In burglary-plagued Oakland, it's easy to pick on this workshop









OAKLAND — Burglaries have plagued just about every corner of this beleaguered city of late: Last year, Oakland averaged one break-in every 42 minutes — a 44% increase over 2011.


So when Mayor Jean Quan recently included a workshop on lock-picking in the "Something for Everyone" section of her newsletter, it didn't go over well.


"Of all the incredibly unbelievable things I've witnessed in my life, this tops the list," one resident wrote in a letter that asked Quan to cancel the class. "What next?" another wrote on a neighborhood chat forum. "The fundamentals of armed robbery?"





In a hasty apology, Quan said she regretted the "inappropriate listing," which was part of a 20-page cut-and-pasted newsletter of local events assembled by volunteers. "It strikes the wrong note when we're doing everything we can to bring down crime," she said.


The Introduction to Lock-Picking class, to be held Saturday evening, is part of a downtown Workshop Weekend that includes more than 40 offerings, including Build a Robot, Electroluminescent Wire Projects, DNA Sequencing and Telescope Making.


The event was launched two years ago by a pair of brothers eager to help residents of all ages find their passion and learn how things work. But now Gil and J.D. Zamfirescu have found themselves doing damage control while giving this city a primer in the subculture of "sport-picking."


"We recognize there is a lot of community concern," Gil Zamfirescu said in an interview. "But the best way to combat crime is to educate yourself, to understand locks so you know how to protect yourself better."


Or, in the words of the 19th century locksmith and lock-picker Alfred Charles Hobbs: "Rogues knew a good deal about lock-picking long before locksmiths discussed it … the spread of the knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance."


Hobbs is a legend to the hobbyist lock-picker community. His quote graces the website of the Open Organisation of Lockpickers — or TOOOL — a group that started in the Netherlands and expanded to the U.S. in 2004.


In light of the Oakland brouhaha, the organization — which is hosting the Saturday class — has agreed not to offer the lock-pick kits normally sold at workshops and competitions. And just to ensure that all goes well, U.S. TOOOL co-founder Babak Javadi (a Philadelphia security consultant) and fellow board member Brian Rea (a security expert known in lock-picking circles as Deviant) are making a special trip to Oakland.


TOOOL has a strict code of ethics that association members and workshop participants must follow, including, of course, no lawbreaking.


And instructors abide by guidelines on what they will and won't teach. Rea said they dispense lock-pick kits but don't sell bump keys — which are used to quickly and forcefully open a lock. (They do explain bumping and discuss ways to make locks bump-proof.)


Though Javadi and Rea do provide know-how on covert entry, or the secret sexy stuff of James Bond movies, to their private clients, largely law enforcement and security officials, "we temper how we disseminate information, depending on who the audience is," Javadi said.


As for the risk of educating burglars, he said most can find guidance online without having to "pay $40 and come to an event where you have to use your real name." Besides, he said, the vast majority of burglars enter through open doors, kick them in or are lucky enough to find a key hidden under a rock.


Saturday's workshop description beckons: "In many cases, opening a lock without a key is easier than you think!" Open to participants ages 10-101, it has sold out.


"Sometimes a 12-year-old will come to a meeting and they're great. They just get it," said Michael Fitzhugh, a member of San Francisco's TOOOL chapter, who will be teaching the workshop. "For most people, it takes a lot of time and practice."


As for Quan, she called the class "part of a do-it-yourself, garage-science sort of event, and those are popular in our creative community." Still, she promised to "do a better job reviewing these listings in the future."


lee.romney@latimes.com





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Listen to David Bowie's First Album in 10 Years for Free Online (Legally)











You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.


The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both “Where Are We Now?” and “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” debuted on YouTube in the last month with little fanfare, like this stream. Although iTunes’ page for the stream lacks any information about the individual songs, The Next Day’s track listing is as follows:


01. The Next Day 3:51
02. Dirty Boys 2:58
03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) 3:56
04. Love Is Lost 3:57
05. Where Are We Now? 4:08
06. Valentine’s Day 3:01
07. If You Can See Me 3:16
08. I’d Rather Be High 3:53
09. Boss Of Me 4:09
10. Dancing Out In Space 3:24
11. How Does The Grass Grow 4:33
12. (You Will) Set The World On Fire 3:30
13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die 4:41
14. Heat 4:25


Deluxe version bonus tracks:
15. So She 2:31
16. Plan 2:34
17. I’ll Take You There 2:44


The stream will remain available until March 11.






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U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison


Todd Heisler/The New York Times


Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.







Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.




The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.


The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.


But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.


So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.


In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.


“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.


The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.


“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”


The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.


“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”


For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.


“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”


The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.


“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”


At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.


Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.


The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)


In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.


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Economix Blog: Bernanke Defends Stimulus as Necessary and Effective

The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, picked an unusual time to offer his most recent defense of the Fed’s campaign to stimulate the economy: 7 p.m. on a Friday night in San Francisco, 10 p.m. back home on the East Coast.

The basic message was the same as Mr. Bernanke delivered to Congress earlier this week: The Fed regards its current efforts as necessary and effective, and the risks, while real, are under control.

“Commentators have raised two broad concerns surrounding the outlook for long-term rates,” Mr. Bernanke told a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “To oversimplify, the first risk is that rates will remain low, and the second is that they will not.”

If rates remain low, it may drive investors to take excessive risks. If rates jump, investors could lose money – not least the Fed.

Regarding the first possibility, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed was keeping a careful eye on financial markets. But he noted that rates were low in large part because the economy was weak, and that keeping rates low was the best way to encourage stronger growth. “Premature rate increases would carry a high risk of short-circuiting the recovery, possibly leading — ironically enough — to an even longer period of low long- term rates,” he said.

At the other extreme, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could “mitigate” any jump in rates by prolonging its efforts to hold rates down, for example by keeping some of its investments in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities.

Three more highlights from the question-and-answer session after the speech.

1. Mr. Bernanke, asked about the outlook for the Washington Nationals, responded by accurately quoting the “Las Vegas odds” of a World Series appearance: 8/1.

2. Although the decision may be made under a future chairman, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed should continue to offer “forward guidance” — predicting its policies — even after it concludes its long effort to revive the economy.

“Providing information about the future path of policy could be useful, probably would be useful, under even normal circumstances,” he said in response to a question. “I think we need to keep providing information.”

3. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bernanke often is asked to reflect on the financial crisis. He offered something a little different than his normal response on Friday night.

“In many ways, in retrospect, the crisis was a normal crisis,” he said. “It’s just that the intuitional framework in which it occurred was much more complex.”

In other words, there was a panic, and a run, and a collapse – but rather than a run on bank deposits, the run was in the money markets. Improving the stability of those markets is something regulators have yet to accomplish.

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed









After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member of the panel was dismissed for misconduct and replaced by an alternate.


The original juror, a white-haired woman identified only as Juror No. 3, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy she had gone onto a legal website to look up jury instructions and then asked her daughter to help find a definition for the word "coercion."


Although all but one defense attorney requested that the woman stay, Kennedy said the juror needed to be removed. "She has spoken about the deliberations with her daughter, she has conducted research on the Internet, and I've repeatedly, repeatedly throughout this trial — probably hundreds of times — cautioned the jury not to do that," the judge said.





