E-Book Price War Has Yet to Arrive

Thor Swift for The New York Times

A Google e-reader is displayed at a bookstore. Sales of e-books for the devices have slowed this year.

Right about now, just as millions of e-readers and tablets are being slipped under Christmas trees, there was supposed to be a ferocious price war over e-books.

Last spring, the Justice Department sued five major publishers and Apple on e-book price-fixing charges. The case was a major victory for Amazon, and afterward there were widespread expectations — fueled by Amazon — that the price of e-books would plunge.

The most extreme outcome went like this: Digital versions of big books selling for $9.99 or less would give Amazon complete domination over the e-book market. As sales zoomed upward, even greater numbers of consumers would abandon physical books. The major publishers and traditional bookstores were contemplating a future that would pass them by.

But doomsday has not arrived, at least not yet. As four of the publishers have entered into settlements with regulators and revised the way they sell e-books, prices have selectively fallen but not as broadly or drastically as anticipated.

The $10 floor that publishers fought so hard to maintain for popular new novels is largely intact. Amazon, for instance, is selling Michael Connelly’s new mystery, “The Black Box,” for $12.74. New best sellers by David Baldacci and James Patterson cost just over $11.

One big reason for the lack of fireworks is that the triumph of e-books over their physical brethren is not happening quite as fast as forecast.

“The e-book market isn’t growing at the caffeinated level it was,” said Michael Norris, a Simba Information analyst who follows the publishing industry. “Even retailers like Amazon have to be wondering, how far can we go — or should we go — to make our prices lower than the other guys if it’s not helping us with market share?”

Adult e-book sales through August were up 34 percent from 2011, an impressive rate of growth if you forget that sales have doubled every year for the last four years. And there have been more recent signs of a market pausing for breath.

Macmillan, the only publisher that has not settled with the Justice Department, said last week as part of a statement from John Sargent, its chief executive, that “our e-book business has been softer of late, particularly for the last few weeks, even as the number of reading devices continues to grow.” His laconic conclusion: “Interesting.”

Mr. Norris said Simba, which regularly surveys e-book buyers, has been noticing what it calls “commitment to content” issues.

“A lot of these e-book consumers aren’t behaving like lab rats at a feeder bar,” the analyst said. “We have found that at any given time about a third of e-book users haven’t bought a single title in the last 12 months. I have a feeling it is the digital equivalent of the ‘overloaded night stand’ effect; someone isn’t going to buy any more books until they make a dent in reading the ones they have already acquired.”

Another, more counterintuitive possibility is that the 2011 demise of Borders, the second-biggest chain, dealt a surprising blow to the e-book industry. Readers could no longer see what they wanted to go home and order. “The print industry has been aiding and assisting the e-book industry since the beginning,” Mr. Norris said.

It is possible that Amazon, which controls about 60 percent of the e-book market, is merely holding back with price cuts for the right moment. The next few weeks are when e-book sales traditionally take a big jump, as all those newly received devices are loaded up with content.

Amazon declined to comment beyond saying, “We have lowered prices for customers from the prices publishers set on a broad assortment of Kindle books.” Barnes & Noble declined to comment on its pricing strategy.

The question of the proper price for e-books has shadowed the industry ever since Amazon introduced the Kindle in late 2007 and created the first truly popular portable reading device. Amazon had a natural impulse to build a market and was an aggressive retailer in any case, so it took best sellers that cost $25 in independent bookstores and sold them for $9.99 as e-books. Consumers liked that. E-book adoption soared.

Read More..

Meat company owner sues USDA for right to slaughter horses

Rick de los Santos wants to reopen an animal slaughter business that's been banned in the U.S. for years. Along the way, he's also opened a can of worms.

The Roswell, N.M., meat company owner sued the federal government last week, alleging that officials ignored his application to resume domestic horse slaughter for food because the practice had become an emotional political issue throughout the West.

After waiting a year for permits, De los Santos, 52, says he's using the courts to force the U.S. Department of Agriculture to resume inspections necessary to open what would be the nation's first new horse slaughterhouse since 2007.

"I've submitted all the paperwork and have been told all along 'Oh, it won't be long now,'" said De los Santos, who owns Valley Meat Co. "I followed all their guidelines. I put more than $100,000 in upgrades and additions on my facilities to handle equine slaughter. And then the government comes back and tells me, 'We can't give you the permits. This horse issue has turned into a political game.'

"So what else do you do? I figured it was time to go to court."

The slaughterhouse owner, whose business had been slaughtering cattle, is also suing the Humane Society of the United States, Front Range Equine Rescue and Animal Protection of New Mexico, accusing those groups of defamation and causing loss of income during the dispute.

