The Lede Blog: A 'Black Bloc' Emerges in Egypt

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Last Updated, Saturday, 10:17 a.m. While using Twitter to narrate events in Tahrir Square on Friday, people in Egypt described tires burning in the street, protesters blocking traffic and hurling rocks, and police officers launching tear gas in an effort to break up crowds that had gathered to protest against the Muslim Brotherhood and the country’s new Islamist president.

Many of the actions described on Friday appeared to hew to a script that has become familiar over the past two years, but some in the crowds of protesters appeared to be using new tactics, dressing from head to toe in black, covering their faces with bandannas or kerchiefs and brandishing black flags as they skirmished with security forces.

“Asked one of them who they are they said we don’t talk to media but we are black bloc,” wrote ‏the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr, adding that a member of the group had “mentioned anarchism.”

An article filed on Thursday by The Associated Press reported the presence of a “previously unknown group calling itself the black block.” The article continued, “Wearing black masks and waving black banners, it warned the Muslim Brotherhood of using its ‘military wing’ to put down protests.”

Although largely new in Cairo, the term “black bloc” has been used for years in the United States and Europe to describe a tactic commonly used by anarchists and anticapitalists during large-scale political demonstrations that occasionally devolve into street fights with the authorities.

Participants in the bloc typically dress in black to foster a sense of unity and to make it difficult for witnesses to differentiate between individuals. Members of the bloc often blend in with larger groups of protesters, then break away, linking arms as they rush down streets.

In the United States, at least, black bloc members usually eschew violence against people but have few compunctions about damaging property.

The tactic received attention during the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, when youths dressed in black broke windows and spray-painted graffiti on buildings.

In St. Paul, during the 2008 Republican National Convention, black bloc members roamed through the city smashing bank windows and using hammers to batter a police car.

It is unclear whether there are any connections between American and Egyptian black bloc participants, but the site anarchistnews.org posted a message about occurrences in Cairo, quoting the blog Even If Your Voice Shakes.

Last night, anarchism left the graffitied walls, small conversations, and online forums of Egypt, and came to life in Cairo, declaring itself a new force in the ongoing social revolution sparked two years ago with multiple firebombings against Muslim Brotherhood offices. Later, the government shutdown the “Black Blocairo” and “Egyptian Black Bloc” Facebook pages, but they were soon re-launched.

The site went on to say that Egyptian anarchists had firebombed the Shura Council.

As my colleague Robert Mackey reports, an Egyptian journalist, Sarah El Sirgany, wrote on Twitter, “Vendors tell me it was the Black Block group that attempted to storm the Ikhwan Online building sparking the fight.”

Later, she added, “Now those who had continued the fight are heading to Tahrir, flag of Black Block flying high.”

This week, a video was uploaded to an Egyptian YouTube channel titled “Black Bloc Egypt.” Accompanied by driving music the video shows masked people marching while holding aloft black banners, a black flag with an anarchy symbol and an Egyptian flag.

Egyptian journalists and bloggers wondered what to make of the black bloc in Egypt. In a place where sexual assaults and gropings remain common, one journalist, Ghazala Irshad, reported from Cairo that the “self-proclaimed” anti-Muslim-Brotherhood militia “has female members.”

The activist bloggers Gigi Ibrahim, Adel Abdel Ghafar, Bassem Sabry and Egyptocracy wrote that they were troubled by the development.

This post was revised after publication to reflect comments on Twitter by the journalist Ghazala Irshad, who asked us to clarify that she was merely reporting on the presence of the Black Bloc, not admiring them as we first reported.

Additional reporting was contributed by Robert Mackey.

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Gadgetwise Blog: Is January the Time to Buy Electronics?

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At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, manufacturers tantalized consumers with new electronics soon to hit the shelves. But what does that do to the prices of current models that are being replaced? Is this a golden buying opportunity?

Yes and no. Yes for TVs, no for laptops. I’ll explain.

Decide.com, which tracks the price of electronics, studied what happened to the cost of TVs and laptops in past years after C.E.S.

What it found is that TV prices dip to near yearly lows after the show, matching holiday prices. With the average price of the top 250 TVs at $1,057, the post-show average is projected to drop an average of $211, to $846, based on data from previous  years. That is a 20 percent savings.

Laptops don’t drop so steeply. After the show, the 100 most popular laptops have historically been discounted 8 percent. This year that would mean the top 100 laptops, which average $780 in price, would be reduced $62, to $718.

Laptop price are lowest in late June through early July, right before the back to school sales, and during the last two weeks of September, after those sales, according to Decide.com’s data. At those times the discounts are typically 10 percent.

Of course, averages can be deceiving. Prices are volatile all year around, so a particular TV or computer you want could be discounted far more at any time.

There are a number of browser add-ons and apps that let you track prices of individual products, or you can use Decide.com – but it will cost you. Membership is $5 a month or $30 a year for full access.

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Diner’s Journal Blog: PepsiCo Will Halt Use of Additive in Gatorade

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PepsiCo announced on Friday that it would no longer use an ingredient in Gatorade after consumers complained.

The ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, which was used in citrus versions of the sports drink to prevent the flavorings from separating, was the object of a petition started on Change.org by Sarah Kavanagh, a 15-year-old from Hattiesburg, Miss., who became concerned about the ingredient after reading about it online. Studies have suggested there are possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones.

The petition attracted more than 200,000 signatures, and this week, Ms. Kavanagh was in New York City to tape a segment for “The Dr. Oz Show.” She visited The New York Times on Wednesday and while there said, “I just don’t understand why they can’t use something else instead of B.V.O.”

“I was in algebra class and one of my friends kicked me and said, ‘Have you seen this on Twitter?’ ” Ms. Kavanagh said in a phone interview on Friday evening. “I asked the teacher if I could slip out to the bathroom, and I called my mom and said, ‘Mom, we won.’ ”

Molly Carter, a spokeswoman for Gatorade, said the company had been testing alternatives to the chemical for roughly a year “due to customer feedback.” She said Gatorade initially was not going to make an announcement, “since we don’t find a health and safety risk with B.V.O.”

Because of the petition, though, Ms. Carter said the company had changed its mind, and an unidentified executive there gave Beverage Digest, a trade publication, the news for its Jan. 25 issue.

Previously, a spokesman for PepsiCo had said in an e-mail, “We appreciate Sarah as a fan of Gatorade, and her concern has been heard.”

Brominated vegetable oil will be replaced by sucrose acetate isobutyrate, an emulsifier that is “generally recognized as safe” as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration. The new ingredient will be added to orange, citrus cooler and lemonade Gatorade, as well Gatorade X-Factor orange, Gatorade Xtremo citrus cooler and a powdered form of the drink called “glacier freeze.”

Ms. Carter said consumers would start seeing the new ingredient over the next few months as existing supplies of Gatorade sell out and are replaced.

Health advocates applauded the company’s move. “Kudos to PepsiCo for doing the responsible thing on its own and not waiting for the F.D.A. to force it to,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Mr. Jacobson has championed the removal of brominated vegetable oil from foods and beverages for the last several decades, but the F.D.A. has left it in a sort of limbo, citing budgetary constraints that it says keep it from going through the process needed to formally ban the chemical or declare it safe once and for all.

