It Started With ‘Genome’: ‘Omes’ Proliferate in Science

Abstract: The age of “omes” is here. It began with the genome, continued with the proteome, branched out with the memome and reached full flowering with the notion of the omome. This probably sounds like raw material for nonsense poetry, but it’s a real biological and linguistic trend that makes sense, once you get the idea of just what an “ome” is. The genome is the place to start. It is the totality of all the genes, whether in an organism or in something else, like a tumor . The human genome, mapped out about a decade ago, includes all the genes that make a human being. Creating a map of the whole genome was a monumental achievement, and during work on that project and after its completion, the omification of science took off. Joshua Lederberg, a geneticist and Nobel laureate who died in 2008, and Alexa T. McCray, now an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, saw it coming, and talked about the origin of the suffix “ome” in a 2001 essay, “ ’ Ome Sweet ’Omics — A Genealogical Treasury of Words, ” in The Scientist. The word “genome” was first used in 1920, by Hans Winkler, a German scientist, to mean all the material on the chromosomes in a sperm or egg, but did not become really popular until the end of the last century, when genome mapping began. Various experts had differing ideas on where the suffix came from, but it seems to be one that was made up. In any case, it clearly meant the totality of something. Dr. Lederberg, who coined a few scientific terms himself, contributed “microbiome” — all the microbes that live in and on humans — to the growing trend. An epidemic of neologia ensued. Thus were born the proteome and the secretome and the glycome, and numerous other omes that are pretty much impossible to keep track of. Interactome. Regulome. Connectome. Epigenome. The list goes on. In fact, it goes on for about 18 pages if you go to the Omics.org site and print out its list of omes and omics . The list could be said to be the omome, the ome of all the omes, a word which, in a moment of indulgent fantasy, I thought perhaps I had invented. Apparently not. “Omome,” or “omeome,” is on the Omics.org list, although the Web site given as a source led nowhere. Another possible inventor is Martin Krzywinski, a scientist at the Genome Sciences Center in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has created some extraordinary visual representations of genomes, and also invents new words. Among the coinings he offers on his site are “omome,” “omeomics,” “omicsophy,” which I don’t think will ever take off, and, just Thursday, “metaomomics,” which I don’t even want to think about. I loved the idea of the omome, but I thought it needed a reality check. I called Mark Gerstein at Yale. His lab is deeply involved in bioinformatics, the use of computing to make sense of the vast amounts of information produced in pursuit of the various omes. Dr. Gerstein also has an interest in the way scientific terminology develops. The omome, he said, was a fun idea, but he doubted anyone was making a living in omomics. Despite the humor in speculative omification, he said, the proliferation of real omic disciplines marked the spread of a “very important scientific idea.” He said, “All the omes derive to some extent from the genome,” and key to all of them is that an ome represents “the entirety of the thing being studied.” The mapping of genomes, he said, inspired scientists to use the same approach in studying proteins, metabolites and their biochemical connections, to name a few. And as they pursued this “omic idea,” the focus of biological research shifted in the direction of studying complete systems and networks, rather than individual parts, discrete genes or proteins. His comments reminded me of a recent conversation I had when I was reporting on the evolution of polar bears. One scientist wanted to make it clear to me that she was studying genomics, whereas another researcher was studying only genes. Only genes, I thought? What a difference an ome can make.

Biology and Biochemistry
English Language
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
Science and Technology


Senator Portman Sorts Ohio Fallout After Marriage Shift

Abstract: CINCINNATI — No one heckled Senator Rob Portman during his first appearance before thousands of Ohioans since becoming the most prominent elected Republican in the country to endorse same-sex marriage. “Wouldn’t you say,” he said, turning to his wife, Jane, after marching in an opening day parade for the Cincinnati Reds on Monday, “that most of the comments were thank yous and thumbs up and ‘You did the right thing’?” True, but for some of the Ohioans who acknowledged Mr. Portman, doubts flickered below the surface. “Senator!” said one spectator, Pete Kidnocker, reaching out to shake Mr. Portman’s hand. But after Mr. Portman passed, Mr. Kidnocker said he would vote for an alternative in a Republican primary and accused the senator of “betraying his principles.” “If you’re a Christian and you believe in those principles, whether your son or daughter is a homosexual, you can’t change your principles,” he said. Mr. Portman’s reversal of his long-held opposition to same-sex marriage — he said it was spurred by a son’s disclosure that he is gay — has intensified and quickened debate over the issue here in his home state. Though his shift has been welcomed by gay rights advocates as an example of how a family’s love can change minds, social conservatives have denounced Mr. Portman and vowed to block his re-election. “I totally respect their point of view,” Mr. Portman said of his opponents. “I held it until not too long ago.” One impact of Mr. Portman’s change of heart has been to fuel a movement seeking the repeal of a constitutional amendment in Ohio that bans same-sex marriage, according to the group leading the effort, FreedomOhio. Requests to download petitions from the group’s Web site more than doubled overnight, to 50 a day, after Mr. Portman’s announcement, said Ian James, a co-founder of FreedomOhio. “His endorsement of freedom to marry, I would submit, has done more than any politician other than Barack Obama,” Mr. James said. He said volunteers would easily gather the 385,000 signatures needed to qualify for the state ballot this November, but the group might delay a vote until 2014 to raise money in anticipation of a fierce public fight. On the other side, Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, said that he would now oppose Mr. Portman’s re-election “tooth and nail,” and that without the support of the 40 percent of evangelical voters in the Republican base, Mr. Portman, who will be a candidate again in 2016, “cannot win, he will not win.” Mr. Burress, a longtime supporter of Mr. Portman, said the senator called him the night before he went public on March 15 and said, “I have some bad news.” “I thought he was talking father to father with me,” said Mr. Burress, who supports discredited therapies aimed at changing sexual orientation. “I spent four and a half years on the board of an organization that helped people walk away from homosexuality. It is not innate; you’re not born that way.” “That devastated me, that he embraced his son’s behavior.” In a column in The Columbus Dispatch announcing his change of view, Mr. Portman wrote of learning from his son Will, then a college freshman, that he is gay. “He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is,” Mr. Portman wrote. Image Mr. Portman, right, with his son Will. The senator’s change of heart has quickened debate in Ohio, which has a ban on same-sex marriage. Credit Uncredited/Senator Portman office., via Associated Press He added, “I believe all of our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joy and stability of marriage.” The Republican establishment in the state stands behind Mr. Portman, and its leaders said that if he runs for a second term in three years, most voters will judge him on his support for lower taxes and spending, his longtime issues. “Should Rob Portman choose to run in 2016, he will have the full-throated support of the Ohio Republican Party,” said Matt Borges, its executive director. He said the senator’s willingness to stand apart from other elected Republicans, “knowing it was potentially at his political peril,” was commendable. “If we’re not supporting our own children, what are we doing?” Mr. Portman became a slightly less lonely figure in his party on Tuesday when a second Republican senator, Mark Kirk of Illinois , announced his support of same-sex marriage. Among Democratic senators, nearly 50 have rushed to come out in favor. Ohioans, including Ohio Republicans, are rapidly shifting on gay marriage, just as elsewhere. In a recent poll, 42 percent of Republicans in the state favored repealing the state’s ban to allow same-sex marriages. The poll , conducted for The Columbus Dispatch last month (before Mr. Portman’s announcement, but released after it) found that 54 percent of all Ohioans would repeal the ban, a significant shift since it was passed in a statewide referendum in 2004 with 62 percent of voters. Much of the change is driven by a generational shift: 73 percent of Ohioans under 35 favor same-sex marriage. Along the parade route, Sarah Renz, a school administrator who votes Republican, said she supported Mr. Portman. “You have to respect change, and if times change, people have to change with them.” Tiffani Jackson, a Democrat, echoed a number of others both approving and disapproving who were cynical about the senator’s change of heart, noting that he was against same-sex marriage until it hit close to home. “I think it’s sad it took his son being gay for him to flip-flop,” she said. Lisa Hall, a homemaker, wished he had not changed his position. “I just don’t agree with all that,” she said of same-sex marriage. “It’s changing families. The whole family loses stability.” Jeanne and Bob Ward, whose 3-year-old grandson, Garrett, sat between them in a Reds cap, found nothing wrong with changing one’s views because of a gay friend or family member. Their daughter, Shannon, who is Garrett’s mother, had told them she is a lesbian a couple of years ago. She and her partner own a home north of Cincinnati and want the legal protections of marriage for Garrett’s sake, Mrs. Ward said, adding, “We support gay marriage.” She and her husband did not always feel that way. They voted for Ohio’s ban nine years ago, before their daughter came out. “We’re 66 years old, and those views are instilled in you from little on,” Mrs. Ward said. “As we get rid of this older generation — our generation — they’re going to wonder why it was ever an issue.”

