Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

Label:


THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.


But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.


Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.


The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.


“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.


The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.


Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.


If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.


DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.


“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”


Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)


The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.


“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.


The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.


In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”


Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.


Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.


He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.


“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.


There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.


UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”


The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.


“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.


Read More..

Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

Label:


THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.


But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.


Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.


The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.


“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.


The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.


Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.


If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.


DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.


“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”


Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)


The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.


“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.


The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.


In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”


Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.


Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.


He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.


“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.


There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.


UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”


The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.


“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.


Read More..

This Life: Maria Popova Has Some Big Ideas

Label:

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times


Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, an online grab bag of eclectic information.







SHE is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.




At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.


Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed (263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.


“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”


Unlike most blogger celebrities, however, Ms. Popova revels in remaining anonymous, which means her followers know almost nothing about her. In an age when many tweet what they put in their morning coffee, she rarely uses the word “I.” Her personal history is almost completely absent. Her photograph is not on the site. “I don’t feel the necessity to be in the public eye that way,” she said after reluctantly agreeing to sit for an interview. “There’s a certain safety in making people feel like you’re an organization and not a person. ”


A fierce creature of habit, she begins every day by working out. On this morning, she alternates 20 chin-ups with 50 push-ups, then performs a series of planks and stretches. Once on the elliptical, she frantically highlights an obscure 1976 book, “The Creativity Question” (Amazon sales ranking: one million-plus), and checks her RSS feed on her iPad.


Exactly 70 minutes later, she returns to her modest one-bedroom apartment to write a brief essay about Freud and daydreaming, file her thrice-daily blog entries and schedule her regimen of 50 Twitter messages a day. She does this while balancing on a wobble board.


“I try to sit still when I work, but my mind goes spiraling elsewhere,” she said in a mild Slavic accent reminiscent of Bond girls in the 1970s. “When my body is moving, it’s almost like it takes the wind out of this mental spinning, and I’m able to focus.” Recently, she came upon a 1942 book on inspiration chronicling others with the same habit. “Mark Twain paced while he dictated,” she said. “Beethoven walked along the river. Maybe there’s a psycho-biological element.”


Ms. Popova traces her discipline to her upbringing behind the Iron Curtain. Her parents met as teenage exchange students in Russia and had her almost immediately. Her father was an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman; her mother was studying library science. “We’re not very much in touch,” she said of her parents today, “but recently we were on Skype, and this whole library science thing came up. I realized a lot of what I do is organizational, almost like a Dewey Decimal System for the Web. My mother got so emotional. It was very funny, and kind of moving.”


Her paternal grandmother was a rabid biblio and had a collection of encyclopedias, Ms. Popova said, and she credits the act of randomly opening volumes and happening upon entries for her passion to discover old knowledge. “The Web has such a presentism bias,” she said, with Facebook updates, tweets and blog entries always appearing with the latest first. By contrast, flipping through the encyclopedia was “an interesting model of learning about the world serendipitously and also guidedely.”


After graduating from an American high school in Bulgaria, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly grew bored with what she calls the “industrial model” of education, involving large-scale lectures. While still a student, she was working part time at an advertising firm in 2005, when a colleague sent around an e-mail with clippings of rivals’ work to inspire the team.


Bruce Feiler’s latest book,“The Secrets of Happy Families,” will be published in February. “This Life” appears monthly.



Read More..

Enrique Peña Nieto Takes Office as Mexico’s President

Label:

Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Enrique Peña Nieto, center, during his swearing-in ceremony in Mexico City on Saturday morning.







MEXICO CITY — With protests and little pomp, Enrique Peña Nieto on Saturday began his six-year term as president of Mexico, promising big spending and sweeping changes to bring peace and prosperity to a country troubled by drug violence and uneven economic growth.




“This is Mexico’s moment,” Mr. Peña Nieto declared in his inaugural address before a gathering of domestic and foreign leaders at the national palace, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., seated in the front row, while demonstrators kept far from the scene vandalized buildings outside.


Mr. Peña Nieto, 46, a lawyer who had been governor of Mexico State, has pledged to work closely with the United States to strengthen security and economic ties, which he believes would bring Mexico closer to a middle-class society and reduce the kind of drug war violence that has left tens of thousands dead in the past several years.


He made no promise to dismantle the drug-trafficking organizations, a focus of his immediate predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Instead, he unveiled a sweeping 13-point agenda focused more on domestic goals for crime prevention that would revise the penal code to attack impunity, give more attention to victims of violence, lessen poverty and hunger, improve schooling and even build new passenger train lines and expand Internet access.