Brominated vegetable oil is banned as a food ingredient in Japan and the European Union. About 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain it, including Mountain Dew, which is also made by PepsiCo; some flavors of Powerade and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

PepsiCo said it had no plans to remove the ingredient from Mountain Dew and Diet Mountain Dew, both of which generate more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Heather White, executive director at the Environmental Working Group, said of PepsiCo’s decision, “We can only hope that other companies will follow suit.” She added, “We need to overhaul how F.D.A. keeps up with the latest science on food additives to better protect public health.”

Ms. Kavanagh agreed. “I’ve been thinking about ways to take this to the next level, and I’m thinking about taking it to the F.D.A. and asking them why they aren’t doing something about it,” she said. “I’m not sure yet, but I think that’s where I’d like to go with this.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the 15-year-old who started a petition on Change.org to end the use of brominated vegetable oil in Gatorade. She is Sarah Kavanagh, not Kavanaugh.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/26/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: PepsiCo Will Halt Additive Use In Gatorade.
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Diner’s Journal Blog: PepsiCo Will Halt Use of Additive in Gatorade

Labels:

PepsiCo announced on Friday that it would no longer use an ingredient in Gatorade after consumers complained.

The ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, which was used in citrus versions of the sports drink to prevent the flavorings from separating, was the object of a petition started on Change.org by Sarah Kavanagh, a 15-year-old from Hattiesburg, Miss., who became concerned about the ingredient after reading about it online. Studies have suggested there are possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones.

The petition attracted more than 200,000 signatures, and this week, Ms. Kavanagh was in New York City to tape a segment for “The Dr. Oz Show.” She visited The New York Times on Wednesday and while there said, “I just don’t understand why they can’t use something else instead of B.V.O.”

“I was in algebra class and one of my friends kicked me and said, ‘Have you seen this on Twitter?’ ” Ms. Kavanagh said in a phone interview on Friday evening. “I asked the teacher if I could slip out to the bathroom, and I called my mom and said, ‘Mom, we won.’ ”

Molly Carter, a spokeswoman for Gatorade, said the company had been testing alternatives to the chemical for roughly a year “due to customer feedback.” She said Gatorade initially was not going to make an announcement, “since we don’t find a health and safety risk with B.V.O.”

Because of the petition, though, Ms. Carter said the company had changed its mind, and an unidentified executive there gave Beverage Digest, a trade publication, the news for its Jan. 25 issue.

Previously, a spokesman for PepsiCo had said in an e-mail, “We appreciate Sarah as a fan of Gatorade, and her concern has been heard.”

Brominated vegetable oil will be replaced by sucrose acetate isobutyrate, an emulsifier that is “generally recognized as safe” as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration. The new ingredient will be added to orange, citrus cooler and lemonade Gatorade, as well Gatorade X-Factor orange, Gatorade Xtremo citrus cooler and a powdered form of the drink called “glacier freeze.”

Ms. Carter said consumers would start seeing the new ingredient over the next few months as existing supplies of Gatorade sell out and are replaced.

Health advocates applauded the company’s move. “Kudos to PepsiCo for doing the responsible thing on its own and not waiting for the F.D.A. to force it to,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Mr. Jacobson has championed the removal of brominated vegetable oil from foods and beverages for the last several decades, but the F.D.A. has left it in a sort of limbo, citing budgetary constraints that it says keep it from going through the process needed to formally ban the chemical or declare it safe once and for all.

Brominated vegetable oil is banned as a food ingredient in Japan and the European Union. About 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain it, including Mountain Dew, which is also made by PepsiCo; some flavors of Powerade and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

PepsiCo said it had no plans to remove the ingredient from Mountain Dew and Diet Mountain Dew, both of which generate more than $1 billion in annual sales.

Heather White, executive director at the Environmental Working Group, said of PepsiCo’s decision, “We can only hope that other companies will follow suit.” She added, “We need to overhaul how F.D.A. keeps up with the latest science on food additives to better protect public health.”

Ms. Kavanagh agreed. “I’ve been thinking about ways to take this to the next level, and I’m thinking about taking it to the F.D.A. and asking them why they aren’t doing something about it,” she said. “I’m not sure yet, but I think that’s where I’d like to go with this.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the 15-year-old who started a petition on Change.org to end the use of brominated vegetable oil in Gatorade. She is Sarah Kavanagh, not Kavanaugh.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/26/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: PepsiCo Will Halt Additive Use In Gatorade.
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Labor Relations Board Rulings Could Be Undone

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By ruling that Mr. Obama’s three recess appointments last January were illegal, the federal appeals court ruling, if upheld, would leave the board with just one member, short of the quorum needed to issue any rulings. The Obama administration could appeal the court ruling, but no announcement was made on Friday.


If the Supreme Court were to uphold Friday’s ruling, issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it would mean that the labor board did not have a quorum since last January and that all its rulings since then should be nullified.


Many Republicans and business groups applauded Friday’s ruling. They often assert that the appointments Mr. Obama made to the board have transformed it into a tool of organized labor. But many Democrats and labor unions say Mr. Obama’s appointments restored ideological balance to the board after it was tipped in favor of business interests under President George W. Bush


Mark G. Pearce, the board’s chairman, issued a statement saying the board disagreed with the ruling and suggested that other appeals courts hearing cases about the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s appointments could reach a different conclusion.


“In the meantime, the board has important work to do,” said Mr. Pearce, whose agency oversees enforcement of the laws governing strikes and unionization drives. “We will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”


Unless the Senate confirms future nominees to the board — Senate Republicans have blocked several of Mr. Obama’s board nominees — Mr. Pearce will be the only member left if Friday’s ruling is upheld. The board has five seats.


Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued a statement that urged the recess appointees to “do the right thing and step down.” He added, “To avoid further damage to the economy, the N.L.R.B. must take the responsible course and cease issuing any further opinions until a constitutionally sound quorum can be established.”


The three disputed recess appointees included two Democrats, Sharon Block, deputy labor secretary, and Richard Griffin, general counsel to the operating engineers’ union; and one Republican, Terence Flynn, a counsel to a board member. Mr. Flynn resigned last May after being accused of leaking materials about the group’s deliberations. Another Republican member, Brian Hayes, stepped down when his term expired last month.


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IHT Rendezvous: Which Companies' Sustainability Promises Do You Believe?

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H&M, the Swedish clothing retail giant, has vowed to become greener and more sustainable when it comes to the water it uses to make its clothes.

“Water is a key resource for H&M, and we are committed to ensuring water is used responsibly throughout our value chain. We do this to minimize risks in our operations, protect the environment and secure availability of water for present and future generations,” said Karl-Johan Persson, the head of H&M, in a press statement released yesterday.

The World Wildlife Fund, the venerable environmental group, will monitor the effort and collaborate with H&M in a campaign called “Pioneering Water Stewardship for Fashion” over the next three years.

With 94,000 employees selling clothes in 48 countries and 750 direct suppliers, H&M is a significant global force in the garment industry.

