Bobcats’ Larry Brown Working Overtime in Pursuing Playoffs

Abstract: PHILADELPHIA — Three buses rumbled into the Wachovia Center loading dock Friday afternoon, about 25 minutes apart, each carrying a distinct Charlotte Bobcats contingent. It is standard N.B.A. practice: rookies, journeymen and assistant coaches arrive early, the veterans and the head coach a little later. The Bobcats followed protocol, with one notable deviation. Among the early-bus passengers who needed extra work — Dontell Jefferson, Cartier Martin and Sean May — was one Hall of Fame coach who came to monitor every dribble. Larry Brown ’s shift began around 4:15 p.m., when the rookies hit the court. “What head coach does that?” marveled Dave Hanners, a longtime assistant under Brown. “But he wants to watch them and coach them.” Hours later, Brown directed his energy toward the veterans, goading the Bobcats to a 100-95 victory over the 76ers and keeping Charlotte’s playoff hopes alive. If ever there were a time for Brown to stop and gloat and distribute “I told you so’s” to a skeptical public, this might be it. It is late March, and the Bobcats — a team with no All-Stars, no playoff appearances and no winning tradition — are still in the postseason hunt. After winning Friday and again Saturday against the Knicks, the Bobcats were just two and a half games behind Detroit and Chicago for the eighth and final playoff berth in the Eastern Conference. It is a testament to Brown’s enduring influence, tangible proof that he did not lose his coaching mojo during one comically bad season in New York three years ago. But Brown, who was hired to transform the Bobcats last summer, is too immersed in the details to take in the bigger picture. “I don’t look at it like that,” he said before the game Friday. Brown fretted about Charlotte’s recent 3-5 slide, including a brutal loss to Washington. He worried about the April schedule, which has the Bobcats playing six of their final eight games on the road. And, of course, there are all these young players who needed tutoring. There seemed to be no room in Brown’s whirring mind to contemplate satisfaction or vindication. “You’re a coach, you’re supposed to do a job,” he said. “Every team you ever coach, you hope that they win a championship or compete for a championship. The thing that I’m excited about is the players are getting better, and it’s been a phenomenal experience, a real positive one, being around this group.” It would be hard to find a coach and a franchise that needed each other as much as Brown and the Bobcats did. Brown’s reputation took a beating during a disastrous 23-win season with the Knicks in 2005-6. He needed another chance. The Bobcats have never had a winning season since their birth in 2004. They needed someone to make them relevant. Everyone looks good at the moment. After beating Philadelphia, the Bobcats (32-40) needed just two victories in their final 10 games to break the franchise record. They will need some luck, and a losing streak by Chicago or Detroit, to make the playoffs. But Charlotte is unmistakably on the rise, and Brown’s imprint is clear. The Bobcats play smarter and harder now, they defend and they share the ball — all traits of a classic Brown team. “He’s made us better,” said point guard Raymond Felton, who has known only misery since being drafted by Charlotte in 2005. “We’re in the playoff hunt, something we haven’t been in since I’ve been in the league. So that’s progress.” Their most dramatic progress has been, predictably, on defense. Going into Saturday’s games, the Bobcats ranked seventh in the league in points allowed per game (94.7) and ninth in opponents’ field-goal percentage (.455) — both vast improvements over last season. The dedication to defense has helped offset their standing as the 29th-ranked scoring team (93.6). “It’s a total reflection on him,” forward Gerald Wallace said of Brown. “Because our main principle is defense first.” The Larry Brown improvement program, as practiced in his eight prior N.B.A. coaching stops, calls for two steps: teaching and purging. He develops the players who are amenable and gets rid of the rest. Brown has used a league-high 23 players this season. Only five Bobcats remain from last season, and just three of them — Felton, Wallace and Emeka Okafor — are in the rotation. Everyone else was imported this season to meet Brown’s demands for more defense (Raja Bell), playmaking and intelligence (Boris Diaw), shot blocking (DeSagana Diop) and veteran leadership (Bell, Diaw and Juwan Howard). Those who know Brown well say that the veterans are key, because Brown often wears out younger players with his long practices and perfectionist ways. Brown is particularly hard on his point guards, but he has forged a surprisingly solid relationship with Felton, who said he is having “my best year so far.” Felton recalled the advice given to him by Chauncey Billups, who blossomed into an All-Star under Brown in Detroit. “One of the things that he always told me: Just listen to the message, don’t listen to how he’s saying it,” Felton said. In New York, the message was lost amid internal warfare. Brown spent the year feuding with point guard Stephon Marbury and the team president, Isiah Thomas. “I knew that was an aberration,” said Hanners, who was with Brown in New York, Detroit and Philadelphia. “He just didn’t have a free hand. Every time he tried to do something, somebody undermined it.” A fierce defender of Brown’s, Hanners added, “I knew that if he went somewhere and was allowed to coach and nobody interfered, he’d be fine.” Thomas was fired as the Knicks’ president last April. Marbury was banished by the franchise in December and waived in February. The Knicks, although improving under Coach Mike D’Antoni, are out of the playoff race. On top of all that, eight N.B.A. head coaches have been fired this season. There is a moral somewhere in all of this, but Brown is not looking for it. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

Brown Larry
Coaches and Managers
Basketball
Charlotte Bobcats


Harvard Is Picked to Win the Ivy League, and So Is Yale

Abstract: NEW HAVEN — Before college football put in the overtime rule in 1996, an occasional Ivy League game ended in a tie. But preseason news media polls ending in ties? Twice in nine years? In 2000, Yale and Cornell tied for first place in the Ivy preseason poll. Penn won the title. This year’s Ivy poll results, announced Tuesday, came up with another tie. The 17 voters, giving 8 points for first place down to 1 point for eighth, could not decide between Harvard and Yale. Each received 124 points. Harvard and Yale carried 6-0 Ivy records into last season’s final game, which Harvard won, 37-6. Still, echoing the usual sentiment of coaches, Tim Murphy of Harvard is not thrilled with a preseason anointment. “We have a chance to be a good team, but I don’t know how hungry we are,” he said. “I see five teams in the hunt: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn. The bottom teams have improved so much that there are no gimmes. This used to be a top-heavy league, but now, if you’re not hungry or ready, you’re going to get beat.” Murphy said he saw the logic of his team’s being a preseason favorite. Yale Coach Jack Siedlecki also looked at history. “In the last two years, we finished first and second, and our record for those two years was 17-3,” he said. “So we should be up there.” The Ivy League plays in the N.C.A.A. ’s Bowl Championship Subdivision, formerly Division I-AA. The league’s universities give no athletic scholarships, but most players receive financial aid based on need. “It’s tougher to find kids who have the criteria to get into an Ivy League school and want to go there and will play without a scholarship,” Murphy said. “Still, I’ve been at Maine and Boston U. when they were I-AA playoff teams, and there’s no question the best teams in our league in the last 10 years could compete at the highest level.” They do not because the league bans its football teams from the postseason. And with its round-robin schedule, the Ivy League limits its teams to 10 games. That leaves room for only three nonconference games for each team. For Harvard, the three outside opponents this year and the next two years are Holy Cross, Lafayette and Lehigh. For Yale, they are Georgetown, Holy Cross and Fordham this year, with Lafayette, Lehigh and Army to come. All those nonconference opponents, like the Ivy universities, have high academic standards. “We’re trying to broaden the scheduling base, and give us a little more geographical diversity, like our student body has,” Murphy said. The classroom diversity is there. Murphy said that 10 players from Harvard’s last three teams are in medical school. EXTRA POINTS After Harvard and Yale, the preseason poll placed Brown (99 points) third, followed by Penn (85), Princeton (58), Cornell (54), Dartmouth (47) and Columbia (21).

National Collegiate Athletic Assn
Ivy League
Football
College Athletics
Harvard University
Yale University


Times Site Is Attacked by Hackers

Abstract: The New York Times Company was a victim of online attacks earlier this week that slowed down The New York Times Web site and limited access to articles and other types of content. According to Danielle Rhoades Ha, a company spokeswoman, the Web site became unavailable to “a small number of users” after a denial-of-service attack, a tactic used by hackers to slow or halt Web traffic by bombarding a host site with requests for information. She added that the company did not “have confirmation on who is responsible for the most recent attacks on nytimes.com.” The announcement follows attacks that were made on The Times’s site late last year. In January, the newspaper announced that its computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers who found passwords for reporters and other employees. The attacks took place as The Times investigated the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, and how they had built up a multibillion-dollar fortune during his political tenure. David Barboza, the author of the article, won a Pulitzer Prize. Attacks on media organizations are not unique to The Times. Shortly after the January announcement by The Times, officials at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post also reported that their Web sites had been attacked by Chinese hackers. On Friday, the Syrian Electronic Army said it had hacked the Web site and several Twitter accounts that belonged to The Financial Times. In the past, it has attacked other media companies, including The Associated Press and The Onion.

