Dave Roberts brings diversity to the San Diego County supervisors

DEL MAR — In January, when he joins the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Dave Roberts will be the only Democrat among four Republicans, the first Democrat on the board in more than two decades.

He will also be the first new supervisor in 18 years. And he will be the only one who is not a graduate of San Diego State. He has three degrees from American University in Washington, D.C.

He's also gay and married to a retired Air Force master sergeant. The two are adoptive parents to five former foster children, ages 4 to 17, who call them Daddy Dave and Daddy Wally.

With Roberts' election to a district representing a portion of San Diego and several seaside communities north of the city, diversity has arrived for the Board of Supervisors, long one of the region's most homogenous governing bodies.

"I'm going to bring some unique characteristics," Roberts, 51, said with a laugh during a family outing on the beach here.

Roberts hopes to concentrate on the same issues he focused on while serving on the Solana Beach City Council, where he is currently deputy mayor: regional fire protection, expansion of the San Dieguito River Park and "sensible" growth.

Roberts is a Democrat in the style of Republican-leaning northern San Diego County: fiscally conservative. He worked as a budget analyst for the Department of Defense and as a corporate vice president for the La Jolla-based defense contractor SAIC. He was a Republican until some in the GOP took exception to a gay man working in the Pentagon.

"The Republicans wanted me to be fired," Roberts said. "That's when I changed political parties."

Some of his first experience in government came from working as a staffer to Sen. Lowell Weicker, a Republican from Connecticut. "I learned from working for Sen. Weicker that you can make change if you're in the right place," Roberts said.

In 2009, Democratic party officials encouraged Roberts to seek the party's nomination to face incumbent Brian Bilbray (R-Carlsbad) in the 50th Congressional District.

On the verge of declaring his candidacy, Roberts was alerted by social workers about two children who needed a "forever" home. He decided that the adoption process took precedence over his political career.

Now there are five children in the two-story home in Solana Beach once owned by singer Patti Page: Robert, 17; Alex, 12; Julian, 8; Joe, 5; and Natalee, 4. Three of the children have taken the last name Roberts, and two took his spouse's last name, Oliver.

"We don't like double names," Roberts said.

Roberts and Wally Oliver, 55, have been together for 14 years. They had a commitment ceremony in 1998 and married in July 2008 in the brief period when county clerks in California were allowed to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

The family may soon expand.

"Wally would like a baby," Roberts said. "We're not Jewish, but we believe in the Jewish proverb: 'If you can save one soul, you can save the world.'"

During his race against a Republican opponent, Roberts was endorsed by the retiring incumbent, Pam Slater-Price. He has also begun discussions with Supervisor Dianne Jacob, possibly the most fiscally conservative member of the board.

He also looks forward to working with Supervisor Bill Horn, an ex-Marine who supported Proposition 8, the measure to ban same-sex marriage, and has said he opposes gays in the military. "He says things from time to time that remind me of my father," Roberts said.

For all of their fiscal conservatism, the supervisors have not dabbled much in social issues in a way that might satisfy some elements in the GOP. The board took no position on Proposition 8. Health clinics in gay neighborhoods and AIDS prevention programs are funded without controversy.

Roberts may be different in another respect from his colleagues: He will not be assigning a staff member to send out his Twitter messages. He sends out his own tweets — lots of them, on topics political and personal.

Last week, among many tweets, was one announcing that he has hired his predecessor's chief-of-staff, praising him for his "broad experience, management style and network of contacts."

And the next tweet: "Took the kids out for frozen yogurt at Seaside Yogurt in Del Mar for a treat."

tony.perry@latimes.com

Read More..

How One <em>Myst</em> Fan Made Himself a Real-Life Linking Book

The classic PC game Myst was known for drawing people in to its massive, surreal world. But maker Mike Ando took a little piece of that world and drew it into ours. He made a lovingly authentic replica of the Linking Book that helps the main character — you — navigate the world.

Myst was a ground-breaking point-and-click adventure game created by Cyan Worlds, made of hundreds of beautifully rendered scenes whose combined size made the game so big that it needed a CD-ROM to play, back when many computers didn’t have them. It was the first breakout hit in PC gaming and from its release in 1993 it held the title of best-selling PC game until 2002 when The Sims surpassed it.

The game spawned four sequels, along with novels, music, and an MMO that is still online and being powered by donations from the fan base. The games have been widely ported and the game — once so huge that you needed special hardware to run it — is now available for download on iOS (among other places). In other words, it’s a pretty big deal.

At the core of Myst’s story was a mystical technology called Linking Books that pulled players into other realms, called Ages. They were these beautiful old tomes that, when opened, showed an animated preview of the Age to which you’d be linked.

“Ever since I first played the game, I always wanted my own linking book,” says Ando, “Of course, there was no way my old bulky 486 would fit within a book, but as time marched on technology advanced and computers became smaller. Eventually technology caught up and it was possible to shrink everything down to fit inside the book.”

Ando says his drive to make this project began six years ago when he learned where Cyan got the texture reference for the books — Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312, December 1876 to May 1877. “My mind hatched all sorts of plans about what I’d do once I had the book,” he says, “and finally I decided to set the bar as high as I could — all the Myst games, all playable, and playable well, even the 3-D ones at 30fps.”

To do this, Ando needed to perform two main feats. First, he needed to find the parts to make a computer that would fit in an extremely limited space. Then, he needed to restore the antique book, customize it to look like the ones from Myst, and gut it to make room for the compact computer that would power the game.

“Research was the main skill involved,” says Ando, “I spent hundreds of hours, literally, trying to find suitable components to meet all my requirements.”

To build the tiny computer that powers the Linking Book, Ando needed to find a X86 board that could fit inside. Most mobile devices run on ARM, but Ando wanted to run the original releases of each game, so porting wouldn’t do. It had to be X86.

“To give you an idea of how uncommon it is to shrink an X86 computer down this small,” he says, “the smallest X86 computer made by Apple, the Mac Mini, is 17 cm — this book is only 12 cm, plus I had to squeeze in my own power source and screen.”

The parts that made up the computer came from specialist vendors that ordinarily sell to aerospace and other niche enterprise customers. Ando ended up ordering a mixture of store-bought parts, and custom PCB layouts, soldering the whole thing together and switching out components between a bunch of boards to get the most efficient versions. He says he designed the touchscreen controller himself.

And as for the touchscreen itself? At one point in his search, he found himself talking to a vendor in China to arrange for a custom design. “His English skills were so poor I suggested we talk in Chinese and I used Google Translate, so I guess you could add that to my skills,” he says. “I suspect he just found one already to size and charged me as if they made it. If so, good for him — I couldn’t find one anywhere.”

For restoration and preparation of the book, Ando turned to Ian Bates, the president of the Australian Bookbinding Association. Bates handled the restoration of the cover, along with cutting the pages and embossing the book with the Myst logotype (but only after Ando had picked which of the several versions of the Myst font they should use).