WWF sees H&M’s commitment to changing all aspects of its water use — from cotton to the customer — as a chance to change the way an entire industry deals with water use and pollution.

“This partnership marks an evolution in the corporate approach to water,” said James P. Leape, Director General of WWF International, according to the statement.

Just two years ago Greenpeace U.K. condemned H&M for wasting water, shaming it with commitments Puma, Adidas and Nike had made to do better. At the time Greenpeace charged: “H&M had links to factories discharging a range of hazardous chemicals into China’s rivers.”

The German sportswear-maker Puma (owned by the French PPR) has been scoring points with environmentalists on several sustainability campaigns. Two years ago, the company introduced an accounting tool that measures the sustainability of products in terms of the greenhouse gases emitted and water consumed to make them. More visible to consumers, the company has received much praise for its environmentally friendly packaging.

Even the corporate behemoth Nike, which in the ’90s was forced to fight against the image of profiting from child labor, has long vowed to be a good and sustainable corporate citizen. In 2011, it announced it wanted to stop discharging hazardous chemicals by 2020.

Join our sustainability discussion. Do you trust these multinational companies when they announce sustainability plans? Or are such announcements more public relations and marketing than honest goals?

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DealBook: Moving From Wall Street to the Tech Sector Proves Tricky

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When Vinicius Vacanti set out to make a pitch for a local deals start-up to investors, he figured he understood the process given his four years on Wall Street.

But minutes into his first meeting with a venture capitalist, Mr. Vacanti realized he would be rejected. The investor quickly pointed out the flaws, including the site’s lack of users. As Mr. Vacanti rode the bus back to New York from Boston, he considered scrapping the project and starting over.

“The skills you build on Wall Street don’t correlate to a start-up,” said Mr. Vacanti, 31, a founder of the daily deal aggregator Yipit, who previously worked at the private equity firms Blackstone Group and the Quadrangle Group. While some of those skills are useful, he said, “a couple of those are actually bad.”

As more financiers jump to the technology sector, some are finding that their background, typically considered an asset in the corporate world, can be a liability. Some do not know how to write computer code. Others are ill-prepared for the penny-pinching and frustration of start-up life. In short, they have trouble persuading the Silicon Valley establishment that they have what it takes to nurture a young company.

“We start a little skeptical of someone from a finance background,” said Eric Paley of Founder Collective, the investor who declined to back Mr. Vacanti’s original idea. “It’s the lack of having to create something for a customer, find the market opportunity and persevere through it with very, very low economics.”

The challenge has become particularly acute as big investors become more discerning with their money. While the technology scene has boomed in recent years, venture capitalists are showing signs of pulling back, especially after the struggles of Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and other former Internet darlings.

Last year, venture capitalists invested $1.78 billion in 302 deals in New York City. That compares with $2.27 billion in 317 deals in 2011, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, which use Thomson Reuters data.

“There’s definitely fewer dollars available” for young companies that need an additional round of financing, said David Pakman, a New York-based partner at the venture capital firm Venrock. “Capital is tight and getting tighter.”

For young Wall Street professionals contemplating a bleak job market, the lure of working at a start-up — with its cachet and prospects for riches — can be powerful. But many financiers are finding it difficult to make the switch.

When Evan Rose left his job at the hedge fund Dynamic Capital Management to start an online night life service, he did not know how to write code. At first, he tried to outsource the programming for the site to Web developers in India. But he had to throw out the final product. “It was pretty much gobbledygook,” said Mr. Rose, 25.

After that, he started from scratch, learning to write code using Google and online forums. It took him a year to create the finished product.

When he eventually took the project to investors, he was excited about the idea, which he called an “OpenTable for night life.” But the site, NiteFly, had a chilly reception. “Although to him it was a novel concept, we’d heard it before,” said Kyle Widrick, a venture capitalist at Burch Creative Capital who heard the pitch.

To be taken seriously, Mr. Rose realized that he would need a deeper knowledge of the intended industry. So he abandoned NiteFly to work on a different start-up, eCruit, which aims to connect corporate recruiters to college students through online video conferences.

He worked with a human resources employee at a big bank, who used his contacts to attract recruiters to the service. With a seed investment from Ted Dintersmith, a partner emeritus at Charles River Ventures, eCruit is now planning its inaugural recruiting sessions for this year.

Some first-time entrepreneurs turn to mentorship programs like Y Combinator and TechStars to gain experience and tap into sources of financing.

Olga Vidisheva, the founder of the online fashion company Shoptiques, had a classic Wall Street background when she entered Y Combinator, having spent two years at Goldman Sachs before going to Harvard Business School. Two of her earliest investors were friends from Goldman, and her first employee came from the buyout firm Providence Equity Partners.

With no technical background, Ms. Vidisheva, 27, used the opportunity at Y Combinator to find a programmer. After the three-month-long program, she also ended up raising $2 million from prominent venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Only a handful of “Wall Street refugees” have gone through Y Combinator, said Paul Graham, a founder of the incubator, adding that the number of applicants from finance has been growing in the last couple of years. “What we like about them is they tend to be pretty fierce,” Mr. Graham said. “You can point them at any problem, and if they don’t know how to solve it, they’ll figure out how to solve it and then solve it.”

Others are trying to bring their Wall Street experience to the Web, rather than entering a completely new field.

Nick Sedlet, a former quantitative strategist at Goldman Sachs, and Elli Sharef, a former management consultant at McKinsey & Company, started HireArt, a site that connects qualified job seekers with employers. They modeled the program on the in-depth interview process at Goldman and McKinsey, which require applicants to tackle math and logic problems. Prospective employees might be asked to design a marketing campaign for a fitness start-up, or calculate the amount of capital that a chief executive should invest in new property.

“McKinsey and Goldman are two institutions that have really thought about how to assess people,” said Mr. Sedlet, 27. “We saw a very easy way to make that methodology available online.”

Keenly aware of the challenges of start-up life, Mr. Vacanti, of Yipit, now writes a blog chronicling his experiences and sometimes speaks at gatherings for young professionals considering a similar path. After the disappointing meeting in 2010, Mr. Vacanti took the investor’s advice to heart and decided to “pivot,” in tech parlance, moving from offering local discounts to aggregating daily deals from sites like Groupon. In 2010, Yipit raised $1.3 million from investors; in 2011, it raised $6 million.

Last March, in response to one of Mr. Vacanti’s blog posts, Mr. Paley commented on their meeting. “Glad I could help,” Mr. Paley wrote on Twitter. “Should have invested in the pivot!”

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/25/2013, on page B6 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Moving From Wall Street to the Tech Sector Proves Tricky.
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Doctor and Patient: The Drawn Out Process of the Medical Lawsuit

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She was one of the most highly sought radiologists in her hospital, a doctor with the uncanny ability to divine the source of maladies from the shadows of black and white X-ray films.

But one afternoon my colleague revealed that she had been named in a lawsuit, accused of overlooking an irregularity on a scan several years earlier. The plaintiff suing believed my colleague had missed the first sign of a now rampant cancer.