The removal came after jurors notified the judge that they were deadlocked and that continued deliberations seemed fruitless.


It was unclear how to interpret the day's events, whether the dismissed juror had been a lone holdout or an indication of a fractured jury.


The juror started to tell the judge which way she was leaning in the case, saying she had gone online "looking to see at what point can I get the harassment to stop.... How long do I have to stay in there and deliberate with them when I have made my decision that I didn't think there was —"


Kennedy cut her off before she could finish.


The woman clasped her hands over her mouth and said, "I'm sorry."


Two defense attorneys thought she was leaning toward acquittal and wanted her to stay. "I would have preferred the deadlock to a guilty verdict," said Alex Kessel, the attorney for George Mirabal, one of six former council members charged with misappropriation of public funds.


The council members are charged with inflating their salaries in what prosecutors contend was a far-reaching web of corruption in which fat paychecks were placed ahead of the needs of the city's largely immigrant, working-poor constituents.


When attorneys and defendants were summoned to the courtroom Thursday morning, they were initially told that the jury appeared to be deadlocked.


"Your honor, we have reached a point where as a jury we have fundamental disagreements and cannot reach a unanimous verdict in this case," read a note signed by two jurors, including the foreman, that was given to Kennedy.


A note from another juror alerted the judge that Juror No. 3 had consulted an outside attorney. That did not appear to be the case, but her other actions were revealed under questioning from the judge.


The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.


On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about "the abuse I have suffered." She said her daughter told her, "Mom, they're trying to find the weak link."


The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word "coercion." After her daughter helped her look up the word's definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.


The woman later left the courtroom in tears.


With an alternate in place, Kennedy told the panel to act as if the earlier deliberations had not taken place. The alternate had sat in the jury box during the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations.


Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and Mirabal are accused of drawing annual salaries of as much as $100,000 a year by serving on boards that did little work and seldom met, part of a scandal that drew national attention to the small city in 2010.


Prosecutors said that Bell's charter follows state law regarding council members' compensation. In a city the size of Bell, council members should be paid no more than $8,076 a year.


The trial began in late January, and the case went to the jury last Friday.


As the jury resumed deliberations in downtown Los Angeles, the verdict was clearly in on the streets of Bell.


One resident unfurled old protest banners and signs from the days when the pay scandal was first exposed and then called former members of an activist group that had led the charge for reform in the city.


"We're holding our breaths and waiting," Denise Rodarte, a member of the grassroots group Bell Assn. to Stop the Abuse, said in regard to a verdict.


"It's cut and dry: Local elected officials were supposed to make a certain amount of money, and they made a lot more."


corina.knoll@latimes.com


jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com


Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report.





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Verbal Java: Meaning-Based Language Can Be Instantly Translated



LONG BEACH, California — Software written in the Java programming language can be written once and then run on all sorts of computers without being recompiled. An emerging system for human communication, Free Speech, performs a similar trick: Encode information once in Free Speech and it could be instantly rendered into any language.


Using Free Speech, a news publisher could disseminate articles capable of adapting themselves to the native tongue of whomever is reading them; since Free Speech records meaning rather than words, it can easily be converted into idiomatic speech or writing in any number of human languages.


At the moment, Free Speech is mainly to teach English in India, whose citizens famously speak a wide array of regional languages, and to help teach speech to children with autism and other disabilities. But its creator, Ajit Narayanan, sees big possibilities, which he described at the TED conference here Thursday.


Narayanan hit upon the idea for Free Speech while developing techniques, including an iPad app “Avaz,” to teach verbal skills to autistic children. There were established techniques for teaching vocabulary, like pairing words with pictures, but grammar presented a major stumbling block.


“Grammar is incredibly powerful,” Narayanan told the TED audience. “It is one component of language that takes finite vocabulary and allows an infinite amount of ideas to be conveyed.”


But finding ways to abandon grammar has its benefits as well. After watching the mother of an autistic child convert the ambiguous exclamation “Eat” into a meaningful sentence via questions – “Eat what? Eat when? Who eats?” – he upgraded Avaz with its own question and answer system, as well as with filters for tense and other bits of information conveyed with grammar. The result was Free Speech, an engine that produces a sort of intermediate data structure between thought and words. Narayanan says the meaning-based system, and the interface to it provided by Avaz, has proven a faster way for many autistic children to communicate than any spoken language.


It remains to be seen whether there is general utility in a grammar-free linguistic engine like Free Speech. Narayanan’s Invention Labs will, presumably, be investigating that issue further. But for many children in India, letting go of grammar has, counterintuitively, been a great way to come back around and fully comprehend grammar, along with the rest of an unknown language.


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The New Old Age Blog: Why Can’t I Live With People Like Me?

“Aging in place” is the mantra of long-term care. Whether looking at reams of survey data, talking to friends or wishing on a star, who among us wouldn’t rather spend the final years — golden or less so — at home, surrounded by our cherished possessions, in our own bed, no cranky old coot as a roommate, no institutional smells or sounds, no lukewarm meals on a schedule of someone else’s making?

That works best, experts tell us, in dense cities, where we can hail a cab at curbside, call the superintendent when something breaks and have our food delivered from Fresh Direct or countless takeout restaurants. We’d have neighbors in the apartment above us, below us, just on the other side of the wall. Hearing their toilets flush and their children ride tricycles on uncarpeted floors is a small inconvenience compared to the security of knowing they are so close by in an emergency.

Urban planners, mindful that most Americans live in sprawling, car-reliant suburbs, are designing more elder-friendly, walkable communities, far from “real” cities. Houses and apartments are built around village greens, with pockets of commerce instead of distant strip malls. Some have community centers for congregate meals and activities; others share gardens, where people can get their hands in the warm spring dirt long after they can push a lawn mower.

All of this is a step in the right direction, despite the Potemkin-village look of so many of them. But it doesn’t take into account those who are too infirm to stay at home, even in cities or more manageable suburban environments. Some are alone, others with a loving spouse who by comparison is “well” but may not be for long, given the rigors of care-taking. It doesn’t take into account people who can’t afford a home health aide, who don’t qualify for a visiting nurse, who have no adult children to help them or whose children live far away.

But by now, aging in place, unrealistic for some, scary or unsafe for others and potentially very isolating, has become so entrenched as the right way to live out one’s life that not being able to pull it off seems a failure, yet another defeat at a time when defeats are all too plentiful. Are we making people feel guilty if they can’t stay at home, or don’t want to? Are we discouraging an array of other solutions by investing so much, program-wise and emotionally, in this sine qua non?

Regular readers of The New Old Age know that I am single, childless and terrified of falling off a ladder while replacing a light bulb, breaking a hip and lying on the floor, unattended, until my dog wails so loudly a neighbor comes by to complain. A MedicAlert pendant is not something that appeals to me at 65, but even if I give in to that, say at 75, I’m not sure my life will be richer for digging my heels in and insisting home is where I should be.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about the alternatives. I know enough to distinguish between naturally-occurring-retirement communities, or NORCs (some of which work better than others); age-restricted housing complexes (with no services); assisted living (which works fine when you don’t really need it and not so fine when you do); and continuing care retirement communities (which require big upfront payments and extensive due diligence to be sure the place doesn’t go belly up after you get there).