If you find yourself gasping in horror at the idea that a book restorer would destroy a beautiful old book for a strange electronics project, Ando wants to assure you that nothing of value was lost. “The book I used is basically a cross between a Reader’s Digest & a gossip magazine and many of the articles are incomplete,” he says, “Today, books like this are sold to interior designers literally by the meter without any care given to their contents, author or title. Their main value rests on the aesthetics of their spine.”

Photos courtesy of Mike Ando.

Read More..

AP PHOTOS: TV icon Larry Hagman through the years

Larry Hagman, whose masterful portrayal of the charmingly loathsome J.R. Ewing on “Dallas” brought him his greatest stardom, has died at the age of 81. That role on CBS’ long-running nighttime soap opera was a ratings bonanza for the network, particularly the “Who shot J.R.?” story twist.

Years before “Dallas,” Hagman gained TV fame as a nice guy with the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy “I Dream of Jeannie.” He played Capt. Tony Nelson, an astronaut whose life is disrupted when he finds a comely genie, portrayed by Barbara Eden, and takes her home to live with him.

He also starred in two short-lived sitcoms, “The Good Life” (NBC, 1971-72) and “Here We Go Again” (ABC, 1973). His film work included well-regarded performances in “The Group,” ”Harry and Tonto” and “Primary Colors.”

Here, in images, are some of Hagman’s memorable moments:

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft’s top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications’ speech recognition service, and in Google’s Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just “neural nets” for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

“There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,” said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.”

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. winter.”

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be “trained” by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

Read More..

Lining up even earlier for Black Friday becomes a shop priority

In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.

Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters. 

Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.

"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items. 

PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals

At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.

"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."

Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."

After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.

A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.

About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.

"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.

Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.

But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.

Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.

Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.

For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.

The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.

JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.

"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.

To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.

Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

joseph.serna@latimes.com

Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.

Read More..

Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Celestial Finger Painting

This colour-composite image was obtained by FORS1 on ANTU. It displays a sky area near the Chamaeleon I complex of bright nebulae and hot stars in the constellation of the same name, close to the southern celestial pole.This picture was taken a few days before the Paranal Inauguration and the "hand-over" to the astronomers on April 1, 1999.This colour composite photo of the Chamaeleon I area is based on six 1-min exposures obtained with VLT UT1 + FORS1 in the V, R and I bands. The sky field measures 6.8 x 11.2 arcmin2; North is up and East is left.

Image: ESO [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

Subscribe to the Wired Science Space Photo of the Day

Follow Wired Science Space Photo of the Day on Twitter

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Home Health Care Help by the Hour

Here is a bright idea that ought to spread: You call your home care agency and say you will need your mother’s aide for the normal two hours on Monday and Wednesday, but for just half an hour (to drive her to a doctor’s office) on Tuesday, then 90 minutes on Thursday. And the agency says, “Sure.”

It sounds logical to hire someone to help — with bathing, dressing, errands, meal preparation, medication reminders – for only as many hours as an older adult needs assistance. But it is actually unusual for companies to offer such flexibility.

The majority of agencies require a four-hour minimum. Having to spend $80  — the national average cost for home care is $21 an hour — if you only need $40 worth of help is a big barrier for families trying to keep their elderly relatives living at home longer. A few agencies allow you to hire for fewer than four hours, but at higher rates.

But Mission Healthcare in San Diego, Calif., a three-year-old agency that began with Medicare-certified skilled home nursing and hospice care, expanded to general home care this summer and decided that clients should be able to specify how much help they want – in 15-minute increments — and will pay for.

“We’ll come for as long as they need us to,” said Mark Kimsey, one of Mission’s four directors. “In one hour, a well-trained caregiver can get the client bathed and dressed, prepare three meals and have them organized for the day.” (I have to think that is a speedy caregiver with a not-too-frail client, but still … )

Can Mission, which charges $19 to $20 an hour, actually make money this way? Though overall the agency serves 1,100 clients, its fledgling home care business is still small: 30 aides caring for just 60 clients. The aides can get benefits if they work enough hours, a bonus for them and for consumers (better employees, lower turnover), but an additional cost for the company.

The directors say they are profitable already, and that the approach will succeed because more people will like the flexibility and potential savings, and sign up. It is also true, let’s acknowledge, that a person who can get by with an hour or two a day for now may well need more help eventually, a boost for Mission’s bottom line.

Competitors are no doubt watching to see if this works. I’m curious, too, to see if the policy catches on. “Consumers can change the marketplace if they want to,” Mr. Kimsey said. It would be nice to think that is true.

Would you use this kind of hourly service, if it were available?

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

Read More..

The Lede Blog: Vignettes of Black Friday

With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.

Read More..

New California legislators get a warm welcome &#8212; from lobbyists

SACRAMENTO — The day after being elected to the state Assembly, several incoming lawmakers were in AT&T's luxury suite at the Sacramento sports arena, watching the Kings with the company's top Capitol executive.

The next day, the California Dental Assn. feted the state's freshman legislators. That was before more than 20 legislators jetted off to Hawaii, China, Brazil, New Zealand and other locales — with some trips paid for in large part by healthcare, energy and communications companies.

"It's the start of lobbyists inculcating them, saying 'Hey guys, line up and receive your gifts,' " said Bob Stern, former chief counsel to the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

It's a new day in Sacramento, with one of the largest-ever freshman classes elected in districts drawn for the first time by an independent, bipartisan commission.

And the lobbying campaign to shape their minds has begun.

The intent of the redistricting — as well as a rule change that allows lawmakers to serve up to 12 years in either legislative house — was to make the Capitol more accountable. In theory, the changes would reduce the influence of lobbyists and give lawmakers more time to gain expertise and independence.

But old traditions die hard.

Following the example of veteran legislative leaders, including Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles), more than a dozen Democratic freshmen headed off to AT&T's suite at the Sleep Train Arena.

Lawmakers are not allowed to take more than $420 in gifts per year, and they are supposed to report what they receive. But sidestepping the rules is hardly a challenge.

The freshmen who joined Pérez didn't have to report the value of their tickets because the gathering was hosted by the state Democratic Party.

Jose Medina, a newly elected assemblyman from Riverside, said the event was totally appropriate. Spending time with lobbyists is "part of my job,'' he said.

"At the end of the day, I'll make my decision based on what is best for the people I represent," he said.

Jim Frazier, a freshman assemblyman from Oakley, called the evening "a great opportunity to start meeting the people who worked so hard to represent their districts."

Other freshman Democrats in the suite included Ken Cooley of Rancho Cordova, Marc Levine of San Rafael, Phil Ting of San Francisco, Kevin Mullin of South San Francisco, Rudy Salas of Bakersfield, Bill Quirk of Hayward and Reggie Jones-Sawyer of Los Angeles.

