urged to wear black to protest rapes and violence against women.

[Updated, 8:35 a.m. Feb. 15: The family and Pistorius' management company later issued a statement denying that the athlete had murdered his girlfriend, saying: "The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest possible terms."

Some details of Pistorius' argument and the state's case are expected Tuesday.]

The famed athlete's court appearance came as South African media reported that he shot Steenkamp, his girlfriend of several months, four times through a bathroom door.

Under South African law, a person who fatally shoots an intruder has to prove he or she had a reasonable fear that the intruder posed a real threat to his or her life.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the world, with killings of women by intimate partners the leading cause of female homicide in the country. About 57% of female homicide victims were killed by their partners in 2009, according to a report last year by the Medical Research Council.

One-third of female homicides were committed by partners with a history of prior violence against their partners, according to the report.

Friends of Steenkamp and Pistorius mourned the incident on social media.

"Drained, confused, I just can't wrap my head around things," one of Pistorius’ close friends, Alex Pilakoutas, posted on Twitter.

Darren Fresco, who described himself as one of Steenkamp’s best friends said he was hoping to wake from a nightmare and hear her infectious laughter again.

"We were just goofing off the other day talking to each other in only the way that we could to each other. My heart is on the verge of exploding with the pain of such a sudden loss of one of my best friends," Fresco, who said he was one of the last people to exchange tweets with Steenkamp, posted on Facebook.

ALSO:

Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

Mexico finds fire-god figure at top of Pyramid of the Sun

Iranian general reportedly assassinated while traveling from Syria

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Read More..

Lebbeus Woods: The Architect Who Dared to Ask 'What If?'

He envisioned underground cities, floating buildings and an eternal space tomb for Albert Einstein worthy of the great physicist’s expansive intellect. With such grand designs, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the late Lebbeus Woods, one of the most influential conceptual architects ever to walk the earth, had only one of his wildly imaginative designs become a permanent structure.

Instead of working with construction and engineering firms, Woods dreamed up provocative creations that weren’t bound by the rules of society or even nature, according to Joseph Becker and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, co-curators of a new exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Lebbeus Woods, Architect.

“It was almost a badge of honor to never have anything built, because you were not a victim of the client,” Becker told Wired during a preview of the fascinating show, which opens Saturday and runs through June 2. While not a full retrospective of Woods’ career, the exhibit shows off three decades of his work in the form of drawings, paintings, models and sketchbooks filled with bold ideas, raw concepts and cryptic inscriptions. (See several examples of Woods’ work in the gallery above.)

As the curators discussed Woods’ work and his impact on the world of architecture, they talked of a brilliant mind consumed with disruption, with confronting the boring, repetitive spaces humans have become accustomed to living in by challenging the “omnipresence of the Cartesian grid.” Woods’ fantastic visions included buildings designed for seismic hot zones that might move in response to earthquakes, or a sprawling city that would exist underneath a divided Berlin, providing a sort of subterranean salon where individuals from the East and West might mingle, free from the conflicting ideologies of their governments.

“He was very focused, I think, in all of his work, in what he said was ‘architecture for its own sake,’” Becker said. “Not architecture for clients, not architecture that is diluted, and not architecture that really had to be held up against certain primary factors, including gravity or government.”

Woods found his place in the conceptual architecture movement that sprang from the 1960s and ’70s, when firms like Superstudio and Archigram presented a radical peek into a possible — if improbable — future. Casting a skeptical eye on the way humans lived in cities, these conceptual architects were more interested in raising questions than in crafting blueprints for buildings that would actually be built of concrete, steel and glass.

In fact, none of the nearly 200 fascinating drawings and other works on display in Lebbeus Woods, Architect were ever meant to be built, said Dunlop Fletcher. Instead of the archetypical architect’s detailed plans and models, carefully calibrated to produce a road map to a finished structure, Woods’ drawings are whimsical and thought-provoking, with radical new ideas being the intended result of his efforts. “There are going to be gaps in this, and you fill in the gaps with what you bring to it,” she said.

Woods’ ideas started in his sketchbooks, which he crammed with detailed drawings. “He was extremely gifted with the pen,” said Becker, adding that many of the pieces are notated in a strange hybrid language that could be part Latin, part invented. The curators likened it to a kind of code that connected the conceptual fragments that run through Woods’ highly theoretical work.

“It could mean something, it could be that he’s creating almost these fictional artifacts of these supporting elements to engage with the larger drawings that he would do later,” Becker said. “They’re almost Da Vinci-like in their illegibility.”