What I find so unappealing about all these choices is that each means growing old among people with whom I share no history. In these congregate settings, for the most part, people are guaranteed only two things in common: age and infirmity. Which brings us to what is known in the trade as “affinity” or “niche” communities,” long studied by Andrew J. Carle at the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mr. Carle, who trains future administrators of senior housing complexes, was a media darling a few years back, before the recession, with the first baby boomers approaching 65 and niche communities that included services for the elderly — not merely warm-weather developments adjacent to golf courses — expected to explode. In newspaper interviews as recently as 2011, Mr. Carle said there were “about 100 of them in existence or on the drawing board,” not counting the large number of military old-age communities.

Mr. Carle still believes that better economic times, when they come, will reinvigorate this sector of senior housing, after the failure of some in the planning stages and others in operation. In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Carle said there were now about 70 in operation, with perhaps 50 of those that he has defined as University Based Retirement Communities, adjacent to campuses and popular with alumni, as well as non-alumni, who enjoy proximity to the intellectual and athletic activities. Among the most popular are those near Dartmouth, Oberlin, the University of Alabama, Penn State, Notre Dame, Stanford and Cornell.

At the height of the “affinity” boom, L.G.B.T.-assisted living communities and nursing homes were all the rage, seen as a solution to the shoddy treatment that those of different sexual orientations in the pre-Stonewall generation experienced in generic facilities. A few failed, most never got built and, by all accounts, the only one to survive is the pricy Rainbow Vision community in Sante Fe, N.M.

A handful of nudist elder communities, and ones for old hippies, also fell by the wayside, perhaps too free-spirited for the task. According to Mr. Carle, despite the odds, at least one group of RV enthusiasts has added an assisted-living component to what began as collections of transient elderly, looking only for a parking spot and necessary water and power hook-ups for their trailers. Native Americans have made a go of an assisted-living community in Montana, and Asians have done the same in Northern California.

But professional affinity communities, which I find most appealing, are few and far between.

The storied Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, a sliding-scale institution in the San Fernando Valley since 1940, survived near-closure in 2009 as a result of litigation, activism by the Screen Actors Guild and the local chapter of the Teamsters, and news media pressure. Among film legends who died there — along with cameramen, back-lot security guards and extras — were Mary Astor, Joel McCrea, Yvonne De Carlo and Stepin Fetchit.

New York State’s volunteer firefighters are all welcome to a refurbished facility in the Catskill region that offers far more in the way of care and activities, including a state-of-the-art gym, than when I visited there five years ago. At that time, the residents amused themselves by activating the fire alarm to summon the local hook and ladder company, which didn’t mind a bit.

Then there is Nalcrest, the retirement home for unionized letter carriers. Even as post offices nationwide are preparing to eliminate Saturday service, and snail mail becomes an artifact, the National Association of Letter Carriers holds monthly fees around the $500 mark, is located in central Florida so its members no longer have to brave rain and sleet to complete their appointed rounds, and bans dogs, the bane of their existence.

So why not aged journalists? We surely have war stories to embroider as we rock on the porch. Perhaps a mimeograph machine to produce an old-fashioned, dead-tree newspaper, which some of us will miss once it has given way to Web sites like this one. Pneumatic tubes, one colleague suggested, to whisk our belongings upstairs when we can no longer carry them. Other colleagues wondered about welcoming both editors and reporters. How can these two groups, which some consider natural adversaries, complain about each others’ tin ears or missed deadlines if we’re not segregated?

I disagree. The joy of this profession is its collaboration. We did the impossible day after day when young. We belong together when old.


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F-35 Jets Returned to Service by Pentagon





The Pentagon lifted its grounding of the new F-35 jet fighter on Thursday after concluding that a turbine blade had cracked on a single plane after it was overused in test operations.


The office that runs the program said no other cracks were found in inspections of the other engines made so far, and no engine redesign was needed.


It said the engine in which the blade cracked was in a plane that “had been operated at extreme parameters in its mission to expand the F-35 flight envelope.”


The program office added that “prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack.”


All flights were suspended last week for the 64 planes built so far once the crack, which stretched for six-tenths of an inch, was found during a routine inspection.


Pratt & Whitney, which makes the engines, investigated the problem with military experts. The company, a unit of United Technologies, said on Wednesday that the crack occurred after that engine was operated more than four times longer in a high-temperature flight environment than the engines would in normal use.


The F-35, a supersonic jet meant to evade enemy radar, is the Pentagon’s most expensive program and has been delayed by various technical problems. The program could cost $396 billion if the Pentagon builds 2,456 jets by the late 2030s.


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DNA science points to better treatment for acne









Ancient Egyptians were vexed by it, using sulfur to dry it out. Shakespeare wrote of its "bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire."


Today, acne plagues us still. Doctors can cure some cancers and transplant vital organs like hearts, but they still have trouble getting rid of the pimples and splotches that plague 85% of us at some time in our lives — usually, when we're teenagers and particularly sensitive about they way we look.


But new research hints that there's hope for zapping zits in the future, thanks to advances in genetic research.








Using state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques to evaluate the bacteria lurking in the pores of 101 study volunteers' noses, scientists discovered a particular strain of Propionibacterium acnes bacteria that may be able to defend against other versions of P. acnes that pack a bigger breakout-causing punch.


As best as dermatologists can tell, zits occur when bacteria that reside in human skin, including P. acnes, feed on oils in the pores and prompt an immune response that results in red, sometimes pus-filled bumps. But the study subjects who had the newly discovered bacterial strain weren't suffering from whiteheads or blackheads, according to a report published Thursday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.


Someday, the realization that "not all P. acnes are created equal" might help dermatologists devise treatments that more precisely target bad strains while allowing beneficial ones to thrive, said Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute who conducted the study with colleagues from UCLA and Washington University in St. Louis.


Doctors might prescribe probiotic creams that deliver "good" P. acnes to the face the same way a daily serving of yogurt helps restore healthy bacteria in the digestive tract.


"There are healthy strains that we need on our skin," Craft said. "The idea that you'd use a nuclear bomb to kill everything — what we're currently doing with antibiotics and other treatments — just doesn't make sense."


The research is part of a broad effort backed by the National Institutes of Health to characterize the so-called human microbiome: the trillions of microbes that live in and on our bodies and evolve along with us, sometimes causing illness and often promoting good health.


Most of the microbiome attention so far has gone to studying species in the gut, said study leader Huiying Li, an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine. But the NIH's Human Microbiome Project, which funds her research, also looks at microbial communities in the nasal passages, the mouth, the urogenital tract and the skin.


Li said she became interested in studying acne because the skin microbiome seemed particularly understudied.


The research team recruited 101 patients in their teens and 20s from dermatology clinics in Southern California. Among them, 49 had acne and 52 had "normal skin" and were not experiencing breakouts but had come to the clinics for other problems.


Doctors used adhesive pore strips to remove skin bacteria from patients' noses. The researchers then collected the waxy plugs — a combination of bacteria, oils, dead skin cells and other stuff — and used DNA to figure out which bacteria were present.


They found that the P. acnes species accounted for about 90% of the bacteria in pores, in both healthy patients and acne sufferers. Digging a little deeper into the DNA, they found that two particular strains appeared in about 20% of acne sufferers, while a third strain was found only in acne-free patients.


