Gun lobby's grip on Congress threatened









WASHINGTON — The gun-control debate sharpened Tuesday as President Obama backed an effort to revive the assault weapons ban spearheaded by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is poised to have a powerful new role as the head of the Senate committee overseeing gun laws.


Calls for federal gun restrictions were mounting following last week's shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. — even from lawmakers who had rejected them in the past. The National Rifle Assn. and its allies have successfully kept such efforts at bay for years, but the slayings of 20 children have roiled the politics of gun control and now challenge the gun lobby's hold on Capitol Hill.


The NRA broke its four-day silence Tuesday, saying it "is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again," but offered no details. The group plans to hold a news conference Friday.





The gun lobby faces a newly empowered opponent in Feinstein, a Democrat, who is in line to succeed Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) as chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the power to call hearings and move new legislation.


Feinstein said Tuesday that on the first day of the next Congress she would introduce an updated version of the expired assault weapons ban that she helped pass in 1994. As drafted, the measure would ban the Bushmaster .223 rifle that Adam Lanza used in the Newtown slayings, which also left six school employees dead.


"This is an uphill climb," she said. "Sure, it's tough, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try."


The issue is personal for Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 after then-Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot to death at City Hall. A pen President Clinton used to sign the assault weapons ban hangs prominently in her Capitol Hill office.


Feinstein has the backing of Obama, who vowed Sunday in Newtown to harness the power of his office to try to prevent future massacres.


The president put little effort into gun legislation during his first four years in the White House, despite several mass shootings — including one in Tucson that left six people dead and 13 wounded. Then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, was shot in the head and nearly killed.


On Tuesday, spokesman Jay Carney said that Obama was "actively supportive" of Feinstein's effort to reinstate the assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, and that he would back support legislation to tighten sales at gun shows.


An NRA spokesman declined to comment on the calls for gun control. But the group released a statement saying it was "shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown."


"Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting," the statement continued.


The gun lobby's influence is renowned: It easily swept back efforts to toughen federal gun laws after the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, as well as the July movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., that left 12 dead and dozens wounded. Much of the NRA's power stems from its relentless lobbying and an increasingly polarized House, which is controlled by the group's Republican allies.


Few doubt the NRA will wield substantial influence in the debate, joined by even more vociferous groups, such as Gun Owners of America, which sees the NRA as too willing to compromise.


Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, said his group wouldn't retreat an inch from its opposition to restrictions, including a ban on high-capacity magazines like those used in Newtown.


"I think it's a horrible idea," he said, saying such magazines are valuable in self-defense. Lanza used magazines that held 30 rounds each.


Hammond noted that gun-rights supporters have faced hostile political environments in the past. After the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School that left 12 students, a teacher and two gunmen dead, he said, "things looked very bleak for the 2nd Amendment community." Despite the increase in public support for gun control at the time, his group and others turned back efforts to tighten gun laws.


Still, both allies and opponents say the gun lobby faces a much steeper fight this time. Those calling for tougher gun laws include longtime NRA allies, such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who met Tuesday with Feinstein and spoke with Obama by phone.


Susan Ginsburg, who coordinated firearms policy at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, says she believes the Newtown massacre will lead to new gun restrictions.


"I don't think this is going to fade back into invisibility again," she said. "We seem to have turned a corner in which it's just not acceptable for children to be killed like that."





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The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World

There used to be an established order to the world. A structure to things. You couldn't print a gun like a term paper. It was impossible to wreck a nuclear production plant with a few lines of code. Flying robots didn't descend on you in the dead of night and kill you in your home.



But that order has been upended. Cheap videos in California help spark riots in Cairo. Lynchpins of the Middle East now rant about 'Planet of the Apes' in pubic, and Iranian generals trash-talk David Petraeus over SMS. The world has gone a little haywire — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Here are our choices for the 15 people most responsible for making it that way.



Who did we miss? What did we get wrong? Sound off in the comments, or find us on Twitter or Facebook.



— Noah Shachtman



Above:



One day you're pitching a biography of a top general. The next you've brought down a CIA director, stalled the career of another top general and ensnared numerous federal agencies — and yourself — in a sprawling investigation-cum-media circus. Paula Broadwell didn't mean to wreck any careers, but she accomplished something that no U.S. adversary could: remove David Petraeus from the U.S. government.



Broadwell, a former Army intelligence officer, developed an unhealthy attraction to Petraeus. What started out as spinning for Petraeus' Afghanistan strategy and a florid book became a full-blown affair once Petraeus became director of the CIA. All that would have stayed between the two lovers — had Broadwell not used an anonymous e-mail account to berate Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite whom Broadwell considered unduly flirtatious with the military brass. Kelley turned to an FBI agent she knew, Frederick W. Humphries II, to open a cyber-stalking investigation.