The dispute over killing horses has raged for years. Equine advocates have accused the Bureau of Land Management of failing to protect tens of thousands of mustangs that wander government-owned land in 10 Western states. Many of the animals are corralled each year and sent to long-term holding facilities. And reports surfaced this fall that the BLM was knowingly selling wild horses for slaughter, an outcome banned annually by Congress. The agency is investigating the claim.

In 2007, the last three domestic slaughterhouses in the United States were closed. Since then, unwanted domestic animals have been shipped to Mexico and Canada for slaughter.

Many animal protection groups and public officials were outraged at the idea of resuming domestic horse slaughter, including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, who has opposed the plan.

Many animal advocates says horse slaughter has no business in the U.S.

"Everything is wrong with this idea," said Sally Summers, founder of Horse Power, a Nevada-based equine advocacy group. "The economy has done just fine without this type of slaughter. And these plants are toxic to the community. They hurt these towns; they don't help them."

Summers said that many of the drugs that U.S. owners give their horses to ensure longevity and peak performance are carcinogenic. "This stuff gets into the water table through the drains," she said. "It's a nightmare. This man is smoking a pipe and I don't know what's in it."

The USDA declined to comment last week on the pending litigation. The agency has until January to respond to the suit, filed in federal court in late October.

De los Santos says his lawsuit will show that a recent "marked change in cooperation" by the USDA is due to pressure the government is receiving on the horse issue.

Some support a return to domestic horse slaughter. The American Quarter Horse Assn. says a 2011 report from the federal Government Accountability Office shows horse abuse and abandonment have been increasing since Congress essentially banned horse slaughter by cutting funding for USDA inspection programs in 2006.

The number of U.S. horses sent to other countries for slaughter has nearly tripled since domestic horse slaughter ceased. Most animal advocacy groups agree that some of the worst abuse occurs in the slaughter pipeline that often takes horses to inhumane facilities in Mexico.

Last year, 68,429 horses were shipped to Mexico and 64,652 to Canada, according to USDA statistics compiled by the Equine Welfare Alliance, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending horse slaughter. That compares with total exports of 37,884 of the animals in 2006.

De los Santos says he is tired of sitting in southern New Mexico and watching countless truckloads of horses en route to Mexico for slaughter.

"I've seen 130,000 horses a year on their way to Mexico — they go right through our backyard — and I wanted to tap into the market," he said. "I could have hired 100 people by now. Everyone in our community agrees we need this type of service. And I'm tired of waiting."

De los Santos says he is ready to start killing horses humanely.

"Everything that has four legs that walks can be slaughtered the same way, but we're ready to do this humanely," he said. "We've upgraded our knocking chutes for giving them that lethal hit."

He says he can't understand why everyone is so upset. Americans kill cows; why not horses?

"My wife says horse is on the menu all over Europe, but the moment you mention horse slaughter in the U.S., you've got a problem," he says.

john.glionna@latimes.com

Read More..

Terra/MODIS Color Image of Copahue Eruption Plume Across South America

For the first time since 2000, Copahue is erupting, sending an ash plume across southern South America. So far, the eruption is following the same patterns as the activity that ran from July to October 2000. That activity started with phreatic (water-driven) explosions, so it will be interesting to see if this eruption has new juvenile magma involved. Earlier this year, a study of the summit crater lake suggested new magma was intruding under Copahue and the SERNAGEOMIN report mentioned. that seismicity was rising before today’s eruption.

I grabbed the brand new Terra/MODIS imagery for South America and the plume from the Copahue was glorious – stretching over 350 km across Argentina to the east of the volcano. For a sense of scale on the image, the distance between Copahue and the Embalse los Barreales is ~225 km. The plume itself has been reported to be over 9.5 km / 30,000 feet tall.

UPDATE 12/22 5 PM EST: Eruptions reader Kirby pointed me to the SERNAGEOMIN webcam pointed at Copahue — check out the eruption live!

UPDATE 12/22 7 PM EST: ONEMI has not called for any evacuations on the Chilean side of Copahue — this article also has a nice gallery of pictures from the eruption as well.

Check out the original post with more details.

Erik Klemetti is an assistant professor of Geosciences at Denison University. His passion in geology is volcanoes, and he has studied them all over the world. You can follow Erik on Twitter, where you'll get volcano news and the occasional baseball comment.

Read more by Erik Klemetti

Follow @eruptionsblog on Twitter.

Read More..

Reports: Rolling Stones guitarist Wood ties knot

LONDON (AP) — Two British newspapers say Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has married his fiancee Sally Humphreys at a ceremony at London‘s Dorchester Hotel.