"Dogs are dogs, but a Chihuahua isn't a Great Dane," Craft said. "People with acne had pit bulls on their skin. Healthy people had poodles."


The team then sequenced the complete genomes — about 2.6 million base pairs apiece — of 66 of the P. acnes specimens to explore in more depth how the good and bad strains differed.


The two notable bad strains had genes, probably picked up from other bacteria or viruses, that are thought to change the shape of a microbe to make it more virulent. The researchers hypothesized that the foreign DNA, perhaps by sticking more effectively to human host tissues, may help trigger an inflammatory response in the skin: acne.


The good strain, on the other hand, contained an element known to work like an immune system in bacteria, Li said. Perhaps it allows this P. acne to fight off intruders and prevent pimples from forming.


Li said the researchers did not know why some people had the bad P. acnes strains and others did not, and whether genetics or environment played a bigger role.


Dr. Vincent Young, who conducts microbiome research at the University of Michigan Medical School but wasn't involved in the acne project, said advances in sequencing technology and analysis made the new study possible. In the past, he said, scientists wouldn't have tried to sequence dozens of genomes in a single species.


"They'd say, why waste the money?" he said. "Now you can do this in a couple of days."


Li and Craft — neither of whom suffered bad acne as teens — plan to keep up the work.


More research is needed to come up with super-targeted anti-microbial therapies, or to develop a probiotic cream for acne sufferers.


Craft continues collecting samples from patients' pores. He hopes to study whether twins share the same microbial profiles, how acne severity is reflected in bacteria populations, and how things change in a single patient over the course of a treatment regimen.


One of the study volunteers, 19-year-old UC Santa Cruz student Brandon Pritzker, said he would have loved to have treated his acne without affecting the rest of his body. When he took Accutane, he suffered back pain and mood shifts.


Now off the drug, Pritzker said he is at peace with his pimples. "I still have breakouts, but I figure I'm 19, that's the way it's going to be," he said.


But, he added, "it hindered my confidence at the time. Kids with clear skin are probably a little happier."


eryn.brown@latimes.com





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LaserOrigami Turns Your Laser Cutter Into a Folding Factory



Researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute have worked out a way to make 3-D objects using only a 2-D laser cutter. They call it LaserOrigami.


When you own a laser cutter, careful calibration is key. Get the focal length wrong and, instead of a nice clean cut, you end up with a blurry burn pattern. LaserOrigami takes this problem and turns it into a feature. By aiming a de-focused laser at a section of plastic, it can heat it just enough to allow it to bend. By alternating between cutting, bending, and turning the sheet, the application can make remarkably complicated objects.



Want to see a magic trick? Watch this 2-D laser cutter make 3-D objects.


The project is a joint effort between Stefanie Mueller, Bastian Kruck, and supervisor Patrick Baudisch, members of the human computer interface lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute, who developed Constructable, the system to let you whittle with lasers. They’ll be presenting their findings at CHI 2013 in May.


Is it possible to be a laser cutter virtuoso? The team seems intent on finding the limits of the tool. “With both Constructable and LaserOrigami we try to push the boundaries of what is possible with laser cutting,” says Mueller. “While laser cutters are already a great tool for rapid prototyping today, we believe there is a large space for improvement: on the interaction side as well as on what laser cutters can fabricate.”


Mueller says their focus on laser cutters is all about making a great tool even better. “In our lab we have a 3-D printer and a laser cutter for prototyping. One might expect that the 3-D printer is the most used device since it offers the most freedom of shapes, but the opposite is true,” she says. “While the laser cutter runs several times a day, the 3-D printer is barely used because printing is so slow. If we need to iterate on a design, we can do this within one to two hours with a laser cutter, but with a 3-D printer this takes us several days.”



LaserOrigami’s implementation is quite simple. All it needs is a laser cutter and the ability to raise and lower the cutting table. Once a section is heated, gravity pulls it down and the plastic cools. A servo motor can be used to rotate the sheet for more precise angles.


On the software side, LaserOrigami can either be controlled using a set of master shapes in a custom Microsoft Visio library, or using the same suite of laser pointers used in constructable. “Our goal is to create systems that are particularly easy and intuitive to use, kind of how 1-year-olds can already control an iPad,” says Mueller. “Our approach is to unify the virtual world of the computer with the physical world of the user into a single space.”


“If you sift through our projects you will see how this desire for unification and simplification drives all projects in the group.”


Photos: Courtesy Hasso Plattner Institute


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Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal






VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.


Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.






Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.


The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.


The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.


One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”


The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.


GREY AREAS


Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”


The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.


Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.


In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”


The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.


“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.


“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”


The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.


“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.


The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.


The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.


The film goes on general release on Thursday.


(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)


Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Well: Think Like a Doctor: The Man Who Wobbled

The Challenge: Can you solve the medical mystery of a man who suddenly becomes too dizzy to walk?

Every month, the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to try their hand at solving a medical mystery. Below you will find the story of a 56-year-old factory worker with dizziness and panic attacks. I have provided records from his two hospital visits that will give you all the information available to the doctor who finally made the diagnosis.

The first reader to offer the correct diagnosis gets a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” and the satisfaction of solving a case that stumped a roomful of specialists.

The Patient’s Story:

The middle-aged man clicked his way through the multiple reruns of late-late-night television. He should have been in bed hours ago, but lately he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Suddenly his legs took on a life of their own. Stretched out halfway to the center of the room, they began to shake and twitch and jump around. The man watched helplessly as his legs disobeyed his mental orders to stop moving. He had no control over them. He felt nauseous, sweaty and out of breath, as if he had been running some kind of race. He called out to his wife. She hurried out of bed, took one look at him and called 911.

The Patient’s History:

By the time the man arrived at Huntsville Hospital, in Alabama, the twitching in his legs had subsided and his breathing had returned to normal. Still, he had been discharged from that same hospital for similar symptoms just two weeks earlier. They hadn’t figured out what was going on then, so they weren’t going to send him home now.

The patient considered himself pretty healthy, but the past year or so had been tough. In 2011, at the age of 54, he had had a mild stroke. He had no medical problems that put him at risk for stroke — no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, no diabetes. A work-up at that time showed that he had a hole in his heart that allowed a tiny clot from somewhere in his body to travel to the brain and cause the stroke. He was discharged on a couple of blood thinners to keep his blood from making more clots. He hadn’t really felt completely well, though, ever since. His balance seemed a little off, and he was subject to these weird panic attacks, in which his heart would pound and he would feel short of breath whenever he got too stressed. Mostly he could manage them by just walking away and focusing on his breathing. Still, he never felt as if he was the kind of guy to panic.

And he had always been quick on his feet. The first half of his career he had been in the steel business — building huge metal trusses and supports. He and his team put together 60-plus tons of steel structures every day. For the past decade he had been machining car parts. After his stroke, work seemed to get a lot harder.

The Dizziness:

A few weeks ago, he stood up and wham — suddenly the whole world went off-kilter. He felt as if he was constantly about to fall over in a world that no longer lay down flat. His first thought was that he was having another stroke. He went straight to his doctor’s office. The doctor wasn’t sure what was going on and sent him to that same emergency room at Huntsville Hospital. After three days of testing and being evaluated by lots of specialists, his doctors still were not sure what was going on. He hadn’t had a heart attack; he hadn’t had a stroke. There was no sign of infection. All the tests they could think of were normal.