The feds don't usually pursue cyber-stalking cases. And this one ended without any charges filed against Broadwell — but not before uncovering poor data hygiene from Broadwell's famous paramour. Petraeus and Broadwell shared a password on an e-mail account and would pass messages to each other by saving e-mails as drafts. What's more, Broadwell got into the habit of talking openly about sensitive CIA operations, like its response to the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. It's unclear whether there will be any charges filed against either Broadwell or Petraeus over classified material discovered on Broadwell's computer.



Petraeus, the most celebrated general of his generation, resigned in humiliation. The FBI inquiry also turned up what the Pentagon called "flirtatious" e-mails between Gen. John Allen, the outgoing Afghanistan war commander, and Kelley, which has now blocked Allen's promotion to NATO commander. What's more, the coming reshuffle in President Obama's national security team has reopened a debate into whether the CIA should back away from Petraeus' torrid pace of drone strikes. Next time a cabinet official sleeps around, he'd better make sure his mistress keeps the affair offline.



— Spencer Ackerman



Photo: AP/Nell Redmond

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“Castle” star Nathan Fillion to preside over Writers Guild Awards show






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Pretend writer Nathan Fillion will help honor real writers on February 17, when he hosts the Writers Guild Awards West Coast show, the Writers Guild of America, West said Monday.


Fillion, who plays a mystery novelist on ABC’s “Castle,” joked that he was “confused” when he was tapped for the hosting gig.






“When I first accepted the honor of hosting the Writers Guild Awards, I was confused and actually thought I was receiving one. Since I play a writer on TV, I felt perhaps someone was under the impression I deserved an award and I wasn’t about to correct them,” Fillion said. “However, now I’m in the perfect position to present myself with whichever award I choose. Who’s going to know?”


The Writers Guild Awards West Coast show will take place February 17, 2013 at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live. The East Coast show will take place simultaneously at B.B. King Blues Club in New York City.


Writers Guild Awards executive producer Cort Casady praised Fillion’s multiple talents – along with his thriving Twitter account – in the announcement.


“Not only does he play a writer brilliantly on ‘Castle,’ but also, in addition to acting, he sings, dances, is a popular voice talent, and has a great gift for comedy,” Casady said. “And with over 1.5 million Twitter followers, Nathan brings a smart, enthusiastic audience to our celebration of writing.”


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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The New Old Age Blog: Older People Become What They Think, Study Shows

All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older. Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health.

When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.

When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.

For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.

The researcher who has done more than anyone else to advance our understanding of this is Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University.

In the mid-1990s, she began a series of experiments with older people in laboratory settings. The idea was to expose them subliminally to negative or positive stereotypes by flashing words associated with aging on a computer screen too fast for them to process consciously. Then these seniors were asked to perform a task.

Those exposed to negative words such as “decrepit” had poorer handwriting, slower walking speeds, higher levels of cardiovascular stress and a greater willingness to reject hypothetical medical interventions that could prolong their lives. Those primed with positive words such as “wisdom” did much better.

The experiments involved external stimuli, however, and Dr. Levy was interested in peoples’ subjective experience of older age. For that, she turned to a database of adults age 50 and older in Oxford, Ohio, who were followed for a period of 23 years, from 1975 to 1998.

Many had filled out questionnaires at the start of the study designed to elicit stereotypes about aging. This involved soliciting a “yes” or “no” answer to a series of statements like “things keep getting worse as I get older,” or “as you get older, you get less useful.”

When Dr. Levy looked at 660 participants, she found that those with positive age stereotypes lived 7.5 years longer than those with negative stereotypes. The research was published in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology in 2002.

What might account for this finding? In her paper, Dr. Levy speculated that people with positive age stereotypes have a stronger will to live, and that this might affect their ability to adapt to the rigors of older age. Also, people with negative age stereotypes may have a heightened cardiovascular response to stress, with attendant ill health effects.

In other research using this data set, Dr. Levy established that people with positive age stereotypes were more likely to eat a balanced diet, exercise, limit their alcohol consumption, stop smoking and get regular physical exams, and that they had a higher level of physical functioning over time. Results were controlled for other factors like illness, gender, race and socioeconomic status.

In these papers, Dr. Levy hypothesized that positive age stereotypes are associated with a greater sense of control and that this enhanced seniors’ sense of self efficacy — their ability to remain captains of their own ship, as it were.

Her new findings about the impact of age stereotypes on older adults’ recovery from disability is an extension of this body of work. In this case, Dr. Levy and her co-authors followed 598 adults age 70 and older in New Haven, Conn., from 1998 to 2008. Disability was defined as needing help with basic activities of daily living like bathing, dressing and walking, and its onset was typically precipitated by an illness or injury.

Again, seniors with positive age stereotypes were much more likely to have good results and recover fully.

Dr. Marie Bernard, a geriatrician who serves as deputy director of the National Institute on Aging, said she found the report “quite intriguing” and that it confirmed her clinical observations in more than 30 years of medical practice. But she cautioned that it is a small study that needs to be replicated.