The Sun and the Daily Mirror carried photographs of the 65-year-old rocker with a pale boutonniere and a dark blue suit, and his 34-year-old bride in a traditional white gown and a clutch of matching white flowers.

The Sun quoted Wood as saying “I’m feeling great” as he and his bride kissed and posed for pictures outside the exclusive hotel in London’s upscale Mayfair district.

The newspapers said the guests included singer Rod Stewart and his wife Penny Lancaster as well as ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife Nancy Shevell.

A call and an email to Wood’s U.S.-based agent weren’t immediately returned Saturday.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Reports: Rolling Stones guitarist Wood ties knot
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

Genetic Gamble : Drugs Aim to Make Several Types of Cancer Self-Destruct

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

Dr. Donald Bergstrom is a cancer specialist at Sanofi, one of three companies working on a drug to restore a tendency of damaged cells to self-destruct.

For the first time ever, three pharmaceutical companies are poised to test whether new drugs can work against a wide range of cancers independently of where they originated — breast, prostate, liver, lung. The drugs go after an aberration involving a cancer gene fundamental to tumor growth. Many scientists see this as the beginning of a new genetic age in cancer research.

Great uncertainties remain, but such drugs could mean new treatments for rare, neglected cancers, as well as common ones. Merck, Roche and Sanofi are racing to develop their own versions of a drug they hope will restore a mechanism that normally makes badly damaged cells self-destruct and could potentially be used against half of all cancers.

No pharmaceutical company has ever conducted a major clinical trial of a drug in patients who have many different kinds of cancer, researchers and federal regulators say. “This is a taste of the future in cancer drug development,” said Dr. Otis Webb Brawley, the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society. “I expect the organ from which the cancer came from will be less important in the future and the molecular target more important,” he added.

And this has major implications for cancer philanthropy, experts say. Advocacy groups should shift from fund-raising for particular cancers to pushing for research aimed at many kinds of cancer at once, Dr. Brawley said. John Walter, the chief executive officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, concurred, saying that by pooling forces “our strength can be leveraged.”

At the heart of this search for new cancer drugs are patients like Joe Bellino, who was a post office clerk until his cancer made him too sick to work. Seven years ago, he went into the hospital for hernia surgery, only to learn he had liposarcoma, a rare cancer of fat cells. A large tumor was wrapped around a cord that connects the testicle to the abdomen. “I was shocked,” he said in an interview this summer.

Companies have long ignored liposarcoma, seeing no market for drugs to treat a cancer that strikes so few. But it is ideal for testing Sanofi’s drug because the tumors nearly always have the exact genetic problem the drug was meant to attack — a fusion of two large proteins. If the drug works, it should bring these raging cancers to a halt. Then Sanofi would test the drug on a broad range of cancers with a similar genetic alteration. But if the drug fails against liposarcoma, Sanofi will reluctantly admit defeat.

“For us, this is a go/no-go situation,” said Laurent Debussche, a Sanofi scientist who leads the company’s research on the drug.

The genetic alteration the drug targets has tantalized researchers for decades. Normal healthy cells have a mechanism that tells them to die if their DNA is too badly damaged to repair. Cancer cells have grotesquely damaged DNA, so ordinarily they would self-destruct. A protein known as p53 that Dr. Gary Gilliland of Merck calls the cell’s angel of death normally sets things in motion. But cancer cells disable p53, either directly, with a mutation, or indirectly, by attaching the p53 protein to another cellular protein that blocks it. The dream of cancer researchers has long been to reanimate p53 in cancer cells so they will die on their own.

The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”

Companies began chasing a drug to restore p53 in cells where it was disabled by mutations. But while scientists know how to block genes, they have not figured out how to add or restore them. Researchers tried gene therapy, adding good copies of the p53 gene to cancer cells. That did not work.

Then, instead of going after mutated p53 genes, they went after half of cancers that used the alternative route to disable p53, blocking it by attaching it to a protein known as MDM2. When the two proteins stick together, the p53 protein no longer functions. Maybe, researchers thought, they could find a molecule to wedge itself between the two proteins and pry them apart.

The problem was that both proteins are huge and cling tightly to each other. Drug molecules are typically tiny. How could they find one that could separate these two bruisers, like a referee at a boxing match?

In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.

But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.

Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.

At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.

The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.

Read More..

Flawed data stall California's 911 upgrades

A three-year effort by California to improve 911 emergency service has been stymied by flawed data and aging computers at local fire departments and rescue agencies across the state, a Times investigation has found.