“We are a nation that is growing at two speeds; some live behind and in poverty and others live in the developing part,” he said, alluding to new manufacturing plants and investments but also grinding poverty that affects half the population.


“There are a great number of Mexicans who live every day worried about the lack of employment and opportunities,” he added. “Those conditions also damage the image of Mexico abroad, and that is the Mexico that must be transformed.”


Still, his administration will be watched to see if it is propelling Mexico forward or backward.


Mr. Peña Nieto ushers in a new era for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years before the more conservative National Action Party toppled it in 2000 and again in 2006.


Mr. Peña Nieto and his associates say they represent a new, chastened party bent on promoting efficiency and economic change — there were no public inaugural celebrations — and promising to fight the kind of corruption long associated with it.


“It’s a very common misconception to think that the PRI’s return to power means the return of something that is already in history,” Luis Videgaray, who led the president’s transition team and is now finance minister, said in a recent interview.


“The PRI of today is like any other party: a party that competes in a democracy, that accepts results and understands that only through good government would it be able to compete again in elections,” he said.


But Mr. Peña Nieto hardly begins with a mandate; he won 38 percent of the vote and faces a divided Congress. He recited the oath of office before Congress amid cheers and jeers, mostly from leftist legislators, and left the congressional chamber quickly.


Later, outside the national palace, scores of mostly young masked people clashed with the police, set fires, threw rocks and vandalized hotels and stores along several blocks. More than 60 were arrested and several were injured.


“The corruption and mockery are going to keep getting worse in Mexico,” said one protester. “The cabinet is a bunch of thieves.”


When Mr. Peña Nieto announced his cabinet on Friday, it was clear that he had relied largely on PRI stalwarts, including five former governors. But he also placed several foreign-educated technocrats from his inner circle, including Mr. Videgaray, in prominent positions.


Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute in Washington, said Mr. Peña Nieto seemed intent on reaffirming the power of the state, a hallmark of his party, while also hinting at taking on interest groups. He specifically promised an end to entrenched employment in the education system, seen as a jab at the powerful teachers’ union, which has long backed his party and has stymied changes.


“After several years of decentralized government in Mexico, Peña Nieto seems intent on showing that the Mexican state is back and that all of the interest groups in the country will need to respect his authority,” Mr. Selee said. “How significant these efforts are in reality depends on what he does next, but symbolically Peña Nieto reasserted the power of the presidency after years of what many Mexicans feel has been fragmented and ineffective government.”


Read More..

Hockey Coaches Defy Doctors on Concussions, Study Finds

Label:




Despite several years of intensive research, coverage and discussion about the dangers of concussions, the idea of playing through head injuries is so deeply rooted in hockey culture that two university teams kept concussed players on the ice even though they were taking part in a major concussion study.




The study, which was published Friday in a series of articles in the journal Neurosurgical Focus, was conducted during the 2011-12 hockey season by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the University of Montreal, Harvard and other institutions.


“This culture is entrenched at all levels of hockey, from peewee to university,” said Dr. Paul S. Echlin, a concussion specialist and researcher in Burlington, Ontario, and the lead author of the study. “Concussion is a significant public health issue that requires a generational shift. As with smoking or seat belts, it doesn’t just happen overnight — it takes a massive effort and collective movement.”


The study is believed to be among the most comprehensive analyses of concussions in hockey, which has a rate of head trauma approaching that of football. Researchers followed two Canadian university teams — a men’s team and a women’s team — and scanned every player’s brain before and after the season. Players who sustained head injuries also received scans at three intervals after the injuries, with researchers using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques.


The teams were not named in the study, in which an independent specialist physician was present at each game and was empowered to pull any player off the ice for examination if a potential concussion was observed.


The men’s team, with 25 players and an average age of 22, played a 28-game regular season and a 3-game postseason. The women’s team, with 20 players and an average age of 20, played 24 regular-season games and no playoff games. Over the course of the season, there were five observed or self-reported concussions on the men’s team and six on the women’s team.


Researchers noted several instances of coaches, trainers and players avoiding examinations, ignoring medical advice or otherwise obstructing the study, even though the players had signed consent forms to participate and university ethics officials had given institutional consent.


“Unless something is broken, I want them out playing,” one coach said, according to the study.


