2 Years Into Nokia Turnaround, Some Good News

Nearly two years ago, Stephen A. Elop, Nokia’s new chief executive, spoke of flaming ocean platforms and shark-infested waters to describe the problems he inherited as the company teetered on the brink of irrelevance.

Mr. Elop painted the bleak outlook as he prescribed a radical cure for the Finnish mobile phone pioneer: The rejection of the company’s own Symbian smartphone operating system for a shotgun wedding to Microsoft, itself stumbling badly with smartphone software. After that, sales slumped sharply, losses mounted and huge layoffs followed.

On Thursday, he delivered unexpected good news: a profit. Sales of its new smartphone line, the Lumia, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, soared more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to preliminary financial information.

In what was seen as a make-or-break quarter, Mr. Elop said Nokia would break even or turn a 2 percent profit rather than report a loss as large as 10 percent, as analysts expected.

Nokia will report its earnings on Jan. 24.

Wall Street reacted to the announcement by sending Nokia’s American depositary receipts up 18.67 percent, or 70 cents, to $4.45.

“While we definitely experienced some tough challenges in the first half of 2012, we are managing through these issues,” Mr. Elop said in a conference call with journalists.

What Nokia has accomplished under Mr. Elop is to produce a line of increasingly competitive smartphones that are starting to draw favorable comparisons with those from Samsung and Apple, the two companies most responsible for knocking Nokia from its lofty perch.

“The Lumia smartphones are night-and-day different from Nokia’s old Symbian handsets,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst with the International Data Corporation in London. “I think what we are starting to see now is what will be a steady turnaround in Nokia’s fortunes.”

The company, which dominated the cellphone business until Apple introduced its iPhone in 2007, still has a long way to go to achieve its former stature. In the third quarter, Nokia held on to a 4 percent share of the global smartphone market, and was ranked a distant No. 10 in the sector, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

Samsung and Apple, the No. 1 and No. 2 smartphone makers, together had 50 percent of the global smartphone market, and their sales were growing. While its competitors rose, Nokia has generated nearly 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in losses under Mr. Elop, and eliminated a third of its work force.

The key to its turnaround was the introduction in October of the top-of-the-line Lumia 920 and 820, which used the new Windows Phone 8 operating system. Since then, Nokia has spent heavily on advertising in Britain and Europe to promote the models. The company will not disclose how much it had spent on its campaign, but its television ads were ubiquitous over the holidays, said Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London.

The heavy promotion, which was aided by Microsoft’s own advertising, has helped the company recapture some of its lost glory, Mr. Mawston said.

But he warned that “Nokia still lacks the true killer phone that will enable it to compete with the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S III.” He expected Nokia’s share of the global smartphone market to rise to 6 percent by the end of the year.

The company’s financial position is likely to revive even more quickly as a result of the strict cost-cutting imposed by Mr. Elop, who ran Microsoft’s business software division before joining Nokia in late 2010.

Since then, Nokia has shut factories across Europe. Last month, the company sold its 540,000-square-foot glass-and-wood headquarters in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo to Finnish investors, and leased it back. The maneuver netted Nokia 170 million euros.

Besides a more competitive array of phones, Nokia has discarded its market-leader mentality. Employees are now routinely traveling in economy class and sharing rides to airports. Workers no longer use costly telephone conference calling but speak in group teleconferences using less expensive Internet calling services.

“The company is a lot smaller now but people are working better together,” said Susan Sheehan, a Nokia spokeswoman. “Everyone has been pitching in.”

Even at Nokia Siemens, the company’s long-suffering network equipment venture, the future is looking brighter than it was two years ago. On Thursday, Nokia said the unit, which contributes about 40 percent of total sales, would report an operating profit for the quarter, its third consecutive quarterly profit.

Nokia, in its announcement to investors, even revised the operating profit margin forecast at the venture to 13 to 15 percent of sales, up from a range of 4 to 12 percent.

Looking ahead, Nokia said it expected to return to an operating loss of 2 percent of sales because of the first-quarter postholiday buying lull and fierce competition. But the results for the coming three months could vary widely.

Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England, said that Nokia still faced challenges. “2013 could still turn out to be another very difficult year for Nokia. It is way too premature to say that the company has made a turnaround.”

Mr. Cunningham said he used the Lumia 920, Nokia’s newest smartphone, during the Christmas holidays and liked it.