“What we really need to understand is the mechanism,” she said. “Is it something that is malleable and, if so, could we help people live longer, healthier lives?”

Researchers don’t have an answer to that yet. But many believe that part of the answer has to lie in tackling ageism – which is pervasive in our youth-oriented culture — early on, from earliest childhood.

“Even young kids have negative associations; they tell you that older adults are sick, slow, forgetful, no good,” said Dana Kotter-Gruehn, a visiting assistant professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.

Also generations need to be brought together so that “people can experience what it means to be an older person” and stereotypes can be dispelled, Dr. Kotter-Gruehn said. This has been shown to help change people’s stereotypes about race and homosexuality, she noted.

Closer to home, all of us who interact with older people can “think about how to reinforce the more positive aspects of aging,” Dr. Levy said.

“If all of us became a little more aware of the implications of our communications” — the tone of voice we use with seniors, the attitude we adopt, the use of loaded phrases or expressions, the extent to which we give older adults our full, undivided attention — “that would help quite a lot.”

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DealBook: As Unit Pleads Guilty, UBS Pays $1.5 Billion Over Rate Rigging

UBS, the Swiss banking giant, announced a record settlement with global authorities on Wednesday, agreeing to a combined $1.5 billion in fines for its role in a multiyear scheme to manipulate interest rates.

In a sign that officials are increasingly taking a hard line against financial wrongdoing, the Justice Department also secured a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese subsidiary, sending a warning shot to other big banks suspected of rate rigging. The UBS subsidiary, which agreed to plead to a single count of wire fraud, is the first unit of a big bank to agree to criminal charges in more than a decade.

The cash penalties represented the largest fines to date related to the rate-rigging inquiry. The fine is also one of the biggest sanctions that American and British authorities have ever levied against a financial institution, falling just short of the $1.9 billion payout that HSBC made last week over money laundering accusations.

The severity of the UBS penalties, authorities said, reflected the extent of the problems. The government complaints laid bare a scheme that spanned from 2005 to 2010, describing how the bank reported false rates to squeeze out extra profits and deflect concerns about its health during the financial crisis.

“The findings we have set out in our notice today do not make for pretty reading,” Tracey McDermott, the enforcement director for the Financial Services Authority of Britain, said in a statement. “The integrity of benchmarks,” she said, “are of fundamental importance to both U.K. and international financial markets. UBS traders and managers ignored this.”

The UBS case reflects a pattern of abuse that authorities have uncovered as part of a multi-year investigation into rate-rigging. The inquiry, which has ensnared more than a dozen big banks, is focused on key benchmarks like the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. Such rates are used to help determine the borrowing rates for trillions of dollars of financial products like corporate loans, mortgages and credit cards.

Libor Explained

In the UBS matter, the wrongdoing occurred largely within the Japanese unit, where traders colluded with other banks and brokerage firms to tinker with Yen denominated Libor and bolster their returns. During the 2008 financial crisis, UBS managers also “inappropriately gave guidance to those employees charged with submitting interest rates, the purpose being to positively influence the perception of UBS’s creditworthiness,” according to authorities.

In a series of colorful e-mails and phone calls, traders tried to influence the rate-setting process. “I need you to keep it as low as possible,” one UBS trader said to an employee at another brokerage firm in September 2008, according to the complaint filed by the Financial Services Authority. “If you do that,” the trader promised to pay “whatever you want. I’m a man of my word.”

As the employees carried out the alleged manipulation, they also celebrated the efforts, with one trader referring to a partner in the scheme as “superman.” “Be a hero today,” he urged, according the complaint by regulators.

The British and Swiss authorities released their complaints on Wednesday before the bank’s shares began trading in Switzerland. American authorities are expected to release their own complaints later Wednesday in Washington.

In a statement, UBS highlighted its cooperation with the investigation. The firm previously stated that it made provisions of 897 million Swiss francs ($975 million) to cover potential legal and regulatory fines.

“We discovered behavior of certain employees that is unacceptable,” the chief executive of UBS, Sergio P. Ermotti, said in the statement. “We deeply regret this inappropriate and unethical behavior. No amount of profit is more important than the reputation of this firm, and we are committed to doing business with integrity.”

The UBS case provides a lens to view broader problems in the rate-setting process, which affects how consumers and companies borrow money around the world. In June, authorities scored their first Libor settlement, securing a $450 million payout from Barclays, the big British bank.

The UBS case — the product of cross-border collaboration among regulators and federal prosecutors – is more than triple the earlier fine.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department leveled about $1.2 billion in combined fines. The Financial Services Authority of Britain fined the bank $260 million. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which does not have the power to fine, recovered $65 million in the bank’s supposed ill-gotten gains.

The Justice Department’s criminal division, which arranged the guilty plea with the Japanese subsidiary, also struck a non-prosecution agreement with the parent company. The exact total of the penalties was unclear, because the department has not yet released its settlement documents.