Same-Sex Marriage,Gay Marriage
US Politics
Rob Portman
Ohio


Young American Cashes In on Gold Cup

Abstract: After hitting a goal seen around the world, Benny Feilhaber has hit the big time. “Right after the Copa, I got a phone call from Billy Davies,” Feilhaber said yesterday in a telephone interview from Goteborg, where he is preparing to play for the United States national team today against host Sweden. He was referring to the Copa América tournament in Venezuela and to the manager of Derby County. “It was exciting to know that a Premier League team was interested in me.” Feilhaber, who was born in Brazil but moved to the United States as a youngster, had a breakout summer playing for the United States in the Concacaf Gold Cup and Copa América. Against Mexico in the Gold Cup final, Feilhaber struck the winning goal on a dazzling volley from the top of the penalty area. “I heard from players, coaches and friends about how that was such a great goal,” he said. “It was real special for me. It was the best goal I’ve ever scored in my life. I think it opened some eyes in Europe and helped in my move from Hamburg.” Feilhaber, 22, had signed with Hamburg SV of the German Bundesliga after a strong performance in the FIFA U-20 World Cup two years ago in the Netherlands. But like many players, his situation went downhill quickly when Huub Stevens replaced Thomas Doll as Hamburg’s coach last February. “It was tough for me,” he said. “When Huub came in, I went straight to the second team and was playing with the reserves. I had been happy until then.” After the two summer tournaments, Feilhaber said he heard from a number of European clubs, including Heerenveen in the Netherlands; Racing Strasbourg of France; Hertha Berlin of Germany; and Derby County, which had just gained promotion to England’s Premier League. When the offer arrived in Hamburg (Derby paid a $6 million transfer fee, according to the Derby Web site), Feilhaber said Hamburg officials were initially reluctant to allow him to leave. “My No. 1 priority was finding a team I could play at, in England or in another league,” Feilhaber said. “I’m excited to be in England. I’m thrilled.” But before his move could be completed, Feilhaber and Derby were forced to make an appeal to a British Home Office football review panel to obtain a work permit. British work rules require that incoming foreign players have played a minimum of 75 percent of their national team matches the past two years. Feilhaber did not qualify, and he knew it. “There were a lot of people who were not too optimistic,” he said. “It was 50-50. On Aug. 9, after training in Germany, I found out we had won the appeal. It was a big relief.” Feilhaber was on the bench Saturday when Derby lost, 4-0, at Tottenham. Now he is away from the club with the United States national team, but he hopes to get back to the English Midlands “to play more consistent minutes in the Prem.” ¶If he scores against Sweden, Landon Donovan will surpass Eric Wynalda’s career record of 34 international goals for the United States. The American team has a 10-3-1 record in 2007. ¶Jay DeMerit, a defender for Watford of the League Championship, is with the United States national team in Sweden but may not be with his club team much longer, according to The Daily Mirror of Britain. The newspaper said DeMerit, 27, had drawn interest from Middlesbrough and Derby County and had asked Watford for a new deal that would pay him nearly $20,000 a week. U.S. Open Cup The Seattle Sounders are trying to become the first team from the United Soccer Leagues to win the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup since Rochester in 1999. On the way to a semifinal date with F.C. Dallas of Major League Soccer (Sept. 4 at Qwest Field), the Sounders have defeated two M.L.S. teams, including an eye-opening 5-0 shellacking of Colorado on Aug. 7. (The Carolina Railhawks, another U.S.L. team, will play New England of M.L.S. in the other semifinal.) “It was one game; we try not to get carried away,” Adrian Hanauer, the Sounders’ owner, said last week in a telephone interview. “We pride ourselves here in putting a very good team on the field, and oftentimes that team can compete pretty well with M.L.S. teams.” If Hanauer has his way, Seattle could be an M.L.S. expansion team in the near future. M.L.S., which has 13 teams this season with the addition of Toronto, will return to the San Jose, Calif., area next year and will probably add two more teams by 2010. “I think an M.L.S. team in Seattle would be very successful,” Hanauer said. “Right now, I think the league is missing out by not having a team in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle was an original member of the N.A.S.L., and I don’t see why Seattle can’t support an M.L.S. team. Right now, it’s kind of a seller’s market for M.L.S.” League officials have a long list of possible expansion cities, including Atlanta; Philadelphia; Seattle; New York; Montreal; St. Louis; Milwaukee; San Diego; Las Vegas; Portland, Ore.; and Vancouver, British Columbia. “I think it’s just a matter of time before M.L.S. is in Seattle,” Hanauer said. “There are some big global companies up here. There are a lot of people working hard to bring M.L.S. to Seattle, and I’m one of them.” Notes ¶Benfica, Freddy Adu’s new team, has a new coach only one game into the Portuguese SuperLiga season. It dismissed Fernando Santos and hired José Antonio Camacho, who previously coached Spain and Real Madrid. He returns to the club he left after the 2004 season. Benfica was held to a 1-1 draw by newly promoted Leixões in the first game of the season and will play F.C. Copenhagen in the return leg of a Champions League qualifier next Wednesday in Denmark. ¶The 66,237 fans at Saturday’s Red Bulls-Galaxy/David Beckham match were the most at a league game at Giants Stadium since the Cosmos drew 70,312 against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers on June 22, 1980. The crowd was the largest for a MetroStars/Red Bulls game since May 23, 1998, when 56,404 attended a doubleheader (MetroStars-Miami and Scotland-Colombia).

Feilhaber Benny
Soccer
Gold Cup (Soccer)


Colorado: First Marijuana Club Breaks Ground, but Closes a Day Later

Abstract: The nation’s first known legal recreational marijuana club has already closed. The White Horse Inn in the town of Del Norte closed Tuesday, a day after its opening, because of a landlord dispute. Its owner, Paul Lovato, had planned to open on New Year’s Day. He wanted to be the first in the nation to open a marijuana club, but pressure from another cannabis venue, Denver’s Club 64, a members-only gathering that intends to stage at different spots throughout the year, caused him to speed up his timetable to beat the Denver club by a few hours. Mr. Lovato said his lease on the building did not start until Tuesday. He said that when his landlord saw the publicity about the club, he canceled the lease before it took effect. Colorado voters in November legalized use and limited possession of marijuana.


Tests Confirm Spreading Oil Plumes in the Gulf

Abstract: The government and university researchers confirmed Tuesday that plumes of dispersed oil were spreading far below the ocean surface from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, raising fresh concern about the potential impact of the spill on sea life. The tests, the first detailed chemical analyses of water from the deep sea, show that some of the most toxic components of the oil are not necessarily rising to the surface where they can evaporate, as would be expected in a shallow oil leak. Instead, they are drifting through deep water in plumes or layers that stretch as far as 50 miles from the leaking well. As a rule, the toxic compounds are present at exceedingly low concentrations, the tests found, as would be expected given that they are being diluted in an immense volume of seawater. “It’s pretty clear that the oil that has been released is becoming more and more dilute,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , said in an interview. “That does not mean it’s unimportant — far from it. The total amount of oil out there is likely very large, and we have yet to understand the full impact of all that hydrocarbon on the gulf ecosystem.” BP ’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, continued to insist Wednesday morning on the “Today” show on NBC that no underwater oil plumes in “large concentrations” have been detected from the spill, saying that it “may be down to how you define what a plume is here.” But scientists outside the government noted that the plumes appeared to be so large that organisms might be bathed in them for extended periods, possibly long enough to kill eggs or embryos. They said this possibility added greater urgency to the effort to figure out exactly how sea life was being affected, work that remains in its infancy six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. “I’m glad to see the levels are low,” said Carys L. Mitchelmore, an aquatic toxicologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. “But we’re talking about a huge Gulf of Mexico here. I want to see evidence that this is one of the main plumes and there’s not something way more concentrated somewhere else.” The announcement of test results came as the White House said President Obama would make his fourth trip to the region next week, visiting Mississippi, Alabama and Florida on Monday and Tuesday. The results on the plumes came from samples taken by researchers at the University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg. NOAA helped finance the research and joined in Tuesday’s announcement. The test results, from samples taken in late May aboard the research vessel Weatherbird II, appeared to confirm information first presented three weeks ago by another group of researchers, who found evidence of large plumes of dispersed oil droplets in the deep ocean. Those scientists have not yet completed their analysis of water samples, but one of them, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, supplied additional information at a news conference on Tuesday, including instrument readings taken on her most recent research cruise. Those readings suggest that a large plume, probably consisting of hydrocarbons from the leak, stretches through the deep ocean for at least 15 miles west of the gushing oil well, Dr. Joye said. The top of the plume is about 3,600 feet below the sea surface; the plume is three miles wide and as thick as 1,500 feet in spots, she said. The University of South Florida researchers found an even larger plume stretching northeast of the oil well, with the hydrocarbons separated into two distinct layers in the ocean. One layer is about 1,200 feet below the surface, and the other is 3,000 feet deep, the scientists said. The government’s confirmation of subsea oil plumes is significant in part because BP, the oil company responsible for the leak, had denied that such plumes existed, and NOAA itself had previously been cautious in interpreting the preliminary results from Dr. Joye’s group. “The oil is on the surface,” Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said last week. “There aren’t any plumes.” Descriptions of the plumes from the two groups of scientists are filling in details of one of the most remarkable findings to come from the disaster: the realization that much of the oil in a deepwater blowout may remain below the surface. The scientists say the plumes are not bubbles of oil, as many people have imagined them, but consist of highly dispersed or dissolved hydrocarbons. In some spots, enough oil is present to discolor the water, but in most places, water samples come up clear. Yet the dissolved hydrocarbons show up vividly on instruments, and they can be smelled in some samples. “This so-called invisible oil, which people tend to have a hard time grasping, is detectable clearly using analytical methods,” said Ernst Peebles, a University of South Florida oceanographer who helped carry out the research. Jeffrey Short, a marine scientist with Oceana , an advocacy group, said that even though the concentration of chemicals was low at any one locale, the magnitude of the plumes suggested a need for more research. “We should, at a bare minimum, keep a much closer eye on how many plumes there are, how big they are, how long they last and what organisms they’re affecting,” Dr. Short said. As the government wrestled with the many safety issues raised by the disaster, it imposed a drilling freeze late last month that halted virtually all new oil exploration in the gulf. On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced new standards that will allow resumption of drilling in water less than 500 feet deep. All wells in water deeper than 500 feet remain under a moratorium for at least the next six months while a presidential panel studies the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion and makes recommendations on whether and how to resume such drilling. The new rules address some of the problems that investigators believe contributed to the blowout of the BP well, including failure of the blowout preventer and improper design or application of the cement around the well bore. “Oil and gas from the outer continental shelf remains an important component of our energy security as we transition to the clean-energy economy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday in a statement, “but we must ensure that offshore drilling is conducted safely and in compliance with the law.”

Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline
BP Plc
Gulf of Mexico
Offshore Drilling and Exploration
Accidents and Safety


Positive Procrastination, Not an Oxymoron

Abstract: For the past 5 years, or maybe it’s more like 10, I’ve been meaning to publish a New Year’s Day column offering a bold resolution for the coming year: “The Power of Positive Procrastination.” Well, Jan. 15 is close enough, especially if you still haven’t gotten around to dealing with this year’s resolutions. And you can stop feeling guilty for procrastinating. Science has come up with a defense of your condition. Researchers have independently identified the phenomenon of positive procrastination, although there’s some disagreement on what to call it. “Structured procrastination” is the preferred term of John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford who published a book about it last year. Admittedly, it’s not a long book (92 quite small pages), but give him credit: He got it done, and only 17 years after he identified the concept. Dr. Perry was a typical self-hating procrastinator until it occurred to him in 1995 that he wasn’t entirely lazy. When he put off grading papers, he didn’t just sit around idly; he would sharpen pencils or work in the garden or play Ping-Pong with students. “Procrastinators,” he realized, “seldom do absolutely nothing.” A modest insight, perhaps, but it eased his conscience and disabused him of the old idea that procrastinators should limit commitments. The key to productivity, he argues in “ The Art of Procrastination, ” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it. At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter. “Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.” Dr. Perry generously acknowledges that he has stood on the shoulders of giants, in particular Robert Benchley, the Algonquin Round Table member. In 1930, Benchley revealed how he mustered the willpower to pore through scientific magazines and build a bookshelf when an article was due. “The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” he wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” You can also call this “productive procrastination,” the term used by Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary. It’s his personal favorite of the dozens of techniques he cataloged while researching his 2011 book, “ The Procrastination Equation. ” “For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten,” Dr. Steel told me, describing how one of his scholarly papers on procrastination took him a decade to write. “My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another.” Dr. Steel says it’s based on sound principles of behavioral psychology: “We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.” He gives theoretical credit to Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher, whose self-control strategy was to “set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast.” Dr. Steel, who has surveyed more than 24,000 people around the world, says that 95 percent of people confess to at least occasional procrastination. (You can gauge yourself by taking his survey at Procrastinus.com. ) About 25 percent of those surveyed are chronic procrastinators, five times the rate in the 1970s. He attributes the increase to the changing nature of the workplace: the more flexible that jobs become, the more opportunities to avoid unpleasant tasks. Workers now typically spend a quarter of the day procrastinating, students a third of the day. Men are more likely than women to be chronic procrastinators, especially young men. How many of them are actually being productive about it? Alas, there’s no good data, and for now many self-control researchers have doubts about positive procrastination. Even when it works, they say, you’re still wasting energy as you fret, consciously or unconsciously, about the task you’re avoiding. And while Robert Benchley may have built that bookshelf, Raymond Chandler strikes many experts as a better role model. Chandler used the same insight of Dr. Perry — that procrastinators rarely sit around absolutely idle — to develop a strategy that Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State (and my co-author of a book on willpower) calls the Nothing Alternative. Chandler forced himself to write detective stories by setting aside four hours a day and following two rules: a) You don’t have to write. b) You can’t do anything else. “It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school,” Chandler explained. “If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored.” Even Dr. Perry says it often makes sense to follow that classic advice for procrastinators: Just get started. He knows his strategy is tricky. “Structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, because one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself,” he writes. “One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines while making oneself feel that these tasks are important and urgent.” Fortunately, he notes, procrastinators can be great at self-deception, a skill also observed by Dr. Steel.“Productive procrastination is a bit of make-believe, along the lines of setting your watch five minutes fast,” he told me. “You know you did it, but you still pretend you didn’t. “Not everyone can do this. I think it works best for those who feel guilt for their procrastination and need to assuage it. If you are among the set of people who cleaned their dorm room the night before exams, it likely will work.” At the very least, you can use it to stop feeling so bad about a problem that everyone shares. It’s certainly a saner strategy than the bromide about never putting off until tomorrow what you can do today. By that logic, you’d never stop working — there’s always something that could be done today. Better to follow Dr. Perry’s rewritten version: Never do today any task that may disappear by tomorrow.


Farhad and Mike Hash Out the Week’s Big Topic: Apple

Abstract: Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news , offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Mike: Hey hey, Farhad! We’re just coming off our annual Times tech reporter summit in San Francisco this week, and I’m pumped! There’s nothing like Dean Baquet catching me in a trust fall to make me believe in teamwork. Farhad : Let’s not lie to our readers, Mike. He didn’t catch you. We weren’t even doing a trust fall. I hope you got some medical attention for those bruises. Mike: The aspirin is kicking in. So, on with the news! It looks like Zynga, the social gaming company, is selling its headquarters , which at this point I imagine consists mostly of the chaff of empty Farmville fields. The Eero, a Wi-Fi router, is supposed to be incredibly fast, simple and easy to use , except for taking the difficult first step of actually paying $500 for a three-pack of Wi-Fi routers. And speaking of Wi-Fi, earlier in the month American Airlines decided to sue Gogo, the in-flight Wi-Fi provider, for generally being the opposite of incredibly fast , simple and easy to use. On Monday, American Airlines dropped the suit . I assume it was all some elaborate legal chess game, but it was nice to have my terrible onboard Wi-Fi experiences vindicated publicly, however briefly. Farhad : Oh, also, Facebook finally rolled out the emoji reactions that it has been chatting up for some time as an evolution of the Like button. There are now icons for “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” How does that make you feel, Mike? Mike : Is there a reaction for “generally apathetic at a feature that has received far too much press for what it is”? Because I would use that emoji. Reaction. Whatever. But what I want to get to is what we’ve all been thinking about and talking about in tech for the last two weeks: Apple versus the F.B.I . I think it’s safe to say that at this point, it will probably be the biggest tech story of the next few years — if not the decade — and it is all playing out in public in gory detail. To recap: The F.B.I. essentially wants Apple to help crack open an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the rampage in San Bernardino, Calif., that ended with the deaths of 14 people last year. The way the F.B.I. wants Apple to do that is by writing some new software that bypasses a bunch of safeguards Apple created to help consumers’ phones stay safe in the first place. That is a thing that, for many reasons, Apple does not want to do. The whole thing is fascinating, as it cuts to the heart of so many issues in a rapidly changing age of new technologies, one in which we must decide the balance between our personal right to privacy and digital liberties, and the authority of the government to seek out information in the name of national security. But while I imagine it will take quite some time for the courts to pass judgment, I’m already seeing some fairly clear lines in the sand being drawn. As a token tech reporter living and working in New York, the questions that most normal, nontechies have been asking me is, “Why doesn’t Apple care about finding the terrorists? Why is the company acting so anti-American?” That’s starkly different than what I hear from most people in our industry, but I’d love to hear your take on it and what you’re hearing from people on the West Coast. Farhad : Maybe it’s just my sun-soaked California attitude, but to me Apple’s stand here makes sense. If it loses, it would be a very big deal. One thing that’s clear is that we are not talking about just one phone. This is a test case. If the F.B.I. wins, it has a collection of other phones it would like Apple to unlock for it. The Manhattan district attorney has a lot more. I suspect many other D.A.s will be lining up for this service as well. There’s a good chance that most of these cases won’t be about terrorism – they’ll be about more routine investigations that don’t make headlines. So, as I argued in a column this week , what we really should be discussing is the precedent this case sets. We are now surrounded by tech devices that contain all our secrets and that can be set to record and monitor us from afar. As we’ve seen often in the last couple of years, police powers can be abused. So before we force a tech company to break open its security to grant the cops access to an unprecedented trove of data, it seems wise to have a debate about whether we want any limits on those powers. For instance, should a court be able to compel access to a smartphone for any law-enforcement aim? What about drug crimes? What about immigration enforcement? After all, several presidential candidates have endorsed rounding up undocumented immigrants for deportation. Or look at Ferguson, Mo., where riots erupted in 2014 after a police officer killed a teenager named Michael Brown. The Justice Department found that Ferguson’s police and courts were routinely stopping, searching and issuing arrest warrants for the city’s black citizens. Should those authorities be allowed to search through people’s smartphones, too? These questions make me really queasy. What about you? Mike: I mean, I’m always queasy, but that’s because I’ve had a lot of San Francisco burritos on this last trip back. Seriously, though, of course all those things make me nervous. Do I want the government to access my text messages with you? Man, that would look bad. Here’s the thing, though: A year or so ago, Apple took the deliberate step of making it so it could not gain access its own phones at the behest of the government, and it is only accelerating that effort . And I’ve already reported they’re going to take similar steps with iCloud and generally embrace this approach overall. That’s drastically different than Apple’s history of complying with government requests for data when it is legally required to do so. So when the company bound its own hands, I have to ask: What did it expect the government to do, just sit back and say, “Oh, well, I guess we won’t request any more data.” Of course not. This is an escalation in a continuing war for reach into consumer data, and now it’s going to court. I think, in general, people don’t want the government snooping on their data. However, I think this is perhaps the absolute worst case Apple and others chose to push back on, considering that it includes questions of terrorism and the mass slaughter of innocents. Tracking down terrorist ties to murderers is far easier for normal, nontechie people to comprehend than the intricacies of software and data extraction. Anyway, I expect this will continue on into our next set of trust falls in 2017. Till then, I’ll continue to nurse my bruises and watch the case. Farhad: You’re right, the F.B.I. picked the perfect case for pushing for this authority. We are in for interesting times.

Apple
Privacy
Terrorism
FBI
iCloud
Zynga
Justice Department
Facebook
American Airlines


Rebels Lineman to Enter Draft

Abstract: Mississippi defensive lineman Robert Nkemdiche, who was recently charged with marijuana possession after a 15-foot fall at an Atlanta hotel, will not play in the Sugar Bowl against Oklahoma State on Jan. 1. The university said he would enter the N.F.L. draft as a junior.