Jones-Sawyer was one of 15 legislators who flew a few days later to Maui for a five-day conference at the Fairmont Kea Lani organized by the California Independent Voter Project.

The group, which paid some of the legislators' travel expenses, has been funded over the years by tobacco giant Altria Group Inc., Southern California Edison, Eli Lilly & Co., Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the California Beer & Beverage Distributors, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Assn., Chevron Corp. and the state prison guards union.

In between rounds of golf and poolside lounging, the sponsors talked with lawmakers.

"I was learning about the issues," said Jones-Sawyer, the only freshman on the trip. "There were some things I didn't know — such as how businesses really need help to flourish here in California."

Phillip Ung, an advocate with California Common Cause, said he found the explanations bewildering.

"They have obviously convinced themselves that the people's business is best solved poolside with mai tais in hand," he said. "Congress banned this type of travel years ago."

Other lawmakers went to China, Australia, New Zealand or Brazil this month, in some cases paid for by special interests.

Those in Brazil were sponsored by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, which is bankrolled by Chevron, PG&E, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Southern California Edison, among others.

The sponsors sent representatives to accompany Assemblyman Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), who is chairman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, as well as Sens. Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres), Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Niguel), Bill Emmerson (R-Hemet) and Michael Rubio (D-East Bakersfield).

The group paid for airfare, hotels, meals and ground transportation, said P.J. Johnston, a spokesman for the nonprofit foundation.

The lawmakers were there to meet with government and business leaders in Brazil to discuss reducing pollution, setting low-carbon fuel standards, transportation projects and other issues, Johnston said.

"Brazil provides real-world insight into issues California's decision-makers are grappling with, putting them in a larger perspective and offering lessons learned from a country with a rich history of challenges and successes in these areas," he said.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Times staff writer Anthony York contributed to this report.

Read More..

Before the iPad, There Was the Honeywell Kitchen Computer

In the winter of 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered to computerize your kitchen.

Cooking up a gourmet holiday meal will be a snap, the department store promised. Push a few buttons, and — presto! — a shiny orange-red, white, and black machine will compute the perfect five-course meal. No more silly culinary errors. The days of your wife slaving away in her Chanel apron will vanish into memory, and all those blinking lights will add to your holiday cheer.

All you needed was space for this 100-pound machine. And about $10,000. And a teletype. And a paper tape reader. And some serious engineering skills.

Needless to say, Neiman Marcus’ male-topian fantasy never materialized. The department store didn’t sell a single Honeywell Kitchen Computer, and it may never have intended to. The ad was no more than a publicity stunt, just like the stores ads for your very own Noah’s Ark and His-and-Hers airplanes in Christmas catalogs past.

The computer did exist. It was based on one of the Series 16 minicomputers from Honeywell, an early computer maker that would later help power the Arpanet, the forerunner to the modern internet. It’s just that this machine didn’t quite live up to the image of the modern computer that so often turned up in the popular imagination in the late ’60s and ’70s. It’s a bit like the talking Honeywell that turned up two years earlier in the Michael Caine spy flick The Billion Dollar Brain.

The Neiman Marcus ad was “a brilliant idea” and “wonderful publicity,” says Gardner Hendrie, who served as program manager for the Honeywell machine at the heart of the Kitchen Computer and is now a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “But I thought the packaging was probably a waste of time and wouldn’t sell.”

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer was really a 16-bit business machine called the H316 minicomputer. The H316 was available as a table-top machine or a machine you could mount on a rack, but Kitchen Computer was based on a version that was shoehorned into a futuristic, Jetsons-like pedestal. People did actually buy this machine, but not very many people.

“I don’t think it was a very popular style. Ninety-five percent of people wanted to build it into a [larger] system…. They were sticking them in racks,” says Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum, which is home to the only Kitchen Computer in existence. “The people buying these are engineers. They don’t care what it looks like.”

What they cared about were machines that could manage industrial, military, aerospace, research, and scientific projects — not sleek ines and a built-in writing desk. They wanted a minicomputer that could connect to a teletype and a paper tape reader.

An engineer would type a program in human-readable form, and the teletype would spit out the program on paper tape, translating the code into a series of punched holes and spaces. The paper tape reader could then read the holes and spaces as ones and zeros. The paper tape was “like a floppy disk, circa 1960. It’s a personal means of data storage,” Spicer says.

Without a teletype, a programmer would need to enter software into the Honeywell using the 16 buttons on the front panel, each of which corresponds to a bit. A pressed button represented a one, and un-pushed button signaled a zero. “The chances that you would get a program right doing it one bit at a time like that were so low,” Spicer said. “The first peripheral people bought for [the Honeywell] was a teletype so they could speak to it.”

Now try to imagine all that in late 1960s kitchen. A full H316 system wouldn’t have fit in most kitchens, says design historian Paul Atkinson of Britain’s Sheffield Halam University. Plus, it would have looked entirely out of place. The thought that an average person, like a housewife, could have used it to streamline chores like cooking or bookkeeping was ridiculous, even if she aced the two-week programming course included in the $10,600 price tag.

If the lady of the house wanted to build her family’s dinner around broccoli, she’d have to code in the green veggie as 0001101000. The kitchen computer would then suggest foods to pair with broccoli from its database by “speaking” its recommendations as a series of flashing lights. Think of a primitive version of KITT, without the sexy voice.

“What that means is you have to be able to decode the lights in your brain,” says Spicer of the Computer History Museum. Or at least remember the pattern and look up what it meant. At that rate, dinner might be ready next week. “The reason this is such a joke, a gag item, was that there was no real human-readable I/O [input/output] for it.”

It may not have worked in a practical sense, but at least it got people thinking about computers as consumer products. The concept of kitchen and home computers had already been circulating in popular culture by the time Neiman Marcus’ kitchen computer graced its Christmas catalog. In The Jetsons, which aired in the early 1960s, humans lived in a tech-happy world alongside robots and computers. In 1966, Westinghouse Corporation engineer Jim Sutherland built the Electronic Computing Home Operator (ECHO IV) to automate storing recipes, controlling home temperature, keeping track of household inventory, and conserving energy.

A year later, Philco-Ford Corporation released A.D. 1999, a short film that portrayed what life would be like at the end of the century. A scene in the kitchen of the future shows a family teleconferencing while mom plans dinner with the help of a flat-screen computer that knows how many calories dad is allowed to have. And after seeing the Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer, Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corporation, a leading company in the minicomputer industry, sent out a congeries on the computer-in-the-home market in which he called the trend “inevitable.” And he was right.

The dedicated kitchen computer never quite happened. Since the Honeywell, there have been several attempts to revive the idea, like Electrolux’s Screenfridge and the HP Touch Smart, but none have really caught on. “In a way, the technology is in search of a problem,” said Spicer. “There is just this persistent meme of having computers in the kitchen, and somehow that’s going to create more leisure time.”