The Justice Department’s case is also expected to take aim at some of the bank’s traders, including 33-year-old Thomas Hayes. The Justice Department plans to announce charges against Mr. Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader, who featured prominently in the investigation, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He was arrested in London last week and later released on bail. Other UBS employees have been suspended or fired following an internal investigation.

The fallout from the UBS case is expected to ratchet up the pressure on some of the world’s largest financial institutions and spur settlement talks across the banking industry.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has said it expects to pay fines before its next earnings statement in February, while Deutsche Bank has set aside an undisclosed amount to cover potential penalties. Some American institutions, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, also remain in regulators’ crosshairs.

The UBS case has exposed the systemic problems with the rate-setting process. Over a 6-year period, UBS traders targeted the major currencies that form the Libor system, including the U.S. dollar denominated rate. The bank was also cited for attempting to manipulate other benchmarks like the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or Euribor, and the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate, or Tibor.

Much of the activity took place in the bank’s Japanese unit. Authorities said four UBS traders colluded to manipulate submissions to Yen Libor. The individuals made more than 1,900 requests to brokers and other banks to alter the rate, according to regulatory filings. As part of their efforts, UBS employees made quarterly payments of £15,000 ($24,000) to outside brokers involved in the rate-rigging for at least 18 months for their help, the complaint said.

To avoid arousing suspicion, UBS employees routinely made small changes to submissions, the complaint detailed. The individuals, who communicated with colleagues about the rate-setting through emails and instant messages, also altered rate submissions to benefit traders at other banks.

The Japanese unit’s guilty plea for wire fraud follows frantic last-minute negotiations last week between senior UBS officials and American authorities. The actions detailed in the complaint emboldened the Justice Department to seek the guilty plea from the Japanese unit. By forcing the plea from the firm’s Japanese subsidiary, federal authorities sent a clear message about the level of wrongdoing, but stopped far short of shutting UBS out of the American markets.

Still, the steep sanctions come as a surprise, given the bank’s cooperation with investigators.

Since first announcing that it was the subject of Libor investigations, the Swiss bank has eagerly worked with authorities in a bid for leniency. UBS, for example, had received conditional immunity from the Justice Department’s antitrust unit, a deal that did not apply to the Justice Department’s criminal division.

The case presents the latest setback for UBS.

The Swiss bank already agreed to a $780 million fine in 2009 with American authorities to settle charges that it helped American clients avoid tax. The firm also announced a $2.3 billion loss last year related to illegal trading activity by a former employee, Kweku M. Adoboli. Mr. Adoboli subsequently was sentenced to seven years, and British authorities fined UBS $47.5 million over the scandal.

UBS said it expected to report a net loss of up to $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter of the year because of the costs related to Libor and other legal matters. The figure includes around $2.3 billion of provisions of legal and regulatory costs, as well as $548 million in restructuring charges.

In the wake of the Libor scandal, UBS has been forced to beef up its compliance and rate-setting procedures, according to the Swiss regulator. The bank has also fired individuals connected to the rate-rigging.

“We are pleased that the authorities gave us credit for the important and positive changes we have already made,” the chairman of UBS, Axel Weber, said in a statement. “I have zero tolerance for inappropriate and unethical behavior of any of our staff.”


This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 19, 2012

An earlier version of this post misstated a loss announced by UBS related to illegal trading activity by a former employee, Kweku M. Adoboli. It was $2.3 billion, not $2.3 million.

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Newport Beach dock renters may withhold holiday love









Marcy Cook embraces the holiday season. The tell? Start with the teddy bears dressed as Santa. More than 1,500 stand sentry around and inside her Newport Beach waterfronthome. Garland and strings of lights threaten to strangle the place like kudzu.


"We decorate a little bit, if you haven't noticed," said Cook, 69. "It's the highlight of the year for us."


Each Christmas, Newport Harbor is ablaze in lights as homeowners go to extraordinary lengths to complement the city's annual Christmas Boat Parade — an indelible tradition that renews itself Wednesday night and continues through Sunday.





But this has been a stressful season here along the tranquil waterfront lined with multimillion-dollar homes.


An increase in city rental fees for residential docks that protrude over public tidelands created a furor when it was approved last week by the City Council.


It also prompted a call to boycott the boat parade and festival of lights by a group calling itself "Stop the Dock Tax."


"It costs us thousands of dollars to voluntarily decorate our homes and boats to bring holiday smiles to nearly 1 million people," organization Chairman Bob McCaffrey wrote to the city. "This year, we are turning off our lights and withdrawing our boats in protest of the massive new dock tax we expect the City Council to levy."


Pete Pallette, a fellow boycott proponent and harbor homeowner, told city leaders the group would call off the boycott only if the council delayed voting on the rent hike. "Otherwise," he vowed, "game on."


In a place where homes come with names and mega-yachts bob in the harbor, it might appear the wealthy are wielding a weapon most often reserved for the masses. A holiday blackout, proponents say, will underscore their displeasure.