The New York Times
Hacker (computer security)


Bulls’ Stunning Collapse Has Team and Coach on Tenterhooks

Abstract: With his back to the wall — or, in this case, a collapsible Chicago Bulls backdrop — and a hailstorm of questions pelting him, Vinny Del Negro wielded clichés like a virtual shield. The Bulls blew a 35-point second-half lead on Monday, the most spectacular collapse in the N.B.A. since 1996. They were outscored by 58-19 over the final 20 minutes 49 seconds. They were booed off of their home court after being thoroughly dismantled by the Sacramento Kings. A night later, standing in a dull gray Madison Square Garden hallway, Del Negro, the Bulls’ coach , made it all sound like a temporary glitch. He called the loss “a perfect storm.” He cautioned against looking in “the rear-view mirror.” He talked about playing hard and attacking the basket and bouncing back against the Knicks, their opponent on Tuesday night. And, just for a moment, Del Negro detoured into self-reflection. He admitted that his rotation was probably too short and that perhaps the Bulls might be livelier if he used more players. “Managing that a little bit better is something that I need to do a better job with,” he said. Surely, Del Negro’s bosses are listening with great interest. Del Negro has been under fire from fans and the news media in Chicago as the Bulls have dipped and veered through nearly two months of substandard play. They looked no better on Tuesday, falling behind by 22 points early and sputtering late in an 88-81 defeat. The loss dropped the Bulls to 10-17, 11th in the Eastern Conference, and well behind their 41-win pace of last season. They are one of only two teams to lose this season to the woebegone Nets. The Bulls are charging in reverse, leaving the franchise cranky and Del Negro vulnerable. The team has fired two coaches on Christmas eve — Scott Skiles in 2007 and Tim Floyd in 2001 — and Del Negro could conceivably be the third. The Bulls do not play again until Saturday, Dec. 26, giving them a four-day window to make the transition. Del Negro said he spoke daily with John Paxson, the executive vice president of basketball operations, and Gar Forman, the general manager. He hears the criticism but said he was not feeling the burden of the Bulls’ record. “Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “I mean, you can’t control that. I go about my business every day, go to work and try to help this team win and develop the younger players. I feel we’ve done that on a consistent basis. We’ve had some bumps in the road, there’s no question. But the guys are playing hard, and I think we have good character on this team.” There are legitimate questions, however, about whether the Bulls have enough character, or enough talent, or the right coach. Sparked by Derrick Rose, the rookie of the year, and a midseason trade, the Bulls made a late charge last spring, slipped into the playoffs and staged a memorable seven-game series against the Boston Celtics in the first round. They expected to keep pushing forward. But their growth has been stunted, through a combination of injuries and benign neglect. The Bulls let Ben Gordon, the high-scoring guard, leave as a free agent over the summer. His absence is glaring. John Salmons, who provided a boost after being acquired from the Kings in February, is struggling to make the transition to shooting guard from small forward. Tyrus Thomas has played just four games because of a broken arm but is expected to return this weekend. “Whenever you lose quality players, it’s going to affect your lineup,” Del Negro said. “The statistics show we haven’t shot the ball well.” The mental anguish is another matter. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Bulls’ second-half collapse Monday was the biggest since Denver blew a 36-point lead in a loss to Utah on Nov. 27, 1996. Del Negro accused his team of getting complacent, and Rose said the Bulls showed “a nonchalant attitude.” It was a different sting Tuesday, as the Bulls failed to complete their rally. They pulled to a point behind, 80-79, with 1:41 to play, then fell apart. Luol Deng lost the ball and Kirk Hinrich and Rose both botched inbounds plays as the Knicks sealed the win. “It’s the way we lose,” Joakim Noah said. “I think that the way you lose definitely kills you mentally.” Thomas’s return will help Del Negro lengthen the rotation and spare everyone some fatigue. But the Bulls may be beyond help. Assessing his team late Tuesday night, Rose exhaled hard and took a long pause, concluding, “I guess we’re not on the same page.” Eventually, there will be consequences. As Del Negro said, while referring to the Bulls’ failure to keep up their intensity on Monday, “You usually get what you deserve.”


Possibility Is Thrust of 100-Year Starship Study

Abstract: ORLANDO, Fla. — A starship without an engine? It may seem a fantastical notion, but hardly more so than the idea of building a starship of any kind, especially with NASA ’s future uncertain at best. Yet here in Orlando, not far from the launching site of the space program’s most triumphant achievements, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , or Darpa, drew hundreds this month to a symposium on the 100-Year Starship Study, which is devoted to ideas for visiting the stars. Participants — an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers — explored a mix of ideas, including how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip. (Alternatively, machines could build humans at the destination, perhaps tweaked to live in non- Earth -like environs.) “The space program, any space program, needs a dream,” said one participant, Joseph Breeden. “If there are no dreamers, we’ll never get anywhere.” It was Dr. Breeden who offered the idea of an engineless starship. A physicist by training, he had most recently devised equations that forecast to banks how much they were going to lose on their consumer loans. From his doctoral thesis, Dr. Breeden remembered that in a chaotic gravitational dance, stars are sometimes ejected at high speeds. The same effect, he believes, could propel starships. First, find an asteroid in an elliptical orbit that passes close to the Sun. Second, put a starship in orbit around the asteroid. If the asteroid could be captured into a new orbit that clings close to the Sun, the starship would be flung on an interstellar trajectory, perhaps up to a tenth of the speed of light. “The chaotic dynamics of those two allow all the energy of one to be transferred to the other,” said Dr. Breeden, who came toting copies of a paper describing the technique. “It’s a unique type of gravity assist.” Darpa, by design, pursues out-of-the-box projects without immediate military use. (In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the agency laid the groundwork for the Internet.) David L. Neyland, the director of tactical technology at Darpa, who orchestrated the one-year starship study, noted that his agency was founded more than 50 years ago as a response to Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s cold war satellite coup. And the research and development of technologies that could lead to a starship, he said, would likely create useful military spinoffs. “At every step along the way in the space business, the Department of Defense has benefited,” Mr. Neyland said. In the talks, speakers laid out challenges that, while herculean, did not seem out of the realm of the possible, even without resorting to exotic physics like “Star Trek” warp drives. Still, the sheer distances are daunting. “The problem of the stars is larger than most people realize,” said James Benford, a physicist who organized sessions on starship propulsion. Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, an organization of volunteers that has already spent several years on starship designing, gave an analogy. If Earth were in Orlando and the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, were in Los Angeles, then NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft, the most distant manmade objects, have traveled just one mile. Another way of looking at the challenge is that in 10,000 years, the speed of humans has jumped by a factor of about 10,000, from a stroll (2.6 m.p.h.) to the Apollo astronauts’ return from the Moon (26,000 m.p.h.). Reaching the nearest stars in reasonable time — decades, not centuries — would require a velocity jump of another factor of 10,000. The first steps, however, are easy to imagine. Even in the 1950s, rocket scientists realized that the current engines — burning kerosene or hydrogen and spewing flames out the nozzle — are the rocket equivalent of gas guzzlers. They designed nuclear engines that use reactors to heat liquid hydrogen into a fast-moving stream of gas. NASA had such engines ready for a hypothetical manned mission to Mars to follow the Moon landings. Today, the space agency has revived that work, beginning with studies on an ideal fuel for a space reactor, and new nuclear engines could be ready by the end of the decade. As for radioactivity concerns, the reactors would not be started until they reached space. “Space is a wonderful place to use nuclear power, because it is already radioactive,” said Geoffrey Landis, a scientist at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio (and a science fiction author). More advanced nuclear engines could use reactors to generate electric fields that accelerated charged ions for the thrust. Then fusion engines — producing energy through the combining of hydrogen atoms — could finally be powerful enough for interstellar travel. The British Interplanetary Society put together a concept for a fusion-powered starship in the 1970s called Daedalus, extrapolating from known physics and technology. Dr. Obousy’s group, Icarus Interstellar, is revisiting the Daedalus design to see if 30-some years of new technology can produce a better starship. Daedalus dwarfs the Saturn 5, the rocket that took astronauts to the Moon. “However, it’s no bigger than a Nimitz aircraft carrier,” Dr. Obousy said. “We have the ability to create big things. We just don’t have the ability to launch big things.” Dr. Benford advocated another approach, harking back to the era of sailing ships. Giant sails on the starship could billow from photons beamed from Earth by lasers or giant antennae. “Here’s a case where we know the physics, and the engineering seems doable,” he said. By contrast, no one has yet built an energy-producing fusion reactor. Some of the questions posed at the symposium seemed almost mundane: What kind of lights should a starship have? How do you pack enough spare parts for a 50-year trip when there’s no Home Depot along the way? Other talks ruminated on theological and philosophical questions. “Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too?” was the title of one. “Vision without execution is daydreaming,” Mr. Neyland said in his introductory remarks, paraphrasing a Japanese proverb. “And what we’re trying to inspire with the 100-Year Starship Study is that first step in establishing a bar that’s high enough, with challenges that are hard enough that people will actually go start tackling some of these really hard problems.” For Dr. Breeden, discussions with other attendees affirmed his underlying idea and calculations, but it seems unlikely that asteroid flinging would be sufficient by itself. Still, it could prove a useful and cost-effective supplement for other propulsions systems. The $1.1 million study — $1 million from Darpa, $100,000 from NASA — will culminate with the awarding of a $500,000 grant to an organization that will take the torch for further work. Darpa would then exit the starship business, sidestepping interrogation by Congress during the next budget hearings of why it was spending taxpayer money on science fiction dreams. “They want to get people thinking about a topic and propagate it very subtly,” said Gregory Benford, a physics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is also a science fiction author (and the twin brother of James Benford). “They want it out of the budget by early next year.” Perhaps tellingly, no high-level NASA officials spoke at the symposium other than Pete Worden, director of the Ames Research Center in California, whom Mr. Neyland described as a “co-conspirator” and who is often regarded as a maverick in the space agency. “If we’re lucky, it will change NASA,” the science-fiction-writing Dr. Benford said of the starship research. Some speakers said they thought the first goal over the next century should be colonizing the solar system, starting with Mars. Dr. Obousy, for one, made his preference known in a couplet: On to the stars! Cowards shoot for Mars.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Hiring of Isiah Thomas Angers Some F.I.U. Faculty Members