College football
Robert Nkemdiche
Sugar Bowl
Oklahoma State University
University of Mississippi


New Father Helps Isles Win Game

Abstract: UNIONDALE, N.Y., March 2 - Miroslav Satan became a father Thursday morning in Buffalo, then realized he had enough time to get to Long Island for an important hockey game. His wife, Ingrid, gave him her blessing, and away he went. The weather was even worse in Buffalo, but Satan made it to Nassau Coliseum on a snowy day with two and a half hours to spare. He did not score a goal in regulation on the first day of Miroslav Satan Jr.'s life, but his shootout goal led to a 3-2 victory against the Devils. "I didn't want to leave the guys to battle by themselves," Satan said. "We're in a situation where we have to win a lot of games until the end of the season." Thanks in part to Satan's goal against Martin Brodeur, scored on a backhand shot after he momentarily lost control of the puck, the Islanders (26-28-4) remained 8 points out of eighth place in the Eastern Conference standings. "It slipped away from me, but it wasn't something I couldn't recover from," Satan said of the puck. He could have been referring to the season. The loss was the third in 10 shootouts this season for the Devils (31-22-7), who had defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in a shootout Wednesday. Islanders goaltender Rick DiPietro opened the shootout Thursday by stopping Viktor Kozlov, who came into the game with six goals in nine shootout attempts. "He didn't give me a chance to do what I wanted to do," Kozlov said. Satan then scored, and DiPietro made a save against John Madden. Trent Hunter clinched the victory by beating Brodeur, who had allowed only 4 goals on 26 shots in shootouts before Thursday's game. "We solved a great goalie," said the Islanders' interim coach, Brad Shaw. "To score two out of two is pretty special." The Devils had tied the score twice in regulation, the second time on Jay Pandolfo's ninth goal of the season at 8 minutes 45 seconds of the third period. The Devils tested the Islanders the rest of the way, but DiPietro held on. "This game is big, but now the Philly game is going to be even bigger," DiPietro said, referring to Saturday's home game against the Flyers, before which the Islanders' 1980 Stanley Cup team will be honored. "There's not one game you can't say is big now." Islanders defenseman Brent Sopel scored at 8:35 of the second period by bouncing the puck past Brodeur, but the lead lasted only 78 seconds. Scott Gomez scored his 21st goal of the season after a scramble in front of the net. The Islanders reclaimed the lead on Jason Blake's 22nd goal at 12:20 of the second period, but Pandolfo took a pass from defenseman Brian Rafalski and beat DiPietro to tie the score. "We're in a stretch where we need two points every game," Shaw said. That is why Satan decided to show up. It did not seem to surprise Shaw that Satan arrived at the arena, despite slushy roads that kept most ticket-holders at home. "One of the first things out of his mouth was that he wanted to be here," Shaw said. Satan said he planned to return to Buffalo early Friday to be with his wife and his infant son. "There's a lot of desperation and a lot of heart in here," DiPietro said. "We've got to keep putting together performances like this."

NEW YORK ISLANDERS
NEW JERSEY DEVILS
HOCKEY ICE


Albany Fighting Heats Up as Shutdown Edges Closer

Abstract: ALBANY — State officials began preparing on Wednesday for what they said would be the first government shutdown in New York history as prospects for the passage of another emergency budget bill grew cloudy. Democratic and Republican legislative leaders engaged in an acrimonious public meeting in the Capitol with Gov. David A. Paterson . Republicans charged that they had been shut out of negotiations, and Democrats insisted that the Republicans shoulder some responsibility for averting a shutdown. With no agreement yet reached on a budget for the fiscal year that began April 1, the state has been relying on a series of emergency bills to stay in operation. But Republicans have voted uniformly against the last three bills. After the last vote, two Democratic senators said they would oppose the next emergency bill, suggesting that Senate leaders might not be able to muster enough votes to pass it. As a result, administration officials have started huddling with their counterparts at the state comptroller’s office to work through the consequences of a shutdown, warning that if the Legislature fails to approve the next emergency budget bill, due on Monday, the state would face unprecedented chaos. “We don’t have an answer to many of these questions because we’ve never shut down the government before,” said Robert L. Megna, the state budget director. Without the ability to pay workers or even guarantee their salaries in the future, officials said, they could be forced to close down state agencies immediately after the last emergency bill expires on Monday. Administration officials said they were still searching for a legal mechanism to continue financing essential public safety services, like prisons and the State Police. But courtrooms, parks, highway rest stops and even the state terrorism hot line could all close. A shutdown could also affect some county and local workers, like those who administer Medicaid benefits. Though such workers are employed by the counties, they must gain access to state computer systems to process claims. Since the last budget expired on March 31, the State Senate and the Assembly, both controlled by Democrats, have not come close to reaching a budget deal with Mr. Paterson. On Monday, with negotiations seemingly at an impasse, Mr. Paterson inserted sweeping cuts to health care spending in the latest emergency bill, essentially forcing lawmakers to accept a portion of his budget proposal. Republicans in the Senate voted uniformly against the bill, even though they had publicly favored Medicaid cuts, saying that Mr. Paterson’s cuts did not go far enough. On the other side of the aisle, two Democratic state senators — Rubén Díaz Sr. and Pedro Espada Jr. , both of the Bronx — said they would not vote for any more emergency bills that included major budget cuts. That move raised the prospect of a shutdown, since without Republican votes, Senate Democrats, who have a 32-to-30 majority in the chamber, must act unanimously to pass legislation. At the leaders’ meeting, Mr. Paterson said he would not give in to “thug activity,” which some took as a reference to the two Democratic senators. After the meeting, the governor criticized Dean G. Skelos , the Senate Republican leader, and blamed him for forcing the state to the brink of catastrophe. “I’m shocked, and I’m appalled,” Mr. Paterson said. “Senator Skelos has told us that he and the Republican senators are going to shut down the government, and they would shut down the government over something about meetings they haven’t been invited to and process issues.” Pressed on whether his conference would provide any votes to pass the emergency bill, Mr. Skelos insisted that Democratic lawmakers who control both chambers would be to blame for any shutdown. “This is a failure of Democrat leadership in the state,” Mr. Skelos said. Regarding a shutdown, he said: “It’s an unfortunate way to go, but we are not going to just automatically vote for something because they have failed, as leaders, to put something together.” Mr. Skelos softened his tone later in the day after a private meeting with Mr. Paterson, suggesting that some Republicans might vote for the next emergency bill if the governor included some of the Republicans’ proposals to further cut Medicaid and other spending. But Mr. Díaz did not appear inclined to relent. “The governor called me a thug,” he said. “When I pick a fight, I don’t go back. Let’s see what a thug can do.”

Budget
David A Paterson
New York
Closings
Ruben Diaz Sr
Pedro Espada Jr
Dean G Skelos
Politics


In Rush to Build, Property Stumbles

Abstract: If you have not seen the famous Shanghai skyline recently, look again: You may be in for a surprise. A new skyscraper has begun to appear on the Pudong side of the Huangpu River, joining the mass of high rises that have sprung up there since the area began to be developed in the 1990s. Once it is finished, in 2014, the Shanghai Tower, a twisting, glass-encased structure 632-meters, or 2,073-feet, tall, will dominate the skyline. Projects like these have come to epitomize the meteoric rise of China’s economy and the breathtaking pace of the country’s transformation. From Kashgar in the far west to Guangzhou in the southeast, property development has shaped cities and landscapes, creating tens of thousands of high-rise buildings, millions of jobs and many a multimillionaire in the process. At least 10 percent of China’s gross domestic product comes directly from the construction and real estate sectors — far more when the industries that supply them and the consumption linked to the purchase of homes are taken into account, analysts at GK Dragonomics, a research firm in Beijing, wrote in a recent report. Internationally, they added, construction in China has accounted for more than 40 percent of the growth in global demand for steel and 10 percent for copper. No wonder, then, that any signs of weakness in the sector send shivers down the backs of analysts, industry executives and policy makers alike. “The property sector is a pillar industry for the Chinese economy,” said Li-Gang Liu, an economist in Hong Kong for Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. But now, he added, it is “the weakest link in the Chinese economy.” The current problems are twofold. Property prices have fallen in many cities since Beijing sought to cool a red-hot market in 2010 by imposing higher down-payment requirements, among other measures. At the same time, many analysts worry that a flood of investment into the sector in recent years could leave some developers holding empty properties, and lenders saddled with bad debts. Of course, the picture across this vast country is varied, with tight conditions in some places and oversupply in others. In many top mainland cities, places like Beijing or Shanghai, a typical household must pay 15 to 20 times its annual income for an average apartment, said Andy Zhang, managing director for China at Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate services firm. Such multiples, he added, are well above the international average. An index tracking residential prices in Hong Kong, compiled by the Centaline Property Agency, hit its highest ever level in late August. Similarly, some of the highest office rents in the world can be found in Beijing and Hong Kong, with Hong Kong’s Central district easily leading the pack, according to research by the real estate services firm CBRE that was published in July. “In cities such as Beijing and to a slightly lesser extent Shanghai, there is still a shortage of high-quality new supply, as well as strong end-user demand for commercial property,” said Chris Brooke, the China chief executive of CBRE. What worries some analysts now is the hangover from an investment binge that resulted from Beijing’s efforts to prop up the economy after the 2008 financial crisis. Lower interest rates, ample bank lending and infrastructure spending helped China to weather the global downturn. But they came with an unpalatable side effect: rising property prices, which put new homes beyond the reach of many ordinary Chinese. That situation is worrying for a government highly sensitive to anything that could fan social discontent. Moreover, analysts say large amounts of cash flowed into construction projects that were conceived more with an eye to vanity than to financial returns. Buffeted by changing interest rates, rising supply and a slowing economy, property prices have seesawed over the past two years, and policy makers are engaged in a delicate balancing act aimed at cooling the sector without crushing it. On the one hand, Beijing wants to forestall another price bubble, and has been resisting the temptation to loosen some of the restrictions it put in place in 2010. On the other hand, low prices spell trouble for developers that over-invested during the stimulus binge of 2009 and 2010 — often into office blocks and retail spaces in smaller cities such as Urumqi, Guiyang or Ordos, where China’s overall growth is perhaps not yet generating the demand needed to fill the space. “In the near term there is a big risk of oversupply in second- and third-tier cities,” said Mr. Zhang of Cushman & Wakefield. The ratings agency Standard & Poor’s said in a recent report that Chinese real estate developers “headed into 2012 facing record-high debt maturing within 12 months and a liquidity drain.” Sliding sales and tricky refinancing conditions sharpened the pain, putting financially weak players at risk of defaulting, it added. Moreover, explained Patrick Chovanec, who teaches business at Tsinghua University in Beijing, housing restrictions merely shifted buyers’ attention away from a handful of first-tier cities toward cities in the provinces. Many developers started building luxury condos and villas in the countryside — in other words, properties that do not address the demand for affordable housing. Such misallocations, Mr. Chovanec said, are hard to fix, and could result in wider problems for the Chinese economy. Real estate is a major driver of the investment and lending that underpin overall growth, he said, so weakness here spells trouble. Longer term, however, there are some grounds for optimism. For one thing, “there’s a strong cultural desire in China to own real estate,” said Mr. Brooke of CBRE. “It’s something that you can touch and feel, it feels safe.” For another, China’s rapid urbanization continues to attract floods of migrant workers from poorer, rural areas, as well as foreign investors, to cities like Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai, creating a seemingly insatiable appetite for affordable housing and prime commercial space. “The urbanization trend will take another 20 to 30 years to play out,” said Mr. Zhang of Cushman & Wakefield. “This helps underpin fundamental confidence in the housing market.” Standard & Poor’s said it was starting to become “less negative” on the sector’s for 2012. “The overall outlook for the sector is mixed,” the agency said, “but we see some bright spots emerging.”