Since 2009, the state Emergency Medical Services Authority has been seeking to centralize reports on millions of emergency medical responses, a project that officials see as critical to improving life-saving practices.

State officials hoped to capture information from the moment dispatchers answer a call until the victim is transferred to a hospital. The program would for the first time give public officials, medical researchers and regulators the ability to compare response times and patient treatment across local jurisdictions.

But the project has floundered because many fire departments and ambulance operations have been unable to provide usable information.

One problem is that fire departments report basic information inconsistently, including how long it takes them to reach victims. Some begin counting the second a 911 call is answered. Others, including the Los Angeles Fire Department, have started the clock when rescue crews are alerted at fire stations.

Moreover, nearly half of the state's 32 regional emergency medical agencies have failed to contribute reports to the system, officials said. And many of those who do file reports use paper records.

The shortcomings, officials and experts said, underscore how fire agencies lag behind police departments and the private sector in using technology to better manage and evaluate their performance.

"There's been a lot of benign neglect in the fire service as far as collecting data," said Robert Upson, a Connecticut fire marshal who has analyzed data for a nationwide group that sets performance standards for fire departments.

"There's so much sloppiness in recording data. It's just built into the system."

Similar troubles have fueled a months-long controversy over faulty response time data at the Los Angeles Fire Department. In March, top commanders admitted that the department had repeatedly published reports overstating how fast rescuers reached victims in need of help. The flawed reports have been blamed on the use of unqualified firefighters to analyze data and outdated computer systems.

In an effort to improve such data, California officials launched their program to collect rich, comparable details on medical emergencies statewide. Incident reports were to be gathered by regional regulatory agencies and forwarded to the state.

But three years and about $1.6 million later, the voluntary project is plagued by lack of participation, money problems and inconsistent information. The root of the problem is that some agencies rely on outmoded, "home-brewed" computer systems, said Tom McGinnis, the state official overseeing the project.

"We can't compare apples to apples. We compare apples to oranges and peaches," McGinnis said.

The state isn't forcing cash-strapped local agencies to participate because doing so would require many to replace computer systems, McGinnis said. "Really what it comes down to is money," he said.

Some experts say the state program won't be able to deliver on its promise until reporting standards are clarified and participation is mandatory.

"It should become a requirement tomorrow," said Bruce Wagner, the top administrator for the emergency medical services agency in Sacramento County.

His agency is among those that have not provided data to the state. That's because fire departments and ambulance firms under his jurisdiction are hesitant to spend time and money gathering records if they are not required to do so, Wagner said.

"It's hard for us to tell them they are going to incur additional costs if it's not mandated," he told The Times.

Los Angeles County, where a third of the state's 911 medical rescues take place, is a year behind in processing performance information because 28 of the county's 31 fire departments submit paper reports, said Cathy Chidester, the local oversight agency's top executive. Voluminous pages of information must be individually scanned into electronic files or manually typed into a county computer system.

"It's like sweeping sand off the beach," Chidester said.

Of the county's three largest fire departments — Los Angeles city, Los Angeles County and Long Beach — only the LAFD collects medical records electronically.

The county Fire Department has not filed reports on more than 300,000 incidents over the last two years because budget cuts eliminated employees working on the records, officials said. Next year, the agency is launching a test program in which paramedics will use iPads to create electronic reports, Chief Deputy Mike Metro said.

The state data project, known as CEMSIS, short for California Emergency Medical Services Information System, has also struggled for funding. It began as a $240,000-a-year demonstration project using federal grants and philanthropic donations. But no permanent funding has been secured.

Where possible, officials are attempting to use the partial records they have compiled for research. But thus far, they haven't been able to answer fundamental questions, including how different agencies' 911 response times compare, McGinnis said.

Ideally, McGinnis said, regulators could use the database to compare "the entire spectrum" of emergency medical care in California. "I want everybody to participate and see what we're doing statewide," he said.

Detailed data could improve understanding of what works best in the field. For example, researchers could examine how often rescuers are able to restore heartbeats after arriving on the scene, a key step in increasing cardiac-arrest survival rates, said Dr. Marc Eckstein, the medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

"You have to really drill down to make sure we are talking about the right things," he said.

Slipping response times at the LAFD were only documented when outside experts, the city controller and The Times dug into the department's data. A series of Times reports found breakdowns and delays in processing 911 calls, dispatching units and summoning the nearest medical rescuers from neighboring jurisdictions.

Los Angeles Fire Commissioner Alan Skobin, who is overseeing a task force charged with overhauling the LAFD's data management, said programs such as California's fledgling 911 records system could help his agency compare its performance to other departments and improve service.