That said, this holiday season, so many of you will cook our meals with the help of iPads and laptops and smartphones, as you told us just last week. They’re smaller than the Honeywell. They’re cheaper. They don’t require a teletype. They’re not attached to your fridge. And you can take them outside the kitchen and use them for so many other things. Sometimes the future isn’t what a catalog tells us it will be. Sometimes, it’s better.

Read More..

Ex-’Price is Right’ model gets $8.5M in damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.

The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.

Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.

“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”

FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.

“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.

In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.

Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.

Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.

Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..

Tool Kit: Online Shopping Tips for the Holidays

Some people may be looking forward to leaving Thanksgiving dinner before the pie is served to join the Black Friday rush, which will begin during dinnertime Thursday, earlier than ever, at stores like Sears, Walmart and Lord & Taylor.

But for those who prefer to stay for the pie course, avoid the lines and freezing temperatures and shop from the comfort of their homes, there are just as many deals to be found online this year, especially for smart shoppers.

Last year, online shoppers spent $816 million on Black Friday, an increase of 26 percent from the year before, and an additional $2.3 billion over Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, according to comScore. It expects online spending to rise this year.

Online, there is no commute, no parking and no crowds — and shopping can be done in bed or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Still, you cannot try clothes on, you have to wait for your purchase to arrive and there is always the nagging feeling that a better price is just one more click away.

To find your way around those problems, here are some tips from online shopping pros, retailers and shopping bloggers.

BARGAINS START EARLY “Cyber Monday is passé,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer for ShopRunner.com, a network of e-commerce sites. “With online sales beginning as early as the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, consumers who hold out for the best deal may find that what they are looking for has already sold out.”

Amazon.com, for example, started its Black Friday deals on Monday, but they end Saturday. SHOP ON TUESDAYS One of the secrets of online shopping is that prices change by the second. To maximize your chances of getting the best price year-round, shop on Tuesday, a variety of e-commerce experts say. For whatever reason, Tuesday is when most e-commerce sites, including Shopbop, Etsy and RetailMeNot, post discounts and new items.

No matter the day, online retailers often start sales in the wee hours, so shop early.

As for the time of year, women’s clothes, shoes and accessories are discounted most in January, February, August and September, according to Shop It To Me, an online shopping search site. For consumer electronics like laptops, shop in midsummer and late September, before and after the back-to-school rush, according to Decide.com, a price comparison site.

NEVER PAY FULL PRICE Online holiday shoppers should use 40 percent off as a benchmark for a good deal, said Marjorie Cader, a Shop It To Me spokeswoman, based on discount data the site has collected. Expect discounts that are about 5 percent better from online-only retailers than from those that also operate brick and mortar stores, she said.

Comparison shopping sites like TheFind or ShopStyle can locate the best prices; Google or coupon sites like RetailMeNot can also help find a discount.

Google, Amazon and even flash sale sites like Gilt.com do not always have the lowest prices. You might check small shopping blogs dedicated to your favorite brands, like Grechen’s Closet for contemporary women’s clothes or J. Crew Aficionada.

“Spend 20 minutes and ensure you are getting the best deal out there,” said John Faith, senior vice president of mobile at WhaleShark Media, which operates coupon sites, including RetailMeNot.

BE A HAGGLER This is the year haggling at the cash register could become acceptable, as offline retailers try to keep shoppers offline. If you find a better price online — by using an application like RedLaser or searching Amazon — ask whether the cashier will match it. Big retailers like Target have already said they will.

WAIT TILL THE LAST MINUTE Procrastinators might benefit during the holidays. Electronics sold online are least expensive in the week before Christmas, according to Decide, especially TVs, laptops and cameras.

And while Dec. 17 is the last day that most online retailers will offer free shipping in time for Christmas, Walmart, the luxury clothing seller Net-a-Porter and others will deliver the same day. In San Francisco and New York, eBay now offers same-day delivery from hundreds of stores, including Macy’s, Target and Toys “R” Us.

NEVER PAY FOR SHIPPING... Nine of ten retailers will offer free shipping on certain purchases this holiday season, and a third will offer free shipping on all purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

Some, though, require that you enter a promotional code, so it’s wise to take a minute to look around the Web site or search a coupon site to find it.

Stores including Walmart, Toys “R” Us and Nordstrom allow you to shop online and pick up your order locally.

...OR FOR RETURNS Sites like Zappos.com and Piperlime send prepaid shipping labels, but beware.

“When it comes to returns, read the fine print,” said Brian Hoyt, a spokesman for WhaleShark Media. Some merchants include a prepaid return label but subtract the price from your refund, and others charge a restocking fee as high as 30 percent for consumer electronics.

Many companies, including Gap and J. Crew, also let you return an online purchase to a local store. And until Dec. 31, PayPal will cover the return shipping cost if the merchant does not, as long as you pay with PayPal and make the return within 30 days.

SEARCH WISELY Try searching synonyms, like “coat” instead of “jacket.” On sites like eBay, try leaving out words — if you are looking for an Yves Saint Laurent handbag on eBay, search for “Saint Laurent” or “Laurent bag.”

“If you search for ‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ you’ll be fighting over pieces with a bigger group of people,” said Sophia Amoruso, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce retailer Nasty Gal, who suggested purposefully misspelling brand names as well. “Think of what an uninformed person might list a really great designer piece as, and you can get an amazing gem for an incredible price.”

EBay Fashion also lets shoppers search by taking a cellphone picture of a fabric to find similar designs.

GET INSPIRED Search for “black sequin dress,” and you’ll get 128 results on Zappos.com, 2,618 on Amazon.com and a truly overwhelming 18 million on Google.

One solution: Trust online curators to suggest items. Etsy creates lists of recommended items. On Pinterest, you can peruse items culled by others. Other sites to search for inspiration: Polvyore, Fancy, Svpply, Lookbook.nu and We Heart It.

TRY IT ON, VIRTUALLY You can visit sites that show real people wearing the clothes you’re interested in buying, like Go Try It On, Fashism and Rent the Runway and sites that show video, including Asos, MyHabit and Joyus. Or, as long as a site offers free shipping and returns, order two sizes and return one.

SHOP INTERNATIONALLY “Don’t let international shopping scare you off,” said Caroline Nolan, the writer of Pregnant Fashionista, a maternity shopping blog.

Many international e-commerce sites, like Asos, ship free to the United States. And because the seasons are different, winter clothes in Australia, for instance, go on sale just as Americans are starting to shop for winter, she said. FarFetch has items from small boutiques worldwide and 1stDibs is good at finding rare items like an antique from Paris. On eBay, you might have luck finding items made by a European designer by switching to eBay’s site for a particular country.

MAKE SITES WORK FOR YOU On Shop It To Me, you can enter your favorite designers and sizes and the site will send you personalized e-mails with promotions and sales. Many sites allow shoppers to place a symbol like a heart on best-liked items or save them to a wish list. On a site like Pinterest, shoppers can build a list.