While other radiologists tried to assure her that the “irregularity” was well within what might be considered normal, my colleague became consumed by the what-if’s. What if she had lingered longer on the fateful film? What if she had doubled-checked her reading before signing off on the report?

She began staying late at the hospital to review, and review again, her work. And she worried about her professional reputation, asking herself if colleagues were avoiding her and wondering if she would have trouble renewing her license or hospital privileges. At home she felt distracted, and her husband complained that she had become easy to anger.

After almost a year of worry, my colleague went to court and was cleared. But it was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. “I lost year of my life,” she told me. “That lawsuit completely consumed me.”

She was not the first colleague to recount such an experience. And far from overstating the issue, doctors may in fact be underestimating the extent to which malpractice not only consumes their time but also undermines their ability to care for patients, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

For more than 150 years, the medical malpractice system has loomed over health care, and doctors, the vast majority of whom will face a lawsuit sometime in their professional lives, remain ever vocal in their criticism of the system. But with few malpractice claims resulting in payments and liability premiums holding steady or even declining, doctors have started to shift their focus from the financial aspects of malpractice to the untold hours spent focused on lawsuits instead of patient care.

Now researchers are putting numbers to those doctors’ assertions. For the current study, they combed through the malpractice claims records of more than 40,000 doctors covered by a national liability insurer. They took note of the length of each claim, any payments made, severity of the injury and the specialty practiced by the physician being sued.

Most claims required almost two years to resolve from initiation of the lawsuit — and almost four years from the event in question. Cases that resulted in payment or that involved more severe patient injuries almost always took longer.

The researchers then looked at the proportion of a doctor’s career spent on an open claim. They discovered that on average, doctors spent more than four years of their careers — more time than they spent in medical school — working through one or more lawsuits. Certain specialists were more vulnerable than others. Neurosurgeons, for example, averaged well over 10 years, or more than a quarter of their professional lives, embroiled in lawsuits.

“These findings help to show why doctors care so intensely about malpractice and what they might face over the course of a lifetime,” said Seth A. Seabury, lead author and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

The results also underscored what plaintiffs must endure. Previous studies have shown that when medical errors occur, patients prefer to have physicians acknowledge the mistake quickly and apologize as soon as possible. Though less than 5 percent of all errors lead to a malpractice claim, lengthy claims drag out the process and, in certain cases, hold up what may be appropriate compensation.

Patients not directly involved can be affected as well. A legitimate malpractice lawsuit sometimes results in doctors or even entire institutions changing how they practice in order to prevent similar events. Lengthy legal wrangling can slow down these potentially important improvements.

While the findings are only an indirect measure of the extent to which malpractice claims can affect doctors’ and patients’ lives, the study makes clear the importance of considering time, as well as cost, when looking at malpractice reform.

“If we could get these cases resolved faster, we might be able to improve the efficiency of the system, lower costs and even improve quality of care for patients,” Dr. Seabury said.

“Having these things drag on is a problem for doctors and patients.”

Read More..

Doctor and Patient: The Drawn Out Process of the Medical Lawsuit

Labels:

She was one of the most highly sought radiologists in her hospital, a doctor with the uncanny ability to divine the source of maladies from the shadows of black and white X-ray films.

But one afternoon my colleague revealed that she had been named in a lawsuit, accused of overlooking an irregularity on a scan several years earlier. The plaintiff suing believed my colleague had missed the first sign of a now rampant cancer.

While other radiologists tried to assure her that the “irregularity” was well within what might be considered normal, my colleague became consumed by the what-if’s. What if she had lingered longer on the fateful film? What if she had doubled-checked her reading before signing off on the report?

She began staying late at the hospital to review, and review again, her work. And she worried about her professional reputation, asking herself if colleagues were avoiding her and wondering if she would have trouble renewing her license or hospital privileges. At home she felt distracted, and her husband complained that she had become easy to anger.

After almost a year of worry, my colleague went to court and was cleared. But it was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. “I lost year of my life,” she told me. “That lawsuit completely consumed me.”

She was not the first colleague to recount such an experience. And far from overstating the issue, doctors may in fact be underestimating the extent to which malpractice not only consumes their time but also undermines their ability to care for patients, according to a new study in Health Affairs.

For more than 150 years, the medical malpractice system has loomed over health care, and doctors, the vast majority of whom will face a lawsuit sometime in their professional lives, remain ever vocal in their criticism of the system. But with few malpractice claims resulting in payments and liability premiums holding steady or even declining, doctors have started to shift their focus from the financial aspects of malpractice to the untold hours spent focused on lawsuits instead of patient care.

Now researchers are putting numbers to those doctors’ assertions. For the current study, they combed through the malpractice claims records of more than 40,000 doctors covered by a national liability insurer. They took note of the length of each claim, any payments made, severity of the injury and the specialty practiced by the physician being sued.

Most claims required almost two years to resolve from initiation of the lawsuit — and almost four years from the event in question. Cases that resulted in payment or that involved more severe patient injuries almost always took longer.

The researchers then looked at the proportion of a doctor’s career spent on an open claim. They discovered that on average, doctors spent more than four years of their careers — more time than they spent in medical school — working through one or more lawsuits. Certain specialists were more vulnerable than others. Neurosurgeons, for example, averaged well over 10 years, or more than a quarter of their professional lives, embroiled in lawsuits.

“These findings help to show why doctors care so intensely about malpractice and what they might face over the course of a lifetime,” said Seth A. Seabury, lead author and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

The results also underscored what plaintiffs must endure. Previous studies have shown that when medical errors occur, patients prefer to have physicians acknowledge the mistake quickly and apologize as soon as possible. Though less than 5 percent of all errors lead to a malpractice claim, lengthy claims drag out the process and, in certain cases, hold up what may be appropriate compensation.

Patients not directly involved can be affected as well. A legitimate malpractice lawsuit sometimes results in doctors or even entire institutions changing how they practice in order to prevent similar events. Lengthy legal wrangling can slow down these potentially important improvements.

While the findings are only an indirect measure of the extent to which malpractice claims can affect doctors’ and patients’ lives, the study makes clear the importance of considering time, as well as cost, when looking at malpractice reform.

“If we could get these cases resolved faster, we might be able to improve the efficiency of the system, lower costs and even improve quality of care for patients,” Dr. Seabury said.

“Having these things drag on is a problem for doctors and patients.”

Read More..

Davos 2013: On Russia's To-Do List at Davos: Buff Image

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DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — This year at Davos, the Russians are working hard to make a splash.




There is a House of Russia near a main hotel and a media center for Russia at the opposite end of this ski village. And then there is the bevy of Russian politicians, business folk and cultural figures on hand trying to encourage more foreign investment and correct what many of them privately concede is a poor image abroad.


Even Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former president and now prime minister, whose political standing in Russia was tarnished by a swap of offices with Vladimir V. Putin announced in September 2011, subjected himself to a highly unusual spectacle here.


Scores of Russian experts had worked with the World Economic Forum, as the conference here is known, on a presentation they called Scenarios for Russia.


The session on Wednesday, with Mr. Medvedev gamely sitting through the judgment before speaking himself, sketched out three ways that Russia, whose economy is heavily dependent on oil and gas extraction, could develop in the near future.