The only abnormal finding was that when he stood up, his blood pressure dropped. Why this happened wasn’t clear, but the doctors in the hospital gave him compression stockings and a pill — both could help keep his blood pressure in the normal range. Then they sent him home. He was also started on an antidepressant to help with the panic attacks he continued to have from time to time.

You can read the report from that hospital admission below.

You can also read the consultation and discharge notes from that hospital visit here.

He had been home for nearly two weeks and still he felt no better. He tried to go back to work after a week or so at home, but after driving for less than five miles, he felt he had to turn around. He wasn’t sure what was wrong; he just knew he didn’t feel right. Then his legs started jumping around, and he ended up back in the hospital.

The Doctor’s Exam:

It was nearly dawn by the time Dr. Jeremy Thompson, the first-year resident on duty that night, saw the patient. Awake but tired, the patient told his story one more time. He had been at home, watching TV, when his legs started jumping on their own and he started feeling short of breath. His wife sat at the bedside. She looked just as worried and exhausted as he did. She told the resident that when he spoke that night at home, his speech was slurred. And when the ambulance came, he could barely walk. He has never missed this much work, she told the young doctor. It’s not like him. Can’t you figure out what’s wrong?

The resident had already reviewed the records from the patient’s previous hospital admissions. He asked a few more questions: the patient had never smoked and rarely drank; his father died at age 80; his mother was still alive and well. The patient exam was normal, as were the studies done in the E.R.

The first E.R. doctor thought that his symptoms were a result of anxiety, culminating in a full-blown panic attack. The resident thought that was probably right. In any case he would discuss the case with the attending in a couple of hours during rounds on the new patients. Till then, he told the worried couple, they should just try to get a little sleep.

An Important Clue:

Dr. Robert Centor was definitely a morning person. His cheerful enthusiasm about teaching and taking care of patients made him a favorite among residents. At 7:30 that morning, he stood outside the patient’s door as Dr. Thompson relayed the somewhat frustrating case of the middle-aged man with worsening dizziness and panic attacks. Then they went into the room to meet the patient. He was a big guy, tall and muscular with the first signs of middle-aged thickening around his middle. His complexion had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Dr. Centor introduced himself and pulled up a chair as the rest of the team watched. He asked the patient what brought him to the hospital.

“Every time I get up, I get dizzy,” the man replied. Sure, he had had some balance problems ever since his stroke, he explained, but this felt different – somehow worse. He could hardly walk, he told the doctor. He just felt too unstable.

“Can you get up and show us how you walk?” Dr. Centor asked.

“Don’t let me fall,” the patient responded. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed. The resident and intern stood on either side as he slowly rose. He stood with his feet far apart. When asked to close his eyes as he stood there, he wobbled and nearly fell over. When he took a few steps, his heel and toes hit the ground at the same time, making a strange slapping sound.

Seeing that, Dr. Centor knew where the problem lay and ordered a few tests to confirm his diagnosis.

You can see the review report and notes for the patient’s second hospital visit below.

Solving the Mystery:

What tests did Dr. Centor order? Do you know what is making this middle-aged man wobble? Enter your guesses below. I’ll post the answer tomorrow.


Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the Comments section below. The correct answer will appear tomorrow on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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European Union Moves Toward Bonus Cap for Bankers


BRUSSELS — The European Union moved a step closer early on Thursday to imposing strict curbs on bonus pay for bankers, which has been blamed by many politicians for inciting the risk-taking behavior that triggered the recent financial crisis.


A provisional agreement struck between the European Parliament, the European Commission and national representatives could mean that the coveted bonuses many bankers receive are capped at the level of their annual salaries starting next year.


The agreement, as it stands, was seen as some as a blow to Britain, which partly relies on generous remuneration packages to ensure that the City of London remains the biggest financial center in Europe and the overseas headquarters of banks from around the globe.


’We need to make sure that regulation put in place in Brussels is flexible enough to allow those banks to continue competing and succeeding while being located in the U.K.,” David Cameron, the British prime minister, said on a visit to Riga, the capital of Latvia. A majority of E.U. states still must give their final approval for the legislation to go into force and there are expected to be more discussions on the rules at the European Parliament and among governments.


The goal of the bonus cap proposal is to balance many different interests, including “the desire to limit bankers pay while maintaining a competitive European banking sector,” Michael Noonan, the finance minister of Ireland, which holds the rotating E.U. presidency, said in a statement after the talked ended.


Under the proposal, the bonus rules would also apply to bankers employed by E.U. banks but working outside the bloc, for example in New York. E.U. authorities are drafting separate rules that could restrict remuneration at private equity firms and hedge funds.


Mr. Noonan said he would present the plan at a meeting of finance ministers next week.


Alex Beidas, a lawyer with Linklaters, a global legal and consulting firm based in London, warned that the legislation represented “a major disadvantage in the global market” for banks and said there was “a real danger that this will result in bankers moving to the U.S. and Asia.” 


The rules were “also likely to lead to an increase in salaries which is undesirable as banks are trying to minimize their fixed costs,” she said.


Amid concerns that capping bonuses could mean bankers begin to migrate to banks in more economically dynamic locations, lawmakers emphasized that the proposal would include provisions for monitoring such side effects and, if necessary, allow leeway for remedies.  


“If the bonus cap is shown to cause bankers to begin relocating outside the E.U., then we will have the ability to swiftly look again at the provisions in place through an early review,” said Vicky Ford, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group from Britain.


Political leaders who hailed the preliminary deal included Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament and a German member of the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.


"The cap on bonuses is a groundbreaking measure that in my view will make the economic system fairer and safer," Mr. Schulz said in a statement. "Exuberant bonuses often provided a wrong incentive for financial markets, encouraging risky behavior and short-term, purely speculative investment," he said.


An E.U. diplomat stressed that a significant amount of technical work still needed to be done before the rules were finalized by governments.


The diplomat, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, said the rules would contain a review clause requiring authorities to assess whether the rules were having damaging effects on the banking sector. The envoy said no date was fixed for the review but that could be finalized during discussions over coming weeks.


The proposal would also allow higher bonuses if a sufficient number of shareholders agreed.


It is part of a set of laws requiring higher capital requirements for banks, called the Basel III rules, which the E.U. officials also approved early Thursday.


Mr. Noonan said the Basel III package would “make sure that banks in the future have enough capital, both in terms of quality and quantity, to withstand shocks” and that “will ensure that taxpayers across Europe are protected into the future.”


David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.



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Race for L.A. city controller heats up









A previously low-profile race for Los Angeles city controller has begun to heat up as opponents of City Councilman Dennis Zine accuse him of "double dipping" the city's payroll and question why he is considering lucrative tax breaks for a Warner Center developer.


Zine, who for 12 years has represented a district in the southeast San Fernando Valley, is the better known of the major candidates competing to replace outgoing Controller Wendy Greuel.


The others are Cary Brazeman, a marketing executive, and lawyer Ron Galperin. Zine has raised $766,000 for his campaign, more than double that of Galperin, the next-highest fundraiser, and has the backing of several of the city's powerful labor unions.





He also has been endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several of his council colleagues. Galperin is backed by the Service Employees International Union, one the city's largest labor groups, and Brazeman is supported by retired Rep. Diane Watson and several neighborhood council representatives.