China
Real Estate and Housing (Residential)
Real Estate (Commercial)
Economic Conditions and Trends


Shell and Nigerian Partner Are Sued in Britain Over Spills

Abstract: LONDON — Nigerian communities from the oil-rich Niger Delta initiated court action on Wednesday in London against the energy giant Royal Dutch Shell, in a case that may have far-reaching implications for whether companies can be sued in Britain for pollution and damages caused by their activities in other countries. The case is based on accusations by farming and fishing communities that say they have suffered years of damage because of repeated large spills from oil pipelines in their home areas. The law firm Leigh Day is bringing the claims against Shell and its Nigerian joint venture, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, in London on behalf of two communities in the swampy, oil-rich Niger Delta: the Ogale and the Bille. On Wednesday, the claimants won a small victory when a judge ruled that the Nigerian venture could be included in the case, along with its parent company. Daniel Leader, a partner at Leigh Day, said in an interview that the outcome of what are likely to be lengthy proceedings “will set an important precedent as to whether the courts here are going to be willing to hear cases relating to multinational enterprises and their subsidiaries in the developing world.” If the case is ultimately successful, he added, “cleanup costs could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.” Jonathan French, a Shell spokesman in London, said in an email that the company was “at an early stage of assessing the Bille and Ogale claims.” Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary said in a statement that “both Bille and Ogale are areas heavily impacted by crude oil theft, pipeline sabotage and illegal refining, which remain the main sources of pollution across the Niger Delta.” The Nigerian joint venture is 55 percent owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, with Shell holding a 30 percent stake. The French energy company Total holds 10 percent, and Eni of Italy owns the remaining 5 percent. Shell has said that cleanup costs from spills are shared on the basis of holdings. The company says it is committed to cleaning up oil spills, which it is obliged to do under Nigerian law no matter what the cause, but the company said it was not liable to pay compensation for damage caused by oil thieves and saboteurs. In January last year, the energy company settled a claim brought by Leigh Day on behalf of another Nigerian community, the Bodo, for 55 million pounds, or $77 million at current exchange rates, in a development that analysts say has encouraged new lawsuits. Mr. French said the Bodo case differed from the ones now being brought because the company acknowledged that the spills in the settled case had been “caused by operational failure.” All of the money paid in that case was listed as compensation. Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary said that it would fight having the case tried in Britain. “We believe that allegations concerning Nigerian plaintiffs in dispute with a Nigerian company, over issues which took place within Nigeria, should be heard in Nigeria,” the company said. Mr. Leader, however, said that bringing cases against oil companies in Nigeria was futile. “The Nigerian legal system cannot deal with these cases and there is complete regulatory failure,” he said. Nigeria remains one of the most important countries for Shell production, but because of the theft of oil from its pipelines and other difficulties, the company is gradually withdrawing from onshore areas and is focusing on offshore facilities, where it is easier to maintain security.

Royal Dutch Shell
Nigeria
Oil spill
Pipelines
Oil and Gasoline
Niger Delta
Lawsuits


Stephen Curry Gave Davidson Good Publicity, and a Bad Rap

Abstract: The confidence and charisma Stephen Curry has shown during the Golden State Warriors’ march to the N.B.A. finals was on display in 2009 when he sent an email to the entire Davidson College student body. It was an invitation to the premiere of his first rap video. “This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve done during college,” the email said. “I mean, going to the Elite Eight was great, but this…” It was hardly the first time basketball and rap had intersected, but in this instance it was strictly benign. Allen Iverson had rapped about whether or not someone was man enough to use a gun , and Kobe Bryant had questionably labeled himself a thug poet . But when Curry got his turn at the mike he just wanted to talk about his favorite cafeteria. Such was life at Davidson, an unexpected but effective incubator for basketball’s most atypical superstar, who will now take on LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in a seven-game series that begins on Thursday night. On a few hours’ notice, Curry’s email helped entice more than 600 of Davidson’s 1,698 students to show up on a Monday night for the college’s awards show. And they were greeted by a music video that was equal parts fascinating, hilarious and terrible. The video opens with Evan Mintz, a student, waking up on a lawn and declaring he is hungry. Soon a motley group that includes Curry and his teammate Steve Rossiter as well as the Davidson soccer players Mauricio Sims, Charlie Reiter, Mark Millard and Yannick Pilgrim join Mintz as the group enters Vail Commons, an all-you-can-eat dining hall on the Davidson campus. With a backing track of Asher Roth’s “I Love College,” the students, decked out in sunglasses, hats and T-shirts, walked around making inside jokes and singing perhaps the flattest hook in recorded history. The video, which has nearly 500,000 views on YouTube, was a hit largely because it coincided with Curry’s declaring for the N.B.A. draft, which led to posts about it on sites like ESPN, Deadspin and Sports Illustrated. Much can be said about the rapping ability of the group of friends, and it is easy to laugh at the lack of continuity as their outfits magically change between scenes, but Rossiter made it clear that the video, while goofy, was also earnest. Commons was a cafeteria, but it was also a refuge from a busy college life. “We had school work all day and then practice,” Rossiter said. “Commons was the place you’d go to at the end of the day before you started studying. We’d have these two-hour dinners and just kind of hang out and goof around.” To take the video from concept to reality, the group enlisted the help of Austin Bell, whom they had worked with on “The Davidson Show,” a variety program broadcast on campus. Bell shot the video over a few days, and Curry was notably absent in a few scenes. One of his solo verses was shot at night without the rest of the group, which could lead some to believe that he had to be cajoled into participating. But Rossiter and Bell both said that Curry, despite being in the process of working out for N.B.A. teams, had done everything he could to be included. To Bell and Rossiter, there was nothing unusual about a player about to be taken seventh in the N.B.A. draft making time to fool around with his friends. That was just the way things were done at Davidson. Image Stephen Curry in 2007, during his freshman season at Davidson. Credit Chuck Burton/Associated Press At basketball powerhouses, star players are treated like celebrities, but that would not fly at the small college in Davidson, N.C., where Curry lived on campus all three years — just as 92 percent of the school’s students do. It was a small enough community that Curry and his friends would joke about the Davidson golden rule: If you’re talking about someone, you’re about to run into them. “Davidson is kind of a quirky place,” Rossiter said. “That’s one of the reasons he fit in so well there.” Curry’s coach at Davidson, Bob McKillop, said the college was ideal for Curry’s personality, but credited his upbringing and his faith with tearing down the walls between him and the rest of the student body. “It starts with him personally, the kind of character he has,” McKillop said. “The word entitlement has never been associated with him.” Despite being the son of Dell Curry, a 16-year N.B.A. veteran, Stephen was an unheralded recruit coming out of high school. But he proved his doubters wrong at Davidson, averaging more than 20 points a game in his three seasons. Bell, who first encountered Curry when they worked together on a segment for “The Davidson Show,” said that despite his success, Curry was more social director than celebrity. “The first thing he said to me was: ‘Why don’t I know you? Where have you been?’” Bell said. “He took it as a personal affront that he had not met me, because he sort of prided himself on knowing everyone on campus.” “The Davidson Show” had Curry helping incoming freshman move into the dorms while interviewing them and their parents about whether they had met Stephen Curry yet. Curry seemed particularly chagrined when an attractive young woman did not know whom he was talking about. Bell recounted marathon editing sessions, with Curry staying into the middle of the night to make sure everything came out right. The fact that he had morning classes the next day was almost irrelevant because he had committed to it. “I was aware it was going on, but I was not aware of how much time he was investing,” McKillop said, sounding a bit amused, but unsurprised. Image Curry with Davidson Coach Bob McKillop in 2009. “The word ‘entitlement’ has never been associated with him,” McKillop said. Credit Chuck Burton/Associated Press “The aspect of Stephen that is so unparalleled is that he had such detail and such focus about everything he did,” McKillop said. “He had a purpose to it.” Rossiter said the combination of on-court confidence and off-court goofiness was no put-on. It is how he remembers Curry going back to workouts when Curry was a high school senior. “It’s who he is because of his family and because of the person that he is,” Rossiter said. “It’s not like he was like, ‘I’m going to be funny in this video.’ That’s what he always was behind all the basketball stuff. So it was just a matter of him being himself.” One theme of the video “I Love Commons” was never wanting to leave the comfort of college, which was fitting in a way because Curry decided to leave school a year early while the video was being made. And it was at Commons where Curry had breakfast with Rossiter on the day he made his final decision. McKillop marveled at the amount of consideration Curry gave to leaving. Curry hashed it out with Rossiter over omelets, then broke the news to McKillop in a private meeting in the coach’s office. Only then did he tell his parents, who had waited patiently outside the office to find out what he had decided. Curry’s time at Davidson came to an end without repeating the success of his sophomore season, but he left a lasting legacy, with McKillop saying that he gave Davidson the “Good Housekeeping seal of approval.” Dr. Carol Quillen, the president of Davidson, said that Curry was the perfect ambassador for the college and that his leadership, integrity and humility “helped to show the nation and world what it means to be a Davidson Wildcat.” Six years later, Rossiter and Bell follow their old friend’s N.B.A. career closely, and each expressed that their only regret about “I Love Commons” was not having had more time to nail down all of the details. That said, Bell seemed aware that the video, while charming, was perhaps not the masterpiece Curry’s email — which Bell admits to having partially ghostwritten — led people to believe. “If this is my magnum opus,’’ he said, “I’m in trouble.”