Based on assumptions like falling energy prices, regional inequalities and even an open split among Russian elites, none of the three possibilities was particularly optimistic. In addition, when the audience was asked to vote on the most needed development for Russia’s near future, it overwhelmingly chose the need to improve governance and overhaul government.


Given recent developments in Moscow, that may come as no surprise. Many political analysts see moves like the recent clampdown on demonstrations and the banning of American adoptions of Russian children as signals that the government is digging in, rather than opening up to change.


Mr. Medvedev’s response, though, was more tepid than many in the audience presumably hoped to hear. He simply repeated past promises, so far unrealized, that Russia will respond positively to demographic, political and economic shifts that could change the status quo.


Sergey Guriyev, a Russian economist, presented perhaps the gloomiest situation: A schism in the Russian elite that could force eventual, possibly sudden, change, in a country still haunted by memories of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and all that followed.


The status quo “is not sustainable simply because the Russian middle class will grow and demand reforms,” Mr. Guriyev said.


Over the past 10 years, oil and gas riches trickled down to a new middle class, he argued. “Now, more income doesn’t make people happy,” he said, adding that this Russian class “is unprecedentedly educated and rich for a country with such outdated political institutions.”


Unlike Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, whose experience on the hustings of British politics lend him an ability to think on his feet and deliver punchy lines, Mr. Medvedev barely opened up to questioning from an audience that was about half the size of the one that packed the hall to hear Mr. Cameron on Thursday, a day after his gamble on European Union membership.


In private conversation, Russian businessmen deplored what they saw as a missed opportunity for Mr. Medvedev to give a forceful speech to the Davos crowd. But foreign investors invited to private sessions with the prime minister later Wednesday and earlier Thursday were much less inclined to criticize him.


Like the Russian business community, these investors are reluctant to speak on the record, citing the uncertainty of doing business in the country. What they also do not speak much about is the healthy return on their money.


While Russian business and the state accounted for most of the estimated $400 billion said by officials to have been invested in 2012, foreign investors get a good return on their money — some in high double digits, one banker said.


Russians often particularly cite China as a rival for foreign attention and money. Ruben Vardanian, a financier now at Russia’s giant Sberbank, said that while many businesspeople, domestic and foreign, saw that their activities “are much more profitable in Russia than in China,” the Chinese gave a greater sense of certainty.


While the circle of foreigners now interested in Russia is widening, Mr. Vardanian told a meeting of mostly Russian reporters, foreigners still often lament that “we can’t understand the rules of the game.”


“They don’t want to deal with, say, Mr. Vardanian, who is then replaced by Mr. Ivanov, and then by Mr. X,” he said. “They want to deal with rules.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the first name of Ruben Vardanian, a financier at Sberbank, as Reuben.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

An earlier version of the correction for this article misspelled the first name of Ruben Vardanian. It is Ruben, not Reuben.



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Britain Warns of ‘Imminent’ Threat to Westerners in Benghazi

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LONDON — Days after the deadly hostage crisis in Algeria, Britain on Thursday announced a “specific, imminent threat to Westerners” in neighboring Libya and urged any British citizens in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi to leave immediately.




Travel advice updated by the British Foreign Office also warned against “all but essential travel” to several other Libyan cities, citing a “high threat from terrorism” and a possibility of retaliatory attacks targeting Western interest in the region after the French military intervention in Mali, which preceded last week’s Islamist attack on a remote Algerian gas field near the Libyan border.


The Foreign Office did not describe the nature of the reported threat in Benghazi, where an attack on the United States diplomatic compound in September killed four Americans including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.


Since September, the British authorities have warned against all travel to Benghazi.


Earlier this week, a senior Algerian official said that several Egyptian members of the squad that attacked the Algerian gas complex were also among those who had attacked the American mission in Benghazi.


The Egyptians were among 29 kidnappers killed by Algerian forces during the four-day siege of the gas plant in which at least 37 foreign hostages and one Algerian died. Three militants were captured alive and one of them, under interrogation by Algerian security forces, recounted the Egyptians’ involvement in both attacks, the Algerian official said.


“We are aware of a specific, imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi,” the Foreign Office advisory said. “We advise against all travel to Benghazi and urge any British nationals who are there against our advice to leave immediately.”


In other Libyan places, it said, “there is a high threat from terrorism. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travelers.” The advisory did not specifically link its warnings to the kidnappings in Algeria.


Foreign Office officials declined to elaborate on the warnings.


As the crisis in Algeria unfolded, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain repeatedly warned that Al Qaeda-linked extremists and other Islamist militants in North Africa presented a growing threat to Western interests.


“Just as we have reduced the scale of the Al Qaeda threat in other parts of the world, including in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so it has grown in other parts of the world,” he said. “We need to be equally concerned about that, and equally focused on it.”


During the Algerian hostage crisis, the kidnappers depicted their attack as linked to the French intervention in Mali, in turn provoked by a lightning advance south by Islamists who have turned Mali’s desert north into a separatist redoubt.


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Nokia Shows a Profit, but Shares Drop

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BERLIN — The Finnish phone maker Nokia on Thursday reported its first quarterly profit in almost two years since entering its smartphone alliance with Microsoft, but the company’s shares fell as doubts persisted about the company’s ability to accomplish a turnaround.


The company, based in Espoo, Finland, said it had a profit of €202 million, or $269 million, in the three months through December, up from a loss of €1.1 billion loss a year earlier. Sales fell 20 percent to €8 billion from €10 billion as it phased out an older line of smartphones that used the Symbian operating system.


The company’s shares fell as much as 8.4 percent in afternoon trading in Helsinki, to 3.194, as Nokia announced that it would not pay a dividend for 2012, which would save the company about €750 million. It was the first time Nokia had not paid a dividend in recent memory, according to the company.


Mats Nystrom, an analyst at SEB Enskilda Bank in Stockholm, said that Nokia had raised investor hopes earlier this month when it said it would report a quarterly profit, but that the company had not met those expectations with results that showed less-than-expected growth in the average selling prices of its flagship Lumia smartphone line and falling cellphone prices. “I still think it is far from a certainty that this turnaround will be a success,” Mr. Nystrom said.


In a conference call with journalists, the Nokia chief executive, Stephen Elop, said the company had successfully eliminated investor concerns about its future and ability to pull off a turnaround. Nokia’s net cash on hand at the end of December, bolstered by the decision to forgo a dividend payment, rose to €4.4 billion from €3.6 billion in September.


“For investors, it was a solid quarter in which we removed concerns about our cash situation,” Mr. Elop said. The former Microsoft senior executive has closed factories across Europe and eliminated 16,500 workers from Nokia’s phone business over the past year.


The quarterly net profit was the first since Nokia announced its alliance with Microsoft in February 2011, which set off a turbulent transition that led to about €5 billion in combined losses, the laying off of a third of the company’s work force and a steep decline in its market share in smartphones, the industry’s defining segment.