Other questions remain about just what, exactly, Woods was up to with when he took pencil to paper. Take, for instance, a piece called Aero-Livinglab, from his Centricity series from the late 1980s, in which the architect was “essentially creating a utopian city” with “its own set of rules,” according to Becker. The drawing depicts a floating room that resembles an insect as much as it does some sort of alien zeppelin. Just what would the purpose of such a construction be?

“It could be an inhabitable space,” Becker said. “It could be small, it could be large. Often these things don’t have clear scale, but we do know that the point of Centricity was to invite a question of ‘what if?’”

An obituary on the Architectural Record website dubbed Woods “the last of the great paper architects” and said he “achieved cult-idol status among architects for his post-apocalyptic landscapes of dense lines and plunging perspectives. Deconstructivist in the most literal of ways, they were never formalist exercises. Instead, they conveyed the architect’s deep reservations as to the nature of contemporary society, and particularly its penchant for violence. He eschewed practice, claiming an interest in architectural ideas rather than the quotidian challenges of commercial building.”

Pages: 1 2 View All

Read More..

Oscar’s oldest nominee, Emmanuelle Riva, on “Amour”: it’s a gift in the last stage of my life

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The life of an artist is full of surprises, and none has been bigger for French actress Emanuelle Riva than the one that has come late in life. The response has been overwhelming to her performance in this year’s meditative “Amour,” which brought her the first Oscar nomination of her career – and makes her the oldest Best Actress nominee ever, at 85.

Riva was best known previously for her role in the 1959 French New Wave classic, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” directed by Alain Resnais. In Michael Haneke‘s “Amour,” she plays a wife declining inexorably toward death, losing her physical and intellectual grasp.

The loving husband who cares for her is played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose breakout role was playing Brigitte Bardot’s young suitor in the original version of “And God Created Woman.”

After a lifetime of steady roles in France, Riva has spent the better part of the past year responding to global interview requests and accepting accolades, including a New York Film Critics Circle award in January that led to her first trip ever to New York. The Oscars will be her first trip to Los Angeles. It will also take place on her 86th birthday.

TheWrap spoke by phone to Riva from her family home in Les Vosges, a region in eastern France.

Thank you for making the time to speak to us.

Well, I am horribly tired. I don’t have a moment to rest. They don’t leave me in peace. But, my word, I said I’d do it.

Have you been surprised by the response to “Amour”?

It surprises us, this much success. I didn’t expect so much interest. But it’s not only to me, it’s to the film, those who worked in the film. We are very happy for this huge public response.

How did Michael Haneke approach you about doing the role?

It’s not me who decided. It’s Haneke who decided. When a director like him chooses someone, he is so precise. He knew me from “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” I was 30 years old. He hadn’t seen me since that time. And he wanted to meet me. It was done very classically. A director looks for an actor, he has a vision, we met.

And then what happened?

We did a rehearsal with the scene in the kitchen – when she begins to depart, to go elsewhere. the regard that’s no longer there. The absence. It’s terrible. He looked at it closely. He wanted to see me on the screen. He said I touched him deeply in this scene.

What did you think of the role when you read it?

When I read the script I found it so extraordinary.

I had the profound certitude that I could do it. I felt that at that moment in my life as an actress, I was immediately capable of doing it. If he didn’t give me the role, I would have been so sad.

Were you afraid of confronting this theme of mortality?

Afraid? No, not at all. Why would I be afraid? This role presents the subject of the film that touches each of us, every human on the planet. As an actress, it’s so exciting to be engaged in a role like this. I would never have felt fear for this. If an actress is afraid, she should head for the door right away.

I was so happy in the work. Every day, every day. Two months of work. It was such happiness-a feeling of complete fullness. Of life, of death, of love. I never lost the excitement of the work. I was so infinitely happy during this shoot. So serious, but it wasn’t sad at all.

What was it like creating that intimacy with Jean-Louis Trintignant?

I’d met him in Rome many years ago when we were young, but I don’t know him well. This is the heart of our work. We meet other people we don’t know, and immediately we are in complete intimacy. I didn’t do anything. I just was there, and him also.

We started with the kitchen scene after the concert at the Champs Elysee Theatre. I seem to recall that scene. We were facing each other at the table as if we’d been for years. I just lived it. This is what’s so marvelous. When I don’t know someone, I’d say I have more freedom as an actress. Sometimes we surprise ourselves, but one can surprise the director with how deep you can go. Haneke – he is fantastic – he was the music of the film.

What direction did Haneke give you?