Newport's dock fee, which has stood at $100 a year for the last two decades, will now be based on a dock's size. The city says rents will increase to about $250 for a small slip to $3,200 annually for a large dock shared by two homeowners.


"People have been paying $8 a month all these years to access what is public waters," said Newport Beach City Manager Dave Kiff. "That's a pretty good deal. The City Council didn't think the increase it approved was too extreme."


Many did.


They packed council meetings when the hike was discussed, accusing the city of an excessive money grab.


They brushed aside the city's rationale: Statelawmandates cities charge fair market rents for the private use of public lands, and Newport Beach was only now catching up.


And they were unmoved by arguments that the extra revenue will go exclusively to badly needed repairs to a harbor that, despite outward appearances, needs a lot of work.


The city's five-year plan for the harbor calls for $29 million in long-overdue maintenance. Its silt-filled channels haven't been fully dredged since the Great Depression. Ancient, leaky sea walls protecting neighborhoods need to be repaired or replaced.


"We have the makings of a perfect storm like they did on the East Coast" during Superstorm Sandy, said Chris Miller, the city's harbor resources manager. "The sea walls are nearing the end of their useful life."


Even with the rent increases, Newport's dock owners will contribute a tiny fraction of that cost — the rest coming from the federal government and the city's general operating fund.


As dock owners fumed over having to pay more, others recoiled at the proposed boycott of the boat parade, which dates to 1908 when a single gondola led eight canoes illuminated by Japanese lanterns around the harbor. It has now swelled to a decent-sized armada of dozens of boats — some carrying paying customers — that circle past the decorated harbor-front homes.


"The boycott is ridiculous," said Shirley Pepys, whose frontyard on Balboa Island has been taken over by a family of penguins dressed for a Hawaiian luau.





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Mahout, There It Is! Open Source Algorithms Remake Overstock.com



SALT LAKE CITY — Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in creating this clever little app, Bagley also pushed online retailer Overstock.com away from the $2-million-a-year service it was using to generate product recommendations for web shoppers, and onto a system that did the same thing for free — and did it better.


Bagley is a software developer with Overstock’s fledgling O Labs, a mini-research-and-development operation tucked into the fifth floor of the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters, just outside the office of CEO Patrick Byrne. O Labs was founded to incubate projects that can push the company in new directions, and MyCurrent was the first of the lot. A personal news reader may seem like an odd thing to emerge from an online retailer, but that’s largely the point. And in the end, the project pumped new life into the company’s primary retail operation.


In building MyCurrent, Bagley and his O Labs cohorts stumbled onto an open source software project known as Mahout. Founded in 2009, Mahout provides the world with a set of freely available machine learning algorithms — algorithms that give computing systems at least a modicum of artificial intelligence, letting them adjust their behavior according to what’s happened in the past. Inside O Labs, the idea was to use Mahout as a means of examining the news stories you’ve enjoyed in the past and then selecting stories you’re likely to enjoy, well, right now.



‘We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.’


— Judd Bagley



Mahout worked well — so well that Overstock decided it could be used to generate the product recommendations for users on its main website. The company was using a commercial recommendation system from a company called Rich Relevance, but a few months ago, says Saum Noursalehi, who oversees O Labs, it replaced this system with an engine based on Mahout and a sister platform known as Hadoop, a hugely popular open source system that uses a sea of ordinary computer servers to process massive amounts of data.


The tale highlights the benefit of a blue-sky R&D operation. Overstock was founded in 1997 and went public in 2004, and Byrne — the company’s swashbuckling chief exec — created O Labs about a year ago to feed a bit more of the entrepreneurial ethos back into the company. “We’re saving $2 million a year with Mahout, and that never would have happened if not for the sort of experimental stuff we’re doing in the labs,” says Bagley. “We’re discovering things that can then have benefit across the company.”


But it also shows how Hadoop and related open source tools continue to evolve and push even further across the web and into businesses. Mahout — which was specifically built for use with Hadoop — is little more than 3 years old, and it has already attracted the attention of several big-name web operations, including not only Overstock, but AOL, Foursquare, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Amazon.


Originally bootstrapped by Yahoo and Facebook, Hadoop mimics two sweeping software platforms that Google built to underpin its search engine. It’s widely used across the web, and now it’s pushing into other businesses as well, thanks in part of Hadoop-minded software startups such as Cloudera and MapR. It can be used to analyze data, but it can also crunch massive amounts of data for use in live applications — such as the Overstock recommendations service.


Hadoop has also spawned a wide range of sister projects, including Hbase, a database for storing particularly large amounts of information; Hive, a means of querying data crunched by Hadoop; Zookeeper, a means of synchronizing Hadoop and other platforms across a large cluster of servers; and, yes, Mahout, one of the newer projects. Hadoop is named after a yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of the project’s founder, Doug Cutting, and the Mahout moniker plays off this bit of trivia. In India, a mahout is someone who rides an elephant.