Abstract: The former Knicks coach Isiah Thomas will be greeted in his new job at Florida International University with a reminder of his past. Laurie Shrage, the director of women’s studies and a philosophy professor at the university, said she and some of her colleagues planned to hand-deliver to Thomas a copy of the university’s sexual harassment policy. “Given that a federal district jury found he sexually harassed a colleague and created a hostile working environment, this hire sends the wrong message about F.I.U.’s commitment to the success of all students, faculty, and staff, regardless of their gender,” Shrage said in an e-mail message. Thomas was the focus of a sexual discrimination case in which a federal jury awarded a former Knicks executive more than $11 million. Shrage said the women’s studies department wanted to find “constructive rather than destructive” ways for people to “channel their anger” about the hiring. That includes a planned teach-in in which experts in sexual harassment will speak on campus and a plea to the university’s next president to issue a statement about a commitment to its sexual harassment policy. “This is an opportunity to educate the campus about why sexual harassment is a serious issue,” Shrage said, “and have Coach Thomas, the athletic director and our new president indicate where they stand and what their values are.” Thomas and Athletic Director Pete Garcia did not return calls requesting comment.

Thomas Isiah
Florida International University
Colleges and Universities
Sexual Harassment
Basketball
New York Knicks


After Facing Accusations, News Anchor Walks Free

Abstract: Alycia Lane, the former Philadelphia television news anchor who was arrested in December for punching a police officer in Manhattan, walked out of Criminal Court in Manhattan a free woman on Monday. Prosecutors promised to drop the charges, Judge Dena E. Douglas told her, if she stayed out of trouble for six months and performed one day of community service. Ms. Lane, 35, said, “I’m so glad this is over,” and added that she wanted to thank those “who supported me and believed in me.” She said she was “just looking forward to going on with my life.” Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said the original felony assault charge against Ms. Lane “could not be sustained because the scratches to the officer’s face did not rise to the level of physical injury as defined in the Penal Law.” Instead, prosecutors brought new charges of obstructing governmental administration, a misdemeanor, and harassment, a violation, and offered her a six-month adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which she accepted. Ms. Lane’s lawyer, David Smith, said that she had already performed her community service, through a program to help the homeless. The original criminal complaint said that on Dec. 16, at about 2 a.m. at Ninth Avenue and 17th Street, Ms. Lane placed a camera against one police officer’s face. The complaint charged that as the other officer, Bernadette Enchautegui, grabbed Ms. Lane’s arm to move it away from her colleague, Ms. Lane said she was a reporter and cursed at and scratched the officer. Last month, Ms. Lane was dismissed by her employer, KYW-TV in Philadelphia. In an impromptu news conference on the courthouse steps, Mr. Smith said he expected the case against Ms. Lane to be completely dismissed, “with the arrest and prosecution being a nullity as if they never existed.” He said he was “confident that as this goes forward, Alycia will succeed in her life.”

Police
Suspensions Dismissals and Resignations
Lane Alycia
Crime and Criminals


Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

Abstract: It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google , which had always supplied the data for the iPhone ’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself. As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook , Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour. Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world. That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic. Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free. But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads. The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources. Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together. So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads. You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan . Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?” Um, what? And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often. The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks. Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article. Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options. This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building , the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal .” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge .” And so on. Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.) Google’s points-of-interest database also excels. For example, if you look up a restaurant, you can read the Zagat write-up, read customer reviews, read the menu or even book reservations, right there on the info screen. A single button-tap starts navigation to that restaurant. For 100,000 restaurants and other businesses, you can even see what the interior looks like, all 360 degrees of it. Compass Mode lets you hold the phone in front of you; as you move it left, right, up and down, the phone’s view of the place changes accordingly, letting you look all around. It’s wild. It’s “The Matrix.” It’s visual teleportation. Google has even managed to incorporate Google Earth, its zoomable photographic model of the entire world and its oceans. You know, just in case you want to know not just where a building is relative to Detroit , but relative to the Mariana Trench. It’s a lot of features. The big question: How well did Google cram them in without sinking the app with featuritis? This, it turns out, is the best news of all. The brand-new, completely rethought design is slick, simple and coherent. Google admits that it’s even better than Google Maps for Android phones, which has accommodated its evolving feature set mainly by piling on menus. The new software conceit here is the horizontal swipe. Plotting a trip? Maps shows possible routes on the map; a banner at the bottom summarizes the current traffic and time to destination. Swipe the banner to see the next proposed route. Look up “Italian restaurants?” A banner shows the ratings and average price for the first one; swipe to see the next restaurant’s details, and the next. And when you’re navigating, the current driving instruction appears in a green banner; swipe it to look ahead at the next instruction. (Apple’s navigation mode doesn’t permit you to look ahead at upcoming turns.) The maps scroll fast, and they’re lovely; in the 3-D view, which makes you feel as if you’re looking down at the world from a plane, the type sizes of place names contribute to the sense of perspective. They get smaller as they get farther away. So yes, Google Maps for iPhone is a home run. It is not, however, without its footnotes. The biggest thing you give up is Siri integration. If you say to your iPhone, “Give me directions to the airport,” Apple’s Maps app opens automatically, your course charted. It takes more steps to get started in Google Maps. And despite its superior design and fluidity, the iPhone version of Google Maps doesn’t have all of the features of the Android version. It still doesn’t let you download and store maps for use when you don’t have an Internet connection. It doesn’t have indoor maps (of shopping malls and airports, for example). And it doesn’t have ads or pop-up offers. (I know — boohoo, right?) Finally, although Google Maps runs fine on the iPad , it’s just a blown-up version of the iPhone version. There’s not yet an iPad-specific app. Google says that goodies like those will be coming soon. But for a 1.0 app, created in the space of only a few months, Google Maps for iPhone is an astonishingly powerful, accurate, beautiful tool. For millions of iPhone owners, it’s a drive in the right direction.

Mobile Apps
Map
Apple
Google
Google Maps
Smartphone
iPhone


Analyzing Feelings of Regret

Abstract: Studies have suggested that older adults are better off letting go of regrets, while younger adults, with more time left to make life changes, may benefit more from holding on to them. Now, German researchers are studying brain activity to understand the biological mechanism behind this phenomenon; they report their findings in the journal Science. Using functional M.R.I. scans, the researchers found that after facing a missed opportunity, young adults (average age 25) and depressed older adults (average age 65) had similar brain activity in a region called the ventral striatum, which is associated with feelings of regret. Healthy older individuals displayed a different brain pattern, suggesting that they were able to regulate their emotions more effectively. “It seems that we have a lifelong ability to use our brain to regulate our emotions, even when we are old,” said the study’s first author, Stefanie Brassen, a neuroscientist at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. She and her colleagues asked individuals to play a computer game designed to induce regret at a missed opportunity. Players could open boxes that contained either gold or a devil; if they reached the devil, the game ended and they lost all their loot. Players could decide at the end of each round whether they wanted to continue playing. After a missed opportunity, the young adults and depressed older adults played more aggressively in subsequent rounds, presumably because they held regrets from previous rounds. Healthy older adults, on the other hand, did not tend to take more risks in later rounds. By studying the underlying brain mechanisms connected with regret, Dr. Brassen said, it may be possible to provide exercises and training in emotion regulation.

Brain
Emotions
Research
Science and Technology
Science (Journal)