Basketball
College basketball
Stephen Curry
Video Recordings
Downloads and Streaming
Bob McKillop
NBA Championship
Cavaliers
Davidson College
Golden State Warriors


The Yankees Suddenly Find They Have Pitching Options

Abstract: BOSTON, Sept. 14 — The Yankees will not say it yet, but their lead in the American League wild-card race allows them to peek ahead to October. If they get there, they will lean heavily on their top two starters, Chien-Ming Wang and Andy Pettitte. The depth of the starting rotation, a weakness for much of the season, is a strength now with the emergence of Ian Kennedy and the solid return of Mike Mussina on Wednesday. The depth will allow Manager Joe Torre to use Wang and Pettitte on normal rest or give them extra days off if necessary. “It’s most important, with the starting rotation we have, that we do what’s best for Andy and Wang,” Torre said Friday. “We just have to try to figure it out. You’re trying to give yourself a shot to have everybody have a start and be effective in that start. We don’t want to dismiss anybody.” That means that Mussina and Kennedy will both pitch down the stretch, along with Wang, Pettitte, Roger Clemens and Phil Hughes. As for the order, though, Torre said only one spot was lined up for sure: Hughes will start Monday at home against Baltimore. Torre said he could slot Mussina in Tuesday and Kennedy on Wednesday, knowing that Kennedy has gotten extra rest before each of his three starts. But Torre said he might use Pettitte on Wednesday. All of the starters would be eligible for postseason play, even Kennedy, who was not on the roster Aug. 31. The Yankees had several pitchers on the disabled list on that date, so Kennedy could make the postseason roster by taking the place of one of those pitchers. JUGGLING THE BULLPEN The Yankees’ bullpen was loaded and thin at the same time Friday. While it is stuffed with September call-ups and relievers who have gotten little work — Brian Bruney, José Veras and Ron Villone — some of Joe Torre’s go-to relievers were unavailable. Torre said he would not use Kyle Farnsworth until Saturday at the earliest, even though Farnsworth said he felt improvement in his stiff neck. “I still feel it a little bit, but it’s a lot better than the last couple of days,” Farnsworth said. Luis Vizcaíno, who pitched an inning Thursday after missing eight days with a sore shoulder and back, reported soreness on Friday and Torre did not know if he would use him. Joba Chamberlain was also unavailable because he threw 35 pitches Wednesday. Torre said his best option in the eighth of a close game would probably be Edwar Ramírez, who has a 5.40 earned run average but 26 strikeouts in 16 2/3 innings. A FRIENDLY FACE AT FENWAY Joba Chamberlain may be unpopular when he takes the mound at Fenway Park, but he has at least one friend in a Red Sox uniform. Chamberlain, the rookie reliever who has energized the Yankees, became friends this summer with Clay Buchholz, who did the same for the Red Sox. Chamberlain and Buchholz were teammates in the Futures Game in San Francisco in July, and also played against each other in Class AA this summer. After Buchholz threw a no-hitter Sept. 1, Chamberlain called to congratulate him. “I said, I’m glad you got that one out of the way,” Chamberlain said. “Hopefully, we don’t get to see their no-hitters. But it’s good to see a young kid be successful, no matter where it’s at.” WILL IT START A TREND? Before September, there were no Yankees players who asked to wear stirrups. The only Yankees in uniform who wore them were the coaches Ron Guidry and Don Mattingly, who wore them when they played. The fashion trend for players is to wear their pants low, showing no socks at all, or to wear their pants high and show solid-colored socks. Stirrups have gone out of style, but Ian Kennedy is bucking the trend. Kennedy, who joined the Yankees on Sept. 1, wore stirrups at Southern California and encouraged his fellow starters at Class AA Trenton to wear them this summer. As a Yankee, he said he saw no reason to stop. “It just looks better, I think,” Kennedy said. “I never wear my pants down, ever, in a game. If I’m wearing my pants down, it’s only if I’m in the bench or the bullpen. I just like the look of stirrups, on every level.”

Baseball
New York Yankees
Wang Chien-Ming
Mussina Mike


Confronting Surge in Homelessness, New York City Expands Use of Hotels

Abstract: Facing a continued surge in the homeless population, New York City officials are aggressively expanding the costly and highly criticized practice of using hotels to plug gaps in the city’s strained shelter system. The increase has been stark: About 12 percent of the total homeless population is now being housed in hotel rooms, compared with just 4 percent in January. On Jan. 1, the city was using 508 hotel rooms for homeless families with children, comprising 1,237 people, according to the Department of Homeless Services. On Nov. 30, 2,418 rooms were being rented for families with children, amounting to 5,798 people. Now, the city plans to expand its hotel portfolio for homeless families by up to 436 rooms, with 225 of them reserved for families without minor children — the first time the city has earmarked hotel rooms for such families, officials said. The city also plans to add 100 or more hotel rooms for homeless individuals. The expansion comes as the city has struggled to address a record homeless population — an issue that could become an obstacle in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s bid for re-election next year. “Look, I own it,” Mr. de Blasio said Wednesday on WNYC radio, referring to the surge in the homeless population. “We’re arresting that growth and starting to turn it, and I think we’ll be able to show some real progress soon.” He listed some initiatives begun by his administration, including legal assistance to help renters fight eviction. “We’re going to come up with a much more comprehensive vision on homelessness in the coming months, but I can tell you that a lot of these initiatives are taking hold.” But the increased reliance on hotels goes against Mr. de Blasio’s vow to curtail the practice. In February, a homeless woman and two of her children were fatally stabbed in a Staten Island hotel where the city had placed them because it did not have room in a shelter. “The goal is to use hotels less and less and eventually stop using hotels altogether,” the mayor said on the day of the killings, acknowledging that there might be times when the city, which is required to provide shelter to the homeless, would have to resort to hotels as a stopgap. “But what I’m saying is the goal in the short term is to reduce the use of hotels intensely.” Using hotel rooms is far more costly than alternatives, and advocates for the homeless say it poorly serves the needs of families: There are typically no kitchens and little privacy; the hotels may not be close to schools; and it can be more difficult to provide people with the services they need. The city’s embrace of using budget hotels to house the homeless has become a flash point this year; civic groups in Queens used lawsuits and boisterous protests — including one in front of the home of Steven Banks, the commissioner of homeless services — to fight the city’s plan to convert a hotel into a homeless shelter in Maspeth. The city withdrew the plan, but then rented rooms there to house 30 homeless men at the standard rate of $160 a night. The city declared its intention to increase hotel use in a series of letters seeking approval for emergency spending sent to the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, and the corporation counsel, Zachary W. Carter, whose offices supervise contracts. In a response this week, Mr. Stringer approved the request but said he had “deep misgivings” about the city’s approach, citing examples of how hotels are considered inadequate substitutes for other forms of shelter. “They want a dramatic increase of placing people in commercial hotels, and they said they weren’t going to do it,” Mr. Stringer said. “It’s just troubling, the lack of transparency in this process.” The city this week reported a record number of people in homeless shelters, with 60,686 in various types of shelters, including hotels. Nearly 40 percent of them are children. When Mr. de Blasio became mayor in January 2014, the shelter population was 51,470. With the shelter system strained to its limit, the city has turned to budget hotels. According to David Neustadt, a spokesman for homeless services, the number of hotel rooms has increased in part as the city has sought to phase out another type of homeless housing, known as cluster housing. In that type of housing, nonprofit groups under contract with the city rent out apartments, often several in a building, as temporary shelter for homeless families. Cluster housing is considered problematic because it takes affordable apartments off the market and, since the apartments are scattered, it can be difficult to get adequate services to families. On Wednesday, two young girls whose family was placed by the city in a cluster apartment died, apparently after being burned by steam from a radiator. Mr. Neustadt said the city was seeking authorization to use more hotel rooms as winter approached, a time when more people typically seek shelter. He added that the issue highlighted the need to build more shelters. But the hotels are far more expensive than other types of shelter arranged by the city. In a letter to Mr. Banks, the comptroller’s office said that on average, putting up a family in a hotel costs $6,570 a month, compared with $2,740 for a cluster apartment. In both cases, the costs include the amount the contractor charges to provide services to the family. The city has also used hotel rooms for homeless individuals, although it accounts for them differently, since it often has individuals double up in a room. On Jan. 1, the city had capacity for 1,255 beds for “single” adults; at roughly two to a room, that represented about 628 hotel rooms, with 1,212 people staying in them. On Nov. 30, there were 1,567 beds, with 1,491 “singles” being lodged in hotels. The Department of Homeless Services said it was now seeking capacity for 235 additional beds — or roughly 118 more hotel rooms. A spokeswoman for the mayor, Aja Worthy-Davis, said in a statement on Wednesday: “There’s no doubt that hotels are not ideal for homeless New Yorkers, but until we get citywide acceptance that more shelters are needed, hotels remain the only short-term option for keeping many New Yorkers off the streets.”