“But the more I used the phone, the more apparent it became to me that there are big gaps between Lumia and its competitors in terms of the functionality and usability of its apps,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“I still think there is a lot of work to be done on Lumia.”

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Pap Test May Prove Useful at Detecting More Types of Cancer, Study Suggests

The Pap test, which has prevented countless deaths from cervical cancer, may eventually help to detect cancers of the uterus and ovaries as well, a new study suggests.

For the first time, researchers have found genetic material from uterine or ovarian cancers in Pap smears, meaning that it may become possible to detect three diseases with just one routine test.

But the research is early, years away from being used in medical practice, and there are caveats. The women studied were already known to have cancer, and while the Pap test found 100 percent of the uterine cancers, it detected only 41 percent of the ovarian cancers. And the approach has not yet been tried in women who appear healthy, to determine whether it can find early signs of uterine or ovarian cancer.

On the other hand, even a 41 percent detection rate would be better than the status quo in ovarian cancer, particularly if the detection extends to early stages. The disease is usually advanced by the time it is found, and survival rates are poor. About 22,280 new cases were expected in the United States in 2012, and 15,500 deaths. Improved tests are urgently needed.

Uterine cancer has a better prognosis, but still kills around 8,000 women a year in the United States.

These innovative applications of the Pap test are part of a new era in which advances in genetics are being applied to the detection of a wide variety of cancers or precancerous conditions. Scientists are learning to find minute bits of mutant DNA in tissue samples or bodily fluids that may signal the presence of hidden or incipient cancers.

Ideally, the new techniques would find the abnormalities early enough to cure the disease or even prevent it entirely. But it is too soon to tell.

“Is this the harbinger of things to come? I would answer yes,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior author of a report on the Pap test study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine. He said the genomes of more than 50 types of tumors had been sequenced, and researchers were trying to take advantage of the information.

Similar studies are under way or are being considered to look for mutant DNA in blood, stool, urine and sputum, both to detect cancer and also to monitor the response to treatment in people known to have the disease.

But researchers warn that such tests, used for screening, can be a double-edged sword if they give false positive results that send patients down a rabbit hole of invasive tests and needless treatments. Even a test that finds only real cancers may be unable to tell aggressive, dangerous ones apart from indolent ones that might never do any harm, leaving patients to decide whether to watch and wait or to go through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation with all the associated risks and side effects.

“Will they start recovering mutations that are not cancer-related?” asked Dr. Christopher P. Crum, a professor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.

But he also called the study a “great proof of principle,” and said, “Any whisper of hope to women who suffer from endometrial or ovarian cancer would be most welcome.”

DNA testing is already performed on samples from Pap tests, to look for the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer. Dr. Vogelstein and his team decided to try DNA testing for cancer. They theorized that cells or DNA shed from cancers of the ovaries and the uterine lining, or endometrium, might reach the cervix and turn up in Pap smears.

The team picked common mutations found in these cancers, and looked for them in tumor samples from 24 women with endometrial cancer and 22 with ovarian cancer. All the cancers had one or more of the common mutations.

Then, the researchers performed Pap tests on the same women, and looked for the same DNA mutations in the Pap specimens. They found the mutations in 100 percent of the women with endometrial cancer, but in only 9 of the 22 with ovarian cancer. The test identified two of the four ovarian cancers that had been diagnosed at an early stage.

Finally, the team developed a test that would look simultaneously for cancer-associated mutations in 12 different genes in Pap samples. Used in a control sample of 14 healthy women, the test found no mutations — meaning no false-positive results.

Dr. Luis A. Diaz, the other senior author of the report and an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, called the research a step toward a screening test that at first blush appears very effective at detecting endometrial cancer, though obviously less so at finding ovarian cancer.

“Probably one of the most exciting features of this approach,” Dr. Diaz said, “is that we wanted a test that would seamlessly integrate with routine medical practice that could be utilized with the same test that women get every day all over the world, the Pap smear.”

But, he added: “We can’t say it’s ready for prime time. Like all good science, it needs to be validated.”

He and other members of the team said it might be possible to improve the detection rate for ovarian cancer by looking for more mutations and by changing the technique of performing Pap tests to increase the likelihood of capturing cells from the ovary. The change might involve timing the test to a certain point in a woman’s monthly cycle, using a longer brush to collect cells from deeper within the cervix or prescribing a drug that would raise the odds of cells being shed from the ovary.