Travelers Put Safety First in Filling Exit-Row Seats

Abstract: LIKE most business travelers , Richard M. Owens has occasionally sat in an exit-row seat on an airplane and wondered what he would do in a real emergency. He got to find out, he told me, on a harrowing approach into Miami about five years ago. A flight attendant sidled up to him, he recalled, and asked him to follow her back to the rear galley. “She told me that, as far as they could tell, they weren’t able to get the landing gear down.” He returned to his seat with instructions on the anticipated emergency landing. At 6-foot-2 and 175 pounds, he said, “My job was to block people from going at that exit till the door was open and lying on the seat.” The plane made a pass over the airport, where a runway was lined with emergency vehicles. But the landing gear finally deployed and the plane came down without further incident. Mr. Owens said he still tried to book an exit-row seat because it came with extra legroom. “Invariably,” he said, “the flight attendant will come by and say, ‘Do you realize what it means to sit in this row?’ And sometimes I see people in the exit rows just nod their heads, yeah, yeah, even when it seems they really have no idea.” Last week, I wrote about the plan by Continental Airlines to sell exit-row seats to anyone paying extra for the additional seven inches or more of legroom. Most airlines now sell so-called priority seating — the perceived better seats on a plane, including aisle seats toward the front of coach and those in emergency exit rows — as the industry tries to generate revenue. I thought most readers would react with annoyance to hearing about still another airline fee. But instead, most expressed strong feelings about safety. “I urge airlines never to sell exit-row seats,” Mr. Owens said. Like others who wrote, he said selling exit-row seats could loosen already lax procedures for assigning those seats, and add another unwanted chore for flight attendants who, he said, “have enough work to do” ensuring safety. The importance of emergency exits was underlined in January 2009 when US Airways Flight 1549 ditched into the Hudson River off Manhattan and all 155 on board escaped without serious injury thanks to brilliant emergency evacuation work by the flight crew, the passengers and the quick work by rescuers in boats. Since then, flight crews have become more firm in reminding people in exit rows of their special responsibilities. “The bottom line is that it’s up to the airline to make sure that whoever they sit in that exit row can perform the duties that are prescribed in the regulations,” said Les Dorr, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. If an airline has any doubt about a passenger’s fitness, “they shouldn’t let the person sit there, regardless of whether or not they want to pay for it,” he said. The F.A.A. rules on exit-row seats are detailed. Airlines are required to make sure that anyone in an exit row has “sufficient mobility, strength or dexterity in both arms and hands, and both legs” to get the exit hatch open and stowed when instructed. This requires the ability “to lift out, hold, deposit on nearby seats, or maneuver over the seatbacks to the next row, objects the size and weight of over-wing exit doors,” as well as “to assist others” and to understand verbal instructions in English. An exit-row hatch typically weighs 35 to 45 pounds, by the way. Hoisting one in a cabin that may be filled with smoke and flames, perhaps amid screaming, shoving passengers, is not a trivial assignment. And flight attendants are left in a tricky spot, trying to determine with a quick look whether a passenger has the required physical abilities. “Very often these rows are occupied by people who look like they would be in difficulty if they had to do something physically difficult,” Mr. Owens told me. “And some of them will say anything to be able to stay in those seats.” Readers who replied to last week’s column asked if exit rows could be allocated to the physically fit without alienating the not-fit? Should the cut be made exclusively at the check-in gate, rather than on board? Why don’t airlines or airports set up demonstrations in terminals where passengers can hoist that exit-row hatch? There are no easy answers. But one reaction came through clearly. As Werner R. Kraneburg wrote, “An exit row shouldn’t just be extra revenue for the airline.”

Airlines and Airplanes
Priority Seating
Disasters and Emergencies


New Investment Books Aim to Right Your Wrongs - Review

Abstract: WITH sincere apologies to Roseanne Roseannadanna, when it comes to events that can harm the value of your investments , it’s always something. Today, it’s the European debt crisis , or the chance of a double-dip recession, or Congressional gridlock. Tomorrow? Who knows? But one constant, say the authors of two new business books, is the real possibility that you will do something to make your portfolio worse. The writers are out to save you from yourself. The better of the two books, “Investment Mistakes Even Smart Investors Make and How to Avoid Them” (McGraw-Hill, $28) is, in essence, a detailed checklist — in the form of short, focused chapters — of what not to do. Larry E. Swedroe, director of research for the Buckingham Family of Financial Services , which manages $3 billion of clients’ money, and RC Balaban, a media specialist at the firm, have created 77 things to guard against in making investment decisions. First, let’s get the nits out of the way. Of the 77 mistakes the authors describe, there are a handful like “following the herd,” not starting to save soon enough, and being too conservative (and being victimized by inflation as a result). These are things you may have heard 873 times. And as the number climbs to 77, the authors come dangerously close a number of times to double-counting. For example, there is a chapter on not believing in luck, followed closely by one warning against winning streaks (as in, just because a mutual fund manager has outperformed the market for three consecutive years doesn’t mean she is guaranteed success in Year 4.). And there is a chapter cautioning about believing “experts” and another about not blindly following market gurus. No matter. A significant number of chapters should at least get you to reconsider your investment strategy. For example, many investors minimize their exposure to real estate investment trusts, figuring that because they own a home, real estate is already represented in their portfolios. “A home is clearly real estate. However, it is very undiversified real estate,” the authors write. “It is undiversified by type. There are many types of real estate: office, warehouse, industry, multifamily, residential, hotel and so on.” In addition, “a home is undiversified by geography.” Another common mistake is buying an index fund and believing that you own equal amounts of the stocks in the index. That is usually not the case. Most indexes are market-cap weighted. That means an individual stock’s representation in the index is based on that stock’s market capitalization as a percentage of the total market cap of all the index’s stocks. The larger the stock’s market capitalization, the greater the percentage of the index fund it will represent. As a result, the authors write, “most investors would be surprised how little exposure a total market fund has to the asset classes of small-cap stocks and value stocks.” Small-cap stocks accounted for just 8.2 percent of the total at the end of 2008, the book says, while the figure for value stocks was only 5.4 percent. The authors are huge fans of buying index funds, but they add that “indexing does not mean that an investor should hold only an S.& P. 500 Index fund or a total stock market fund.” Instead, they say, you should determine how you want your money allocated by asset class — large cap, small cap, international, etc. — and buy index funds for those classes. Here’s another example of a common mistake: Most people know that when it comes to investing, costs matter, but the authors say investors usually don’t consider every possible expense when putting money into a mutual fund. They will look at operating expenses and may forget about taxes — yet some funds are far more tax-efficient than others. And, the authors warn: “The least-understood hidden cost is the cost of cash. The cost of cash occurs when a mutual fund holds a cash position instead of being fully invested in the market. The greater the cash position held, the greater the impact.” A majority of investor mistakes can be summed up by the phrase “try not to shoot yourself in the foot.” And that, as David Dreman shows in his revised and updated “Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Psychological Edge” (Free Press, $30), is a lot harder than it sounds. The good news is that Mr. Dreman, chairman and managing director of Dreman Value Management , which invests more than $5 billion of money for individuals and institutions, points to all kind of work in cognitive and neuropsychology that proves why investing is so darn difficult. For example, “the more we like an investment, the less risk we think it entails even if it is riddled with it.” What follows from this understanding, Mr. Dreman says, is that “the psychology-aware investor holds a superior advantage, not just more theoretical knowledge, but a genuine practical investment edge.” But the bad news is that it takes substantially more than 200 pages before he starts to tell the reader how to use that edge. The early going is all about the psychology; what’s happened in the more than 13 years since the last edition of the book, and why just about everyone else is wrong when it comes to investing. (He is particularly harsh on people who believe in “the efficient market theory,” which suggests that it’s very hard to beat the market over time.) When he does start offering specific investment advice, Mr. Dreman presents a classic value-investing approach. This recommendation is typical: “Buy solid companies currently out of market favor as measured by their low price-to-earnings, low price-to-cash flow, or low price-to-book-value ratios, or by the high yields.” The payoff is fine, but you have to wade through an awful lot of neuroscience and psychology, and people with even a passing understanding of behavioral economics will already know much of it. But taken together with “Investment Mistakes,” this book is a solid reminder that one of the biggest risks to your overall investment health is staring back at you in the mirror.

Investment Mistakes Even Smart Investors Make and How to Avoid Them (Book)