There was one direction, not 36. From there we had a lot of freedom. He’s not tyrannical. His direction was very simple, very rigorous. We were doing a scene and he said, “It’s very nice – very sweet, very tender – but it’s too tender. No sentimentality. From here on in, no sentimentality.” This was the key that opened the horizon of the film. Once I heard that, it became much more clear. I said, “I get it.” This husband and wife each have very strong personalities. But it is not expressed in sentimentality.

How did you react to the Oscar nomination?

I found out in New York, I was there for the critics circle award. The 10th of January, early morning. My neighbors who help me when I travel shouted for joy. I was barely awake. They were screaming, “You’re nominated!” I stayed very calm. I got up and said, “I’m not nominated.” Of course I was very happy.

And how do you feel about coming to the Oscars?

I am very calm in the face of all of this. I am 85 years old. I am not going to flop about like a fish. What makes me nervous is these hours on the plane. Frankly, it seems like a hell of a journey to me. It’s so long. But I will do things to the end. I will fall in someone’s arms if I need to.

This adventure, this gift, in the last stage of my life – it’s not easy to measure up – but it’s the exact moment in my life when I could do it. Before would have been too early. Later might have been too late. But it’s a great treasure to participate in this film.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Fat Dad: Baking for Love

Fat Dad

Dawn Lerman writes about growing up with a fat dad.

My grandmother Beauty always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and by the look of pure delight on my dad’s face when he ate a piece of warm, homemade chocolate cake, or bit into a just-baked crispy cookie, I grew to believe this was true. I had no doubt that when the time came, and I liked a boy, that a batch of my gooey, rich, chocolatey brownies would cast him under a magic spell, and we would live happily ever.

But when Hank Thomas walked into Miss Seawall’s ninth grade algebra class on a rainy, September day and smiled at me with his amazing grin, long brown hair, big green eyes and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, I was completely unprepared for the avalanche of emotions that invaded every fiber of my being. Shivers, a pounding heart, and heat overcame me when he asked if I knew the value of 1,000 to the 25th power. The only answer I could think of, as I fumbled over my words, was “love me, love me,” but I managed to blurt out “1E+75.” I wanted to come across as smart and aloof, but every time he looked at me, I started stuttering and sweating as my face turned bright red. No one had ever looked at me like that: as if he knew me, as if he knew how lost I was and how badly I needed to be loved.

Hank, who was a year older than me, was very popular and accomplished. Unlike other boys who were popular for their looks or athletic skills, Hank was smart and talented. He played piano and guitar, and composed the most beautiful classical and rock concertos that left both teachers and students in awe.

Unlike Hank, I had not quite come into my own yet. I was shy, had raggedy messy hair that I tied back into braids, and my clothes were far from stylish. My mother and sister had been on the road touring for the past year with the Broadway show “Annie.” My sister had been cast as a principal orphan, and I stayed home with my dad to attend high school. My dad was always busy with work and martini dinners that lasted late into the night. I spent most of my evenings at home alone baking and making care packages for my sister instead of coercing my parents to buy me the latest selection of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans — the rich colored bluejeans with the swan stitched on the back pocket that you had to lie on your bed to zip up. It was the icon of cool for the popular and pretty girls. I was neither, but Hank picked me to be his math partner anyway.

With every equation we solved, my love for Hank became more desperate. After several months of exchanging smiles, I decided to make Hank a batch of my chocolate brownies for Valentine’s Day — the brownies that my dad said were like his own personal nirvana. My dad named them “closet” brownies, because when I was a little girl and used to make them for the family, he said that as soon as he smelled them coming out of the oven, he could imagine dashing away with them into the closet and devouring the whole batch.

After debating for hours if I should make the brownies with walnuts or chips, or fill the centers with peanut butter or caramel, I got to work. I had made brownies hundreds of times before, but this time felt different. With each ingredient I carefully stirred into the bowl, my heart began beating harder. I felt like I was going to burst from excitement. Surely, after Hank tasted these, he would love me as much as I loved him. I was not just making him brownies. I was showing him who I was, and what mattered to me. After the brownies cooled, I sprinkled them with a touch of powdered sugar and wrapped them with foil and red tissue paper. The next day I placed them in Hank’s locker, with a note saying, “Call me.”

After seven excruciating days with no call, some smiles and the usual small talk in math class, I conjured up the nerve to ask Hank if he liked my brownies.

“The brownies were from you?” he asked. “They were delicious.”

Then Hank invited me to a party at his house the following weekend. Without hesitation, I responded that I would love to come. I pleaded with my friend Sarah to accompany me.