According to Ted Dunning — a MapR engineer who works on the Mahout project — the project has been adopted by “dozens” of sites to help drive user recommendations, including Amazon, one of the companies that pioneered such recommendations more than a decade ago. It’s unclear how Amazon is using Mahout, but according to a job listing on LinkedIn, it has been used by the team that oversees Amazon’s “Personalization Platform” — i.e., the software platform used to personalize content across the site.


But Dunning is quick to point out that Mahout is still a young project. And it’s important to realize that it is merely a library of algorithms — something you use to build larger applications. “It’s not a product. It’s not a package. It’s not a service,” he says. “Batteries are not included. And you will find rough corners. Various aspects of Mahout are better or worse in terms of code maturity. Some parts are literally student projects — and are really bad. Others parts are absolutely production quality.”


So, even though Overstock is saving $2 million a year in dropping its commercial recommendations tool, its switch to Mahout did involve development costs. But Overstock’s Saum Noursalehi tells us that the company built its system on its own — without paid help from the likes of MapR or Cloudera. The team that runs the project spans about six developers and a product manager.


According to Noursalehi, Hadoop logs everything that any Overstock customer does on the site, and then it feeds this data into a system based on Mahout. The Mahout library includes hundreds of algorithms, and Overstock is in the process of A/B testing many of these to determine which work the best. It’s also starting to “cluster” recommendations, creating groups of people who are likely to respond to certain types of recommendations.


“You might find the people living in certain zip codes are high-income people,” Noursalehi says, “and their recommendations might be slightly different than those we provide to people in other regions.” Similarly, the company is looking to create clusters around members of its loyalty program or its most active customers.


In other words, Overstock is behaving like an online retail operation. The difference is that it’s generating these online recommendations with open source algorithms.


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Ricky Gervais in negotiations for “The Muppets” sequel






LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Ricky Gervais is in negotiations to star in “The Muppets” sequel at Disney, a representative for the actor told TheWrap.


Ty Burrell was cast in the film earlier this month after Christoph Waltz dropped out.






James Bobin, who directed the 2011 Muppets film, is directing the sequel, which he co-wrote with Nicholas Stoller.


Filming is expected to begin in Europe early next year.


The 2011 “Muppets” feature made $ 88 million at the U.S. box office.


David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman are producing the sequel.


Gervais’ recent credits include “Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D.” His upcoming films include “The Wind in the Willows.”


He is represented by WME and United Agents.


Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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The New Old Age Blog: In the Middle: Helping Unhappy Couples

A post on Monday discussed the forces that can make an older couple’s good marriage suddenly go bad — an array of subtle, and often-misunderstood, mental, physical and emotional factors that can upset the equilibrium of even the happiest marriages.

Now we have consulted marriage counselors and geriatricians to find out what caregivers — either the grown children of the couple, or one of the spouses involved– can do to help restore peace and balance to these relationships. The experts consulted uniformly agreed that even older people can at least take steps to reduce tensions and improve their relationship, even if they cannot actually change. (Really, who can, at any age?)

“Even though the situation may seem overwhelming, take heart,” said Dr. Gordon Herz, a psychologist in private practice in Madison, Wisc., who specializes in neuropsychology and rehabilitation psychology. “Couples who have been together for 60 years tend to have worked out ways to manage conflict – or they wouldn’t still be together.”

Retreat to a neutral corner

When grown children see their parents fight, many want to run and hide. But those who are assuming an increased caregiving role often feel impelled to jump in and “fix” the problem, as they do with the other caregiving issues.

If you are so inclined, experts speak with one loud voice to advise: Don’t!

Trying to act as emotional broker between your parents can backfire. (Now they tell me! Suffice it to say that after one such effort my sister said to me in not exactly the friendliest tone, “Well, that went well, didn’t it?”)

“It’s better if your parents can find somebody else to talk to than you,” said Dr. Nancy K. Schlossberg, professor emerita of counseling psychology at the University of Maryland and the author of “Overwhelmed: Coping With Life’s Ups and Downs.”

Don’t give up on marital therapy

“Marital therapy for individuals over 65 years of age is difficult, since habits of a lifetime are deeply ingrained,” stated a study in The Canadian Journal of Medicine, one of the few in the medical literature about marital therapy among older people.

“Yet, in a sense, marital therapy is more crucial for the elderly than for younger patients,” the study continued. “At a time when they are least adaptable and most vulnerable to stress and are entering perhaps the most difficult period of their lives, the elderly must learn new methods of relating and coping” because of the physical and mental changes described in our earlier post.

There’s another reason learning to cope with life changes as a couple is even more critical for older couples: Unlike younger couples, the elderly are rarely in a position to leave the marriage and start over.

Help at least one spouse get counseling

What if only half the couple is ready to seek counseling? Not a problem, therapists said. “You want to help the part of the couple that is suffering,” said Dr. Elaine Rodino, a therapist in private practice in State College, Penn. “The other person may still be the curmudgeon, but I think of it as the law of physics: When you change one aspect of the formula, things change in the total.”