In one incident, a neurologist observing the men’s team pulled a defenseman during the first period of a game after the player took two hits and was skating slowly. During the intermission the player reported dizziness and was advised to sit out, but the coach suggested he play the second period and “skate it off.” The defenseman stumbled through the rest of the game.


“At the end of the third period, I spoke with the player and the trainer and said that he should not play until he was formally evaluated and underwent the formal return-to-play protocol,” the neurologist said, as reported in the study. “I was dismayed to see that he played the next evening.”


After the team returned from its trip, the neurologist questioned the trainer about overruling his advice and placing the defenseman at risk.


“The trainer responded that he and the player did not understand the decision and that most of the team did not trust the neurologist,” according to the study. “He requested that the physician no longer be used to cover any more games.”


In another episode, a physician observer assessed a minor concussion in a female player and recommended that she miss the next night’s game. Even though the coach’s own playing career had ended because of concussions, she overrode the medical advice and inserted the player the next evening.


According to the report, the coach refused to speak to another physician observer on the second evening. The trainer was reluctant to press the issue with the coach because, the trainer said, the coach did not want the study to interfere with the team.


Read More..

Hockey Coaches Defy Doctors on Concussions, Study Finds

Label:




Despite several years of intensive research, coverage and discussion about the dangers of concussions, the idea of playing through head injuries is so deeply rooted in hockey culture that two university teams kept concussed players on the ice even though they were taking part in a major concussion study.




The study, which was published Friday in a series of articles in the journal Neurosurgical Focus, was conducted during the 2011-12 hockey season by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the University of Montreal, Harvard and other institutions.


“This culture is entrenched at all levels of hockey, from peewee to university,” said Dr. Paul S. Echlin, a concussion specialist and researcher in Burlington, Ontario, and the lead author of the study. “Concussion is a significant public health issue that requires a generational shift. As with smoking or seat belts, it doesn’t just happen overnight — it takes a massive effort and collective movement.”


The study is believed to be among the most comprehensive analyses of concussions in hockey, which has a rate of head trauma approaching that of football. Researchers followed two Canadian university teams — a men’s team and a women’s team — and scanned every player’s brain before and after the season. Players who sustained head injuries also received scans at three intervals after the injuries, with researchers using advanced magnetic resonance imaging techniques.


The teams were not named in the study, in which an independent specialist physician was present at each game and was empowered to pull any player off the ice for examination if a potential concussion was observed.


The men’s team, with 25 players and an average age of 22, played a 28-game regular season and a 3-game postseason. The women’s team, with 20 players and an average age of 20, played 24 regular-season games and no playoff games. Over the course of the season, there were five observed or self-reported concussions on the men’s team and six on the women’s team.


Researchers noted several instances of coaches, trainers and players avoiding examinations, ignoring medical advice or otherwise obstructing the study, even though the players had signed consent forms to participate and university ethics officials had given institutional consent.


“Unless something is broken, I want them out playing,” one coach said, according to the study.


In one incident, a neurologist observing the men’s team pulled a defenseman during the first period of a game after the player took two hits and was skating slowly. During the intermission the player reported dizziness and was advised to sit out, but the coach suggested he play the second period and “skate it off.” The defenseman stumbled through the rest of the game.


“At the end of the third period, I spoke with the player and the trainer and said that he should not play until he was formally evaluated and underwent the formal return-to-play protocol,” the neurologist said, as reported in the study. “I was dismayed to see that he played the next evening.”


After the team returned from its trip, the neurologist questioned the trainer about overruling his advice and placing the defenseman at risk.


“The trainer responded that he and the player did not understand the decision and that most of the team did not trust the neurologist,” according to the study. “He requested that the physician no longer be used to cover any more games.”


In another episode, a physician observer assessed a minor concussion in a female player and recommended that she miss the next night’s game. Even though the coach’s own playing career had ended because of concussions, she overrode the medical advice and inserted the player the next evening.


According to the report, the coach refused to speak to another physician observer on the second evening. The trainer was reluctant to press the issue with the coach because, the trainer said, the coach did not want the study to interfere with the team.


Read More..

This Life: Maria Popova Has Some Big Ideas

Label:

Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times


Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, an online grab bag of eclectic information.







SHE is the mastermind of the one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown. She is the champion of old-fashioned ideas, yet she is only 28 years old. She is a fierce defender of books, yet she insists she will never write one herself.




At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.


Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed (263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.