“You always think you’ll remember where you saw something or what brand it was, but really you never do,” said Noria Morales, style director at SugarInc, a network of fashion and lifestyle blogs.

Even better, sites like Shopbop and Polyvore send alerts when items you have saved go on sale or are running low. EBay sends alerts when new items are listed for a search you have saved.

BE DILIGENT No one has time to read 50 e-mails a day from retailers. But for your favorite e-commerce sites, it is worth signing up for e-mails, as well as tracking them on Facebook and Twitter, where they often post exclusive deals. Many online shoppers have more luck hunting for items than trusting services to send alerts, said Grechen Reiter, owner of Grechen Media, a network of shopping blogs.

“It is the thrill of the hunt that gets us going, after all,” she said.

Read More..

Supreme Court to hear California raisin growers' case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear an appeal from Fresno raisin growers Marvin and Laura Horne, who contend that the federal marketing program that can take nearly half of their crop is unconstitutional.

Their case poses a significant challenge to the New Deal-era farm program that seeks to prop up prices by keeping part of the crop off the market.

It also raises questions about the limits of the government's power to regulate commerce, an issue that sharply divided the justices in the major healthcare overhaul case decided in June.

California produces 99.5% of the nation's raisins and about 40% of the world's supply, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a say on how some of the crop can be used.

Under the federal program, the USDA's raisin board seeks to maintain stable prices by setting aside some portion of the crop and keeping it off the market. Those raisins can be used in the federal school lunch program, but the growers are paid little or nothing for them.

Believing the scheme to be outdated and unfair, the Hornes joined with several other growers to evade the system and sell their raisins independently. They were hit with an order to pay a $483,843 civil fine.

They sued, but lost in the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals. The judges said the Hornes should have filed a claim in a special claims court.

Over the objections of the Department of Agriculture, the high court said it would hear the growers' arguments that they were denied "just compensation" as required by the Constitution, making the program an illegal "taking" of private property.

California raisins were last before the court in the late 1990s in a dispute over marketing campaigns. Then, dissident growers were challenging the mandatory fees for generic ads, such as those depicting dancing raisins and a rendition of the song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine."

The new case arises from independent farmers who admitted that they spoke for only a "small part of the large raisin industry" in California.

The federal marketing order for raisins "extracts a hefty portion of a farmer's annual raisin crop as a condition" for selling the rest of it on the market, said the growers' appellate lawyer, Michael McConnell, a Stanford University law professor and former federal appeals court judge.

In 2003, when the case began, raisin handlers were required to set aside 47% of the crop, he said. The next year, the percentage dropped to 30%.

In those two years, the raisin board "determined that the compensation for the reserve-tonnage raisins should be set at precisely zero dollars," he said. The Hornes "received no compensation for the USDA's appropriation of almost one-third of their crop," he said.

In defense of the USDA, Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli Jr. had urged the court to steer clear of the case. The marketing orders apply to "handlers" of raisins, not to producers, he said.

The Hornes tried to play both roles by producing raisins and then marketing them, he said. They "cannot flout the raisin marketing order and then challenge the resulting monetary assessment on the ground that compensation might hypothetically be owed if they had complied," he said.

The case of Horne vs. USDA will come up for argument in March. While it could yield a narrow procedural ruling, it also could lead to a broader decision that will affect the many other agricultural marketing orders.

david.savage@latimes.com

Read More..

3-D Printing Branches Out With New Wood-Based Filament

Printed plastics? So 2011. And high-end printers have been working with metals and ceramics for some time. But now the 3-D printing community is toying with a material more natural in origin: printed wood.

The new concept has a mysterious start. A Thingiverse member going by the nom de printer ”Kaipa” recently uploaded pictures of 3D-printed parts that weren’t made of extruded plastic, but a wood/plastic mixture he created on his own. The maker wouldn’t share the process for making the material, or even what the ingredients were, but he did offer to send sample spools of his experimental filament to interested hackers.

Forward-thinking French fabricator Jeremie Francois took Kaipa up on the offer and put the filament, called Laywood-D3 through its paces. He found that the material had interesting properties. On his blog he reported that “It actually looks like something between cardboard and a springy MDF. The printed object also really can be painted, much more than with PLA or ABS.”

And then Francois took it a step further. He noted that as the temperature of the extrusion nozzle changed, the color of the wood changed with it. Lower temperatures meant lighter, piney colors; higher temperatures led to darker hues. And the variable temperatures introduced an uneven “grain,” further enhancing the natural appearance.

Keen to keep the crowdsourced innovation going, Francois developed software to allow makers to experiment with the material and its variable temperature performance more easily.

The only problem with this material is that Kaipa can’t seem to make enough.

The one website that carries it is perpetually out of stock, while the only other option is to buy small batches through Germany’s eBay. With no open source sharing, it’s impossible for others in the fledgling community to continue helping its development. Some have expressed interest in trying to re-create the product’s formulation, including Brentwood, California, high school student Logan Dorsey, who has started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise research funds, but that comes with no guarantees.

3-D printing wood might not rival traditional production methods in terms of cost or quality, but it stands alone for its unique aesthetic. And in a world where 3-D printers are printing coral and fixing eagle beaks, it might be just the tool a sustainability-minded engineer needs.

All photos: Jeremie Francois

Read More..

J.R.R. Tolkien estate sues Warner Bros. over gambling, games

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The estate of “The Lord of the Rings” author J.R.R. Tolkien and publisher HarperCollins have filed an $ 80 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. studios over the licensing of characters and plots in online and gambling games derived from the films.

The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Monday, alleges that Warner Bros. and its subsidiary New Line Cinema – which own the merchandising rights to the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” brands – infringed on copyrights by licensing to casino slot machines, online gambling, games and downloads.

Tolkien‘s estate accuses Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., of “infringing conduct.”

“Not only does the production of gambling games patently exceed the scope of defendants’ rights, but this infringing conduct has outraged Tolkien’s devoted fan base, causing irreparable harm to Tolkien’s legacy and reputation and the valuable goodwill generated by his works,” the lawsuit stated.

The suit claimed Warner Bros. earned millions of dollars from legal merchandise licensing revenue related to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films, which have grossed nearly $ 3 billion at the global box office.

The estate of the late English author and HarperCollins, a division of News Corp., are asking for at least $ 80 million in damages.

Representatives for Warner Bros., Tolkien’s estate and HarperCollins were not immediately available for comment.

The lawsuit comes a week ahead of the New Zealand premiere of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” the first of a new trilogy of films returning to Tolkien’s world of elves, goblins and wizards of Middle Earth, based on the “Lord of the Rings” prequel novel “The Hobbit.”

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Mohammad Zargham)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Patience, Consciousness and White Lies

My wife and I are blessed with having three “semi-independent” parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little — now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.

What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aides and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.

Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned — independence versus helicoptering.

Children’s yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: “I can do it myself!” It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver’s license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.