Patrick Drahi Positions Himself to Be a Player in U.S. Cable

Abstract: PARIS — When the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi bought a St. Louis cable TV company in May and was mentioned as a potential suitor for Time Warner Cable, it may have been the first time many Americans had heard his name. But Mr. Drahi, 52, is no stranger to American cable. Back in 1990, fresh from his honeymoon and living in a Paris suburb, he surprised his new wife by abruptly resigning his job in a fiber-optics lab at the European electronics giant Philips. He told her he was going to try his hand in the cable industry in the United States. The decision was largely driven by boredom and frustration with corporate bureaucracy, Mr. Drahi has said. But it was also inspired by his observation that the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people included, at the time, a significant number of American cable entrepreneurs. “So that’s where I went, because I figured that would be where I would have the best chance,” Mr. Drahi recalled recently at a Paris gathering of students and alumni at the École Polytechnique, a leading French engineering school where he earned his undergraduate degree. Setting off for the United States, the young engineer offered his services as a consultant to American cable investors, advising them on potential European acquisitions. Within three months, Mr. Drahi said, he was earning more than he had been making at Philips. Now, 25 years later, Mr. Drahi has amassed enough of a war chest that he may soon be on an American cable-buying spree, building on his acquisition of Suddenlink Communications , the United States’ seventh-largest cable operator, for $9 billion in May. Next week, he plans to be in New York for an annual conference of telecommunications executives sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The Time Warner talks, Mr. Drahi said at a news conference in May, were only the most preliminary of discussions. Indeed, shortly after the talks concluded, Time Warner accepted a $56 billion offer from Charter Communications. But the publicly traded company that Mr. Drahi controls, Altice, based in Amsterdam, has a stock market value of 25 billion euros, or nearly $28 billion. And the Suddenlink deal has set off media and analyst speculation that the company, which has never been shy about making debt-driven acquisitions, may next seek to buy cable systems from any number of midsize American players, including AT&T, Cox Communications, Cablevision or Verizon. As Altice plots to expand its American footprint, investors on either side of the Atlantic are taking a closer look at Mr. Drahi and his strategy, which in Europe has focused on the convergence of fixed-line cable, Internet services and wireless communications. “Patrick believes that high-speed communications networks today are the equivalent to what networks for water, electricity and railways were to economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” said Jérôme Yomtov, a former investment banker at HSBC who runs Altice’s main French cable and telecommunications business, Numericable-SFR. Mr. Drahi declined to be interviewed for this article. But a series of interviews with a half-dozen friends and colleagues revealed some sense of his early career and his American ambitions. Born in Casablanca and raised in that city’s small, tightly knit community of European Jews, the young Patrick Drahi was the shy and soft-spoken son of math teachers. A self-taught pianist, he was also gifted with numbers, helping his parents grade their students’ exams from the age of 11. At 15, he left Morocco for France with his parents and sister, settling in the southern city of Montpellier. It was a difficult transition for the family, which, like many of the era’s “pieds-noirs” — North Africans of French descent — struggled for acceptance in France. Although he continued to excel at school, his outsider status made him ill at ease with any public acknowledgment of his talents. “I discovered that, in the end, if you succeeded at something, it wasn’t necessary to brag about it, and it was better to keep quiet,” Mr. Drahi said in a videotaped interview shown this year at a Paris dinner where he received an award from an association of French donors to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mr. Drahi was eventually accepted into the prestigious École Polytechnique, and he subsequently studied fiber optics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications. When he finished his degree, in 1986, Mr. Drahi looked set to follow a traditional engineering career path, joining Philips. But that was before he became impatient with what he considered the plodding pace of a big corporation. Mr. Drahi’s penchant for quick, high-stakes decisions was evident in his school days, friends and colleagues said. While still a graduate student, for example, Mr. Drahi was introduced at a party to a young medical student — an Orthodox Christian from Syria — who happened to be the sister of one of his professors. By the end of the evening, he had proposed. (Mr. Drahi and his wife, Lina — now married 25 years — have four grown children.) On his first day back at Philips after his honeymoon, Mr. Drahi resigned before lunchtime and announced the news to his stunned wife. Their trip to the United States quickly followed. Mr. Drahi soon gained enough experience in America that he felt ready to try his hand at running a business and returned to France. Cable, where it existed, was owned by local utility companies with little interest in investing in what was, for them, an ancillary business. Mr. Drahi lacked the cash to pursue his ambitions. When he failed to persuade any of his new American contacts to back his first French investment, Mr. Drahi turned to what quickly became his signature financial tool: debt. In 1994, Mr. Drahi transformed a student loan of 50,000 French francs — or a little over $9,000 at the time — into the seed money for his first cable company, Sud Câble Services. But customers weren’t signing up fast enough to cover his costs. To solicit subscriptions, Mr. Drahi went door to door. And to entice the area’s large North African community to sign up, he quietly introduced several Arabic channels — even though French regulations at the time barred broadcasters from showing foreign-language content. “I didn’t list them in the brochures,” Mr. Drahi said in the awards dinner video. “People started saying, ‘Hey, did you hear? If you get cable, you can have all these channels.’” By 1998, Mr. Drahi’s dealings caught the eye of executives at UPC, a Dutch subsidiary of Liberty Global, a group based in Colorado owned by one of those rich American cable barons he had read about: John C. Malone. In exchange for Mr. Drahi’s cable assets in France, UPC offered him a 5 percent stake and hired him to run the company’s Western Europe business, based in Geneva. Mr. Drahi sold his UPC shares two years later, becoming a multimillionaire. He quickly put his new fortune to work, founding Altice with the aim of fully consolidating the French cable industry. By 2012, Altice was ready to move more aggressively into mobile communications. With the backing of Cinven and the Carlyle Group, it made an unsolicited offer for SFR, France’s second-largest mobile operator, which was owned by Vivendi, the media group that owns Universal Music. The two sides were unable to agree on a price, but Mr. Drahi walked away undeterred. When Vivendi eventually put SFR up for sale early last year, Mr. Drahi succeeded with a €13.4 billion bid, though he faced a fierce public battle against Martin Bouygues, the billionaire owner of Bouygues Telecom. Mr. Bouygues tried to rally his well-placed allies in the French government to support his competing offer for SFR and even publicly questioned the “Frenchness” of Mr. Drahi, who is a dual citizen of France and Israel and maintains his legal residence in Switzerland. Even as his profile has risen, Mr. Drahi remains an intensely private man who shuns public appearances and rarely gives media interviews. Despite a personal fortune estimated at close to €17 billion, Mr. Drahi indulges in few of the trappings of great wealth, friends and colleagues said. Although he keeps several elegant homes — in Geneva, Paris and Tel Aviv — his personal tastes and habits hew to the mundane. He wears a plastic Swatch instead of a Rolex and often arrives at business meetings on foot or a bicycle, instead of by chauffeured car. This no-frills style extends to the workplace, where, Altice colleagues said, Mr. Drahi — like the rest of his top staff — works without an assistant, making his own travel arrangements and booking his own appointments from his iPhone. He has no business card. “It is not a face-time organization,” said Bernard Mourad, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who recently joined Altice to run the group’s nascent media business, which includes the French newspaper Libération, the magazines L’Express and L’Expansion, as well as i24, an Israeli television station. Analysts estimate that Altice has the financial firepower to pursue up to €30 billion in new debt-driven deals, provided that interest rates remain low and the group continues to generate sufficient revenue to service its debts. All that borrowing, though, has made some French leaders nervous about Altice’s “bulimic” acquisition strategy. Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, recently worried aloud that Mr. Drahi was building an enterprise that had become “too big to fail” and might one day require a government bailout to preserve jobs. To Mr. Drahi, such concerns are overblown. “When you are focused on debt reduction, it’s because you have a growth problem,” Mr. Drahi told a French legislative committee in June. “If I stop my so-called bulimic development, in five years, I would have no debts,” he said. “And then what? That would be stupid, because I will not have grown for five years.”

TV
Patrick Drahi
Suddenlink Communications
Time Warner
France
Cable television
Altice
US
Mergers and Acquisitions


Netflix Announces Lineup of Animated Children’s Shows

Abstract: Netflix announced on Wednesday that it was adding four new animated children’s series to its lineup of original programming, including a preschool show from Cirque du Soleil Media about a whimsical character named Luna Petunia who plays in a dreamland. Other series include a new take on Tarzan and Jane, in which a 16-year-old Tarzan returns from the African jungle to a London boarding school. Another, called “Kulipari: An Army of Frogs,” is based on a book series by the American football star Trevor Pryce and follows an army of poisonous frogs, scorpions and spiders battling for their world. In some regions, the fourth is “Puffin Rock,” about a puffling named Oona who explores an island off the coast of Ireland with her little brother Baba. “Puffin Rock” will make its debut in September. The other series will be available in 2016. The development is part of a broader strategy at Netflix to appeal to children with exclusive, commercial-free programming — a crucial draw for parents. In the last two years, Netflix has steadily increased the acquisition and development of exclusive original children’s series. The company has linked with a series of partners including PBS, the Disney Channel, DreamWorks Animation, Mattel, Hasbro, Lego and Scholastic. Netflix is also searching internationally to add to its lineup of children’s shows. On Wednesday, the company also announced that it was adding three exclusive first-run children’s series. Those include a Russian hit, “Masha and the Bear,” for American viewers, and a Canadian series, “The Day My Butt Went Psycho,” for viewers in the United States, Britain and Mexico. A Norwegian series about a rescue boat, “Elias,” is available in the United States and some other countries. Netflix is expected to spend more than $450 million on original programming this year, up 88 percent from $243 million in 2014, according to the MoffettNathanson research firm.