“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”


Unlike most blogger celebrities, however, Ms. Popova revels in remaining anonymous, which means her followers know almost nothing about her. In an age when many tweet what they put in their morning coffee, she rarely uses the word “I.” Her personal history is almost completely absent. Her photograph is not on the site. “I don’t feel the necessity to be in the public eye that way,” she said after reluctantly agreeing to sit for an interview. “There’s a certain safety in making people feel like you’re an organization and not a person. ”


A fierce creature of habit, she begins every day by working out. On this morning, she alternates 20 chin-ups with 50 push-ups, then performs a series of planks and stretches. Once on the elliptical, she frantically highlights an obscure 1976 book, “The Creativity Question” (Amazon sales ranking: one million-plus), and checks her RSS feed on her iPad.


Exactly 70 minutes later, she returns to her modest one-bedroom apartment to write a brief essay about Freud and daydreaming, file her thrice-daily blog entries and schedule her regimen of 50 Twitter messages a day. She does this while balancing on a wobble board.


“I try to sit still when I work, but my mind goes spiraling elsewhere,” she said in a mild Slavic accent reminiscent of Bond girls in the 1970s. “When my body is moving, it’s almost like it takes the wind out of this mental spinning, and I’m able to focus.” Recently, she came upon a 1942 book on inspiration chronicling others with the same habit. “Mark Twain paced while he dictated,” she said. “Beethoven walked along the river. Maybe there’s a psycho-biological element.”


Ms. Popova traces her discipline to her upbringing behind the Iron Curtain. Her parents met as teenage exchange students in Russia and had her almost immediately. Her father was an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman; her mother was studying library science. “We’re not very much in touch,” she said of her parents today, “but recently we were on Skype, and this whole library science thing came up. I realized a lot of what I do is organizational, almost like a Dewey Decimal System for the Web. My mother got so emotional. It was very funny, and kind of moving.”


Her paternal grandmother was a rabid biblio and had a collection of encyclopedias, Ms. Popova said, and she credits the act of randomly opening volumes and happening upon entries for her passion to discover old knowledge. “The Web has such a presentism bias,” she said, with Facebook updates, tweets and blog entries always appearing with the latest first. By contrast, flipping through the encyclopedia was “an interesting model of learning about the world serendipitously and also guidedely.”


After graduating from an American high school in Bulgaria, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly grew bored with what she calls the “industrial model” of education, involving large-scale lectures. While still a student, she was working part time at an advertising firm in 2005, when a colleague sent around an e-mail with clippings of rivals’ work to inspire the team.


Bruce Feiler’s latest book,“The Secrets of Happy Families,” will be published in February. “This Life” appears monthly.



Read More..

Brazil Registers Anemic Growth in 3rd Quarter, Surprising Economists

Label:




SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s economy registered anemic growth in the third quarter as investment levels remained disappointingly low, according to figures released on Friday. The results cast doubt on policies meant to prevent Brazil from turning into a laggard among Latin America’s economies.




Gross domestic product grew just 0.6 percent from the previous quarter, stunning economists who had forecast double that rate. Brazil’s economy is now expected to grow only about 1 percent in 2012, delivering a challenge to President Dilma Rousseff, who has tried to increase growth through an array of huge stimulus projects.


Even economists with favorable views of Ms. Rousseff’s policies of assertively directing large government banks and other state-controlled enterprises to promote growth expressed surprise. The figures reflect a sharp departure from 2010, the last year of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency, when Brazil’s economy grew 7.5 percent.


Antônio Delfim Netto, an influential former economic policy chief, called the G.D.P. figures “a tragedy” in comments to reporters here on Friday. Under Ms. Rousseff, who has been president since 2011, Brazil is on track to deliver its weakest two-year period of growth since the early 1990s, before a stabilization program that radically restructured the economy. Finance Minister Guido Mantega contends that Brazil is on the cusp of a recovery, forecasting 4 percent growth next year.


While growth has declined considerably from the boom years, the slowdown has been blunted by state-supported projects aimed at creating jobs, like a shipbuilding sector conceived to support the oil industry. Brazil’s unemployment rate, 5.3 percent, is still hovering near historical lows.


Authorities are also financing broadly popular antipoverty programs. Federal spending surged 9 percent in October compared with October 2011, partly a result of outlays for an moderate-income housing program called Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life). As millions of poor Brazilians are shielded from the slowdown, Ms. Rousseff’s approval ratings remain high.