Homelessness
Homeless Services Department NYC
Bill de Blasio
NYC
Hotels


Relative of Morgan Freeman Is Stabbed to Death in Manhattan

Abstract: An actress related by marriage to Morgan Freeman died on Sunday after she was found with multiple stab wounds in the street outside her Washington Heights apartment, the police said. The woman, E’Dena Hines, 33, was discovered by police officers after they were called just before 3 a.m. to an address close to her apartment on West 162nd Street in Manhattan, the authorities said. She was taken to Harlem Hospital Center, where she was pronounced dead. Lamar Davenport, who the police said was her boyfriend, was taken into custody at the scene and hospitalized for a psychological evaluation, the authorities said. Mr. Davenport, 30, has since been arrested and charged with murder. Ms. Hines’s grandmother was once married to Mr. Freeman, the Academy Award-winning actor. Ms. Hines had a part in one of his movies, playing a receptionist in “5 Flights Up,” which was released in May. “The world will never know her artistry and talent, and how much she had to offer,” Mr. Freeman said in a statement released by his publicist on Sunday. Ms. Hines’s career on screen was mostly limited to small roles like the one in “5 Flights Up” and a turn as a rude barista in an episode of the ABC hidden-camera series “What Would You Do?” On her blog , she wrote that her acting career had left her feeling “unfulfilled,” and at one point, she returned to Memphis, her hometown. But she had recently landed a role in an independent film and returned to New York. “My dream has come true” and is just beginning, she wrote on July 7.

Murders and Homicides
E'Dena Hines
Washington Heights Manhattan
Morgan Freeman
NYC


‘Bikini Moms’ and Petty Squabbles at a Beach Club Fit for Reality TV

Abstract: They are hard to miss, the four glamorous women in bikinis who sunbathe every day in the same spot on the sand at the Silver Gull Beach Club. “These are the Real Housewives of the Silver Gull,” Maria Locascio of Brooklyn said, referring to the popular reality television franchise as she sat with the four women at the club, an oceanfront summer colony near the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Club members call them the bikini moms or the wave girls. They are school secretaries from Brooklyn, and all are approaching or are in their 40s. They are savvy and striking and as good a prospect as anyone at the club for a reality show. “We’ve been saying it for years,” said one of the women, Stacey Collins, who works at John Dewey High School. She had a deep bronze tan and pedicured toenails painted lime green to match her bikini. “The whole club — you got a cast of 100 characters here.” The New York Times has been visiting the Silver Gull this summer for a series of articles chronicling a season at one of the last private oceanfront clubs in New York City. After several articles were published, a West Coast production company contacted the Silver Gull about shooting a reality show at the club next year, using its members and their stories, said the general manager, Jamie Blatman. They wanted to begin screen tests at the club this month, said Mr. Blatman, who, in the end, decided that such a project would have interfered too much with life at the club. The producers were looking for “characters and drama,” Mr. Blatman said, adding that they would not have been disappointed. “You definitely have characters here, and you have enough drama in a week to last a whole season,” he said. “There’s never a quiet moment.” The upsides at the Silver Gull are many and obvious: the two large pools, the beach and the social life, which includes mah-jongg and card games on sunny patios, on shady decks and in cool breezeways. There is a free day camp for members’ children, and cabana boys are at the ready. So Mr. Blatman wonders sometimes why so much of his job entails adjudicating disputes and fielding complaints. To cite a recent example: Two topless sunbathers from Fort Tilden, a national recreation area east of the Silver Gull, walked past the club along the beach. Image Called the bikini moms by club members, four women — from left, Stacey Collins, Kim Raccuglia, Debra LaRosa and Dorren Marino — sunbathe in the same spot every day at the club. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times “You had two members taking pictures of them, and another member complaining about it,” Mr. Blatman said. The prospect, however dim, of a reality show set at the Silver Gull, which opened in 1963, got members chatting about what such a show might look like. August would be the ideal month, a time when petty tensions between members begin rising as the days tick away toward Labor Day, the last day the club is open, said Tommy Cheeseman, 49, an undertaker from the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn who was at his usual spot by the pool. Most of the club’s 2,300 members come from working-class Brooklyn roots, and right about now is “when you start to see their Brooklyn come out,” Vinnie Cennamo, 63, said. Mr. Cennamo said he had seen his share of altercations, often fueled by alcohol and sometimes requiring the police to be summoned. Image A mah-jongg game at the club. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times Dennis O’Donnell and his wife, Brenda, both of whom are retired teachers, called it “August angst.” “Schoolteachers have summers off, and it’s the most enjoyable three months of your life,” Mr. O’Donnell said. Ms. O’Donnell added, “The whole month gets frantic and full of angst as the days get shorter.” Members who rent cabanettes, or lockers, which are small spaces for storage or changing, do not have the refuge of the larger cabanas, built in rows along double-decker piers. They bump up against one another on the patio alongside the pool or on the beach. “It’s six hours every day with the same people,” said Bruce Bernfeld, 69, who rents a locker and gets into plenty of debates. Mr. Bernfeld, who said his politics were “to the left of commie pinko,” often overhears other members express more conservative views and feels compelled to challenge them, whether on the patio, in the pool or on the paddle ball courts. “At this point, it’s a love-hate issue with the club,” said Mr. Bernfeld, who by August goes home each evening vowing never to return. “But for some reason I keep coming back. It gets me upset, but it’s sort of invigorating.” Image Tommy Cheeseman (a.k.a. the Big Cheese), an undertaker from Brooklyn, said that tensions between Silver Gull members rise in the weeks before Labor Day, the last day the club is open. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times Mr. O’Donnell spoke of another syndrome he called “the cabana blues” among friends who share cabanas to lower the cost, a situation in which many people pay for a space the size of a large walk-in closet. Members tend to grow tired of their cabana mates, he said, as one woman in his row did. She had taken to visiting the club in the morning before the others arrived. “She says, ‘I use the full facilities and I’m out by noon,’” Ms. O’Donnell said. Mr. Cennamo said he has had his own experience with intracabana tensions and no longer speaks to some of his old cabana mates. He now rents another cabana nearby. “You have members here living in such close quarters and seeing each other every day, so little things become irritants — where the chairs go, whose space is whose, who left those crumbs on the counter,” Mr. Cennamo said. Other annoyances have included sitting on the steps leading into the pool, forcing everyone to squeeze by. Then there were the women who played mah-jongg and relieved themselves in the pool because it was closer than the women’s bathroom. “They’d drink their coffee and juice all morning, and then all go into the pool for a minute and come out and go back to their game,” Mr. Cennamo said. “I’m a registered nurse. I know these things. So finally, one day I told them, ‘I know you ladies are using the pool as a toilet.’ They wouldn’t even look at me or answer me.” Image A boy swinging from an overhang at the club, where cabanas built in double-decker rows are rented to members. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times As he spoke, the ocean breeze blew an umbrella off the upper-level cabana rented by his former cabana mates. “That’s why umbrellas are not allowed up there,” he screamed. His wife, Emily, called for calm. Sometimes squabbles flare over whose lounge chairs may be inching over the unmarked boundaries outside their cabana, or whose card table is blocking a common walkway, or whose empty lounge chair gets taken or moved — a recurring issue for Mr. Cheeseman. As an undertaker, he said, he values his relaxation time because “life is short, death is forever.” Mr. Cheeseman — a.k.a. the Big Cheese — is known for his size, his outspokenness and his fierce defense of the same patch of the patio for three decades, often at the cost of his popularity. He protects the patch by leaving his lounge chairs there full time with a handwritten sign warning against moving or using the chairs. Offenders can expect a stern primer on patio etiquette. “I work hard for a living, and I want to enjoy my day,” he said. Jane Tringali, 64, of Rockaway Beach, a club member for 14 years, said she once tried to put her chair in the Big Cheese’s spot and was rebuffed, something that Mr. Cheeseman’s sister teased her about repeatedly. Image Emily Cennamo taking a nap outside her cabana. Her husband, Vinnie, spoke of small irritations at the club leading to squabbles among members and cabana mates. Credit George Etheredge/The New York Times “She kept riding me all summer,” Ms. Tringali recalled. “By Labor Day, I told her, ‘You know what — I’m done.’ I became very reality TV. I said, ‘You and me, now, outside.’ She wouldn’t go.” Another Tommy — known as Tommy the doo-wop singer and who withheld his last name because of the delicacy of his comments — said a reality show would have worked at the club a decade ago, “when you had real wiseguys on this court.” “These guys would play cards for serious money, and the spread they put out — lobster, steak, Dom Pérignon Champagne — forget about it,” he said. “My buddy Paulie had the cabana next to them, and he’d put out a bowl of Cheez Doodles and just keep mooching from their table. Finally they got sick of him and threw him in the pool.” All the same, there are still members like Phil Finale. “I’m a top character here,” Mr. Finale said. “Forget a reality show. These people are boring. You’d have to call it ‘Seinfeld’ because nothing happens. I could be the Kramer character.” Mr. Finale is known for randomly letting loose a Tarzan-like roar, a tradition carried over from his days as a member of the Brighton Beach Bath and Racquet Club in Brooklyn. There, he became known — widely — for climbing to the top of the high dive and roaring. “I was asserting my dominance,” Mr. Finale said, “like I was standing on a cliff in the jungle. I would look out and say, ‘This is my domain.’” He used the roar two summers ago while cursing at a club official and was kicked out for the remainder of the season. Mr. Finale said that while he knows he can offend people, “I won’t say anything bad if it’s not true.”