As the day grew closer, I made my grandmother Beauty’s homemade fudge — the chocolate fudge she made for Papa the night before he proposed to her. Stirring the milk, butter and sugar together eased my nerves. I had never been to a high school party before, and I didn’t know what to expect. Sarah advised me to ditch the braids as she styled my hair, used a violet eyeliner and lent me her favorite V-neck sweater and a pair of her best Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

When we walked in the door, fudge in hand, Hank was nowhere to be found. Thinking I had made a mistake for coming and getting ready to leave, I felt a hand on my back. It was Hank’s. He hugged me and told me he was glad I finally arrived. When Hank put his arm around me, nothing else existed. With a little help from Cupid or the magic of Beauty’s recipes, I found love.

---

Fat Dad’s ‘Closet’ Brownies

These brownies are more like fudge than cake and contain a fraction of the flour found in traditional brownie recipes. My father called them “closet” brownies, because when he smelled them coming out of the oven he could imagine hiding in the closet to eat the whole batch. I baked them in the ninth grade for a boy that I had a crush on, and they were more effective than Cupid’s arrow at winning his heart.

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing the pan
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped, or semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs at room temperature, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Fresh berries or powdered sugar for garnish (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease an 8-inch square baking dish.

3. In a double boiler, melt chocolate. Then add butter, melt and stir to blend. Remove from heat and pour into a mixing bowl. Stir in sugar, eggs and vanilla and mix well.

4. Add flour. Mix well until very smooth. Add chopped walnuts if desired. Pour batter into greased baking pan.

5. Bake for 35 minutes, or until set and barely firm in the middle. Allow to cool on a rack before removing from pan. Optional: garnish with powdered sugar, or berries, or both.

Yield: 16 brownies

---

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father appears occasionally on Well.

Read More..

Airbus and Boeing on Different Paths on Battery

When it comes to the volatile new lithium-ion battery technology, Boeing and Airbus are heading in different directions.

Faced with the potential of a lengthy investigation into what caused batteries on two Boeing 787 jets to ignite or emit smoke last month, Airbus said Friday that it had dropped plans to use the technology on its forthcoming wide-body jet, the A350-XWB, to avoid possible delays in producing the planes. But Boeing, which has much more at stake, said later in the day that it would stick with the batteries and that it was working with regulators to reduce risks even if the cause of the hazards is not clearly found.

All 50 of the 787s delivered so far were grounded in mid-January. And even though the problems have embarrassed Boeing and could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars, the company said Friday, “There’s nothing we’ve learned in the investigations that would lead us to a different decision regarding lithium-ion batteries.”

To some extent, Boeing’s bravado reflects a sense among battery experts that they have narrowed down the ways that the batteries, made by a Japanese company, GS Yuasa, could fail. That then increases the chances that a handful of changes may eventually provide enough assurance that the batteries would be safe to use.

Airbus was planning on a more limited use of the lithium-ion batteries than Boeing, and by switching to the more traditional nickel-cadmium batteries, the company can make the necessary changes as it is building the planes. Boeing, on the other hand, has a strong motivation to stick with the lithium-ion batteries in hopes that a solution will emerge.

Under flight safety regulations, industry and government officials said, Boeing might not have to go through as extensive — and time-consuming — an approval process if it redesigned the lithium-ion batteries as it would if it switched to the conventional batteries.

Even though the behavior of the more traditional batteries is better understood, they have not yet been certified for use in the 787s, and the batteries and related parts of the plane’s electrical system would have to be created and tested from scratch. Under the safety directive grounding the planes, Boeing might have a more straightforward path to get them flying again if it could persuade the Federal Aviation Administration that redesigning the lithium-ion batteries would work.

Federal and industry officials said Boeing would probably have to spread the eight cells in the batteries farther apart — or increase the insulation between them — to keep a failure in one cell from cascading to the others in the “thermal runaway” that led to the smoke and fire. Battery experts are also looking into whether vibrations in flight could have added to the risks of unwanted contact between the cells. And Boeing would undoubtedly have to wall off the battery within a sturdier metal container and make it easier to vent any hazardous materials outside the plane.

Aviation experts said the examination of such changes reflected what could end up being a difficult calculation for safety regulators: Will there be a way to assure the safety of the batteries if they cannot tell for certain what set off the problems on the two planes?

Until now, most of the public statements by regulators have focused on the need to pin down the cause of the battery problems. But investigators, now weeks into their work, have only been able to find limited clues in the charred remains of the two batteries.