The technique also needs to be tested in much larger groups of women, including healthy ones, to find out whether it works, particularly at finding cancers early enough to improve survival. And studies must also find out whether it generates false positive results, or identifies cancers that might not actually need to be treated.

Michael H. Melner, a program director in molecular genetics and biochemistry for the American Cancer Society, called the research “very promising,” in part because it is based on finding mutations.

“It tells you not just that cancer is there, but which mutation is there,” Dr. Melner said. “As we learn more and more about which mutations are associated with more or less severe forms of cancer, it’s more information, and possibly more diagnostic.”

Read More..

Pap Test May Prove Useful at Detecting More Types of Cancer, Study Suggests

The Pap test, which has prevented countless deaths from cervical cancer, may eventually help to detect cancers of the uterus and ovaries as well, a new study suggests.

For the first time, researchers have found genetic material from uterine or ovarian cancers in Pap smears, meaning that it may become possible to detect three diseases with just one routine test.

But the research is early, years away from being used in medical practice, and there are caveats. The women studied were already known to have cancer, and while the Pap test found 100 percent of the uterine cancers, it detected only 41 percent of the ovarian cancers. And the approach has not yet been tried in women who appear healthy, to determine whether it can find early signs of uterine or ovarian cancer.

On the other hand, even a 41 percent detection rate would be better than the status quo in ovarian cancer, particularly if the detection extends to early stages. The disease is usually advanced by the time it is found, and survival rates are poor. About 22,280 new cases were expected in the United States in 2012, and 15,500 deaths. Improved tests are urgently needed.

Uterine cancer has a better prognosis, but still kills around 8,000 women a year in the United States.

These innovative applications of the Pap test are part of a new era in which advances in genetics are being applied to the detection of a wide variety of cancers or precancerous conditions. Scientists are learning to find minute bits of mutant DNA in tissue samples or bodily fluids that may signal the presence of hidden or incipient cancers.

Ideally, the new techniques would find the abnormalities early enough to cure the disease or even prevent it entirely. But it is too soon to tell.

“Is this the harbinger of things to come? I would answer yes,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior author of a report on the Pap test study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine. He said the genomes of more than 50 types of tumors had been sequenced, and researchers were trying to take advantage of the information.

Similar studies are under way or are being considered to look for mutant DNA in blood, stool, urine and sputum, both to detect cancer and also to monitor the response to treatment in people known to have the disease.

But researchers warn that such tests, used for screening, can be a double-edged sword if they give false positive results that send patients down a rabbit hole of invasive tests and needless treatments. Even a test that finds only real cancers may be unable to tell aggressive, dangerous ones apart from indolent ones that might never do any harm, leaving patients to decide whether to watch and wait or to go through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation with all the associated risks and side effects.

“Will they start recovering mutations that are not cancer-related?” asked Dr. Christopher P. Crum, a professor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.

But he also called the study a “great proof of principle,” and said, “Any whisper of hope to women who suffer from endometrial or ovarian cancer would be most welcome.”

DNA testing is already performed on samples from Pap tests, to look for the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer. Dr. Vogelstein and his team decided to try DNA testing for cancer. They theorized that cells or DNA shed from cancers of the ovaries and the uterine lining, or endometrium, might reach the cervix and turn up in Pap smears.

The team picked common mutations found in these cancers, and looked for them in tumor samples from 24 women with endometrial cancer and 22 with ovarian cancer. All the cancers had one or more of the common mutations.

Then, the researchers performed Pap tests on the same women, and looked for the same DNA mutations in the Pap specimens. They found the mutations in 100 percent of the women with endometrial cancer, but in only 9 of the 22 with ovarian cancer. The test identified two of the four ovarian cancers that had been diagnosed at an early stage.

Finally, the team developed a test that would look simultaneously for cancer-associated mutations in 12 different genes in Pap samples. Used in a control sample of 14 healthy women, the test found no mutations — meaning no false-positive results.

Dr. Luis A. Diaz, the other senior author of the report and an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, called the research a step toward a screening test that at first blush appears very effective at detecting endometrial cancer, though obviously less so at finding ovarian cancer.

