Kern County farmers take on oil industry, California

SHAFTER — In this lush pocket of Kern County, where the agriculture and oil industries have long coexisted, Mike Hopkins' almond orchard has become a battlefield in a dispute that extends to the governor's office.

Hopkins is standing up to the oil industry — and Gov. Jerry Brown — by filing a lawsuit against the state to bar energy company Venoco Inc. from drilling an exploratory well on his farm without a full environmental review. Venoco has the mineral rights to Hopkins' 38-acre farm.

Across Kern County, other farmers are waging similar fights. With oil prices booming and energy companies eager to develop new wells, the state has granted oil companies permission to drill on farms without first assessing possible harm to the environment, as called for under the California Environmental Quality Act.

"I want the oil industry to make money," Hopkins said. But not if the drilling damages his farm and livelihood.

The exemptions from CEQA are precisely what Brown sought late in 2011 when he replaced two top officials in the state Conservation Department with appointees who agreed to ease environmental restrictions on energy companies.

In the months afterward, the department granted oil companies 19 exemptions statewide — a six-fold increase from the year before — and 14 energy firms gave more than $1.1 million to the governor's tax initiative, Proposition 30, which voters approved in November.

"I've never seen a CEQA exemption I didn't like," Brown told reporters at a news conference earlier this year.

In Kern, farmers pushed back after the state granted 16 exemptions in California's richest oil county. Four farmers wrote a letter to the state accusing officials of skirting the law by granting environmental waivers. The letter, sent in August by Irvine lawyer Gregory Sanders, asked regulators to explain "an institutional pattern and practice … in which the requirements of CEQA are disregarded" when considering oil permits.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what could go wrong with an oil well," Sanders said in an interview.

State officials and the governor's office declined to respond to questions for this story. But in a written statement to The Times, the Conservation Department's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources defended the general use of exemptions.

The statement said oil projects are evaluated case by case, taking into consideration several factors, including proximity to residential communities and whether sites are in existing oil fields.

Nearly all of the state's exemptions cite the same CEQA provision: The operation would result in only a "minor alteration to land."

Environmental groups challenge that interpretation. They note that the provision is typically applied to small projects. The law gives such examples as painting bicycle lanes on a street, clearing flammable vegetation around a home and hosting a carnival in a parking lot.

"It's difficult for us to see how the exemption would ever apply to a new oil and gas well," said George Torgun, an attorney with Earthjustice, one of several environmental groups that have filed lawsuits against the state.

The energy industry contends the exemptions are needed to avoid lengthy delays, helping the economy in the process.

State data shows that the drive for oil is helping Kern County's recovery. The county is just 3,400 jobs short of matching its peak employment of 239,600, reached in 2007 at the height of the housing boom.

Emails obtained by The Times through a Public Records Act request show that before Brown fired the two Conservation Department officials, oil lobbyists had pushed regulators for exemptions — and appealed to higher-ranking state officials when the requests were denied.

In one case, Elena Miller, the Conservation Department's oil and gas supervisor, complained to her boss that AERA Energy had cleared land for well construction and built roads before doing a CEQA study.

"We can presume that little critters lived in that vegetation," she wrote. "This is their environmental program, tear it up, build a road, and then hire a (CEQA) consultant."

Brown fired Miller, saying she and others had needlessly slowed the permit process.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 2

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Young down by boardwalk for benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn’t see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.

Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross‘ storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.

People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.

“I couldn’t see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual,” he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.

Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $ 75 and $ 150, although Young notes there’s no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.

Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York’s Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there’s enough star power there, he said.

“It wasn’t going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference,” he said.

Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to “anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play.”

It’s hard to resist wondering whether Young’s epic “Like a Hurricane” will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.

“Anything’s possible,” Young said. “We have the equipment.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

TV Networks Say DVRs and Weak Shows Explain Low Ratings

If you ask several of the top programmers in network television what is going wrong with their ratings this season, they offer a litany of answers: jarring schedule disruptions from debates, election night and Hurricane Sandy, for instance, as well as the ever-increasing defections toward delayed viewing and away from the nightly schedules that have defined network prime time since the days of radio.

The numbers tell the tale. With seven days of delayed viewing factored in, ABC is down 7 percent in the audience preferred by most advertisers, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49; CBS is down 18 percent; and Fox Broadcasting is down an eye-popping 26 percent. NBC is the only network bucking the trend, with its audience up 23 percent in that category.

“We are definitely in a transition period,” said Paul Lee, president of ABC’s entertainment group, citing the heavy shift toward reliance on DVRs and video on demand to create personalized viewing schedules.

Another factor also seems to have been at work this fall: disappointing new shows.