Still, critics are growing more vocal about the need for Brazil to become more energetic in addressing complex structural dilemmas weighing the economy down, including its byzantine bureaucracy and woeful public schools. Ms. Rousseff is moving to address these issues; she changed an oil royalties bill on Friday, shifting 100 percent of future proceeds to an education fund.


Read More..

Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

Label:




For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.




Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.


This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.


Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.


But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.


The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.


Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”


The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?


Habits of Thought


It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.


Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.


Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.


Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.


Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.


“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”


Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”


Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.


In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.


These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.


Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.


This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.


It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.


Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.


“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.


Resisting Simplification 


It was easier said than done.


The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.


A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.


The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.


Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of traits included in the proposed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.   The final proposal relies on two personality traits, not four.



Read More..

Clearing the Fog Around Personality Disorders

Label:




For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly.




Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors.


This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.


Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities.


But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people.


The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all.


Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.”


The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?


Habits of Thought


It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.


Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators.


Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.


Likewise, Freud spent years formulating his theories on the origins of neurotic syndromes. And Freudian analysts were largely the ones who, in the early decades of the last century, described people with the sort of “confounded identities” that are now considered personality disorders.


Their problems were not periodic symptoms, like moodiness or panic attacks, but issues rooted in longstanding habits of thought and feeling — in who they were.


“These therapists saw people coming into treatment who looked well put-together on the surface but on the couch became very disorganized, very impaired,” said Mark F. Lenzenweger, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “They had problems that were neither psychotic nor neurotic. They represented something else altogether.”


Several prototypes soon began to emerge. “A pedantic sense of order is typical of the compulsive character,” wrote the Freudian analyst Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 book, “Character Analysis,” a groundbreaking text. “In both big and small things, he lives his life according to a preconceived, irrevocable pattern.”


Others coalesced too, most recognizable as extreme forms of everyday types: the narcissist, with his fragile, grandiose self-approval; the dependent, with her smothering clinginess; the histrionic, always in the thick of some drama, desperate to be the center of attention.


In the late 1970s, Ted Millon, scientific director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, pulled together the bulk of the work on personality disorders, most of it descriptive, and turned it into a set of 10 standardized types for the American Psychiatric Association’s third diagnostic manual. Published in 1980, it is a best seller among mental health workers worldwide.


These diagnostic criteria held up well for years and led to improved treatments for some people, like those with borderline personality disorder. Borderline is characterized by an extreme neediness and urges to harm oneself, often including thoughts of suicide. Many who seek help for depression also turn out to have borderline patterns, making their mood problems resistant to the usual therapies, like antidepressant drugs.


Today there are several approaches that can relieve borderline symptoms and one that, in numerous studies, has reduced hospitalizations and helped aid recovery: dialectical behavior therapy.


This progress notwithstanding, many in the field began to argue that the diagnostic catalog needed a rewrite. For one thing, some of the categories overlapped, and troubled people often got two or more personality diagnoses. “Personality Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a catchall label meaning little more than “this person has problems” became the most common of the diagnoses.


It’s a murky area, and in recent years many therapists didn’t have the time or training to evaluate personality on top of everything else. The assessment interviews can last hours, and treatments for most of the disorders involve longer-term, specialized talk therapy.


Psychiatry was failing the sort of patients that no other field could possibly help, many experts said.


“The diagnoses simply weren’t being used very much, and there was a real need to make the whole system much more accessible,” Dr. Lenzenweger said.


Resisting Simplification 


It was easier said than done.


The most central, memorable, and knowable element of any person — personality — still defies any consensus.


A team of experts appointed by the psychiatric association has worked for more than five years to find some unifying system of diagnosis for personality problems.


The panel proposed a system based in part on a failure to “develop a coherent sense of self or identity.” Not good enough, some psychiatric theorists said.


Later, the experts tied elements of the disorders to distortions in basic traits.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of traits included in the proposed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.   The final proposal relies on two personality traits, not four.



Read More..

State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? — Review

Label:

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency


From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.







The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.




But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”


There were variations, of course. “ — for my kid?” “ — for my elderly father?” “ — just for reading?” “ — for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.


No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.


There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).


So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.


DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.


Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.


E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.


Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.


Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)


The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.


Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.


COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch-screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.


They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.


The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).


BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.


E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com



Read More..

General Assembly Grants Palestine Upgraded Status in U.N.

Label:

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times


President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations before the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember observer state” on Thursday.