“Probably one of the most exciting features of this approach,” Dr. Diaz said, “is that we wanted a test that would seamlessly integrate with routine medical practice that could be utilized with the same test that women get every day all over the world, the Pap smear.”

But, he added: “We can’t say it’s ready for prime time. Like all good science, it needs to be validated.”

He and other members of the team said it might be possible to improve the detection rate for ovarian cancer by looking for more mutations and by changing the technique of performing Pap tests to increase the likelihood of capturing cells from the ovary. The change might involve timing the test to a certain point in a woman’s monthly cycle, using a longer brush to collect cells from deeper within the cervix or prescribing a drug that would raise the odds of cells being shed from the ovary.

The technique also needs to be tested in much larger groups of women, including healthy ones, to find out whether it works, particularly at finding cancers early enough to improve survival. And studies must also find out whether it generates false positive results, or identifies cancers that might not actually need to be treated.

Michael H. Melner, a program director in molecular genetics and biochemistry for the American Cancer Society, called the research “very promising,” in part because it is based on finding mutations.

“It tells you not just that cancer is there, but which mutation is there,” Dr. Melner said. “As we learn more and more about which mutations are associated with more or less severe forms of cancer, it’s more information, and possibly more diagnostic.”

Read More..

Delegation to North Korea Urges More Access to Internet and Cellphones

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — A private delegation to North Korea that includes Google’s executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, is urging North Korea to allow more open Internet access and cellphones, although it is unclear how that message is being heard by a leadership that has long depended on a near-total ban on outside information to maintain its totalitarian rule.

Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor leading the delegation, said Wednesday in an interview in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, that his nine-member group had also called on North Korea to put a moratorium on missile launchings and nuclear tests that have prompted United Nations sanctions.

He said the group had also asked for “fair and humane treatment” for Kenneth Bae, a naturalized American citizen born in South Korea who was detained by the North in November and charged with unspecified “hostile acts.”

The delegation’s visit has been criticized as appearing to hijack United States diplomacy and bolster North Korea’s profile after its latest, widely condemned rocket launching less than a month ago.

The State Department characterized the trip as unhelpful at a time when the United States is rallying support for sanctions by the United Nations Security Council as a response to the launching.

North Korea has shown no inclination to back off its nuclear program or to stop the launchings that it depicts as needed to send satellites into orbit, but that Western countries believe are tests for technology to create missiles that could eventually be used to deliver nuclear weapons.

Mr. Schmidt is the highest-profile American business executive to visit North Korea since Kim Jong-un took power a year ago. A vocal proponent of Internet freedom and openness, Mr. Schmidt has not said publicly what he hopes to get out of the visit. On Wednesday, he toured the frigid brick building in central Pyongyang that was presented as the heart of North Korea’s computer industry, at one point briefly donning a pair of 3-D goggles.

Mr. Kim has emphasized the importance of computerizing factories, many of which have fallen into disrepair in the years since the collapse of the former Soviet Union deprived the country of its main provider of technology. But he also has vowed in recent weeks to crack down on the “enemy’s ideological and cultural infiltration,” apparently a reference to the growing flow of information over the border with China.

That flow has been driven in part by North Koreans who sneak into China to bring much-needed food and goods back home, but who also bring back news of the outside world and sometimes DVDs and thumb drives containing banned South Korean dramas.

Mr. Richardson, who has described the delegation as a private humanitarian mission, said the members were bringing a message that more openness would benefit North Korea. Almost no one in the impoverished country owns computers, and even many of the computers that are allowed are not hooked up to the Internet, according to analysts who study the North. They say that even the small number of North Koreans allowed onto the Web — a group said to include party loyalists and computer science students — are severely restricted in what they can access.

On Tuesday, Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Richardson and other delegation members chatted with students who have permission to access the Internet for research at the elite Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang.

On Wednesday, the group toured the main library in Pyongyang, the Grand People’s Study House, where people were crowded into drafty, unheated halls at computers with intranet access to the library’s archive of books, documents and newspapers.

Later, the delegation visited the Korea Computer Center, the hub of North Korea’s efforts to develop software, where a quote from the current leader’s father and predecessor as leader, Kim Jong-il, reads: “Now is the era for science and technology. It is the era of computers.”