The urge for independence is seen in all animal species, but relinquishing independence and accepting assistance in old age is unique to humans. For most elderly, it comes with a struggle, reflecting how hardwired our brains are for independence. The thought of getting in-home help is antithetical to our parents’ sense of self worth, exceeded only by the dread of leaving their homes for assisted living facilities. So, as tasks that were once mundane and automatic have become onerous and stressful for them, we attempt to foster autonomy while protecting them from harm, as we did with our children just a few short years ago.

Childproofing – Our home has again become hazardous, as have theirs. Furniture must be rearranged, booster seats placed on chairs to ease standing up, slippery rugs removed, lighting improved, bathrooms accessorized with handles and rails.

Dressing – Body shapes change in childhood and in old age. Our parents’ wardrobes, like those of our children’s before them, need frequent attention to preserve self-esteem. Their unwillingness to part with old clothes turns us into tailors. And, once again, we shop for slip-on sneakers with Velcro ties.

Driving – For our teens, driving was the symbolic liberation from childhood to young adulthood. For our parents, driving is the symbolic resistance to infirmity and old age. Our attempt to wean them from their cars, in precisely the reverse order we used to phase our teens into driving, has been torture for our parents and for us.

Toys – We have filled our parents’ shelves with new toys to help them with everything from opening cartons of milk (I would like a word with whoever designed those plastic pull loops) and zipping their clothes, to opening jars and removing the protective seals from over-the-counter medicines. A “picker-upper” device helps them avoid bending too low, and a key turner gives them leverage to open their door. Large digital clock faces, easy-to-read telephone keypads, and magnifying glasses keep them in touch with the world, and an e-mail printer keeps them in touch with their grandchildren.

Medicating – Filling those plastic pill box organizers with a week’s worth of medicines has become a personal barometer of competence for our parents, yet, as with our children when they were young, we feel compelled to oversee the dosing.

Mobility – Despite numerous falls, it was only with much teeth gnashing (or denture gnashing, as the case may be) that our mothers consented to use canes; more gnashing when canes gave way to walkers. For long walks, we hide the wheelchair half way there and back so the neighbors don’t see.

The more we do for our parents, the more frail and guilty they feel. Our efforts are sometimes resented. Helping them get in and out of the car, or bracing them under the arm as they negotiate a bumpy sidewalk, can be an affront. “I can do it myself!”

Can I ride my bike to tennis practice if I’m really careful crossing Holly Street? Why can’t I take a cab home from the seniors program at the community center? Can I walk to grandma’s by myself this time? Can I take the bus to the supermarket today? Everyone is hanging out at the park after school, can I go? I’ll just walk down the block to the neighbor’s house this afternoon, O.K.?

What wisdom did we gain the first time around to help us now? Patience, consciousness and white lies.

Patience to wait for them to come to the same conclusions we did. Mom, do you think Rosalind would have fallen and broken both wrists if she had been using a walker?

Consciousness about their need for independence as ballast to our need for their well-being. Why don’t you just let us drive you at night for now?

And white lies: I’m going to the supermarket anyway, we can shop together.

The longer we can protect our parents from harm, the more we can share our lives with them and the more joy they can have from their grandchildren. The trick is doing it without hurting them in other ways.

We have been through this before. It was worth it then, and it is worth it now.

Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”

Read More..

Blue Laws Curb Consumerism Where Pilgrims Gave Thanks

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

The annual Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth, Mass., is held the weekend before the holiday, so as not to interfere.

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — Here in the birthplace of Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims first gave thanks in 1621 for their harvest and their survival, some residents are giving thanks this year for something else: the Colonial-era blue laws that prevent retailers from opening their doors on the fourth Thursday of November.

Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times

Participants in Saturday's town parade.

While shoppers in the rest of the country will skip out on Thanksgiving to go to Walmart or Kmart or other big-box stores, William Wrestling Brewster, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower and participated in that first Thanksgiving, will limit his activities to enjoying a traditional meal here with his extended family at his parents’ house.

“Thanksgiving is supposed to be about giving thanks for all you have,” said Mr. Brewster, 47, who runs a computer repair business. “I cringe to think what society is doing to itself,” he said of the mercantile mania that threatens one of the least commercial holidays.

Some of the nation’s biggest retailers — Sears, Target and Toys “R” Us among them — announced this month that they would be moving up their predawn Black Friday door-buster sales to Thanksgiving Day or moving up their existing Thanksgiving sales even earlier on Thursday. Walmart, which has already been open on Thanksgiving for many years, is advancing its bargain specials to 8 p.m. Thursday from 10 p.m.

But in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the stores will sit dark until the wee hours of Friday. Even Walmart will not open in Maine until just after midnight Friday or in Massachusetts or Rhode Island until 1 a.m.

New England’s blue laws were put down by early settlers to enforce proper behavior on Sundays. (The origin of the term is unclear. Some have said the laws were printed on blue paper, while others have said the word “blue” was meant to disparage those like the “blue noses” who imposed rigid moral codes on others.)

Over decades, many of those laws — which banned commerce, entertainment and the sale of alcohol, among other things — were tossed aside or ignored, or exemptions were granted. In some cases, the statutes were extended to holidays and barred retailers specifically from operating on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Maine granted an exception to L. L. Bean, whose store in Freeport is open around the clock every day, including Christmas. When the blue laws, which had faded, were revived in the 1950s, the store in Freeport was already operating 24/7, said Carolyn Beem, a spokeswoman. She said that the store, which originally catered to hunters and fishermen who shopped at odd hours, was grandfathered in and allowed to stay open on the holidays.

Nationwide, a protest is developing against Thanksgiving Day sales. Workers at some stores have threatened to strike, saying the holiday openings were disrupting their family time. Online petitions have drawn hundreds of thousands of signatures protesting the move. The stores say that many of their workers have volunteered to work on the holiday, when they will get extra pay, and that consumers wanted to shop early. It is not yet clear what effect the protests might have.

At the same time, this corner of New England is serving as something of a bulwark against the forces of commercialism.

Even the Retailers Association of Massachusetts is treading gently on the notion of Thanksgiving sales.

“There hasn’t been any outcry from our members over the years pushing this,” said Bill Rennie, vice president of the association.

But, as Thanksgiving shopping becomes more common, he said, “it may be time to have a discussion about it.”

Blue laws seem anachronistic when people can shop anytime online, he said.

There is also the case of simple economics. These states are already at risk of losing sales to stores in New Hampshire, which has no sales tax. Now, Mr. Rennie pointed out, they could lose even more in the holiday bargain rush when stores in New Hampshire are open and stores here are closed.

Still, Barry Finegold, a Massachusetts state senator whose district abuts New Hampshire, said that so far, none of the retailers in his district had asked for a change in the law.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated William Wrestling Brewster’s occupation. He runs a computer repair business, not a computer store.

Read More..