UNITED NATIONS — More than 130 countries voted on Thursday to grant Palestine the upgraded status of nonmember observer state in the United Nations, a stinging defeat for Israel and the United States and a boost for President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, who was weakened by the recent eight days of fighting in Gaza.




The new ranking could make it easier for the Palestinians to pursue Israel in international legal forums, but it remained unclear what effect it would have on attaining what both sides say they want — a two-state solution.


Still, the vote offered a showcase for an extraordinary international lineup of support for the Palestinians and constituted a deeply symbolic achievement for their cause, made even weightier by arriving on the 65th anniversary of the General Assembly vote that divided the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab — a vote that Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.


In the West Bank city of Ramallah, about 2,000 Palestinians gathered to celebrate in a central square named after the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Security forces fired into the air and people applauded, danced in the streets and honked car horns when the results were broadcast to the crowd.


“We are witnessing exceptional moments after 65 years of injustice, suffering and pain,” said Jibril Rajoub, the member of Fatah Central Committee. “We are going to witness an Israeli American efforts to keep this resolution ink on paper.”


The tally, in which 138 members voted yes, 9 voted no and 41 abstained, took place after a speech by Mr. Abbas to the General Assembly, in which he called the moment a “last chance” to save the two-state solution amid a narrowing window of opportunity.


“The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine,” he said before the vote.


But in the run-up to the vote, he and Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, blamed the other side for not doing enough to pursue peace.


”We have not heard one word from any Israeli official expressing any sincere concern to save the peace process,” Mr. Abbas said.


“On the contrary, our people have witnessed, and continue to witness, an unprecedented intensification of military assaults, the blockade, settlement activities and ethnic cleansing, particularly in occupied East Jerusalem, and mass arrests, attacks by settlers and other practices by which this Israeli occupation is becoming synonymous with an apartheid system of colonial occupation, which institutionalizes the plague of racism and entrenches hatred and incitement.”


“The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: enough of aggression, settlements and occupation,” he said.


Mr. Prosor, speaking after Mr. Abbas but before the vote was taken, said the United Nations resolution would do nothing to advance the process.


“Today the Palestinians are turning their back on peace,” he said. “Don’t let history record that today the U.N. helped them along on their march of folly.”


As expected, the vote won backing from a number of European countries, and was a rebuff to intense American and Israeli diplomacy. In an indication of the bitterness of the blow to the Israelis, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement calling Mr. Abbas’s speech “defamatory and venomous” that was “full of mendacious propaganda against the IDF and the citizens of Israel.”


“Someone who wants peace does not talk in such a manner," the statement continued.


Among the countries that had forecast their yes votes were France, Spain and Switzerland. Germany and the United Kingdom were among the countries that abstained, and a few countries joined Israel and the United States in voting no.


After the vote, Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, explained the American vote as a reaction to an “unfortunate and counterproductive” resolution that placed “further obstacles in the path to peace.”


Reporting was contributed by Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Khaled Abu Aker from Ramallah, and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.



Read More..

Chamber Competes to Be Heard in Fiscal Debate

Label:




WASHINGTON — After months of sparring with President Obama in the heat of the campaign season, Chamber of Commerce executives came to the White House this week with a far more conciliatory tone, offering up suggestions to avert large budget cuts without having to raise taxes.







Jim Young/Reuters

Tom Donahue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, with President Obama last year. The two have been involved in a showdown on the federal budget deficit.







But Mr. Obama’s top advisers were not budging. There would be no deal on the federal budget deficit, they told chamber executives, without higher taxes, participants said. If there were doubts about the White House’s resolve, Mr. Obama met the chamber’s chief executive afterward for an unscheduled Oval Office chat about the showdown.


For the United States Chamber of Commerce, long the leading business voice in Washington, this month’s negotiations over the nation’s debt will be a key test of whether it can retain its influence and swagger in the capital even after a string of bruising political losses.


Many business leaders are looking to the chamber as a bulwark against the White House’s push for higher taxes, but it is unclear if the century-old association has the clout it once did. Other business groups seen as more open to tax increases have become players in the negotiations, exposing rifts in the private sector.


The Chamber of Commerce, in the biggest voter mobilization effort in its history, spent tens of millions of dollars in support of pro-business candidates, usually Republicans, in the Nov. 6 elections. But the results were disastrous: out of 48 House and Senate candidates that it spent money to try to either elect or defeat, the outcome went the chamber’s way only seven times, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that tracks political spending.