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World Briefing | The Americas: Mexico: Killer Dog Case Widens

A pack of feral dogs may be responsible for the deaths of as many as five people in a Mexico City park, the authorities said Wednesday. Last week, the police said dogs had killed four people, including a woman and a baby boy, whose mutilated bodies were found in the park in December. Now, prosecutors are investigating if the wounds found on a fifth person, a 15-year-old girl who died in December, are consistent with dog bites. The authorities have captured several dogs, spurring an online campaign to save them, but it is not clear if any are the culprits.

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James M. Buchanan, Economic Scholar, Dies at 93

James M. Buchanan, a scholar and author whose analyses of economic and political decision-making won the 1986 Nobel in economic sciences and shaped a generation of conservative thinking about deficits, taxes and the size of government, died on Wednesday in Blacksburg, Va. He was 93.

Alex Tabarrok, the director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University, which Mr. Buchanan founded, confirmed his death.

Dr. Buchanan, a professor emeritus at George Mason, in Fairfax, Va., was a leading proponent of public choice theory, which assumes that politicians and government officials, like everyone else, are motivated by self-interest — getting re-elected or gaining more power — and do not necessarily act in the public interest.

He argued that their actions could be analyzed, and even predicted, by applying the tools of economics to political science in ways that yield insights into the tendencies of governments to grow, increase spending, borrow money, run large deficits and let regulations proliferate.

The logic of self-interest was nothing new. Machiavelli’s 16th-century treatise “The Prince” detailed cynical rules of statecraft to extend political power. Thomas Hobbes, in his 17th-century book “Leviathan,” held that aggressive, self-serving acts were “natural” unless forbidden by law. Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776, noted that people pursuing their own good also produced benefits for society at large.

But Dr. Buchanan contended that the pursuit of self-interest by modern politicians often led to harmful public results. Courting voters at election time, for example, legislators will approve tax cuts and spending increases for projects and entitlements favored by the electorate. This combination can lead to ever-rising deficits, public debt burdens and increasingly large governments to conduct the public’s business.

Indeed, he said, governments had grown so vast and complex that it was no longer possible for elected officials to make more than a fraction of the policy decisions that genuinely affect the people. Thus, he said, much discretionary power is actually held by civil functionaries who can manipulate priorities, impose barriers to entitlements and pressure legislators for rules and budgets favorable to their own interests.

Dr. Buchanan did not invent the theory of public choice, an idea whose origins are obscure but that arose in modern economics literature in the late 1940s. But from the 1950s onward, he became its leading proponent, spearheading a group of economists in Virginia that sought to change the nature of the political process, to bring it more into line with what the group considered the wishes of most Americans.

In lectures, articles and more than 30 books, Dr. Buchanan amplified on the theory of public choice and argued for smaller government, lower deficits and fewer regulations — a spectrum of policy objectives that were ascendant in the 1980s conservative agenda of President Ronald Reagan.

Over the years since Dr. Buchanan won the Nobel, much of what he predicted has played out. Government is bigger than ever. Tax revenue has fallen far short of public programs’ needs. Public and private borrowing has become a way of life. Politicians still act in their own interests while espousing the public good, and national deficits have soared into the trillions.

Dr. Buchanan partly blamed Keynesian economics for what he considered a decline in America’s fiscal discipline. John Maynard Keynes argued that budget deficits were not only unavoidable but in fiscal emergencies were even desirable as a means to increase spending, create jobs and cut unemployment. But that reasoning allowed politicians to rationalize deficits under many circumstances and over long periods, Dr. Buchanan contended.

In a commentary in The New York Times in March 2011, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason, said his colleague Dr. Buchanan had accurately forecast that deficit spending for short-term gains would evolve into “a permanent disconnect” between government outlays and revenue.

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Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

Gaps Seen in Therapy for Suicidal Teenagers

Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already received at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled youths, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.

The study, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.

The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems like attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and that about a third of those who had suicidal thoughts had made an attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.

Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.

The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.

“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”

The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author, and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006 at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication. We found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”

In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).

Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts, which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.

(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)

Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.

Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem — attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger — were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.

Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases they can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.

One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and suicide attempts in, among others, people with borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm.

But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments — talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use — was more effective than regular therapies.

“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” said Dr. Brent of the University of Pittsburgh. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”

Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression had seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.

Read More..