As a result, government and outside experts, working closely with Boeing engineers, have been studying the research on lithium-ion batteries carried out since Boeing won approval for its batteries in 2007 and, in essence, trying to come up with a safer design.

Government and industry officials said Friday that it was still too early to know if Boeing could devise enough changes to satisfy regulators and the flying public.

Airbus said it started informing airline customers on Thursday that it would not move ahead with an original plan to use the lithium-ion batteries on its A350s.

“Airbus considers this to be the most appropriate way forward in the interest of program execution and reliability,” said Marcella Muratore, an Airbus spokeswoman.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized incidents in January involving lithium-ion batteries in Boeing 787 Dreamliners. In one case a battery caught fire, and in another a battery emitted smoke; both batteries did not catch fire.

Read More..

Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who made history last year as the first double amputee runner to compete in the Olympics using prosthetic blades, will spend the night in jail Thursday after he was charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend at his house, prosecutors said.

The National Prosecuting Authority said Pistorius would remain in custody until his hearing Friday, when police intend to oppose bail.

Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model, died after being shot several times in the head and arm in Pistorius’ house in an upscale suburb in Pretoria.

PHOTOS: Pistorius in the London Olympics

Pistorius was ushered from the home by police Thursday morning with a gray hoodie covering his head and obscuring most of his face.

South Africans were in shock about the accusation against Pistorius, who became a hero during his long battle for the right to compete in the Olympics. After a controversy on whether the blades he uses to walk and run gave him an advantage in races, Pistorius was granted the right to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of murder and violent crime, and many South Africans keep guns at home to guard against intruders.

The Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld suggested that Pistorius mistook his girlfriend for a burglar and killed her accidentally.

However, a police spokeswoman, Brig. Denise Beukes, said police were “surprised” at reports the killing was accidental, adding that that version hadn’t come from police, according to the South African Press Assn.

"I confirm there had been previous incidents of a domestic nature at his place,” said Beukes, adding that police couldn’t comment on the decision to oppose bail.

Beukes said police had interviewed neighbors who heard sounds at Pistorius’ home earlier in the evening, and also at the time the incident reportedly took place.

Pistorius’ father, Henke Pistorius, said his son was sad. But the older Pistorius said he didn’t know the facts.

“I don’t know nothing. It will be extremely obnoxious and rude to speculate,” he said in a radio interview. “If anyone makes a statement, it will have to be Oscar.”

An advertisement for Nike, one of Pistorius’ major sponsors, was removed from his official website Thursday. It had shown the athlete in a green lycra athletic suit and the slogan, “I am the bullet in the chamber."

ALSO:

Six arrested in Acapulco rape case

Iranian general reportedly assassinated while traveling from Syria

British case of new virus suggests person-to-person transmission

Read More..

<em>Times</em> Reporter Disputes Tesla's Claims, 'Cannot Account' for Data Conflict

New York Times reporter John Broder responded in detail Thursday to Tesla president Elon Musk’s data-driven takedown of Broder’s review of the Model S sedan. And it’s becoming clear that in the credibility battle between a veteran reporter’s notebook and Tesla’s hard data, data has the edge.

In Broder’s second follow-up piece about his trip, he addresses Elon Musk’s blog post point-by-point. He easily dispatches Musk’s claim that the Model S never ran out of juice. The Model S logs analyzed by Tesla may have shown that the battery still had some charge in it, but it’s undisputed that the car announced to Broder that it was shutting down. As Broder writes, “The car’s display screen said the car was shutting down, and it did.” That the battery still had some residual charge left is irrelevant. Score this one to Broder.

But on other points, details in Broder’s original article are plainly at odds with Tesla’s data, and Broder’s explanations are unsatisfying. Take this passage from his review:

I began following Tesla’s range-maximization guidelines, which meant dispensing with such battery-draining amenities as warming the cabin and keeping up with traffic. I turned the climate control to low — the temperature was still in the 30s — and planted myself in the far right lane with the cruise control set at 54 miles per hour (the speed limit is 65). Buicks and 18-wheelers flew past, their drivers staring at the nail-polish-red wondercar with California dealer plates.

Musk disputes that Broder turned down the heat, but as Broder points out accurately, Tesla’s logs show that he did just that. But the logs also show that Broder never cruised as slow as 54 miles per hour, nor did he later slog along at 45 miles an hour in a desperate effort to reach a charging station. Broder’s response Thursday relies on his memory, and some shoulder-shrugging.

I do recall setting the cruise control to about 54 m.p.h., as I wrote. The log shows the car traveling about 60 m.p.h. for a nearly 100-mile stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike. I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have impacted the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters.