The Age of Single-Sport Athletes Endures Despite Detractors’ Suspicions

Abstract: FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Harrison Heffley played nearly every sport that caught his interest during junior high and high school, from his dominant trade of baseball to basketball, football and even golf. Over the years, Heffley, a senior from nearby Rogers, Ark., has seen and felt pressure from coaches for athletes to take part in year-round, single-sport training just to earn playing time at the varsity level. He has watched friends and opponents train outside school and hit the road with their travel teams, chewing up weekends for months at a time. A hard-throwing left-handed pitcher, Heffley wasn’t immune to this kind of effort, either, scheduling baseball workouts each week while playing other sports and often throwing late into the night at his school’s indoor facility. Luckily for Heffley, the message he received from his father has always been to have fun and play as many sports as he could. “Doing this and not doing the 50-games-a-summer thing as a kid definitely helped me not burn out,” said Heffley, who has signed to play baseball at Arkansas. “I can tell when I play with some other people that my love for the sport is fresh and still growing.” Heffley is an anomaly in a world obsessed with sports specialization, where academies charge tens of thousands of dollars in annual tuition to help children get better at football, basketball, soccer and more. That gives athletes a better shot at a college scholarship, the thinking goes, and most agree that the multisport high school athlete is becoming a thing of the past. It is a trend that has come under particular scrutiny over the last year. Notable figures including the Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer, the golfer Jordan Spieth, members of the United States women’s national soccer team and the baseball Hall of Famer John Smoltz are among those who have publicly criticized year-round specialization, primarily for its suspected role in injuries, but for other reasons, too, including pressure and burnout. After working at a high school with 600 students in Las Vegas, Larry Chavez was taken aback when he became the athletic director at 2,400-student Cleveland High in Rio Rancho, N.M. There, he saw volleyball teams with 12 to 14 freshmen and as few as three seniors, and soccer players so tired of the year-round approach that they decided as seniors to try something else. Image The top golfer Jordan Spieth has criticized early specialization. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press To curb the trend toward specialization, Chavez enacted an incentive-based program for multisport athletes. Beginning in 2014, freshmen and sophomores who participated in multiple sports received T-shirts marking their achievement. Juniors earned a multisport patch for their letter jackets, while seniors received a watch. The program cost the school $3,000 to $4,000, and Chavez said it had been met with enthusiastic support from students. “I just feel that with kids, they only have one chance in high school; they only have three or four years of high school experience,” Chavez said. “And by them being forced, by either high school coaches, parents or club coaches, to specialize so early, I think it’s hindering their development, and I think that’s why there’s such a high rate of burnout for our kids.” Despite the program’s success, this year’s multiple-sport participants at Cleveland High give a glimpse of what many believe is a national trend. While 85 freshmen are enrolled in the multisport program, the number dips to 62 sophomores, 45 juniors and only 27 seniors. The Michigan High School Athletic Association has created a task force to come up with practical methods of increasing multisport participation. Jack Roberts, the executive director, said he hoped the task force showed that the issue of specialization was a “public health crisis.” “If that’s the case, then we have to adopt policies and procedures that intend to reduce those pressures and protect young people,” Roberts said, aiming to do so by distinguishing the goals of school sports from those of their club-sport cousins. “We have to define what success means in school sports,” he said. “It might be different in all other levels by all other sponsors, and we’ve got to keep beating that drum to at least try to neutralize all those other messages that parents and kids and coaches are getting.” The notion that specialization is a health crisis has drawn the biggest headlines. Last summer, Smoltz became the first pitcher who had had Tommy John surgery to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame. In his speech, he said children were “maxing out too hard, too early” and should simply “be athletic and play other sports.” Research assessing whether sports specialization leads to more injuries is not common, but this year, Timothy McGuine and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation published research suggesting there is a link. According to the preliminary findings, highly specialized athletes were more likely to report a history of knee or hip injuries blamed on overuse; participating in a single sport for more than eight months per year appeared to be an important factor in increased injury risk. The study tracked the participation patterns of and injuries to more than 1,000 athletes at 27 high schools across Wisconsin, including club and school sports. The early results found the greatest instances of specialization in soccer, volleyball and basketball, and found that female athletes (39 percent) were more likely to specialize than male athletes (25 percent). But it was the injury data that surprised McGuine, with 49 percent of specialized athletes sustaining an injury compared with only 23 percent of multisport athletes. The numbers did not differ much for athletes who specialized but tried to reduce their risk by limiting the number of games they played. In those “low-volume kids,” as McGuine called them, 46 percent of the specialized athletes sustained injuries compared with 20 percent of multisport athletes. Even the high-volume multisport athletes, some who played more than 100 games per year, reported 15 percent fewer injuries than their low-volume specialized counterparts. “Specialization is the biggest predictor of a previous lower-extremity injury in these high school kids,” said McGuine, who presented his findings in January at a meeting of the Pediatric Research in Sports Medicine Society with members of the National Federation of State High School Associations in attendance. The specialization study is not the only one being followed by McGuine, who is also tracking the effectiveness of headgear in reducing concussions among high school soccer players. However, it is one he hopes to expand in the future, giving parents, coaches and athletes a better frame of reference when deciding whether to specialize at a young age. McGuine knows the issue well, having watched his three children each choose to take part in multiple sports throughout high school, where things have become hyper-competitive. Specialization “is not about getting a college scholarship anymore,” he said, adding: “It’s about just getting playing time at their high school with their peers now. That’s the way we’ve made it, and it’s a real shame.”


Reid to Oppose Obama Nominee for Federal Court in Georgia

Abstract: Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, one of the Obama administration’s staunchest allies in Congress, said Thursday that he would oppose the president’s nomination of Michael P. Boggs to the federal bench in Georgia, dealing a fatal blow to the chances of his confirmation. “Somebody should have looked a little more deeply into his record,” Mr. Reid said. Mr. Boggs faced sharp questioning at a recent confirmation hearing into his past support for state proposals to post information online about doctors who perform abortions and to keep the Confederate battle emblem on the Georgia flag.

Harry Reid
Michael P Boggs
Barack Obama
Appointments and Executive Changes
Federal Courts


Alarmed Britons Ask Pollsters: Why Didn’t You Warn Us?

Abstract: LONDON — Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has left no shortage of losers: Prime Minister David Cameron, the pound sterling and the European Union itself. But it also exposed a familiar culprit: the pollsters. On the eve of the vote, most late polls showed the Remain side edging ahead. Late Thursday , the market research company YouGov put Remain up by 52 percent to 48 percent. As the voting ended on Thursday, Ipsos-Mori, another leading polling company, gave Remain an eight-percentage-point lead over the Leave side. Even the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, a voracious euroskeptic, told Sky News ahead of the result that he thought Britain had voted to stay in the bloc. “I think that Remain might just nick it, but there isn’t much in it,” he said. Instead, Britons — and Europeans — woke up Friday to the shocking news that the country had voted 52 percent to 48 percent to leave the European Union, with more than 17.4 million people voting to leave, and about 16.1 million to remain. For pollsters, still reeling from the ignominy of last year’s general elections, when the polls failed to foresee the Conservative Party winning an outright majority, the result was seen, fairly or not, as yet another embarrassment, raising questions about the challenge of parsing the will of capricious voters in open revolt against the status quo. “Now the results have come in and Britain has chosen to leave the European Union, the reputation of British political polling has taken a hit to rival that of the pound,” The Telegraph wrote . Peter Kellner , a leading political commentator and a former president of YouGov, called for polling companies to conduct an inquiry into the failure. “I am not sure what has gone wrong,” he said. Mr. Kellner said one hypothesis was that the results may have been distorted by the sharp decline of people willing to participate in telephone polls, combined with online polls that reflected only the views of the people who had volunteered to participate. In the case of the vote for a British exit, or “Brexit,” he said the polls appeared to have underestimated the number of Labour supporters outside London, in England and Wales, who backed leaving. He said that with the coming presidential election in the United States, the vote in Britain was raising an uncomfortable question: “Are the people who can be reached by pollsters like the people the polls can’t reach?” Image Ballots on Friday in Manchester, England. On the eve of the vote, many polls showed the Remain side edging ahead or the vote too close to call. Credit Danny Lawson/European Pressphoto Agency Pollsters could perhaps be forgiven for their stumbles in this case, given the hefty challenge of trying to predict the intentions of voters in a highly unusual referendum. After all, Britons had not voted on their future in Europe in more than four decades, and comparative data was scarce. Moreover, 17 of the 35 surveys conducted this month showed the Leave side ahead. Leighton Vaughan Williams , the director of the political forecasting unit at Nottingham Business School, argued that the 11th-hour swing in favor of Leave came down to the powerful and determinedly euroskeptic tabloid news media, which he credited for swinging undecided voters on voting day. “It was the Sun wot won it,” he said, a sardonic reference to an infamous headline in the newspaper The Sun on April 11, 1992, in which the popular and influential tabloid took credit for the Conservative Party’s surprise victory in the 1992 general election over Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader. “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?” it had asked. The Sun and most of Britain’s other tabloids led a similarly aggressive campaign against staying in the European Union in the weeks leading up to the “Brexit” vote, and the emotive appeals to patriotism on the day of the vote proved decisive, Mr. Vaughan Williams said. The Sun’s cover on Thursday showed an image of the sun hovering over Earth. “We urge you to vote Leave … and make today our Independence Day,” the paper extolled its readers. “Your country needs you,” The Daily Express wrote on its front page , emblazoned with the Union Jack. “Vote Leave today.” In contrast to past referendums on independence in Scotland and Quebec, when the undecided voted with the status quo, Mr. Vaughan Williams said, the undecided voters in Britain were swayed by the ominous warnings on newsstands on voting day. “The press effect in this referendum cannot be underestimated,” he said. “The Sun and a majority of the other tabloids appealed to patriotism and jingoism and fears about immigration, and knew exactly what buttons to press. With some polls suggesting that 11 percent of people were undecided ahead of the vote, this had a huge impact.” Fearmongering aside, analysts noted that there had been a divergence between online and telephone polling throughout the campaign, with online polls at times showing the Remain and Leave camps neck and neck and telephone polls showing the Remain side ahead. That should have signaled that at least some polls had a sample-weighting problem. YouGov noted that telephone polls may have exaggerated the Remain side’s advantage because when confronted by a person on the other end of the phone, people tended to give an answer, even if they were undecided . Whatever the reasons for the failure, the consequences were costly for some: The polls led investors to pile into the pound sterling and other instruments they thought would rise in value with a vote to remain, leading to heavy losses when the vote went the other way.

Brexit
Polls
Referendum
Great Britain
Voting
David Cameron
Nigel Farage
The Sun British Newspaper


Vista Is Ready. Are You?