If the chamber was an 800-pound gorilla before the elections, “now they’re a wounded 500-pound gorilla,” said Cyrus Mehri, a Washington lawyer for U.S. Chamber Watch, a union-backed group that is critical of the chamber’s political practices.


“But they’re still a major force to be reckoned with,” he added.


As the White House looks to work out a deal with Congress to avert hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic budget cuts at the end of the year, Mr. Obama and his top economic advisers have been meeting through the week with business leaders to push their plan for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.


Mr. Obama met Wednesday with chief executives from Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Yahoo and other prominent firms, and he met a day earlier with small-business representatives.


The president’s advisers also met with officials from the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a centrist group that has become influential in pushing for a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. It is led by Erskine B. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.


When Mr. Obama met two weeks ago with a dozen corporate leaders but did not invite the Chamber of Commerce, it was widely seen as a snub of the group over its political attacks during the presidential campaign. But the chamber got its turn Monday.


Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, and other senior economic advisers listened as chamber executives, including Thomas J. Donohue, the group’s president, and Bruce Josten, its top lobbyist, laid out their ideas for raising significant revenue without necessarily raising taxes by expanding energy development.


“They wrote it down, but where that goes, I don’t know,” Mr. Josten said in an interview.


But Mr. Josten said that the White House advisers stressed that any debt deal would have to include increased taxes at the highest brackets and that if an agreement could not be reached, they were willing to risk the automatic spending cuts — the so-called fiscal cliff option — at the end of the year.


“They reiterated that they want the higher rates, and they’ll go over the cliff if they need to,” Mr. Josten said.


Read More..

Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Label:

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

Read More..

Well: Weight Loss Surgery May Not Combat Diabetes Long-Term

Label:

Weight loss surgery, which in recent years has been seen as an increasingly attractive option for treating Type 2 diabetes, may not be as effective against the disease as it was initially thought to be, according to a new report. The study found that many obese Type 2 diabetics who undergo gastric bypass surgery do not experience a remission of their disease, and of those that do, about a third redevelop diabetes within five years of their operation.

The findings contrast with the growing perception that surgery is essentially a cure for Type II diabetes. Earlier this year, two widely publicized studies reported that surgery worked better than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of Type 2 diabetes in overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control, leading some experts to call for greater use of surgery in treating the disease. But the studies were small and relatively short, lasting under two years.

The latest study, published in the journal Obesity Surgery, tracked thousands of diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery for more than a decade. It found that many people whose diabetes at first went away were likely to have it return. While weight regain is a common problem among those who undergo bariatric surgery, regaining lost weight did not appear to be the cause of diabetes relapse. Instead, the study found that people whose diabetes was most severe or in its later stages when they had surgery were more likely to have a relapse, regardless of whether they regained weight.

“Some people are under the impression that you have surgery and you’re cured,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, the president for medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the study. “There have been a lot of claims about how wonderful surgery is for diabetes, and I think this offers a more realistic picture.”

The findings suggest that weight loss surgery may be most effective for treating diabetes in those whose disease is not very advanced. “What we’re learning is that not all diabetic patients do as well as others,” said Dr. David E. Arterburn, the lead author of the study and an associate investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle. “Those who are early in diabetes seem to do the best, which makes a case for potentially earlier intervention.”

One of the strengths of the new study was that it involved thousands of patients enrolled in three large health plans in California and Minnesota, allowing detailed tracking over many years. All told, 4,434 adult diabetics were followed between 1995 and 2008. All were obese, and all underwent Roux-en-Y operations, the most popular type of gastric bypass procedure.

After surgery, about 68 percent of patients experienced a complete remission of their diabetes. But within five years, 35 percent of those patients had it return. Taken together, that means that most of the subjects in the study, about 56 percent — a figure that includes those whose disease never remitted — had no long-lasting remission of diabetes after surgery.

The researchers found that three factors were particularly good predictors of who was likely to have a relapse of diabetes. If patients, before surgery, had a relatively long duration of diabetes, had poor control of their blood sugar, or were taking insulin, then they were least likely to benefit from gastric bypass. A patient’s weight, either before or after surgery, was not correlated with their likelihood of remission or relapse.

In Type 2 diabetes, the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas tend to wear out as the disease progresses, which may explain why some people benefit less from surgery. “If someone is too far advanced in their diabetes, where their pancreas is frankly toward the latter stages of being able to produce insulin, then even after losing a bunch of weight their body may not be able to produce enough insulin to control their blood sugar,” Dr. Arterburn said.