He goes on:

Certainly, and as Tesla’s logs clearly show, much of my driving was at or well below the 65 m.p.h. speed limit, with only a single momentary spike above 80. Most drivers are aware that cars can speed up, even sometimes when cruise control is engaged, on downhill stretches.

That strains credulity a bit. Modern cruise control systems generally maintain vehicle speed even on downhill slopes. They aren’t prone to a 15 mile per hour speed boost.

Tesla’s charging data notes that during one of the charging stops, Broder plugged in for 47 minutes, but he claims in his article that he spent 58 minutes plugged in. “According to my notes,” Broder writes, “I plugged into the Milford Supercharger at 5:45 p.m. and disconnected at 6:43 p.m.”

None of these unresolved discrepancies go to the root of Broder’s original article, or the trouble the Model S had on the drive. The root of the problem was that when Broder tucked in for the night in Groton, Connecticut, the car showed it was good for another 90 miles. By morning that number had dropped to 25 miles as a result of nothing more than cold weather.

That’s a dramatic loss in range, and in his new response Broder takes Tesla to task for not providing him with enough detail about driving the Model S in colder climes. Tesla spokeswoman Shanna Hendriks disputes that too, and insists the automaker offered to find Broder a hotel where he could charge the electric sedan overnight, which would have started him off with the electrical equivalent of a full tank.

But what this grudge match is no longer about the Model S’s suitability for road trips. It’s about old-school reporting, based on note-taking and memory, peppered with color and craft, versus the precision of numbers and data. And the Times is now obliged to address it on those terms. Because in the end, Broder either set his cruise control for 54 miles and hour, or he didn’t.

Read More..

Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: CBS Reports Record Operating Income for 4th Quarter

The CBS Corporation set records in the fourth quarter for operating income and adjusted operating income, the company said Thursday, but the results were short of some analysts’ expectations and its share price fell in after-hours trading.

The adjusted net earnings of $414 million produced earnings of 64 cents a share, also a quarterly record for CBS, though some analysts had forecast income as high as 69 cents.

CBS, which reported full-year results for 2012 as well as for the quarter ending Dec. 31, also announced an additional stock buyback of $1 billion. That brings the total amount of stock CBS has committed to repurchasing for the current year to $2.2 billion.

Over all, CBS demonstrated improved results in most financial categories and divisions. Revenues for the quarter rose to $3.7 billion, up 2 percent from $3.61 billion for the comparable quarter in 2011.

The company reported net income of $393 million, or 60 cents a share, up 6.2 percent from $370 million, or 55 cents a share, in the fourth quarter of 2011.

CBS cited increases in advertising revenue in the quarter, partly driven by political commercials in an election year. The CBS broadcast network continues to be the most watched in television and will most likely beat all its competitors in the significant ratings categories for the current season.

The company also had increases from subscription fees, driven by improvement in its cable networks. Showtime, the pay-cable channel owned by CBS, has experienced growth in subscriptions, thanks in part to its award-winning drama “Homeland.” CBS has pressed for years for increased compensation from cable systems for the rights to carry CBS broadcast stations, and Thursday the company reported that retransmission fees were also up for the quarter, part of 9 percent growth overall in affiliate and subscription fees.

Adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization increased 6 percent to $866 million, from $814 million the year before. Operating income increased 12 percent to $726 million, up from $647 million.

For the full year CBS also produced some encouraging results. The company reported revenue of $14.09 billion, up 3 percent from $13.64 billion in 2011. Adjusted income increased to $3.49 billion from $3.16 billion. Operating income of $2.98 billion was up from $2.62 billion in 2011. All represented new highs for CBS.

One troubling area was publishing. Revenue decreased at CBS’s Simon & Schuster unit, to $215 million from $229 million in 2011. CBS attributed the drop to decreasing print book sales that could not be offset by increasing e-book sales.

CBS reported its financial results after the stock market closed. In after-hours trading, its stock fell 44 cents, to $42.50.

Read More..

Dorner manhunt: Investigators work to ID charred human remains

After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying the human remains found in the charred cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was believed to have been holed up after trading gunfire with officers, authorities said.

If the body is identified as Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy Reserve lieutenant suspected in a string of shootings following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died in the case, allegedly at Dorner’s hands.

Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until the body was identified as Dorner. Police remained on tactical alert and were conducting themselves as if nothing had changed in the case, officials said.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

The latest burst of gunfire came Tuesday after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, fatally shot a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another, officials said. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.

"This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. "I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."