When dementia affects one of the spouses, therapy can help the caregiving spouse learn coping techniques, “which can reduce the marital discord and stress that can make conditions, especially cognitive difficulties, worse,” said Dr. William Dale, chief of geriatrics at the University of Chicago Geriatrics Medicine.

Consider the general practitioner or internist

If the couple won’t see a marriage counselor or therapist, can a family doctor be of any use? The experts had mixed responses.

Many pointed out that general practitioners have neither the time nor the training to offer much relationship help, unless the origin of the problem is exclusively physical. Others thought they could be of use, if given a little direction from the family.

“I encourage the kids to talk to the doctor in advance and let him know something is going on – signs of depression or other problems the parents won’t talk about,” advised Dr. Dale, adding that a consultation with a geriatrician who is more familiar with problems of the aging might be even more productive. “Then the doctor can say, ‘Gee, you sound really frustrated or down — are there any reasons we can explore?’”

Don’t overlook the importance of intimacy

“Mutually stimulating sexual relationships need care and feeding by both partners at any age, but especially in the geriatric years,” according to a study on marital therapy for the elderly. “The need for physical contact, warmth and touching perhaps reaches a peak in this age of loneliness, decreased self-esteem and poor health.”

Forget the idea that elderly couples are too shy to talk about intimacy, insisted Dr. Rodino. “I saw a couple in their 80s, the husband was getting penile injections at the doctor’s office, and then they hurried home to have sex.”

But Dr. Rodino does concede that for older patients it is especially important to focus not only on sexual function and performance, but on “touching, and non-intercourse sexual relations; I help them rekindle the affection and emotional closeness,” Dr. Rodino said.

Address any neuropsychological issues.

To find out whether the sudden marital conflict may stem from early mental cognitive impairment (M.C.I.) —or to rule M.C.I. out and find the real source of trouble — make sure the spouse obtains a full neuropsychological evaluation. If it is M.C.I., “it convinces everybody that there is more than just abstinence, it’s not a personality problem — and they need to address it,” said Dr. Dale.

Don’t overlook simple solutions

“Sometimes a memory problem is something simple, like low Vitamin B12, that is easily fixed,” said Dr. Dale. “Or hypothyroidism, which is quite common, can affect memory.”

In that case, doctors administer synthroid, a thyroid hormone replacement that Dr. Dale said is “very safe, with almost no side effects.” Other changes in behavior can also be the result of a simple problem or be remedied by a change in medication. Don’t assume the worst.

Put an end to the blame game

Help reframe the problem. “Even if dementia is involved, let them know it’s not that their partner hates them, it’s that he is having cognitive changes,” said Dr. Linda Waite, director of the Center on Demography and Economics of Aging at NORC/University of Chicago.

“When you re-frame it like that, it’s easier for the spouse not to take it personally and not blame themselves and feel it’s something they did,” said Dr. Waite. “It can make a difference.”

A 2009 study in the journal Gerontologist supports this notion: “Care partners likely would benefit from strategies aimed at reducing self-blame, enhancing coping skills … and communicating effectively with the person with M.C.I and significant others.”

Separate the anxiety

Divide and conquer — time away improves time together.

“Older couples, especially those with disabilities, spend way too much time together,” said Dr. Lisa Gwyther, director of the Duke Center for Aging Family Support Program. “It would be a problem for any couple.”

Caregivers can best help by arranging for an activity or outing that each spouse can do separately so they can return to each other refreshed and more cheerful. “That can help a lot,” said Dr. Gwyther.

Dial down the tone

For spouse caregivers, it is important to watch not just what is said, but how it is said. In any relationship, tone influences our interpretation of what our partner says. Those with M.C.I. will especially react to tone, rather than the substance of the exchange, Dr. Dale said.

“Ratchet down the emotions, repeat things calmly,” Dr. Dale said. The person with cognitive problems doesn’t know he asked the same question five times — he only knows that you sound angry at him for no reason he can fathom. One spouse’s anger fuels the other’s, and pretty soon there is a fight or withdrawal.

Zero tolerance for violence

If a spouse becomes violent, “that’s an entirely different issue,” said Dr. Schlossberg. “Call in an expert on family violence” or the police.

Help them help others

Nobody likes feeling dependent and having to ask for help. Finding a way to have your loved one volunteer, help others and continue to feel useful can improve moods and marital interactions – even if M.C.I. is involved.

With one couple Dr. Gwyther saw, the wife was not only “driving her husband nuts because she was asking him the same questions over and over,” but she could no longer drive and deliver food in a mobile meals program as she used to. “So her husband agreed to be the driver — and she took the meals to the doors,” Dr. Gwyther recalled.”It made her feel good to continue to do that — and it made them feel good to do it together.”

Caregiver, heal thyself

You have heard it a million times here and elsewhere but, unlike us, this advice never gets old.