Abstract: WINDOWS VISTA, the latest iteration of Microsoft ’s operating system, is finally here. It was officially released to corporate users last week and will be available to consumers on Jan. 30. But now that Vista is ready, will your computer be? And what will be involved in an upgrade? Microsoft says Vista offers increased security, along with an improved search function, an excellent calendar program, improved networking and a sidebar with quick access to mini-programs called gadgets. With the right display adapter, some editions of Vista will also offer a new interface called Aero that lets you preview what is inside a running program by placing your cursor over its thumbnail in the task bar. It will be possible for many PC users to spend $99 to $259 to purchase a Vista DVD to upgrade their existing Windows XP machines. But before you do that, you need to take a good look at your PC as well as your peripherals and software. If your system isn’t quite compatible, it might be possible to make it ready for Vista with some additional memory or perhaps a new video card. Even if your PC is Vista-ready, that doesn’t mean you should buy the upgrade kit. For most users, especially those whose hardware isn’t quite up to speed, it might make sense to wait until it’s time for a new PC. The easiest way to get Vista is to buy a new PC after Jan. 30. If you want a new PC sooner, make sure the hardware is Vista-ready and see if the vendor is offering a coupon for a free or low-cost upgrade when Vista comes out. It is essential to compare the cost of buying a new system against purchasing Vista and upgrading your current PC. By the time you add up the cost of Vista plus any required hardware, it might be make more sense to get a new machine. One variable for those thinking of upgrading is Vista’s system requirements, which vary by edition. Microsoft will offer a $99 Home Basic Edition that provides limited functionality but runs on more basic equipment. Unlike the higher-end versions, Home Basic won’t support the new Aero interface. The minimum configuration to run the Home Basic Edition of Vista is a PC with 512 megabytes of memory, at least an 800-megahertz processor and a graphics card that is DirectX9-compatible; this includes most graphics adapters sold in the last few years. In other words, a vast majority of PCs that have been purchased in recent years are able to run this stripped-down version of Vista — but just because they’re able doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth the cost, effort and potential compatibility problems with existing software and peripherals. Most consumers will find the $159 Home Premium edition more suitable. It includes the Aero interface along with Windows Media Center (to manage audio and video resources) and other features. The minimum hardware for the Premium edition is a gigabyte of memory and a one-gigahertz processor. You’ll also need DirectX 9 graphics with a Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver and at least 128 megabytes of graphics memory and pixel shader 2.0. Pixel shader refers to the ability of your graphics processor to render the surface properties of an image including lighting, shadows and other visual qualities. Your machine must also have at least a 40-gigabyte hard drive with 15 gigabytes of free space as well as a DVD-ROM drive and audio output. While you can never have too much memory, Microsoft’s Vista group product manager, Greg Sullivan, said that one gigabyte was plenty. I’ve been running Vista on a 1.5-gigabyte machine and haven’t had any memory-related problems. If your machine has Windows XP, an easy way to find out if it’s Vista-ready is to download the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor from Microsoft’s Vista Web site ( www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready ). The program, which is available now, will scan your PC to determine which edition of Vista, if any, can run on your machine. Be sure to plug in all your external peripherals, like printers, scanners and external hard drives, as they, too, need to be evaluated by the upgrade tool. When the upgrade adviser scan is finished it will tell which edition it recommends. You don’t necessarily have to buy the recommended edition. To the left of the screen is a list of other editions. Click on the ones you’re considering and scroll down to see what changes you might have to make to run that edition. Don’t panic if the upgrade adviser finds that some of your device drivers aren’t Vista-compatible. Chances are there are new drivers available to fix the problem. Microsoft has included many drivers within the operating system so, if all goes well, it will take care of making sure that your display adapter, sound card, printer, Ethernet card and other devices have the software they need to operate correctly. But the list of included drivers is not exhaustive. Very old, very new and relatively obscure hardware might not be included, so to be safe, before you install Vista, visit the Web site for each of your hardware vendors to download the latest Vista drivers. The upgrade adviser looks for minimal, not optimal requirements. For the Aero interface, the video card or Graphics Processing Unit (G.P.U.) is the most important component. The chips on that card (or on your PC’s system board) do the heavy lifting when it comes to displaying images on your monitor. Vista’s Aero interface, according to Rob Csongor, vice president of Nvidia, a leading maker of chips for computer graphics, is especially taxing on video processors because of the way it renders windows. The use of Vista’s Flip 3-D window changer, for example, requires the video card to render a 3-D image of all of your open windows every time you press Alt Tab. The Windows desktop, according to a Microsoft Web site, “will be dynamically composed many times a second from the contents of each window.” Even if your graphics card is Aero-compatible, you may still want to upgrade for faster performance. In my tests, a three-year-old Aero-compatible card from ATI (now part of Advanced Micro Devices) was noticeably slower than newer, moderately priced (about $130) cards from both ATI and Nvidia. I noticed it and so did the Windows Experience performance scanning program that comes with Vista. If you have a desktop PC with a graphics card that’s not up to the task, you can replace the card with one that is Vista Aero-ready, and if your PC system board has an embedded graphics system, it may still be possible to add an external card. If you have a notebook PC whose graphics processor isn’t Vista-ready, you’re pretty much out of luck because, other than adding additional memory, it’s generally not possible to upgrade internal components of a laptop. Another way to improve performance is to use a U.S.B. thumb drive or SD card to take advantage of Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. Vista uses that memory to store some of your program code so that programs load much faster than if it had to load from the hard drive. Whether or not your machine is compatible, upgrading an operating system can be challenging despite Microsoft’s efforts to make it as smooth as possible. You should definitely back up your data files before starting. You have the choice of doing an “in place” upgrade, which retains your applications and data files, or a “full install,” which requires you to reinstall your programs. A full install by default will not delete your data, though it may make the data more difficult to find. It often results in a faster and more reliable system because it cleans up the Windows registry and deletes any spyware and possibly problematic software on your machine. And if you’re reluctant to upgrade, don’t fret. If Windows XP works for you now, it will continue to work long after Jan. 30. Besides, Vista isn’t going away anytime soon. Whether you want to or not, you’ll probably be using it on your next PC.

Computer Software
Computers and the Internet
Microsoft Corp


India Calls for Easing of Security in Kashmir

Abstract: NEW DELHI — The Indian government announced a major policy shift in Kashmir on Saturday, calling for the release of jailed student protesters, easing security strictures in major cities, reopening schools and universities, and offering financial compensation to the families of the more than 100 civilians killed since the restive region erupted in protests in June. Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, who led a parliamentary delegation on a fact-finding trip last week, also said a high-level government committee would be established to open a dialogue with political parties, students and civil society groups in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-controlled part of the disputed region. “We hope that these steps should address the concerns of different sections of Jammu and Kashmir, including the protesters,” Mr. Chidambaram said on national television. Separatist leaders said they were assessing the announcement on Saturday night, but several protesters and analysts said that the changes would be judged less by what was said than by how they were carried out. “People are just cynical,” said Amitabh Mattoo, a Kashmir expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “Cynical because of 20 years of conflict and because past dialogues had not gone anywhere.” Kashmir, the predominantly Muslim region claimed by India and Pakistan, has been embroiled in a crisis for more than three months as stone-throwing protesters have clashed with Indian officers firing live ammunition. Many of the protesters were demanding independence from India as outrage over the heavy security presence boiled over. For India, the world’s largest democracy, Kashmir had become a political and security crisis, but also a major embarrassment as the country prepares to host the Commonwealth Games next week in New Delhi. In recent days, the Kashmir Valley, including Srinagar, has choked under a stifling curfew enforced with barbed wire and thousands of security forces. Shops have been shuttered, many people struggled to get medicine and even milk deliveries were halted. Many residents described the situation as “collective punishment.” Omar Abdullah, the embattled chief minister of the state, called the policy changes “a welcome step.” Mr. Abdullah has come under fire from critics who say he has mismanaged the crisis, and has previously called on the central government to ease security laws in the region. In a statement on Saturday, he said that he hoped schools and universities could reopen on Monday but warned that other changes “may take time.” Mr. Mattoo called the announcement an “important beginning,” but also cautioned that it would take time to determine whether the changes would be meaningful. He said some Kashmiris had hoped for a bolder announcement, including the removal of emergency laws that grant broad arrest powers and immunity to soldiers and security officers. Instead, Mr. Chidambaram said that the state government would review them. “Let us see how many of these commitments actually translate into changing the ground reality,” Mr. Mattoo said. The protests have steadily escalated into a major crisis. Mr. Chidambaram said at least 108 Kashmiris had died; 194 students were in custody for throwing stones and 51 for violating the Public Safety Act, one of the special laws that grants broad purview to soldiers and security officers. Mr. Chidambaram said he would advise the state government to free the imprisoned students as well as people jailed under the Public Safety Act, making their release a seeming certainty. The financial package calls for payments of 5 lakh, about $11,000, to the families of the dead. Abid Nabi, 21, whose 18-year-old brother was shot and killed by the police in Srinagar, was not impressed and cautioned that the broader package from New Delhi might not defuse the protests. “I cannot sell the death of my brother for five lakh,” he said in a telephone interview. “I do not think that anybody in Kashmir will accept this money. I lost my 18-year-old brother. Many families lost boys who were 7, 8 or 9. Even if leaders will ask to stop protests, youths will defy them.” Mr. Mattoo said that Kashmiris were deeply skeptical of promises from the Indian government, since so many had been broken. He said if the government proves it is acting in good faith, then Kashmiris, including separatist groups, would give a reciprocal, meaningful response. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the leader of a hard-line faction of Kashmiri separatists, issued a critical reaction on YouTube, saying that the overall package failed to resolve the core dispute. Other leaders were still deliberating. “I cannot comment immediately,” said Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front. “Our party will meet, discuss and decide on this development.” Many Kashmiris hope the announcement will stabilize the region after a bloody summer. “There should be some peace now,” said Altaf Ahamad Khan, 31, a teacher in the village of Nowpora who lost a friend who was shot by the police. “His family is really poor, and they will accept the money announced by the government.”