Family of man shot by sheriff's deputies calls for FBI probe

The family of an Inglewood man gunned down by L.A. County sheriff's deputies this month is requesting an FBI probe of the shooting and subsequent investigation by the Sheriff's Department.

Jose de la Trinidad, 36, was shot and killed by deputies Nov. 10, just minutes after leaving his niece's quinceanera with his older brother.

After police attempted to pull the older brother over for speeding, he sped off. After pleading with his brother to stop, Jose de la Trinidad was let out of the car in the 1900 block of East 122nd Street in Willowbrook, family members said.

There the unarmed man was shot and killed by deputies. But there is some dispute over what happened in those seconds before deputies opened fire.

Sheriff's Department officials said the deputies believed Jose de la Trinidad was reaching for his waistband and, fearing he had a weapon, used necessary force.

The slain man's family, however, said that a 19-year-old woman who witnessed the shooting from her bedroom window reported that she saw De la Trinidad with his hands behind his head before shots were fired.

The family's attorney, Luis Carrillo, said the witness heard the older brother's car screech to a stop and then watched Jose de la Trinidad get out of the vehicle.

"When they told him to stop, his hands went up behind his head and he kept them there," the witness told a private investigator working for Carrillo, according to a transcript of interview notes read to The Times.

Carrillo said the witness, whom he did not identify, was pressured to change her story by sheriff's deputies who were going door-to-door that night looking for information on the shooting.

"It's the classic 'He was reaching for his waistband' defense that is used any time an officer shoots an unarmed man," Carrillo said. "They tried to get her to change her story."

Sheriff's officials sharply reject the accusation and said that, as of Monday, they had yet to speak with any witnesses.

"It's a curious accusation because how can we intimidate people who we have not yet spoken to?" said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman of the Sheriff's Department.

Despite Carrillo's claims that uniformed deputies were going door-to-door seeking witness statements the night of the shooting, Whitmore insisted that no witness interviews were conducted that night.

Sheriff's officials have released few details about the shooting and say the incident will be investigated by multiple agencies, which is standard protocol for deputy-involved shootings.

Officials at the FBI office in Los Angeles said they have not decided wither the accusations merit an investigation.

The driver, who family members believe may have been intoxicated after a night of celebrating, sped off again before crashing his vehicle at the intersection of El Segundo and Avalon boulevards. He ran away but was apprehended by deputies.

On Monday, as more than a dozen family members huddled in a South Pasadena law office, Carrillo and De la Trinidad's widow, Rosie, demanded answers. His mother, Sofia de la Trinidad, seemed overwhelmed by the moment. "Mi hijo, mi hijo," she said, sobbing.

"I just don't know what I'm going to do, I still can't believe this has happened," the widow said. Making plans for a funeral and consoling her two daughters has left little time to process her husband's death, she said.

Family friends have set up a memorial fund in De la Trinidad's name at Wells Fargo Bank. They hope it will cover the costs of a private memorial ceremony planned for this week.

"He was the breadwinner," his wife said, fighting tears. "I don't even know how am I going to bury him."

wesley.lowery@latimes.com

Read More..

Mount Doom, Einstein Crater, and Arrakis Plains: Geekiest Place Names in the Solar System

Ancient civilizations gave us the names of planets in our solar system. But as modern scientists have zoomed in on these bodies and their moons, they have needed to find names for ever more features on their surfaces.

Following the tradition of naming planets after Greek and Roman deities, most place names in the solar system are derived from mythology. Thus, mountains, craters, valleys, and other geologic features on Venus come from names for sky goddesses, water goddesses, desert goddesses, war goddesses, or goddesses of love, fate, fortune, and fertility.

But sometimes it seems that astronomers get a little tired of always asking their mythology friends for new pantheons to mine for names. Scientists are, after all, just as geeky as any other nerd subculture and they like to stamp the solar system with lesser-known minutiae from their favorite books or devote a crater to a scientific hero.

For instance, on Nov. 13 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved the name Mount Doom for a peak on Saturn’s moon Titan. According to the Lord of the Rings series, this mountain lies at the heart of Mordor and is the only site where the One Ring can be unmade. Titan is like a geek heaven, with place names coming from both J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythos and Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

To come up with such names, members of an IAU task group agree on a theme — let’s say, naming all the craters on Jupiter’s moon Europa after Celtic gods and heroes – and label any known features. As better maps are made of a planet or moon, other people may suggest a name for newly resolved features. The names are reviewed, objected to, debated, and eventually approved and published online. The process isn’t just for scientists; members of the public can submit suggestions as well. Maybe it’s time to start stamping the solar system with places like Westeros and Oz?

While we can’t visit these features in person, many have been mapped by our robotic probes. Here we take a look at some images of the geekiest places in the solar system.

Above:

The themes for most of Titan’s features follow the standard mythological criterion. Above you can see the enormous Xanadu region, the bright area just below and to the right of center. Xanadu is named after a legendary palace in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. But all mountains on Titan are named for fictional mountains in the Lord of the Rings series, while all plains and labyrinth-like features are named for planets in the Dune series.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Read More..

Lindsay Lohan, Liz Taylor and pages of “what ifs” for TV’s “Liz & Dick”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor takes courage. Casting wayward starlet Lindsay Lohan as the Hollywood screen legend was both daring and asking for trouble.

And indeed, trouble is what producers got during the shooting of Lifetime TV movie “Liz & Dick” – but they say the payoff made it all worthwhile.

“Let’s say that producing a movie with Lindsay Lohan is not for the faint of heart,” said executive producer Larry Thompson. “I turned 50 shades of white during production…But the risk was worth the rewards; the pain was worth the pleasure.”

“Liz & Dick,” which premieres on November 25, recounts the scandalous and tumultuous romance between Taylor and British actor Richard Burton in the 1960s and 70s. Lohan is one of the few people ever to have portrayed the diamond-loving, larger-than-life, two-time best actress Oscar winner on screen.

The idea was irresistible. Who better than Lohan, 26, a former child star herself, would know the pressures of having her every move scrutinized by the media, the allure of drink and drugs, and the thrills and risks of living life on the edge?

“I think Lindsay Lohan…literally knows no boundaries and that becomes dangerous and exciting. And she has the ability to bring to the screen and her performance that danger, that raw emotion,” Thompson told reporters ahead of the premiere.

“If you are going to make a movie about Taylor, you damn well want some great magic. And we felt that Lindsay Lohan could bring that.”

Some reviews for “Liz & Dick” have been savage. The Hollywood Reporter called Lohan “woeful as Taylor from start to finish” and the TV movie “an instant classic of unintentional hilarity.” Variety was kinder, calling Lohan “adequate” and the film “hammy” but “pretty good, all things considered.” Both noted casting Lohan was a sound publicity move.

Thompson however is proud of the 90-minute TV film. “I think people will see (New Zealand actor) Grant Bowler as Richard Burton just steals your heart, and Lindsay Lohan breaks it.”