“The point the networks make is that the DVR is revolutionizing viewing,” said Brad Adgate, director of research for Horizon Media, a media buying company. “But that is masking the fact that the new shows they put on this fall just aren’t that good. There are better shows on cable.”

The lack of excitement this fall came in stark contrast to a year ago, when a host of new series broke through as hits: “Two Broke Girls” on CBS, “New Girl” on Fox, “Once Upon a Time” on ABC and many others. ABC had an especially fruitful year, bringing back six new series for second seasons.

This season, only one new series, the NBC drama “Revolution,” has cracked the top 30 programs among those 18-to-49 viewers.

Mr. Lee noted that “there is always an ebb and flow” to seasons, with one marked by strong newcomers followed by another filled with misses, and midyear shows that often reverse the fall trend.

Kevin Reilly, chairman of entertainment for Fox, also stressed that the history of television has been marked by what he called “flat years” when the new selections largely didn’t pan out. “I think this is a flat year,” he said.

Another top network executive, Kelly Kahl, the chief scheduler for CBS, suggested that the season may be showing signs of settling down after the disruptions of the fall, citing stabilized performances for CBS’s shows in recent weeks. But he, too, stressed that networks have to recalculate the meaning of success with “people adjusting to new ways of watching television.”

He pointed to CBS’s growing success in adding viewers from DVR recording, with no fewer than eight CBS shows adding more than three million viewers after a week of delayed viewing is counted. (Only one of those, the drama “Elementary,” is a new show.)

A few new shows gained favorable reviews but failed to attract adoring audiences. ABC’s “Nashville,” despite strong critical backing, has struggled to build wide audiences, winning support among young women but not with older viewers — perhaps, Mr. Lee said, because older viewers “have not gotten past the barrier of country music.”

A Fox comedy, “The Mindy Project,” won critical praise, but has ratings that, in most recent years, would have doomed it in two weeks. But it at least has a core audience of young women watching, and as with “Nashville,” in this season’s environment, that has been enough for survival.

“Usually you are able to say the show was sampled and rejected,” Mr. Reilly said. “Almost none of these new shows were even sampled.”

The need to find some way to carve out space on viewers’ recording machines has been an added factor preoccupying the programmers’ minds. “There is a real pressure to make sure this is appointment television,” Mr. Lee said, “television that has a hook.”

Robert Greenblatt, the top entertainment executive at NBC, reinforced that point. “The bigger the hook the better,” he said.

But Mr. Lee said this approach could be contradictory. “On the one hand,” he said, “you need it to have the fierce urgency of now, so you want to watch it live. But on the other hand, you want it to be attractive enough for people to want to put it on their DVRs.”

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Boy Scouts' opposition to background checks let pedophiles in

Amid reports of widespread sexual abuse of children in the late 1980s, several leading youth organizations began conducting criminal background checks of volunteers and staff members.

Big Brothers Big Sisters ordered the checks for all volunteers starting in 1986. Boys and Girls Clubs of America recommended their use the same year.

One of the nation's oldest and largest youth groups, however, was opposed — the Boy Scouts of America.

FULL COVERAGE: Inside the Boy Scouts' "perversion files"

Scouting officials argued that background checks would cost too much, scare away volunteers and provide a false sense of security. They successfully lobbied to kill state legislation that would have mandated FBI fingerprint screening.

While touting their efforts to protect children, the Scouts for years resisted one of the most basic tools for preventing abuse. The result: The organization let in hundreds of men with criminal histories of child molestation, many of whom went on to abuse more children, according to a Times analysis of the Scouts' confidential abuse files.

Scouting did not require criminal background checks for all volunteers until 2008 — despite calls from parents and staff who said its vetting system didn't work.

In 1989, a Scout committee chairman in St. Paul, Minn., decried the organization's "half-hearted" screening in a letter to headquarters.

"BSA is only creating an illusion of performing what they claim," K. Russell Sias wrote to Scout Chief Executive Ben Love. "It becomes quite clear that BSA is more concerned in 'passing the buck' than in accepting responsibility for those who are its adult leaders."

That same year, a Las Vegas scoutmaster with a criminal history of exposing himself to boys was arrested for sexually abusing a 12-year-old Scout. One parent said casinos did a better job of screening workers.

"The black eye which scouting has suffered in this … could easily have been avoided if the council had taken the simple expedient of doing a background investigation," the parent wrote to Scouting officials.

From 1985 to 1991 — when the detailed files obtained by The Times end — the Boy Scouts admitted more than 230 men with previous arrests or convictions for sex crimes against children, the analysis found.

The men were accused of molesting nearly 400 boys while in Scouting. They accounted for one in six of those expelled for alleged abuse during those years.

Scouting officials declined to be interviewed but said in a prepared statement that they have enhanced their policies over the years and tried "to ensure we are in line with and, where possible, ahead of society's knowledge of abuse and best practices for prevention."