The injured deputy is expected to survive but it is anticipated he will need several surgeries. The names of the two deputies have not been released.

TIMELINE: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender, officials said. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames, officials said.

Last week, authorities said they had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside, the said, and the only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.

According to a manifesto that officials say Dorner posted on Facebook, he felt the LAPD unjustly fired him several years ago, when a disciplinary panel determined that he lied in accusing his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest. Beck has promised to review the case.

DOCUMENT: Read the manifesto

The manifesto vows "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago," it said.

On Tuesday morning, two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding news conferences about the manhunt.

The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin, the official said. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.

FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for ex-cop

Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup, authorities said. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.

A short time later, authorities said, the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Searching for suspected shooter

"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.

Read More..

Domestic-Drone Industry Prepares for Big Battle With Regulators

For a day, a sandy-haired Virginian named Jeremy Novara was the hero of the nascent domestic drone industry.

Novara went to the microphone at a ballroom in a Ritz-Carlton outside Washington, D.C. on Wednesday and did something many in his business want to do: tenaciously challenge the drone regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration to loosen restrictions on unmanned planes over the United States. Judging from the reaction he received, and from the stated intentions of the drone advocates who convened the forum, the domestic-drone industry expects to do a lot more of that in the coming months.

There’s been a lot of hype around unmanned drones becoming a fixture over U.S. airspace, both for law enforcement use and for operations by businesses as varied as farmers and filmmakers. All have big implications for traditional conceptions of privacy, as unmanned planes can loiter over people’s backyards and snap pictures for far longer than piloted aircraft. The government is anticipating that drone makers could generate a windfall of cash as drones move from a military to a civilian role: Jim Williams of the Federal Aviation Administration told the Wednesday conclave of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) that the potential market for government and commercial drones could generate “nearly $90 billion in economic activity” over the next decade. $90 billion.

But there’s an obstacle: the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA has been reluctant to grant licenses to drone makers, out of the fear that the drones — which maneuver poorly, have alarming crash rates, are spoofable, and don’t have the sensing capacity to spot approaching aircraft — will complicate and endanger U.S. airspace. (Nor has it been transparent about the licenses it grants: The Electronic Frontier Foundation had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn who’s operating drones in America.) A push last year by Congress and the Obama administration directing the FAA to fully integrate unmanned aircraft into American skies hasn’t been nearly enough for the drone makers: The FAA is months late in designating six test sites for drones around the country.

“When will the test site selection begin? I’m sure that’s what all of you are asking now,” Williams, the head of the FAA’s drone integration department, told the AUVSI crowd. (It’ll start at the end of the month.)

Drone makers are also frustrated by the logic of existing FAA regulations. Currently, a drone weighing under 55 pounds, flying below 400 feet within an operator’s line of sight and away from an airport is considered a model airplane, and cleared to fly without a license. That is, if it’s not engaging in any for-profit activity — sort of. “A farmer can be a modeller if they operate their aircraft as a hobby or for recreational purposes,” Williams said.

Enter Novara, a 31-year old who owns a small drone business in Falls Church, Va. called Vanilla Aircraft. “If a farmer, who hopefully is profit-minded, can fly as a hobbyist an unmanned aircraft,” Novara challenged Williams, “why can’t I, as the owner of an unmanned aircraft company, fly as a hobbyist my own unmanned aircraft over property that I own? The guidelines before this [2012 legislation] were that any commercial intent is prohibited, but–”

“I didn’t change any guidelines,” Williams interrupted. “I didn’t say that any guidelines changed. I said that if a farmer as an individual wants to operate an unmanned aircraft according to the modeling rules, they can do that. The FAA rules are very clear about for-compensation and hire. If you’re going to operate an aircraft for compensation or hire, there’s a different set of rules that apply. So, you know, I’m not gonna split hairs over whether the farmer is making a profit or not, nor are we going to go look for him, but the bottom line is the rules are the rules and we have to enforce them until they’re changed.”

“So unmanned aircraft companies can operate R&D as long as they’re within the modeling guidelines?” Novara continued. Laughter and applause broke out among the hundreds of drone enthusiasts inside the Tyson’s Corner Ritz-Carlton.

“That’s why we have experimental certificates, to allow manufacturers–”

“The farmer doesn’t need an experimental certificate,” Novara pressed, “and everyone knows the experimental certificate process is available but not actually functional.”

Williams conceded that the current FAA rules “need to change,” since they were written for manned aircraft, “and that’s why we’re working hard to get the small unmanned aircraft rule out that will help resolve these issues. Until such time, we have to enforce the rules that are in place.”