With the primary ballot less than a week away, Brazeman and Galperin have turned up the heat on Zine, hoping to push the race beyond the March 5 vote. If no one wins more than 50% of the ballots cast, the top two vote-getters will face a runoff in the May general election.


In a recent debate, Zine's opponents criticized him for receiving a $100,000 annual pension for his 33 years with the Los Angeles Police Department and a nearly $180,000 council salary. Brazeman and Galperin called it an example of "double dipping" that should be eliminated.


That brought a forceful response from Zine, who shot back that he gives a big portion of his police pension check to charities.


"I am so tired of hearing 'double dipping,' " he said. "I worked 33 years on the streets of Los Angeles. I have given over $300,000 to nonprofits that need it.... That's what's happened with that pension."


In the same debate, Brazeman accused Zine of cozying up to a Warner Center developer by pushing for tax breaks on a project that already has been approved. The nearly 30-acre Village at Westfield Topanga project would add 1 million square feet of new shops, restaurants, office space and a hotel to a faded commercial district on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.


"The councilman proposed to give developers at Warner Center tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks even though it's a highly successful project," he said. "He wants to give it away."


City records show that less than a month after the development was approved in February 2012, Zine asked the council for a study looking at possible "economic development incentives" that could be given to Westfield in return for speeding up street and landscaping enhancements to the project's exterior.


The motion's language notes that similar tax breaks have been awarded to large projects in the Hollywood and downtown areas, and that "similar public investment in the Valley has been lacking." Westfield is paying for the $200,000 study.


Zine defended his decision before the debate audience, saying if the study finds that the city will not benefit, no tax breaks will be awarded. "If there's nothing there, then they get nothing," Zine said.


The controller serves as a public watchdog over the city's $7.3-billion annual operation, auditing the general fund, 500 special fund accounts and the performance of city departments. Those audits often produce recommendations for reducing waste, fraud and abuse.


But the mayor and the council are not obligated to adopt those recommendations, and as a result the job is part accountant, part scolder in chief. All the candidates say they will use their elective position not only to perform audits but also to turn them into action.


Their challenge during the campaign has been explaining how they will do that.


Zine, 65, says his City Hall experience has taught him how to get things done by working with his colleagues. He won't be afraid to publicly criticize department managers, he said, but thinks collaboration works better than being combative.


"You can rant and rave and people won't work with you," he said. "Or you can sit down and talk it out, and you can accomplish things."


Galperin, 49, considers himself a policy wonk who relishes digging into the details to come up with ways to become more efficient with limited dollars and to find ways to raise revenue using the city's sprawling assets. For instance, the city owns two asphalt plants that could expand production and sell some of its material to raise money to fix potholes, he said.


He's served on two city commissions, including one that found millions of dollars in savings by detailing ways to be more efficient. Zine is positioning himself as a "tough guy for tough times," but the controller should be more than that, Galperin said.


"What we really need is some thoughtfulness and some smarts and some effectiveness," he said. "Just getting up there and saying we need to be tough is not going to accomplish what needs to be done."


Brazeman, 46, started his own marketing and public relations firm in West Los Angeles a decade ago and became active in city politics over his discontent with a development project near his home. He has pushed the council to change several initiatives over the last five years, including changes to the financing of the Farmers Field stadium proposal that will save taxpayer dollars, he said.


As controller, he would pick and choose his battles, and, Brazeman said, be "the right combination of constructive, abrasive and assertive."


catherine.saillant@latimes.com





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The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead

When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren't cars you smell. Those are computers.


This is the "1401 Room" on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians have spent the last decade reviving two of the massive IBM 1401 mainframe computers that littered the business world throughout the '60s and on into '70s.


As the door opens, you can see not only the 1401s themselves, but the mechanical punch-card machine where they take instructions from the outside world, the towering drives where they store data on spinning spools of tape, and even the desk-sized printer where they funnel information onto good old-fashioned paper. There's a gentle hum in the room. You can feel the heat coming off the machines. And, yes, you can smell them too. Garner says it's the odor of the oils used in some of the mechanical equipment, including the printer and the punch-card reader.


This assault on your senses is one of the chief reasons Garner and his cohorts have spent all these years restoring the two IBMs. They want to show a new generation what these machines were like -- and they want to show it as completely as possible. "This is the creation of a time machine," Garner says. "When people are here, experiencing this, it sparks their imagination. It transfers them back in time, but it also takes them forward in time. It makes them feel like they too can build new things."


Garner and his team also work on the IBMs because it's fun. "Though you might say that people who do this kind of thing are crazy — and you'd wouldn't be wrong — we enjoy doing it together," says Stan Paddock, another member of the group. But Garner is right: there's a larger payoff. And you feel it as soon as you step into the room.


In short, Garner and his team are historians — in the purest sense of the word. And thankfully, they're not alone.


At the Computer History Museum, volunteers have toiled to revive a wide range of artifacts from an earlier age of American computing, including the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-1. Across the Atlantic, in Great Britain, the Computer Conservation Society has sponsored an even longer list of restoration projects, overseeing the revival of such seminal machines as the WITCH (the world's oldest digital computer) and the Colossus (used to crack German codes during the Second World War). And then there are hobbyists like Bill Degnan, people across the globe who spend their free time rebuilding whatever old machines they can get their hands on — and occasionally flaunting their work at events like the Vintage Computer Festival.


Sadly, we can't show you what these machines smell like. Or what they sound like. Or what they feel like. But we can show you what they look like — or at least try. With the gallery of images above, we give you a few of our favorites.


Above


Behold, the 1401 Room. You can see the punch-card machine on the right, the tape drives against the wall at the back, the printer in the middle of the frame, and the 1401 itself on the left, with the blue stripe running across its top edge. This massive collection of machinery was the most popular business computer of the 1960s.


Robert Garner — a modern-day IBM researcher who has also worked for such tech giants as Xerox and Sun Microsystems — bootstrapped the restoration project in 2008 when the Computer Museum History acquired the remnants of a 1401 from an outfit in Germany. He sliped an ad into a Silicon Valley newsletter for IBM retirees, and soon, he had a team of technicians with the know-how to rebuild the thing.


A few years later, Garner was contacted by a man who who had a 1401 in his Connecticut home. This machine was built in 1961, but the man's family had used it to track expenses for the local country club through the mid-'90s. It was in slightly better shape than Garner's german 1401, so the museum bought it too.


If you're a Stanley Kubrick fan, the printer may look familiar. It's an IBM 1403, which makes a cameo in Kubrick's Cold War black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. There's a 1403 at the Air Force Base where Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper unilaterally launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his second in command, played by Peter Sellers, doesn't realize what has happened until he finds a transistor radio tucked inside the lip of the printer.


If you visit the 1401 Room at Computer History Museum, you too will find a transistor radio — right where Sellers did.



Images: Computer History Museum

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The New Old Age Blog: Is the Pope Frail?

White-haired at 85, Pope Benedict XVI looks a bit hunched in photos. He has had a pacemaker for years, the Vatican recently confirmed for the first time — an indicator of long-standing heart problems. His older brother has said that age is taking its toll.

Observers have noticed the pope’s reduced energy. The Times has reported that he was ferried to the altar at St. Peter’s for Midnight Mass Christmas Eve on a “wheeled platform,” then appeared to doze off during the service.