"Numerous independent experts have recognized that our programs for protecting Scouts from abuse are among the best in the youth-serving community," it said.

The Scouts' past handling of child sexual abuse has come under increased scrutiny since October, after the court-ordered release of hundreds of confidential files dating back decades. The Times earlier obtained and analyzed a larger and more recent set of files — about 1,900 dossiers opened from 1970 to 1991.

The records, dubbed the "perversion files" by Scouting officials, have been a key tool for nearly a century, intended to keep out men expelled for alleged abuse.

The files also offer a detailed record of the system's failures. The Times reported in August that from 1970 to 1991 dozens of men previously expelled had slipped back into the program, only to be accused of molesting again. The Times later reported that Scouting officials failed to report hundreds of alleged abusers to police and often hid the allegations from parents and the public.

The organization has fought in court to prevent the release of more recent files, making it impossible to determine how many men with criminal histories were caught in the organization after 1991.

Court records and news accounts, however, show that convicted molesters continued to find new victims in Scouting.

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Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers

Angelina Jolie extends her reputation as filmdom’s most compelling ass-kicker, Female Division, when Salt opens Friday. Midway through a summer freighted with testosterone, Jolie’s lithe Agent Salt is a potent reminder of the power of feminine fighters.

A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that’s changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the "Where Are the Action Chicks?" panel Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con International.

"Compare the original Predator to this summer’s Predators," she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The original film was a complete boy’s club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time."

The rise of the female fighter will be addressed at no fewer than three other female-dominated panels at this year’s Comic-Con (Thursday’s “Divas and Golden Lassoes: The LGBT Obsession with Super Heroines” and Friday’s “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” and “Women Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines,” which features Fringe’s Anna Torv and V’s Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Here’s a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who’ve relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture.

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NBC sets premiere date for “Do No Harm” drama

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – NBC will premiere its new drama “Do No Harm” at 10 p.m. on January 31, NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said Friday.

The premiere date takes advantage of the one-hour series finale of “30 Rock,” which will air at 8 p.m. on that same night.

“Do No Harm” stars “Rescue Me” alum Steven Pasquale as Dr. Jason Cole, a neurosurgeon whose life is going swimmingly until his dangerous alter-ego emerges, hell-bent on creating havoc on Cole and those around him.

“January 31 will be a special night as one classic series will mark its finale with a great hour-long send-off episode while a promising new drama will make its debut on Thursdays,” Greenblatt said. “‘30 Rock’ is acclaimed as a legendary comedy and we will see a truly memorable and fitting last episode. In ‘Do No Harm,’ viewers will have a unique new dramatic storyline with an exciting new star in Steven Pasquale that takes them into dark and uncharted territory.”

To accommodate “Do No Harm,” “Rock Center With Brian Williams” will move to Fridays at 10 p.m., following “Dateline,” beginning February 8.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read More..

L.A. County seeing high-risk offenders entering its probation system

One year into California's state prison realignment program, Los Angeles County is seeing an unexpected number of high-risk offenders coming into its probation system, including some with a history of severe mental illness.

It remains unclear whether realignment — which shifted responsibility for some nonviolent offenders from prisons to county jails and from state parole to county probation — is having an effect on crime rates. But a report by a county advisory body found that a majority of state prison inmates who have been released to county probation are at a high risk of reoffending.

In the first year of the new system, which took effect in October 2011, 11,136 offenders were released from state prison to Los Angeles County probation. Of those who reported to probation for assessment, 59% were classed as high risk, 40% as medium risk and only 1% as low risk.

The department uses probationers' criminal history and other factors to determine the risk that they will commit new crimes and the resources required to supervise them.

Deputy Chief Reaver Bingham said the department originally projected that 50% of the offenders coming out of state prison would fall into the high-risk category.

And a handful of people previously classified as mentally disordered offenders — people considered dangerous because of mental illness — were downgraded or "decertified" while in state hospitals, making them eligible for county supervision, according to the report issued Thursday by the Countywide Criminal Justice Coordination Committee.

County officials said that runs contrary to the spirit of realignment, which was pitched as a money-saving measure for the state that would transfer low-level offenders to less costly county supervision. The committee's report said the decertified mentally disordered offenders "present high public safety risk, present significant placement issues, and consume high levels of resources."

Jeffrey Callison, a spokesman with the state corrections department, said the courts, not the department, determine who is decertified and that under the current law, people not classified as mentally disordered who are eligible for realignment are required to go to county supervision.

"It's not for me to say that a given county does or doesn't have the resources to supervise a person who has been decertified," he said.

The committee's report recommended that the county seek legislation to shift back to the state responsibility for probationers formerly designated as mentally disordered offenders as well as "medically fragile" people and prisoners serving long sentences in county jail.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

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