A Financial Service for People Fed Up With Banks

Steve Dykes for The New York Times

Shamir Karkal, left,

Like many people, Josh Reich got fed up with his bank after it charged him overdraft fees and he endured painful customer service calls to fight them. But unlike most people, Mr. Reich, a software engineer from Australia, decided to come up with a better way to bank.

Mr. Reich and a co-founder, Shamir Karkal, created Simple, an online banking start-up company based in Portland, Ore., that offers its customers free checking accounts and data-rich analysis of their transactions and spending habits.

Few entrepreneurs dare to set their sights on industries as large and entrenched as banking and expect to flourish. But Mr. Reich, 34, a professed data nerd who has built computers and tinkered with the innards of sophisticated cameras, holds a master’s degree in business and has a robust background in financial data analysis. He is confident that Simple’s minimalist approach — it promises not to charge any fees for any services — will draw fans and customers.

“Banks make money by keeping customers confused,” Mr. Reich said. “There’s no incentives to make the experience better.”

Of course, inviting people to trust a start-up with their money is a lot to ask. The company, which began signing up customers late last year in a deliberately slow fashion, now has 20,000 and has processed transactions worth more than $200 million.

It also has the backing of prominent venture capital firms including Shasta Ventures, SV Angel and IA Ventures and has raised more than $13 million. Simple has few, if any, direct competitors, although some services like SmartyPig and Mint offer analysis of bank accounts and financial transactions.

Simple is actually not a bank. It has deals with CBW Bank and Bancorp, federally insured banks, to hold its customers’ money.

And it has built slick apps for the Web and mobile devices to give customers an overview of their accounts and transactions. But it encourages customers to treat it as a bank, closing their more traditional accounts and only using Simple.

The company’s biggest challenge, banking analysts say, will be to persuade people to give it a try.

“It is extremely difficult to get consumers to change and leave their banks,” said Jacob Jegher, an analyst at Celent, a research and consulting firm. “Plus, although they are not a bank, they still operate like a financial institution, and they will face challenges that big banks have decades of experience with.”

After the financial crisis, smaller community banks and credit unions gained customers eager for alternatives to larger corporate banks. Experts say Simple could attract those customers as well.

Early adopters are warming to the service; during a speech last fall at a conference aimed at technology enthusiasts, designers and creative people, Mr. Reich asked how many in attendance were Simple customers. A majority of the crowd raised hands.

Mr. Reich said Simple was keeping its first group of customers small to allow it to work out any kinks. (Already there have been some flaws, like one that briefly locked several users out of their accounts in November.) At this stage, those who want a Simple account have to request an invitation on its site, though these are handed out fairly liberally to those who meet the minimal qualifications of Simple and its bank partners.

Customers receive a plain white card that can be used like a debit card. The company offers most traditional banking features, like direct deposit and money transfers. But there is plenty it does not offer, like joint or business checking accounts, or paper checkbooks, which may be a deal killer for some.

The start-up does not have physical bank branches or automated teller machines, nor does it plan to build any. As a result, Simple customers cannot make cash deposits and must rely on the Internet and phone for service.

Simple tries to make up for what it does not have with modern software design and data analysis.

Each Simple transaction is tagged with detailed information that allows customers to search their accounts with plain English commands like “Show me how much I spent on meals over $30 last month,” or “Show me how much money I spent on gifts in December.”

Customers can see transactions plotted on a map or search for all transactions in a particular state or country, something that would be difficult with a traditional bank account.

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Communists and Liberals Face Off in China Censorship

GUANGZHOU, China — Protests over censorship at one of China’s most liberal newspapers descended into ideological confrontation in this southeastern provincial capital on Tuesday, pitting advocates of free speech against supporters of Communist Party control, who wielded red flags and portraits of Mao Zedong.

The face-off between liberals and leftists outside the headquarters of the company that publishes the weekly newspaper, Southern Weekend, came after disgruntled editors and reporters at the paper last week deplored what they said was crude meddling by the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, which has long had a reputation as a bastion of a relatively free press.

With a number of celebrities and business leaders rallying online to the liberal cause, senior propaganda officials in Beijing began this week to roll out a national strategy of demonizing the rebel journalists and their supporters. The Central Propaganda Department issued a directive to news organizations saying that the defiant outburst at Southern Weekend, also known as Southern Weekly, had involved “hostile foreign forces.”