Visiting Mexico last year, he awoke at night and couldn’t locate a light switch in his room, then fell — such a familiar scenario for caregivers of old people — and bloodied his head when he hit the bathroom sink.

Beyond these few facts, we know very little about the health problems that have led Benedict to announce his retirement after his final audience on Wednesday. We don’t even really know if his flagging stamina — “the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise” of leading the church, as he put it — was the true reason behind his resignation. But people have been describing him as tired and increasingly frail.

In geriatrics, “frailty” has a specific meaning: It’s a syndrome, a collection of physiological symptoms that drain people’s reserves, leaving them less able to withstand stressors — like a long trek through St. Peter’s Basilica or around a foreign country.

Geriatricians diagnose frailty when a patient meets three of five criteria: Unintentional weight loss of more than 10 pounds in the past year. Weakness, as measured by a test of handgrip strength. Self-reported exhaustion. Slowness, calculated by how long it takes to walk 15 feet. Low physical activity.

“You feel a sense of vulnerability,” said Linda Fried, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and a leading frailty researcher for 20 years. With significantly lower energy, “It’s harder to push the envelope.”

Frailty’s prevalence increases with age, “from a tiny proportion of people in their 60s, about three percent, to up to a quarter or a third of people 85 and older,” Dr. Fried said. Doctors have learned to pay attention because of the unhappy consequences. “It’s strongly associated with higher mortality, as well as loss of mobility, falls and other kinds of disability,” she said.

Is Benedict frail? Certainly he is reporting that he is exhausted, but does he fit the other criteria? “The pope has probably never done a grip strength test,” said Ken Covinsky, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco.

But the odds are high that he has health problems, even if they’re unacknowledged by Vatican spokesmen. In the United States, at least, nearly half of those over 65 have two or more chronic diseases, like diabetes, hypertension and emphysema. “It would be a rare 85-year-old with only one thing wrong with him,” Dr. Covinsky said.

And frailty is one of those conditions that indicate all is not well.

People often recognize frailty, even without data on walking speed. “I’ve tested it out myself over the years” when speaking to groups, Dr. Fried reported. “I ask people what they’re seeing, and there’s great consistency between the things they picture and what science has measured.”

Frail elders, people tell her, are thin (although overweight people can also be frail), weak, slow, fragile-looking. “The term people use is, they look like they could be knocked over by a feather,” she said.

So if observers in Vatican City say Benedict looks frail, well, maybe he is.

But I’m pursuing this subject not to ask experts to diagnose the pope from afar, but to point out that paying attention to frailty makes sense for the rest of us and our elders. It’s one of the conditions people can do something about.

In frailty’s early stages, “there’s great potential to reverse it or slow it,” Dr. Fried said. The key is exercise. “You have to walk and move, maintain strength and muscle mass,” she said. “We don’t have a drug to prescribe, but even if we did, there’s no question in my mind that exercise will always be the foundation.”

The pope has said that he plans to move into the Mater Ecclesiae convent within the Vatican once it’s renovated for him. We have to assume the nuns, and perhaps a couple of physical therapists, will provide excellent care there.

“Often, people with frailty can live a pretty good life with good home care and social support, and almost every country does better at that than the United States,” Dr. Covinsky said. Our lack of a workable, affordable system of long-term care for the elderly and disabled poses a national crisis.

This is where being a former pope — something that is so rare that it shocked the world — may be a good way to live out one’s days.

“In the U.S., he could get M.R.I.’s and all kinds of expensive tests,” Dr. Covinsky noted. “But Medicare won’t pay for a home health aide four hours a day.” Luckily, the Vatican probably will provide it.


Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: Wall Street Pay Rises, for Those Who Still Have a Job

7:39 p.m. | Updated

Wall Street may be shrinking — cutting thousands of jobs over the last year — but for those who remain, the pay is still very lucrative.

The average cash bonus for those employed in the financial industry in New York last year rose roughly 9 percent, to $121,900, Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State’s comptroller, said on Tuesday.

Cash bonuses in total are forecast to increase by roughly 8 percent, to $20 billion this year.

The total, however, is down from 2010, when it was $22.8 billion. Wall Street’s peak came in 2006, before the financial crisis, with a total $34.3 billion in bonuses. The year-end bonus can account for the bulk of a finance professional’s annual compensation.

The report from the state comptroller’s office gives estimates on the bonuses, based on tax withholding data, data from banks and conversations with industry experts. It came the same day that JPMorgan Chase, one of the country’s biggest banks, announced it was eliminating 17,000 jobs over the next two years through layoffs and attrition, adding its name to a string of large banks that continue to cut jobs to reduce expenses.

Wall Street has regained 30 percent of the 28,300 jobs lost during the financial crisis, Mr. DiNapoli said. And firms are continuing to streamline as they cope with a sluggish economic recovery, difficult markets and a heavier regulatory burden. While financial industry employment in New York City was steady in the first half of 2012, it was down slightly in the second half of the year, the comptroller’s office said.

“Wall Street is still in transition, but it is very slowly adjusting to changes in its economic and regulatory environment,” he said.

In an effort to hold down — albeit temporarily — compensation costs, a number of financial firms have deferred cash payments to employees in recent years. Mr. DiNapoli said on Tuesday that part of the increase in 2012 was cash promised in recent years but actually paid out last year. He said that it was difficult to break out what percentage of the total was deferrals, but he believed that it was still a small part of the total.

The ebbs and flows of Wall Street pay have a major impact on the economy of New York City, where 169,700 are employed in finance. Local businesses like restaurants, luxury goods retailers and the upper end of the real estate market pin their fortunes to the flood of cash from year-end bonuses.

Before the start of the financial crisis, business and personal income tax collections from finance-related activities accounted for up to 20 percent of New York State tax revenue. In 2012, that contribution fell to 14 percent.

Yet finance remains the best paying sector in New York City, Mr. DiNapoli told reporters during a conference call.

All told, the average pay package for securities industry employees in New York was $362,900 in 2011, the last year for which data is available, almost unchanged from 2010.

“Profits and bonuses rebounded in 2012, but the industry is still restructuring,” Mr. DiNapoli said. Despite its smaller size, the securities industry is still a very important part of the New York City and New York State economies.”

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Mike Piazza softens stance on Dodgers' Vin Scully









PHOENIX—





— Calling Vin Scully "a class act" and saying he had "the utmost respect" for him, Mike Piazza on Monday defended what he wrote in his recently released autobiography about the Hall of Fame broadcaster.


In his book, "Long Shot," Piazza described Scully as instrumental in turning the fans of Los Angeles against him during the contract stalemate that led to his trade to the Florida Marlins in 1998. Piazza wrote that Scully "was crushing me" on the air, a charge Scully vehemently denied.





"I can't say that I have regrets," Piazza said. "I was just trying to explain the situation."


The former All-Star catcher was at the Dodgers' spring-training facility with Italy's World Baseball Classic team, for which he is a coach. Scully was also at the complex, to call the Dodgers' 7-6 victory over the Chicago Cubs.


"I'd love to see him," Piazza said.


The two didn't meet.


"I always liked him," Scully said. "I admired him. I think either he made a mistake or got some bad advice. I still think of him as a great player and I hope he gets into the Hall of Fame. I really do. Whatever disappointment I feel, I'll put aside."