India
Kashmir and Jammu (India)
Demonstrations Protests and Riots
Politics and Government


Graffiti Examined in Brooklyn

Abstract: Detectives in the police hate crimes unit are investigating the appearance of racist graffiti in two elevators near the chambers of Diana A. Johnson, a Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court judge, the authorities said Saturday. Judge Johnson, a former State Supreme Court justice, was elected in November as the first black Surrogate’s Court judge in Kings County. Surrogate’s Court hears cases involving the probate of wills, the administration of estates and adoptions. The police said that members of Judge Johnson’s staff discovered the graffiti on Thursday. No arrests have been made. Marking property with graffiti is normally a misdemeanor, punishable by a year or less in jail, but is prosecuted as a hate crime with a more severe sentence when racial epithets are used. The authorities said the graffiti at the Surrogate’s Court, 2 Johnson Street, contained pejorative and racially charged language. Judge Johnson’s election last year came after a hotly contested Democratic primary in which she defeated another black candidate, ShawnDya L. Simpson, a Civil Court judge and a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney. In a heavily Democratic borough, victors in primary races for judgeships are all but certain to win general elections, as Judge Johnson did in November. But the race provoked tensions, since the Brooklyn Democratic organization and its leader, Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, endorsed Judge Simpson. Several black leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, backed Judge Johnson, who won the party’s nomination with 60 percent of the vote. Surrogate’s Courts in Brooklyn and other boroughs have long been known as sources of patronage, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to lawyers who serve as guardians in thousands of estate cases.

Johnson Diana A
Graffiti
Hate Crimes
Brooklyn (NYC)


Virginia Wins Series Opener

Abstract: Kenny Towns hit a tiebreaking run-scoring double in the eighth inning after Daniel Pinero stole second and third base, and Virginia opened the College World Series in Omaha with a 5-3 victory over Arkansas.


Governors Look for Means to Cope With Budgets

Abstract: WASHINGTON — Democratic governors warned Saturday that federal budget cuts could crimp a fragile economic recovery, and governors of both major parties asked the Obama administration to give them more flexibility in running education and health care programs so that they could cope. On the first day of the National Governors Association ’s winter meeting here, several governors also said that they did not want any federal bankruptcy protection and that Congress should explicitly renounce the option. The mere discussion of it, they said, had increased their borrowing costs. Democratic governors criticized the hard line against labor unions taken by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican. But they muted the criticism, saying they wanted to preserve the bipartisan traditions of the governors’ association. The recession may officially have ended but, “we are still faced with unprecedented fiscal challenges,” said Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington, a Democrat and the association’s chairwoman. States cut $75 billion from their budgets in the last two years, but collectively face a $175 billion gap between projected spending and revenues in the next two years, Ms. Gregoire said. As part of the fiscal stimulus package signed by President Obama in early 2009, Congress provided extra money to the states for Medicaid and schools, but that will end in a few months, a loss that Ms. Gregoire said was “not unexpected.” “We know there is no new money coming to the states,” Ms. Gregoire said, but further cuts in federal grant programs could “undermine the economic recovery in our states.” Maine’s new governor, Paul R. LePage, a Republican, said: “What the federal government can do for us is not money, but flexibility. We can slow down layoffs in a lot of private and public sector jobs if the states are given more flexibility.” Seconding that sentiment, Ms. Gregoire said states wanted “more flexibility in the classroom.” Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, said: “If we could get Medicaid as a block grant with total flexibility to run the program as we see fit, I would be willing to take a cap on growth of 2 percent a year. Many governors feel that way.” There is no cap on federal and state Medicaid spending, and anyone who meets the eligibility requirements is entitled to coverage. The federal aid helped states survive the worst of the recession, but left a difficult legacy in some states. “The stimulus money was used to start new programs, including social service programs, and we don’t have the money to continue them,” Mr. LePage said. The Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the final quarter of last year, and added that spending cuts by state and local governments had apparently held back growth. Likewise, Ms. Gregoire said Saturday, hiring by private employers has been overwhelmed by layoffs at state and local government agencies, contributing to slow growth in overall employment. Governors said their economies were still far from vibrant. “We are recovering, not recovered,” said Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, a Democrat. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, also a Democrat, said, “Unemployment remains uncomfortably high in Connecticut at a number, 9 percent, that we are simply not used to.” The governors’ association signed an agreement on Saturday with provincial officials from China in hopes of building a relationship that will increase trade and create jobs here. The confrontation between Governor Walker and state employees in Wisconsin generated a lot of discussion at the meeting. In a pointed contrast to Mr. Walker, Ms. Gregoire said that when she negotiated with public-employee unions, they had agreed to certain sacrifices on pay and health benefits, as well as changes in their pensions. “I believe in collective bargaining rights,” she said. Governor Barbour expressed support for Mr. Walker in his effort to curb collective-bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin. “Mr. Walker is doing what he said very directly and repeatedly he was going to do,” Mr. Barbour said. “I support him in it. We don’t have collective bargaining in Mississippi. About half the states don’t. The idea that this is some constitutional right of the public employee unions is incorrect.”

Governors (US)
United States Economy
National Governors Assn
Federal Aid (US)
Federal Budget (US)
Obama Barack


Job Loss Looms as Part of Stimulus Act Expires

Abstract: Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs within weeks unless Congress extends one of the more effective job-creating programs in the $787 billion stimulus act: a $1 billion New Deal-style program that directly paid the salaries of unemployed people so they could get jobs in government, at nonprofit organizations and at many small businesses. In rural Perry County, Tenn., the program helped pay for roughly 400 new jobs in the public and private sectors. But in a county of 7,600 people, those jobs had a big impact: they reduced Perry County’s unemployment rate to less than 14 percent this August, from the Depression-like levels of more than 25 percent that it hit last year after its biggest employer, an auto parts factory, moved to Mexico. If the stimulus program ends on schedule next week, Perry County officials said, an estimated 300 people there will lose their jobs — the equivalent of another factory closing. “It’s very scary, because there’s just no work,” said Brian Davis, a 36-year-old father of four, who got a stimulus-subsidized job with the City of Lobelville after he lost his job of 17 years at an auto parts plant that shed hundreds of jobs. Now he faces the prospect of unemployment again. “This was a huge help,” Mr. Davis said. “The way the economy’s been and the way people are struggling, you’re worried about putting food on the table for your children and keeping the electricity on.” The money that pays Mr. Davis’s salary, and the salaries of tens of thousands of other people around the country, will dry up after next Thursday, when the welfare program in the stimulus act that pays the bills for those jobs is set to expire. While the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress want to extend the program, they are meeting stiff resistance from Republicans, many of whom oppose all things stimulus. If the program has encountered hostility from Republicans on Capitol Hill, it has been embraced by some Republican governors who have used it to create jobs in their states. In Mississippi, an innovative program used the money to pay private companies to hire nearly 3,200 workers, and to pay their salaries on a sliding scale so that the employers would end up paying the entire amount after six months. Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, described the initiative there as “welfare to work.” Mr. Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said in an interview last winter that he hoped the program would be extended past this month, since it took so long for the state’s program to get federal approval. The federal program has helped employ nearly 130,000 adults and has paid for nearly an equal number of summer jobs for young people, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy institute in Washington. If the program is allowed to lapse, up to 26,000 workers in Illinois will lose their jobs in the coming weeks, along with 12,000 workers in Pennsylvania and thousands more in other states, according to LaDonna Pavetti, the director of the center’s welfare reform and income support division. “I think that given what we know about the number of people that have been impacted by the recession and the limited jobs available, this has been a lifeline for many families with kids who would otherwise not know when their next rent payment or meal would be coming in,” Dr. Pavetti said. The money came from a pot of $5 billion that was included in the stimulus package as an emergency fund for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the main cash welfare program for families with children. Of the $4.3 billion that has been approved so far, $1.4 billion has gone toward basic assistance, $1.8 billion has been used to help families pay one-time emergency expenses like rent and utility bills, and a little over $1 billion has been used to subsidize jobs. Some economists consider subsidized jobs one of the most cost-effective ways to stimulate employment: there is no overhead or profit, as there is when firms win bids to perform work for the government. Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat who championed the idea of creating jobs in hard-hit Perry County and other places with high unemployment, said he would like to see the program extended because it had a more direct impact than other components of the stimulus act, like infrastructure projects and tax cuts. “I thought we were able to make very efficient use of these funds,” he said in an interview on Friday, “with the money not going off into the ether to create jobs on a spreadsheet, but going where you could go find people who had jobs today who did not have them before.” There are success stories in Tennessee. After the Armstrong Pie Company hired 12 workers with stimulus money, it was able to expand its production, add delivery routes and increase sales, said Dalyn Patterson, who owns the company with her husband, Bert. The business increased enough that she said she expected to keep 11 of the 12 workers. But if the program was supposed to act as a bridge to keep people working until the economy started adding jobs in large numbers again, officials in Tennessee said that it was ending a bit early. And many of the 300 workers who are set to lose their stimulus jobs in Perry County may not be able to collect unemployment benefits. So while people there are grateful for the program, they are nervous about what comes next. “It was very much a Band-Aid,” said Mayor Robby J. Moore of Lobelville, Tenn. “And now the Band-Aid is coming off.”

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009)