“Is everyone else clear on this?” Novara asked, to bales of laughter. Some in the crowd shouted “No!” It felt like pent-up frustrations were being taken out on Williams, to the point where Novara added, apologetically, “I’m not trying to put this on you.”

But to the crowd at AUVSI, Novara was a hero. Outside the hall as he walked by, an older man slapped him on the shoulder and laughed, “Hey, troublemaker! I need to talk to you later!”

Expect a lot more troublemaking over the coming months. And if the domestic drone industry doesn’t succeed in getting the FAA to move fast enough for it, it’s prepared to pressure Congress to kick the FAA into gear. “Every company needs to call their Congressman,” said Peter Bale, the chairman of the board of AUVSI. April 9 is the organization’s “Day on The Hill,” when the drone industry intends to put the screws to legislators and their staff.

Novara says that he’s pessimistic that the lobbying will do any good for him: he expects it to benefit the aviation giants with established drone businesses with the government instead. (Especially as they’re the ones that make the campaign contributions.) He’s sympathetic to the FAA’s commitment to aviation safety: “I’m not advocating anarchy in the skies,” he says. But Novara sees a potential for the commercial domestic drone sector to get regulated out of business before a domestic drone boom actually starts.

“If we were all smart guys, we’d be in consumer products, right?” Novara tells Danger Room. “It’s what I like doing. There’s just no money in it.”

As the domestic-drone industry gets ready to press the FAA and Congress to loosen regulations on unmanned planes in U.S. airspace, there’s something to keep in mind. The FAA’s mandate is to protect the safety of air travel — not the privacy rights of Americans.

Read More..

Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Fitness Tracker

Marathon, half-marathon, 10k and 5K training plans to get you race ready.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

Read More..

Hagel's Defense nomination OKd by Senate Armed Services Committee

WASHINGTON — After a contentious debate, the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday narrowly approved former Sen. Chuck Hagel to be secretary of Defense, moving the fight over President Obama's controversial Cabinet choice to the full Senate.

Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, won the 26-member panel's endorsement with only Democratic votes. All 11 Republicans present voted against his nomination; one GOP senator was absent.

The full Senate will begin considering Hagel's nomination Wednesday, with a final vote possible by week's end. Several GOP senators have threatened to delay the vote, but the White House appears confident it has enough votes to prevail. Hagel, who would replace Leon E. Panetta, already has scheduled his first foreign trip as secretary for Feb. 20.

The two-hour hearing grew heated after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) complained that Hagel did not report the source of $200,000 in income, saying it may have come "directly from North Korea." Cruz acknowledged that he had "no evidence" to support that charge.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman, countered that Hagel had complied with all the committee's financial disclosure requirements, including for foreign sources of income. He chided Cruz, the panel's most junior Republican, for offering "innuendo" without evidence.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) reacted more strongly, calling Cruz's remarks "out of line."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former close friend of Hagel who has been sharply critical of the nominee's views on Iraq, defended him. Like McCain, Hagel served in combat in the Vietnam War, and he was wounded twice in battle.

"Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. He served his country and no one on this committee should impugn his integrity," McCain said.

The tense exchange brought to the surface concerns of several members that the Armed Services Committee, which traditionally has operated in a more bipartisan fashion than other congressional panels, was losing that spirit.

Other Republican criticism focused on issues that emerged before and during Hagel's Jan. 31 confirmation hearing, including his past statements on Iran and Israel, and concerns that he will oversee a significant reduction in Pentagon spending.

Members also cited Hagel's widely panned performance at his confirmation hearing, at which he appeared tentative and unsure at times. McCain called it the worst of any Defense nominee he'd seen.

Even a supporter, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), said she wished he had appeared "feistier."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Hagel's chief critics, said: "The next secretary of Defense is going to have to deal with a world on fire. I just believe that the testimony of Sen. Hagel was not reassuring."

Several Republicans have vowed to delay or derail a final Senate vote on Hagel.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) has said he would insist that Hagel overcome a filibuster, which would require the support of 60 senators to end debate and move to a final up-or-down vote.

Graham has threatened to hold Hagel's nomination until the White House answers specific questions about Obama's actions on Sept. 11, 2012, when armed militants stormed a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and killed four Americans.

Other Republican senators who say they will vote against Hagel also say that they oppose a filibuster.

The White House believes all 53 Democratic senators and the two independents who caucus with the party will support Hagel's confirmation. Two Republicans — Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns of Nebraska — also have said they would vote yes.

michael.memoli@latimes.com

Read More..