PAGES OF ‘WHAT IFS’

After five years of legal troubles, numerous trips to jail, rehab, and courtrooms, the “Mean Girls” star was looking for a project that could re-establish the credentials that had once made her among the most promising young actresses in Hollywood.

But her past brought problems with insurance for the movie, shooting schedules and the personal setbacks Lohan faced during the making of the TV film earlier this year.

Thompson said the deal with Lohan included “pages and pages of ‘what if’ clauses. What if there is a car accident? What if there is a violation of probation and she would be incarcerated? She might be the most insured actress to ever walk on a soundstage.”

The clauses were needed. During shooting, Lohan was involved in a serious car crash in the California beach city of Santa Monica, and on a separate occasion she was rushed to the hospital suffering from what as described as “exhaustion and dehydration.”

And just as Taylor and Burton were hounded by (and sometimes courted) the media during their highly public extra-marital affair, Lohan and the production staff had the paparazzi to deal with.

“There were paparazzi following us around, hanging out of trees every day. And while we were making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor being followed by paparazzi, we had real paparazzi following our paparazzi following Elizabeth Taylor. So it was life imitating art, art imitating life,” said Thompson.

Thompson acknowledged that fans of Taylor, who died in 2011 at age 79 after eight marriages – two of them to Burton – will believe there is no actress who could possibly play her. Burton died in 1984 at the age of 58.

Yet Lifetime chose Lohan also in the hope she would bring a younger generation of her own fans to the movie.

“A lot of young people today think Liz Taylor is an old woman sitting in a wheelchair next to Michael Jackson, whereas our movie is about the young, vibrant, highest-paid movie star in the world at the height of her beauty and power,” Thompson said.

As for whether he would work again with Lohan despite the challenging shoot?

“Sure,” Thompson said.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Christine Kearney and Lisa Shumaker)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Responding to Illnesses Manifesting Amid Recovery From Storm

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Dr. Aaron Gardener, center, attended to a patient at an ad hoc medical unit in Long Beach, N.Y. Many people have coughs, rashes and other ailments.

Day and night, victims of Hurricane Sandy have been streaming into ad hoc emergency rooms and relief centers, like the MASH-type medical unit on an athletic field in Long Beach, and the warming tent in the Rockaways the size of a small high school gym.

They complain of rashes, asthma and coughing. They need tetanus shots because — house-proud and armed with survivalist instincts — they have been ripping out waterlogged boards and getting poked by rusty nails. Those with back pain from sifting through debris receive muscle relaxants; those with chest pain from overexertion are hooked up to cardiac monitors.

“I’ve been coughing,” said Gabriel McAuley, 46, who has been working 16-hour days gutting homes and hauling debris in the Rockaways since the storm hit. “I’ve never felt a cough like that before. It’s deeper down.”

It is impossible to say how many people have been sickened by what Hurricane Sandy left behind: mold from damp drywall; spills from oil tanks; sewage from floodwater and unflushable toilets; tons upon tons of debris and dust. But interviews with hurricane victims, recovery workers, health officials and medical experts over the last week reveal that some of the illnesses that they feared would occur, based on the toxic substances unleashed by the storm and the experience of other disasters, notably Hurricane Katrina, have begun to manifest themselves.

Emergency rooms and poison control centers have reported cases of carbon monoxide exposure — and in New Jersey, several deaths have been attributed to it — from the misuse of generators to provide power and stoves to provide heat.

In Livingston, N.J., the Burn Center at St. Barnabas Medical Center had 16 burn cases over about six days, three times as many as usual, from people trying to dispel the cold and darkness with boiling water, gasoline, candles and lighter fluid.

Raw sewage spilled into homes in Baldwin and East Rockaway, in Nassau County, when a sewage plant shut down because of the surge and the system could not handle the backup. Sewage also spilled from a huge plant in Newark. “We tried to limit our presence in the house because the stink was horrible,” said Jennifer Ayres, 34, of Baldwin, who has been staying temporarily in West Hempstead. She said that she felt ill for several days, that her son had a scratchy throat, and that her mother, who lives in the house, had difficulty breathing, all problems she attributed to the two days they spent inside their house cleaning up last week. “I had stomach problems. I felt itchy beyond itchy on my face.”

Coughing — locally known as the Rockaway cough — is a common symptom that health officials said could come from mold, or from the haze of dust and sand kicked up by the storm and demolitions. The air in the Rockaways is so full of particles that the traffic police wear masks — though many recovery workers do not, worrying people who recall the fallout of another disaster.

“It’s just like 9/11,” said Kathy Smilardi, sitting inside the skeleton of her gutted home in Broad Channel, wrapped in a white puffy jacket, her breath visible in the afternoon cold. “Everyone runs in to clean up, and they’re not wearing masks. Are we going to wait 20 years to figure out that people are dying?”

Health officials and experts say the risks are real, but are cautioning against hysteria. Some coughing could be due to cold, damp weather. Lasting health effects from mold, dust and other environmental hazards generally require long-term, continuous exposure, they said. And the short-term effects can be mitigated by taking precautions like wearing masks, gloves and boots and removing mold-infested wallboard. “The reality is that cleaning up both muck and sewage and spills and removing walls and reconstruction and dealing with debris all do in fact pose concerns,” Daniel Kass, New York City’s deputy commissioner for environmental health, said Friday. “Are they vast or uncontrollable? No. But they depend on people doing work correctly and taking basic precautions.”

The Katrina cough was found to be temporary, said Roy J. Rando, a professor at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist at the school, said that healthy children exposed to mold after Hurricane Katrina showed no lasting respiratory symptoms when they moved back to new or renovated homes.

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, lead levels in New Orleans’s soil dropped after the top layers of dirt, where lead from paint and gasoline can accumulate, were washed away. But in the two years afterward, soil testing found extremely high lead levels, Dr. Rabito said, which she theorized came from renovating old homes. “That’s a cautionary tale,” she said. Lead in soil can be tracked into homes and pose a health hazard to children playing inside or outside.

Though at least one outbreak of norovirus, a contagious gastrointestinal virus, occurred in a Brooklyn high school that was used as a shelter, New York and New Jersey health officials said they had not seen any significant spike in respiratory or gastrointestinal diseases related to the storm.

In Broad Channel, most homes on Noel Road, where Ms. Smilardi lives, have outdoor oil tanks that were overturned by the storm. The innards of many homes, built when asbestos was used, lie spilled among major and minor roads.

Ominous red spots covered both sides of Paul Nowinski’s burly torso. After the storm, Mr. Nowinski, a musician, waded into the basement of his childhood home on Beach 146th Street in the Rockaways to try to salvage records, books and instruments. He was up to his chest in water, which he thinks might have been contaminated with sewage. He said that he did not know the cause of the red marks; and that he had been too busy “schlepping” to go to the doctor.

Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

Read More..