The order, translated by China Digital Times, a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that studies Chinese news media, said that Chinese journalists must drop their support for Southern Weekend and insisted that “party control of the media is an unwavering basic principle.”

An editor at a party news organization said the term “hostile forces” had been used in an internal discussion with a senior editor about the Southern Weekend conflict. Several Chinese journalists outside Guangdong said Tuesday that a positive outcome for the frustrated Southern Weekend reporters and editors appeared uncertain, and that their call for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, the top provincial propaganda official, who took up his post in May, was probably too radical for higher authorities to accept.

The protesting journalists at Southern Weekend blame Mr. Tuo, a former journalist himself, for ordering a drastic change in a New Year’s editorial that had originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights. The revised editorial instead praised party policies. Mr. Tuo has not commented.

A former editor at the Nanfang Media Group, which includes Southern Weekend, said negotiations continued on Tuesday between provincial propaganda officials and representatives of the disgruntled journalists and editors.

The former editor, who asked that his name not be used for fear it could jeopardize his current job, said the talks focused on the protesting journalists’ demands for an inquiry into the New Year’s episode and for the newspaper’s managers to rescind a statement that absolved Mr. Tuo of responsibility for the editorial.

“They want that statement to be removed, and they also want assurances about relaxing controls on journalists — not removing party oversight, but making it more reasonable, allowing reporters to challenge officials,” he said. “The other main demand is for an impartial explanation of what happened, an accounting so it won’t happen again.”

The former editor said a continued standoff into Wednesday could jeopardize the newspaper’s usual publication on Thursday. “In effect, it’s a strike,” he said. “It looks unclear whether it can come out on Thursday.”

So far, senior Chinese officials have not commented publicly on the censorship dispute at the paper, which could test how far the recently appointed Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, will go in support of more open economic and political policies. “I don’t believe that Xi is totally hypocritical when he talks about reform,” said Chen Min, a prominent former opinion writer for Southern Weekend who was forced out of the newspaper in 2011 during a party-led crackdown on potential dissent.

Defenders of Communist orthodoxy turned up at the newspaper headquarters on Tuesday to make the case for firm party control of the media.

“We support the Communist Party, shut down the traitor newspaper,” said a cardboard sign held up by one of 10 or so conservative demonstrators.

“Southern Weekend has an American dream,” another sign said. “We don’t want the American dream, we want the Chinese dream.”

Most of the party supporters refused to give their names. One who did, Yang Xingfa, 50, from Hunan Province, said: “Southern Weekend belongs to the people. However, the paper always ignores the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party and asks why China isn’t more like the United States. Outrageous!”

Some of the participants held portraits of Mao; others waved the red flags of China and of the Communist Party. They said they had come on their own initiative and not at the behest of officials.

The dueling protests outside the newspaper headquarters reflected the political passions and tensions raised by the quarrel over censorship. Internet chatter about the conflict has become widespread, and finding a resolution to the standoff poses a challenge both to the central authorities and to Hu Chunhua, the new party chief of Guangdong and a potential candidate to succeed Mr. Xi in a decade.

Hundreds of bystanders watched and took photos on cellphones as the leftists shouted at the 20 or more protesters who had gathered to denounce censorship, and shoving matches broke out between the demonstrators. The 70 or so police officers and security guards mostly watched, stepping in on occasion to separate the two sides.

At one point, leftists were showered with 50-cent renminbi currency notes, which are worth about 8 United States cents. The Fifty-Cent Party has become a popular term used to disparage pro-party leftists, who are accused by critics of taking 50 cents as payment for each pro-party message they post on the Internet.

One defender of the Southern Weekend journalists was Liang Taiping, 28, a poet who wore a mask popularized by the Hollywood movie and British comic book “V for Vendetta.” Mr. Liang said he had bought the mask after watching the movie recently on state-run China Central Television, which had surprised many Chinese with its willingness to show the film uncut, since the film advocates the overthrow of a one-party dictatorship.

“It’s the only newspaper in China that’s willing to tell the truth,” said Mr. Liang, who added that he had traveled by train about 350 miles from the southern city of Changsha to show his support. “What’s the point of living if you can’t even speak freely?”

Edward Wong reported from Guangzhou, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Jonah M. Kessel contributed reporting from Guangzhou, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou.

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