Scully declined to comment further on Piazza or his book.


Piazza complimented Scully as he tried to defend what he wrote.


"Vin is a class act; he's an icon," Piazza said. "To this day, I have the utmost respect for him. But the problem is, you have to go back in time and understand that at that point in time in my career with the Dodgers was a very tumultuous time. I was more or less telling my version of the story, at least what I was experiencing. And I said at the end of the book, it's not coming from a place of malice or anger. I think anybody who remembers that time knows it was a very tumultuous time."


Piazza said his intent wasn't to blame Scully.


"I don't think anybody who read the passage from start to finish felt that way," Piazza said. "Anybody who reads it knows it wasn't me blaming. That was definitely not the only factor. There were other factors. The team made the mistake, I made the mistake, of speaking publicly."


Piazza acknowledged that he never heard Scully's broadcasts and that his impressions of them were based on what he heard from others.


"My perception was that he was given the Dodgers' versions of the negotiations, which, I feel, wasn't 100% accurate," Piazza said.


In his book, Piazza also took issue with how Scully asked him about his contract demands during a spring-training interview. Piazza said Monday that he was "taken aback" by the line of questioning because he previously hadn't talked publicly about the negotiations.


To reach the practice fields at Camelback Ranch on Monday, Piazza had to pass through a gantlet of Dodgers fans. Piazza said he wasn't nervous.


"I did a book signing a couple of weeks ago in Pasadena and the fans were really nice," he said.


Piazza denied that he hadn't returned to Dodger Stadium in recent years out of fear of being booed, as Tom Lasorda told The Times last month.


Piazza said he always associated the Dodgers with the O'Malley family, which sold the team to News Corp. in 1998.


"Since then, obviously, they've taken on a different identity," Piazza said.


Piazza was noncommittal about visiting the ballpark in the future. "We'll see," he said. "I'll never say never."


Wouldn't it be harder to return now that his portrayal of Scully has upset fans?


"I don't know," he said. "I can't answer that."


Piazza also spoke about falling short of being elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.


"I definitely couldn't lie and say I wasn't a little disappointed," he said.


He is hopeful he will one day be inducted. "I trust the process," he said.


Piazza wouldn't say whether he thought Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Both players, who have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs, also were denied election.


Piazza has denied using performance-enhancing drugs and has never faced detailed allegations that he did. Asked if he was upset that the indiscretions of others might have altered others' perceptions of him, he replied, "Unfortunately, that's the way life is sometimes. I can't control and worry about what people think."


dylan.hernandez@latimes.com





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The Ugly, Corrupted, Brilliant Games of Michael Brough



I’d never heard of Michael Brough when I downloaded his iPhone game Corrypt, and my first impression of it wasn’t entirely positive. It had stark, surrealist pixel graphics and very little animation. After solving the first couple of simplistic puzzles, I found myself hopelessly stuck on an early challenge involving lots of boxes in a cramped room. Frustrated, I quit the game and quickly forgot about it.


But Corrypt refused to go away. IndieGames.com hailed the PC version as the best free puzzle game of 2012, and another of Brough’s games, VESPER.5, was nominated for the 2013 Independent Games Festival’s prestigious Nuovo award for innovation.


What finally snared me was a glowing review of Corrypt penned by Frank Lantz, creator of Drop7 and the director of New York University’s Game Center. “This small game, with its rough edges and its cryptic, self-consuming typography,” Lantz wrote, “will repay the attention you give it a thousandfold.”


I decided to take another look. Corrypt, upon proper exploration, revealed itself to be a brilliantly designed puzzle game, unforgiving and unwilling to accommodate players who refuse to give it their full attention. Peel back one layer, and it reveals another more surprising one. Then it does that again, and again, then it flips itself inside out and laughs at your expectations.


“The way [it] works, you’re not sure if it’s something wrong with the game, or if it’s something intentional,” Brough says. His smile fills my Skype window. “I’ve had people e-mail me saying ‘there’s a bug in your game,’ and then describing it exactly as it’s meant to work.”


Brough, a 27-year-old New Zealand native, makes games that confound players’ expectations. Brough has grabbed numerous awards and captured the attention of the indie gaming community, but many respected developers say his games are too ugly to catch on with a mainstream audience. His games might be too weird, his style too divisive, for him to make any money in the ruthless games business.


Around the time Brough turned 11, his family bought a Tandy computer with BASIC installed. Brough spent countless hours of his childhood mucking about with the programming language, making text adventures and other simple games that he’d share with his parents.



While he tinkered with BASIC, Brough often encountered bugs. He’d make a small change in the code, and a game would break in an interesting way. But instead of immediately fixing the error, Brough became fascinated with the bugs themselves.


“The idea that a bug could produce strange and interesting effects,” he says, “is a mythology that I like.”


“If, when something goes wrong, it just crashes, that tells you nothing,” Brough explains. “If something goes wrong and it keeps going, that reveals something to you about how it works, and how the computer thinks.”


With modern hardware like the iPad, Brough complains that the fun of toying around with computers, “that feeling of being at a low level, feeling close to the way computers work,” is gone. For him, the oft-touted “magical” consumer-friendliness of Apple’s devices is a restriction on learning opportunities.


“Now you have an iPad, and you don’t know what’s going on under the screen,” he says. “It’s basically a piece of magic.”


After completing a degree in math and computer science at the University of Auckland, Brough moved to London and began working towards a Ph.D. He landed a decent-paying programming job while continuing his scholastic work, but continued making games, including the beautiful, abstract strategy game Vertex Dispenser, which even Brough admits may have been too esoteric. It combined elements of shooters and real-time strategy games with a complex puzzle system, and many players felt overwhelmed. “I just could not get my head around those concepts at the same time,” said one.


Halfway through the Ph.D., Brough burned out. He quit both his job and his schooling, becoming a full-time game developer. He followed his wife, now the family’s principal breadwinner, to Scotland, and has for the previous year worked tirelessly on his games, producing a diverse portfolio of Technicolor puzzlers, roguelikes and multiplayer games.


Take for example Helix, another Independent Games Festival nominee. It’s a space shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, but without any shooting. Instead, players defeat enemies by carefully flying around them in circles.


Glitch Tank, an iPad game for two players, is an obvious manifestation of Brough’s lifelong appreciation of glitches. Its fat, stark pixel art pops and crackles on the screen, always seemingly on the verge of falling apart completely. Each player’s controls, a panel of four buttons, is unreliable, with new buttons shuffling in and out with use. It plays like a Game Boy cartridge that’s been dropped in a puddle and trampled by schoolchildren, but it’s all carefully, intentionally designed.


Even the game’s marketing seems glitchy. Brough uses the App Store product description space to describe it as “A digital board %ame⚡⌁ Competitive retro action/strate%* for two pla*ers░.”


Zaga-33, a roguelike with permadeath, is much more subdued, although it does its best to confuse players. Each time the game is played, the effects of all its items are randomized. What was once a teleport skill in one game becomes a deadly laser in the next, and a result each playthrough inspires the same sense of careful curiosity that an entirely new game would.


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Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure





The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.




Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.


Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.


Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?


Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.


“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.


Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”


Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?


No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”


Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?


No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.


The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.


“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”


Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?


Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.


Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.


Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.


Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?


Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.


Is horse meat safe to eat?


That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.


The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.


“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”


The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.




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