If you are exhausted from caregiving, you are bound to be cranky, and that will make everybody around you edgy and irritable, too — especially the spouse who requires your care. Taking the time to look after your own health and engage in activities that bring you pleasure can go a long way toward reducing stress and reestablishing a peaceful balance in a marriage.

How have you coped with tensions in your marriage — or in your elderly parents’ marriage, as you care for them in their old age? Share in the comments below.

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President Delivers a New Offer on the Fiscal Crisis to Boehner


Joshua Roberts/Reuters


Speaker John A. Boehner returned to his office on Monday after meeting with President Obama.







WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered to Speaker John A. Boehner a new offer on Monday to resolve the pending fiscal crisis, a deal that would raise revenues by $1.2 trillion over the next decade but keep in place the Bush-era tax rates for any household with earnings below $400,000.




The offer is close to a plan proposed by the speaker on Friday, and both sides expressed confidence that they were closing in on a major deficit-reduction plan that could be passed well before January, when more than a half-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts would kick in.


Senior Republican aides said the speaker was to meet with House Republicans on Tuesday morning to discuss the state of negotiations. But they cautioned that obstacles remained.


“Any movement away from the unrealistic offers the president has made previously is a step in the right direction,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “We hope to continue discussions with the president so we can reach an agreement that is truly balanced and begins to solve our spending problem.”


The two sides are now dickering over price, not philosophical differences, and the numbers are very close.


Mr. Boehner had offered the president a deficit framework that would raise $1 trillion over 10 years, with the details to be settled next year by Congress’s tax-writing committees and the Obama administration. In response, Mr. Obama reduced his proposal to $1.2 trillion from $1.4 trillion on Monday at a 45-minute meeting with the speaker at the White House. That was down from $1.6 trillion initially.


The White House plan would permanently extend Bush-era tax cuts on household incomes below $400,000, meaning that only the top tax bracket, 35 percent, would increase to 39.6 percent. The current cutoff between the top rate and the next highest rate, 33 percent, is $388,350.


On spending, the two sides are also converging.


The White House says the president’s plan would cut spending by $1.22 trillion over 10 years, compared with $1.2 trillion in cuts from the Republicans’ initial offer. Of that, $800 billion is cuts to programs, and $122 billion comes from adopting a new measure of inflation that slows the growth of government benefits, especially Social Security. The White House is also counting on $290 billion in savings from lower interest costs on a reduced national debt.


Of the $800 billion in straight cuts, the president said half would come from federal health care programs; $200 billion from other so-called mandatory programs, like farm price supports, not subject to Congress’s annual spending bills; $100 billion from military spending; and $100 billion from domestic programs under Congress’s annual discretion.


To make all this happen, Mr. Obama proposed fast-track procedures to help Congressional tax writers overhaul the individual and corporate tax code and make changes to other programs.


Senior Republican aides made it clear that differences remain. For instance, they say the president is still pressing for $1.3 trillion in higher taxes because the change in the way inflation is calculated would not only slow the growth of spending but also raise more revenue by slowing the rate at which tax brackets rise each year with the cost of living. That would mean that incomes would probably grow faster than the rise in tax brackets, pushing people more quickly into higher tax rates.


They also disagree with the president over counting lower interest payments on the national debt as savings.


“A proposal that includes $1.3 trillion in revenue for only $930 billion in spending cuts cannot be considered balanced,” said another spokesman for Mr. Boehner, Michael Steel, using the Republicans’ calculation for the president’s offer.


The president is also insisting on some protections for what he has called the “most vulnerable populations,” which Republican aides said they had not been expecting. The new inflation calculations, for instance, would probably not affect wounded veterans and disabled people on Supplemental Security Income.


And Mr. Obama is sticking by his request for additional upfront spending on infrastructure and an extension of expiring unemployment benefits.


He would also secure some tax and policy changes long sought by both parties but unattainable in the context of smaller budget deals. His proposal would permanently extend popular business tax breaks like the credit for corporate research and development, permanently stop the expansion of the alternative minimum tax so it does not affect more of the middle class, and stop a long-planned and deep cut to Medicare health providers, which Congress has never had the stomach to allow to kick in.


To keep the country from returning to fiscal showdowns, Mr. Obama wants the government’s borrowing limit to rise high enough to take the issue off the table for two years, although he said that Congress could periodically weigh in and try to override a presidential lifting of the debt ceiling, should it want to.


Senior Republican aides made it clear on Monday night that the plan was not what the speaker had wanted. He had proposed higher income tax rates on income over $1 million. That revenue would be supplemented by reinstating a provision in the tax code — phased out by the Bush-era tax cuts — that automatically limits tax deductions and credits for the affluent. The speaker was also ready to accept a White House proposal from Mr. Obama’s first days in office that would limit tax deductions to 28 percent, trimming back deductions for charitable giving and other activities from the top rate paid by the giver, 35 percent currently.


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