Silver Gull Beach Club Queens NY
Rockaway Peninsula Queens
Clubs
Queens


Memo Revisits Policy on Citing Leaked Material, to Some Confusion

Abstract: WASHINGTON — The Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent an internal memo to its work force on Friday saying that its new policy on pre-publication review of speeches, books, articles, term papers and other writings permits current and former employees to refer to news articles as long as the officials do not confirm any classified information. The agency issued the new policy in April, and it came to broader attention this week. Among other things, it bars the agency’s current and former personnel from citing a source “that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information” because the “use of such information in a publication can confirm the validity of an unauthorized disclosure and cause further harm to national security.” The rule alarmed some former intelligence officials, who said it went too far in restricting their participation in public debates and raised First Amendment concerns. It has long been a common practice for current and former officials to take part in public discussions of widely known but technically still-secret information by referring to news articles. In the work force memo on Friday, the agency provided a gloss on the policy, saying that “O.D.N.I. employees, current and former, may not rely upon unauthorized disclosures as a source for factual statements or as proof that the information is no longer classified.” It added: “Nor may they cite ‘anonymous sources’ from media reporting if the citation, combined with their perceived inside knowledge, would tend to confirm classified information. They may cite more generally to media as long as by doing so they do not confirm classified information.” Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an agency spokesman, said in an email that it was “permissible” under the policy for former agency employees to opine on the content of news articles based on leaks about classified programs. But, he said, the former employees could do so only “with the warning, ‘if a program such as this existed, here are some relevant considerations,’ assuring audiences that they do not know the validity of the reports.” It was not clear whether the agency was pulling back from the new policy, or merely clarifying confusingly written portions of it. The work force memo was titled “updates” to its pre-publication review policy, but it also said that “recent media reports have misconstrued” the policy and asserted that “the revised policy is not significantly different” from two previous policies that it had replaced. Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, who first reported on the new policy on his Secrecy News blog, argued that there were numerous changes from the old policy. “I think both things are true: It is badly drafted, and they were taken aback by the response and they are basically trying to say ‘There is nothing new here, it’s just a reformulation,’ ” he said. “But that is not true. I think they need to walk it back, but saying the directive doesn’t mean what it says is not the way to do it.” Mr. Anchukaitis, while acknowledging that the previous policy contained no discussion of any prohibition on using sourcing based on leaked materials because doing so could confirm the validity of an unauthorized disclosure, portrayed it as adding no new restrictions that did not already implicitly exist. “There’s nothing new about this — it’s just an application of the rule that unauthorized disclosure does not equal declassification — though it wasn’t explicit before,” he said. Unlike the new pre-publication review policy, the work force memo was not posted on the agency website. It was first reported on the Just Security blog by Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department official. Mr. Anchukaitis later provided a copy to The New York Times.


David Green to Head Serious Fraud Office of Britain Until 2018

Abstract: LONDON — The director of the Serious Fraud Office, a British agency that investigates fraud, will continue in his post for another two years, the British government said on Tuesday. David Green, who was appointed director of the fraud office in 2012, had his contract extended until April 2018, Jeremy Wright, the British attorney general, said on Tuesday. Mr. Green’s four-year term had been set to expire in April. “I am happy to continue as director, and the S.F.O. will continue to take on the sort of cases for which it was designed,” Mr. Green said in a news release . The contract extension came nearly two weeks after a jury in London acquitted six former brokers of charges that they helped a onetime trader at UBS and Citigroup manipulate the London interbank offered rate, an important benchmark interest rate known as Libor. The verdict represented a severe blow to the reputation of British authorities, who have been criticized for their inability to successfully prosecute financial crimes, particularly when compared with the United States Justice Department. It came after the fraud office successfully prosecuted Tom Hayes, a former trader at UBS and Citigroup. Mr. Hayes was the first person to go to trial over criminal charges related to Libor manipulation and was convicted in August of conspiracy to defraud. In December, a British appeals court reduced his sentence to 11 years in prison from an original term of 14 years. A third trial in London of others accused of manipulating Libor is expected to begin later this month. The fraud office also has accused 11 others of manipulating the euro interbank offered rate, another important benchmark interest rate, known as Euribor. The first trial related to that investigation is expected in 2017 . In announcing the contract extension, Mr. Wright noted that Serious Fraud Office, under Mr. Green’s leadership, used its first deferred prosecution agreement to resolve an inquiry against a company last year. The agency was given the power to use such agreements in 2014. In 2014, the Serious Fraud Office also secured its first convictions under Britain’s new bribery law, which went into effect in 2011 after years of efforts to overhaul the country’s corruption laws. “In his time as director of the S.F.O., David Green led a change in the organization’s approach to prosecuting cases,” Mr. Wright said.

Appointments and Executive Changes
David Green
Serious Fraud Office United Kingdom
Regulation and Deregulation
Libor
Deferred Prosecution Agreements


New Rules of Engagement

Abstract: FOR decades, advertisers spent billions to determine consumers' awareness of brands and their recall of television commercials. Now, with awareness of most brands a given and advertising money moving to new media, Madison Avenue is turning its focus to something called engagement. What is this non-nuptial form of engagement? Dawn E. Hudson, president and chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America, offered an example. In six weeks, Pepsi plans to begin an advertising and promotional campaign that will offer consumers customized ring tones for cellphones, which can be downloaded from the Internet with codes found under soft drink bottle caps. "Whenever the phone rings, you'll think you got that from Pepsi," said Ms. Hudson, whose company is part of PepsiCo. That engagement with Pepsi products and that "depth of brand experience," she said, is far superior to what can be achieved with a "quick, passing message" like a TV commercial. Ms. Hudson was among six executives on a panel who grappled with the brave new world of engagement at the opening session yesterday of the 52nd annual convention of the Advertising Research Foundation. Several panels and speeches during the convention are being devoted to the subject. Determining levels of engagement "is a big challenge for all of us," said Eric Salama, the convention chairman, who is also chairman and chief executive at the Kantar Group division of the WPP Group. A major reason is the need to create measurement methods that will pass muster with all the stakeholders involved: marketers, agencies, media companies and researchers. Engagement, "from a research standpoint, is momentary and driven by emotion," said Joseph T. Plummer, chief research officer at the foundation, who is scheduled to speak to the convention today on efforts being made to define engagement to everyone's satisfaction. "It's turning the mental model of the industry on its head," he added, compared with previous benchmarks like awareness and recall, which are longer-term and have a rational basis. Another big difference is that engagement "happens inside the consumer, not inside the medium," Mr. Plummer said. "All the measurements we have now are media metrics: ratings, readership, listenership, click-through rates." "What we need is a way to determine how the targeted prospect connected with, got engaged with, the brand idea," he added. "With engagement, you're on your way to a relationship instead of just a sales transaction." Ms. Hudson and the other members of the panel outlined several initiatives they described as going beyond awareness or recall to promote engagement with consumers. To better gauge product consumption patterns, Ms. Hudson said, Pepsi-Cola North America has given 8,000 Palm Pilots to consumers "to record at every point where they bought a beverage, where they consumed it, why they purchased it and what they were thinking about." "People who are consuming at 3 o' clock in the afternoon are different from people consuming at lunch," she said. Paul Alexander, vice president for global advertising at the Campbell Soup Company, described how Campbell "sends millions of recipes every day" to visitors to its Web site, which are garnished with an auditory fillip: the music from the venerable "M'm! M'm! Good!" Campbell's Soup jingle. Tony Pace, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for the Subway restaurants franchise association, said that customers interested in learning more about Jared Fogle, a star of the company's ad campaign, are directed online. That "allows them to get the information at the speed and depth they want," Mr. Pace said. David Cohen, executive vice president at Universal McCann Interactive, said that for one client, Wendy's International, the agency created an animated character, Smart Square, based on the square Wendy's hamburger, which has its own Web site (goodtobesquare.com). A profile was subsequently created for the character on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site. The character "has over 100,000 friends on his network, talking about the brand, interacting with the brand," said Mr. Cohen, whose agency is part of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Giovanni Fabris, vice president and international media director at another fast-food chain, McDonald's, said the emergence of the cellphone as a medium would significantly improve the ability of marketers to engage with consumers. Rather than thinking of it as a phone, Mr. Fabris said, marketers ought to consider it "a hand-held computer with video capabilities that allows you to make and receive telephone calls" -- and whose owners can be found wherever they happen to be. Ads delivered by cellphone to those who request them will stand out because of their "contextuality," he added -- that is, their ability "to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, which is not provided by the traditional media." The representative of the traditional media on the panel, Randy Falco, president and chief operating officer at the NBC Universal Television Group, part of the NBC Universal division of General Electric, sought to change those perceptions. In a speech he delivered before joining the panel, Mr. Falco said that "an industry built on its ability to reach large groups of people at once" is striving "to expand and transform itself by reaching one consumer at a time." For instance, Mr. Falco said, during the Winter Olympic Games last month, "15 million people visited our Olympics Web site, which served 9 million video streams, equal to more than 125,000 hours of video." NBC Universal also delivered Olympic content through video-on-demand orders on cable networks, wireless Web page views and wireless video, he added. "So-called old media does stand on the verge of a new golden age," Mr. Falco said, "a difficult, intensely competitive, hard-fought golden age that will leave the carcasses of our vanquished competitors on the roadside, but a golden age nonetheless." That line, delivered deadpan, drew laughter from the audience. More than 800 people have registered to attend the convention, which continues through tomorrow at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

ADVERTISING RESEARCH FOUNDATION
ADVERTISING AND MARKETING
CELLULAR TELEPHONES
CONVENTIONS AND CONFERENCES
RESEARCH
RECORDINGS AND DOWNLOADS (AUDIO)
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
TELEPHONES AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET
ADVERTISING (TIMES COLUMN)