While sales of Nokia’s new Lumia line, which uses Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, are accelerating, to 4.4 million units in the fourth quarter from 2.9 million in the third, the company is now a distant challenger to the industry leaders Apple and Google. The Android operating system from Google is now running nearly two-thirds of all new smartphones sold around the world.


Apple sold more than 10 times the number of iPhones during the fourth quarter, 47.8 million, and sales of Android smartphones, according to International Data Corp., reached 136 million in the third quarter. But as the largest maker of smartphones running Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8, Nokia can build on its gains.


“This is really the time now for Nokia to put up results,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an I.D.C. analyst in London. “They are almost exclusively out there with Windows 8, and Microsoft is strongly promoting the operating system. There can be no more excuses now.”


In North America, Nokia increased its sale of phone handset sales by 40 percent in the fourth quarter to 700,000 units, up from 500,000 in the third quarter. Mr. Jeronimo said those results were weak considering the sizable marketing investment in the United States and Canada by Nokia and Microsoft on Windows 8.


Nokia’s share price has fallen by more than half during its software alliance with Microsoft. The shares have risen about 13 percent this year.


In the fourth quarter, Nokia’s profit was fueled by continued cost-cutting and the introduction of the Lumia 820 and 920 smartphones running Windows Phone 8.


The new handsets helped Nokia raise the average selling price of Lumia phones in the quarter to €186, up 33 percent from €140 in the same quarter a year earlier. But the average price of Nokia’s basic cellphones, which still make up almost two-thirds of its total phone sales, fell by 3 percent to €31 from €32.


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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

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Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

(Photos: Reuters/ASAP)

The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

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Well: Can You Read the Face of Victory?

Labels:

Picture a tennis player in the moment he scores a critical point and wins a tournament. Now picture his opponent in the instant he loses the point that narrowly cost him the title. Can you tell one facial expression from the other, the look of defeat from the face of victory?

Try your hand at the images below, of professional tennis players at competitive tournaments. All were included in a new study that suggests that the more intense an emotion, the harder it is to distinguish it in a facial expression.

(Photos: Reuters/ASAP)

The researchers found that when overwhelming feelings set in, the subtle cues that convey emotion are lost, and facial expressions tend to blur. The face of joy and celebration often appears no different from the look of grief and devastation. Winning looks like losing. Pain resembles pleasure.

But that is not the case when it comes to body language. In fact, the new study found, people are better able to identify extreme emotions by reading body language than by looking solely at facial expressions. But even though we pick up on cues from the neck down to interpret emotion, we instinctively assume that it is the face that tells us everything, said Hillel Aviezer, a psychologist who carried out the new research with colleagues at Princeton University.

“When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if there’s positivity or negativity going on there,” he said. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

Dr. Aviezer and his colleagues, who published their work in the journal Science, carried out four experiments in which subjects were asked to identify emotions by looking at photographs of people in various situations. In some cases, the subjects were shown facial expressions alone. In others, they looked at body language, either alone or in combination with faces. The researchers chose photographs taken in moments when emotions were running high – as professional tennis players celebrated or agonized, as loved ones grieved at funerals, as needles punctured skin during painful body piercings.

According to classic behavioral theories, facial expressions are universal indicators of mood and emotion. So the more intense a particular emotion, the easier it should be to identify in the face. But the study showed the exact opposite. As emotions peaked in intensity, expressions became distorted, similar to the way cranking up the volume on a stereo makes the music unrecognizable.

“When emotions are extremely high, it’s as if the speakers are blaring and the signal is degraded,” said Dr. Aviezer, who is now at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “When the volume is that high, it’s hard to tell what song is playing.”

In one experiment, three groups of 15 people were shown photographs of professional tennis players winning and losing points in critical matches. When the subjects were shown the players’ expressions alone — separated from their bodies — they correctly identified their emotion only half of the time, which was no better than chance. When they looked at images of just the body with the face removed — or the body with the face intact — they were far more accurate at identifying emotions. Yet when asked, 80 percent said they were relying on the facial expressions alone. Twenty percent said they were going by body and facial cues together, and not a single one said they were looking only for gestures from the neck down.

Then, the researchers scrambled the photos, mixing faces and bodies together. The upset faces of players were randomly spliced onto the bodies of celebrating players, and vice versa.

When asked to judge the emotions, the subjects answered according to the body language. The facial expression did not seem to matter. If a losing face was spliced onto a celebrating body, the subjects tended to guess victory and jubilation. If they were looking at the face of an exuberant player placed on the body of an anguished player, the subjects guessed defeat and disappointment.

Although they were not aware of it, the subjects were clearly looking at body language, Dr. Aviezer said. Clenched fists, for example, suggested victory and celebration, while open or outstretched hands indicated a player’s disappointment.

In another experiment, the researchers looked at four other emotional “peaks.” For pain, they used the faces of men and women undergoing piercings. Grief was captured in images of mourners at a funeral. For joy, they used images of people on the reality television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” capturing their impassioned faces at the very moment they were shown their beautiful, brand new homes. And for pleasure, they went with a rather risqué option: images from an erotic Web site that showed faces at the height of orgasm.

Once again, the subjects could not correctly guess the emotions by looking at facial expressions alone. In fact, they were more likely to interpret “positive” faces as being “negative” more than the actual negative ones. When faces showing pleasure were spliced onto the body of someone in pain, for example, the subjects relied on body language and were often unaware that the facial expression was conveying the opposite emotion.

“There’s this point on ‘Extreme Makeover’ where people see their new house for the first time and the camera is on their face, so we have these wonderful photos of their expressions,” Dr. Aviezer said. “At that moment, they look like the most miserable people in the world. For a few seconds, it’s as if they are seeing their house burn down. They don’t look like you would expect.”

The researchers noted that they were not suggesting that facial expressions never indicate specific feelings – only that when the emotion is intense and at its peak, for those first few seconds, the expression is ambiguous. Dr. Aviezer said the facial musculature simply might not be suited for accurately conveying extremely intense feelings – in part because in the real world, so much of that is conveyed through situational context.

And this may not be limited to facial cues.

“Consider intense vocal expressions of grief versus joy or pleasure versus pain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, imagine sitting in a coffee shop and hearing someone behind you shriek. Is it immediately obvious whether the emotion is a positive or negative one?

“When people are experiencing a very high level of excitation,” Dr. Aviezer said, “then we see this overlap in expressions.”

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U.S. Jobless Claims Reach Lowest Mark in Five Years

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The number of Americans seeking unemployment aid fell last week to the lowest level in five years, evidence that employers are cutting fewer jobs and may step up hiring. And another measure of the United States economy intended to signal future activity increased in December from November, suggesting growth may strengthen in 2013.


The Labor Department said weekly unemployment benefit applications dropped 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 330,000. That is the fewest since January 2008. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell to 351,750. That is also the lowest in nearly five years.


The decline may reflect the government’s difficulty adjusting its numbers to account for layoffs after the holiday shopping season. Layoffs typically spike in the second week of January and then plummet. The department seeks to adjust for those trends, but the figures can still be volatile.


Applications are a proxy for layoffs. While layoffs are falling, hiring has been modest in recent months.