Nonetheless, he said it might be the case that obese diabetics, even those whose disease is advanced, can still benefit from gastric surgery, at least as far as their quality of life and their risk factors for heart disease and other complications are concerned.

“It’s not a surefire cure for everyone,” he said. “But almost universally, patients lose weight after weight loss surgery, and that in and of itself may have so many health benefits.”

Read More..

Peter Swire Named Mediator in Internet ‘Do Not Track’ Effort

Label:




Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.







Andrew Spear for The New York Times

Peter Swire, a law professor and former White House privacy official, will be the new co-chairman of an international consortium's Tracking Protection working group.







The idea was to work out a global standard for “Do Not Track,” a computer browser setting that would allow Internet users to signal Web sites, advertising networks and data brokers that they did not want their browsing activities tracked for marketing purposes.


But some industry executives involved in the negotiations have questioned the agenda of privacy advocates, saying their efforts threaten to undermine an advertising ecosystem that fuels free online products and services. At the same time, some technology experts and privacy advocates have accused industry executives of stalling and acting in bad faith.


Into this rancorous battle steps a new mediator, Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration. On Wednesday, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the international consortium that has been trying to develop technical Do Not Track standards, said that Mr. Swire would take over as co-chairman of its Tracking Protection Working Group.


While parties on both sides welcomed the move, many said they were doubtful that Mr. Swire could bring opponents to agreement, especially at a time when some industry groups are questioning whether the W3C is an appropriate forum.


On one hand, industry executives have an interest in protecting “behavioral” ads, marketing pitches that use data about an individual’s online activities to tailor ads to that person. On the other hand, consumer advocates argue that Internet users should be able to limit that kind of online surveillance.


Mr. Swire, a former chief counselor for privacy at the Office of Management and Budget, said he hoped to strike a balance that was palatable to both sides. He said he viewed a Do Not Track system as a kind of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list, a national registry in the United States through which consumers may opt out of phone solicitations.


“People can choose not to have telemarketers call them during dinner. The simple idea is that users should have a choice over how their Internet browsing works as well,” Mr. Swire said in a phone interview. But he added: “The overarching theme is how to give users choice about their Internet experience while also funding a useful Internet.”


Still, Mr. Swire may not be able to overcome the bitterness that remains among the negotiating parties after months of public accusations, personal attacks and recriminations.


Earlier this year at an event at the White House, industry representatives publicly committed to incorporating and honoring a browser-based Do Not Track system under certain conditions. The conditions included a requirement that individual users would actively choose to turn on a don’t-track-me setting. Industry groups also said any system should still permit companies to collect information about users’ browsing activities for market research and product development purposes.


But after months of wrangling with consumer advocates, industry representatives now say the W3C is not an appropriate forum for them to work out policy details, arguing that the group’s expertise is more technical than practical.


In an online discussion forum for the working group, for example, senior industry executives have suggested that respected technology experts are out of touch with commercial reality.


“The advocacy side of the group tends to lean toward absolutist terms and solutions,” Shane Wiley, the vice president for privacy and data governance at Yahoo, wrote in a message in September to Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. “The real world isn’t that easy even if it feels that way in a classroom or a small lab.”


Then there are the technologists who say industry executives are playing down the privacy risks of online data-mining.


“For want of a better metaphor: you are the climate change skeptic of computer privacy,” Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student in computer science and law at Stanford University, wrote last month to Yahoo’s Mr. Wiley. “Unlike some of the more patient members of the group, I long ago ceased pretending you’re negotiating in good faith.”


Now the industry has begun an effort to distance itself from the W3C process and promote its own self-regulatory program that allows consumers to decline targeted advertising by installing opt-out buttons from dozens of member companies.


“We’ve seen the W3C falter,” said Mike Zaneis, the general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. “So industry is redoubling its efforts to come up with a meaningful standard for browser controls.”


As the debate rages on, newer iterations of popular browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome have already installed Do Not Track settings for their users. But in the absence of accepted global standards for these systems, ad networks and data brokers are not yet honoring the don’t-track-me browser flags. Even Microsoft’s and Google’s own ad services don’t respond to such signals coming from their own browsers.


Although Mr. Swire said he hoped to spur progress, for the moment Do Not Track browser settings have no more significance than emoticons.


“Do Not Track is a work in progress,” Mr. Swire said. “So is the Internet.”


Read More..

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)