The Conference Board says its index of leading indicators rose 0.5 percent in December, the best showing since September. In November, the index was unchanged. The gauge is intended to anticipate economic conditions three to six months out.


A decline in applications for unemployment benefits, gains on Wall Street and increases in applications for building permits drove the index higher in December.


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The Lede Blog: Clinton Testifies on Benghazi Attacks

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Mrs. Clinton had been scheduled to testify before Congress last month, but an illness, a concussion and a blood clot near her brain forced her to postpone her appearance.

As our colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported, four State Department officials were removed from their posts on last month after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

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DealBook: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout

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The effort to take Dell private has gained a prominent, if unusual, backer: Microsoft.

The software giant is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell that would exceed $20 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars.

An investment by Microsoft — if it comes to pass — could be enough to push a leveraged buyout of the struggling computer maker over the goal line. Silver Lake, the private equity firm spearheading the takeover talks, has been seeking a deep-pocketed investor to join the effort. And Microsoft, which has not yet made a commitment, has more than $66 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft and Silver Lake, a prominent investor in technology companies, are no strangers. The private equity firm was part of a consortium that sold Skype, the online video-chatting pioneer, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago. And the two companies had discussed teaming up to make an investment in Yahoo in late 2011, before Yahoo decided against selling a minority stake in itself.

A vibrant Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans to make Windows more relevant for the tablet era, when more and more devices come with touch screens. Dell has been one of the most visible supporters of Windows 8 in its products.

That has been crucial at a time when Microsoft’s relationships with many PC makers have grown strained because of the company’s move into making computer hardware with its Surface family of tablets.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

If completed, a buyout of Dell would be the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis, reaching levels unseen since the takeovers of Hilton Hotels and the Texas energy giant TXU. Such a deal is taking advantage of Dell’s still-low stock price and the abundance of investors willing to buy up the debt issued as part of a transaction to take the company private. And Silver Lake has been working with Dell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, who is expected to contribute his nearly 16 percent stake in the company to a takeover bid.

Yet while many aspects of the potential deal have fallen into place, including a potential price of up to around $14 a share, talks between Dell and its potential buyers may still fall apart.

Shares of Dell closed up 2.2 percent on Tuesday, at $13.12. They began rising after CNBC reported Microsoft’s potential involvement in a leveraged buyout. Microsoft shares slipped 0.4 percent, to $27.15.

Microsoft’s lending a hand to Dell could make sense at a time when the PC industry is facing some of the biggest challenges in its history. Dell is one of Microsoft’s most significant, longest-lasting partners in the PC business and among the most committed to creating machines that run Windows, the operating system that is the foundation of much of Microsoft’s profits.

But PC sales were in a slump for most of last year, as consumers diverted their spending to other types of devices like tablets and smartphones. Dell, the third-biggest maker of PCs in the world, recorded a 21 percent decline in shipments of PCs during the fourth quarter of last year from the same period in 2011, according to IDC.

In a joint interview in November, Mr. Dell and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, exchanged friendly banter, as one would expect of two men who have been in business together for decades.

Mr. Dell said Mr. Ballmer had gone out of his way to reassure him that Microsoft’s Surface computers would not hurt Dell sales.

“We’ve never sold all the PCs in the world,” said Mr. Dell, sitting in a New York hotel room brimming with new Windows 8 computers made by his company. “As I’ve understood Steve’s plans here, if Surface helps Windows 8 succeed, that’s going to be good for Windows, good for Dell and good for our customers. We’re just fine with all that.”

Microsoft has been willing to open its purse strings in the past to help close partners. Last April, Microsoft committed to invest more than $600 million in Barnes & Noble’s electronic books subsidiary, in a deal that ensures a source of electronic books for Windows devices. Microsoft also agreed in 2011 to provide the Finnish cellphone maker Nokia billions of dollars’ worth of various forms of support, including marketing and research and development assistance, in exchange for Nokia’s adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/23/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout.
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Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

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The Well section of The New York Times is starting a new online featured called Ask Well. If you have a question about fitness, nutrition, illness or family health, the staff of The New York Times Health section is ready to help you find the answer.

How do you solve the problem of back pain caused by sitting in an office chair all day? Do you still need the flu shot even if you’ve had the flu? What’s the best way to heal tennis elbow? Those are some of the questions we’ve already answered in Ask Well.

Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

All questions submitted to Ask Well will be reviewed by the health staff. We’ll post selected questions and let readers vote on those they would most like to see answered. You can ask a question, vote for your favorites and read answered questions on the Ask Well Questions Page.

While Ask Well is not a source for personal medical advice (only your doctor can give you that), we can offer readers health information from the experts and guide you to various resources to help you make informed decisions. So let’s get started. Tell us what’s on your mind, and Ask Well will provide the answers.

Ask Well

Your health questions answered by Times journalists and experts.

Related Articles Also Tagged:

health

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Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

Labels:

The Well section of The New York Times is starting a new online featured called Ask Well. If you have a question about fitness, nutrition, illness or family health, the staff of The New York Times Health section is ready to help you find the answer.

How do you solve the problem of back pain caused by sitting in an office chair all day? Do you still need the flu shot even if you’ve had the flu? What’s the best way to heal tennis elbow? Those are some of the questions we’ve already answered in Ask Well.

Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

All questions submitted to Ask Well will be reviewed by the health staff. We’ll post selected questions and let readers vote on those they would most like to see answered. You can ask a question, vote for your favorites and read answered questions on the Ask Well Questions Page.

While Ask Well is not a source for personal medical advice (only your doctor can give you that), we can offer readers health information from the experts and guide you to various resources to help you make informed decisions. So let’s get started. Tell us what’s on your mind, and Ask Well will provide the answers.

Ask Well

Your health questions answered by Times journalists and experts.

Related Articles Also Tagged:

health

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Union Membership Drops Despite Job Growth

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The percentage of American workers in labor unions took an unusually large fall in 2012, dropping to 11.3 percent last year from 11.8 percent in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Wednesday.


 The total number of union members also took an unusually big drop, by 400,000, to 14.366 million, even though overall employment in the United States rose by 2.4 million nationwide last year, the B.L.S. said.


 The declines came during a period when the nation’s labor unions have been on the defensive. Wisconsin enacted a law in 2011 that curbed the collective bargaining rights of most of the state’s government employees, while Indiana and Michigan passed “right to work” laws last year that are likely to encourage more private-sector workers to drop their union membership so they do not have to pay any union dues or fees.


 The Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership for private-sector workers dropped to 6.6 last year, from 6.9 percent in 2011 – a drop that has caused some labor leaders to voice fears that unions are steadily fading into irrelevance for many large employers.


The bureau said union membership among public-sector employees fell to 35.9 percent in 2012, from 37.0 percent the previous year, and there were more union members in the public sector — 7.3 million employees – than in the private sector, 7 million.


The number of union members is down from 17.7 million in 1983, when 20.1 percent of the nation’s workers belonged to labor unions.


In recent months, however, there has been an uptick in union activity, as evidenced by labor protests at Walmart stores across the nation in November and one-day strike by fast food workers in New York City last month. In both those job actions, the workers were protesting what they said were low wages and meager benefits. But union officials acknowledge that it is often hard, in the face of intense employer resistance and employee fears of layoffs, to persuade a majority of workers at a big-box store or other workplaces to vote to unionize.


  Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main union federation, responded to the labor report in a statement, saying, “Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”


Among individual states, North Carolina had the lowest unionization rate, 2.9 percent, the B.L.S. report said, followed by Arkansas at 3.2 percent and South Carolina at 3.3 percent. New York had the highest unionization rate, 23.2 percent, followed by Alaska at 22.4 percent and Hawaii at  21.6 percent.


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IHT Rendezvous: Two Views on Liberal Arts

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This week, the IHT education section takes a look at the liberal arts, the largely North American education system that emphasizes a broad base of learning. It is slowly making inroads in Europe and Asia, where university courses have traditionally been more narrowly focused.

In Hong Kong, I met with Rebecca Chopp, the president of Swarthmore College, a top liberal arts colleges in the United States. Professor Chopp was on a whirlwind Asia tour that also included Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai and Suzhou, China. Like most college presidents on the road, she was there to visit alumni, raise funds and recruit students. She was also in a position to explain the pluses of a liberal arts education in a region where it’s still a foreign concept. She said:

“Liberal arts is founded on a whole person, developing a person athletically and academically. Liberal arts is going international. The 21st century is one of entrepreneurship and innovation. There will not be fixed careers. The liberal arts teaches you to think outside the box.”

Here’s a tidbit that didn’t make it into my article: The first semester for every student at Swarthmore is pass/fail. You cannot get an A (or a D, for that matter). Professor Chopp was frank about her own less-than-stellar academic beginnings, so maybe she is particularly forgiving of freshmen who are finding their way. She said that this system encouraged risk-taking — not something all academically driven students are wont to do. With a pass/fail system an aspiring doctor can try an art class, with no fear that it will bring down his or her grade-point average, or an artist can try a science class.

Speaking of doctors, Professor Chopp addressed a common (and inaccurate) worry about the liberal arts: that they lead to impractical degrees in obscure subjects that don’t lead to good careers. She points out that Swarthmore graduates who apply to medical school have a higher-than-average chance of getting in (81 percent).

A private liberal arts college in the U.K.?

In London, D.D. Guttenplan visited the leafy campus of Regent’s College, which is something of an anomaly in Britain. Once it gets government approval, probably next month, Regent’s will be only the second private university in the country (after the University of Buckingham).

Regent’s is also different because it is structured something like a U.S. liberal arts college – with a looser curriculum, small-group teaching, points for speaking up in class and a very international student body. (Only 15 percent come from Britain.)

Lawrence Phillips, who heads Regent’s American College (one of its specialist schools), said in an interview:

“I came here out of specific concerns about the narrowness of British universities, producing business graduates who can’t write and historians who can’t count.”

Mr. Guttenplan also spoke to foreign students like Lisa Marie Nyvoll, who said, “In Norway, you only study a single subject, and I wanted something more flexible.” You can read the full article here.

The liberal arts model is shaped like an inverted pyramid — broad on top, and then tapering down to a point. The traditional European or Asian model is shaped like a telescope — narrow and focused all the way through.

By the middle of high school, most European or Asian students have chosen their field of study and are taking courses and exams that will get them into their desired course. Meanwhile, there are 19-year-olds in America still debating whether they want to major in chemistry and minor in music. Many students and parents I meet in Europe and Asia are surprised to hear that some American students don’t declare their majors until the end of their second year – about half-way through their four-year degrees.

Do private U.S.-style colleges have a place in Britain, which has its own proud academic culture? Which system better prepares students for the real world? One that gives students three years of intense study in one field? Or one that takes four years to produce literate scientists and numerate writers?

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Cornell NYC Tech Will Foster Commerce Amid Education

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Their curriculum devotes months to helping a company solve a current technological challenge. Their progress is supervised not just by an academic adviser, but also by an industry adviser. Their vast campus on Roosevelt Island, when it is built, will intersperse classrooms with office buildings, where high-tech companies can rent a suite and set up shop.




And when they showed up Monday for the very first day of classes at Cornell NYC Tech, the most ambitious institution of higher education to open in New York City in decades, students arrived not at some temporary structure on the edge of a construction site but to 20,000 square feet of donated space in the middle of Google’s $2 billion New York headquarters.


Cornell NYC Tech, a new graduate school focusing on applied science, is a bold experiment on many fronts: a major expansion for an august upstate school, a high-impact real estate venture for Roosevelt Island, an innovative collaboration with a foreign university, a new realm of influence for City Hall. But the most striking departure of all may be the relationship it sets forth between university and industry, one in which commerce and education are not just compatible, they are also all but indistinguishable. In this new framework, Cornell NYC Tech is not just a school, it is an “educational start-up,” students are “deliverables” and companies seeking access to those students or their professors can choose from a “suite of products” by which to get it.


Colleges and universities across the country — a great many of which are scrambling to find new ways to finance scientific research, as well as new ways to profit from the fruits of that research — are watching closely. In the last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced the creation of technology schools by both Columbia and New York University. And Cornell’s president, David J. Skorton, said he had been visited by representatives from other cities hopeful that the Cornell NYC Tech model might work there, too.


Of course, Cornell NYC Tech is not the first school to forge alliances with the local business community. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology plays a prominent role in that state’s technology scene, and Silicon Valley would not exist without Stanford, which has collected more than $1 billion in royalties as innovations linked to its campus made their way into the market.


But for Cornell NYC Tech, that close relationship is not merely the desired outcome; it is the founding premise. “The campus was set up specifically to increase the talent pool in New York City,” Dr. Skorton said, “to positively influence the New York City economy.”


New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped select Cornell NYC Tech as the winner of a competition for $100 million in funds and $300 million worth of real estate from the city, predicts that the companies that will spin out from its campus will create tens of thousands of new jobs.


Calculations like that, impressive as they may be, have given some observers pause.


“The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s,” said Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell’s main campus in Ithaca. “Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.” 


Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell NYC Tech, is the first to admit that this new academic model is rife with potential conflicts of interest.


“I think there are lots of risks in trying to bring what are fundamentally different cultures and sets of goals together,” he said. “Companies need to make a profit. Universities have different motives — partly societal good, partly education — and that leads to different value systems.” For starters, he said, “if a student that a faculty member is advising is working at a company that the faculty member has a financial interest in, is the faculty member really keeping students’ interests in mind?”


Dr. Skorton, an expert in research ethics, mentioned several other areas of concern, including the work that students will do with outside companies. “If you don’t protect that interaction crisply and clearly,” he said, “you could be concerned about the student basically working in an unpaid capacity for industry.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the starting tuition at Cornell NYC Tech. It is $43,185, not $29,500.



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Well Pets: Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey

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Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.

Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.

“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.

“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”

There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.

Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.

Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”

But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”

The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany in which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.

New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.

For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.

KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.

But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.

“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.

Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.

Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.

In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.

“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”

Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.

Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.

Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.

“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can be shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”

He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.

The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.

But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.

Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.

They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”

At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”

The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.

“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”

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