"There's a benefit to looking outside," Skobin said. "That's something the LAFD has to do."

Full coverage: Life on the line, 911 breakdowns at LAFD

Map: How fast is LAFD where you live?

Download: Open-source maps of California's emergency medical agencies

ben.welsh@latimes.com

robert.lopez@latimes.com

Read More..

Digital Social Visibility: How Facebook Gifts Change Our Choices

Facebook Gifts rolled out after a two-month beta last week, seamlessly melding social with shopping. Not to be outdone, Amazon recently released its Friends and Family Gifting option with the same kind of social gifting visibility.

For Facebook, another puzzle piece of its business model falls into place. For users, gift giving becomes by default a public rather than private activity: People can now fluidly and visibly give their friends holiday presents ranging from iTunes cards to Chandon champagne.

For our culture, however, an era of subtlety and “secret” Santa gives way to the era of reality TV. In many ways social gifting shrouds purchasing in a cloak of generosity, since the social streaming context removes the gaucheness of sharing these gifts. Yet these new social features also signal a culture where broadcasting our behaviors – whether gifting or other digitally shared activities – becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out, though: It changes the choices we make, both online and offline.

Lauren Rhue is a doctoral candidate and Arun Sundararajan (@digitalarun) is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where they conduct research about how digital technologies transform business and society. 

How so? Our research and observations here are based on analyzing visibility behaviors across a range of social platforms over the last three years. Our data includes over 10,000 users who shared more than a million purchases on Blippy across two years, as well as a recent sample of over 1,000 Pinterest users with more than 200,000 connections and close to a million re-pins.

I Anticipate, Therefore I Change

Social influence always seemed to flow from the person who makes the choice, to the people who observe it. But digital visibility reverses the direction and creates a new form of anticipatory influence: What we do is now influenced by the peers who observe us.

We anticipate how people might perceive us or react, and those anticipatory effects change our choices.

Facebook Gifts, for example, might make us think twice about and possibly revise our shopping lists. Because our gifts aren’t just between us and our loved ones anymore: They become part of our social Timelines, our online personas. They’re the future digital ghosts of our Christmas pasts.

Social psychologists have long documented how introducing passive audience observers into situations affects athletic performance, productivity, decision times, memory recall, and even the sunny-ness of our smiles. Interestingly, modifying what one does in response to an audience isn’t simply a socially learned human trait: Similar behavior has also been recognized in non-human species ranging from Budgerigars birds to peacocks to Siamese fighting fish.

So these audience effects are primal; they’re deeply ingrained in who we are. The underlying behavior we’re witnessing now isn’t new. Rather, social technologies are creating a broader and more visible digital public persona by letting us choose our audiences; expanding the audience beyond the individual or an intimate few; making the audience persistent; and transcending the constraints of space and time.

Consider maverick economist Thorsten Veblen‘s theory of conspicuous consumption, which formalized the idea that we make some of our purchases – particularly luxury goods – to advertise economic power and gain social status. Velben wrote his masterpiece “The Theory of the Leisure Class” over a century ago, when we could not transport our real-world social networks across all of our purchasing, gifting, and other consuming sites and moments.

But we no longer need physical and temporal co-location to realize the benefits of being conspicuous. We can now name-drop our Prada bag purchase or dinner at Masa instantly via a data trail or an Instagram picture … or through a Facebook gift in our stream.

Our audience might not be online when we do this, but they’ll probably see it tomorrow, next week, or maybe even next year.

Are You There, Audience? It’s Me, Social

Of course, the audience only matters if it’s actually there. But we don’t really know how many people see what we post on Facebook, which friends are online when, or what fraction of daily incoming tweets our followers actually notice.

This audience uncertainty is due to the absence of any real surroundings, environmental factors, and tactile cues for situating our digital visibility. These are the kinds of familiar cues that, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, shape our presentation in face-to-face settings.

One way of dealing with this audience uncertainty is to picture the group toward which we aim our shares, from whom we seek to maximize approval (or minimize disapproval): our imagined audience. When you buy your favorite employee a cool Facebook gift this holiday, it’s not just the gift recipient audience you’re playing to – you’re also orienting your largesse to other colleagues and maybe your boss too.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out: It changes the choices we make.

The trouble is, you might get the audience wrong. Your audience might instead end up being your spouse or your employee’s significant other, who could misinterpret the intent of your gift. The fissure between imagined and realized audiences can lead to conflict or the feeling that our privacy has been compromised — even though our intent was social.

This is an example of context collapse: facing multiple and unknown contexts for each of our online shares. It’s the result of having a variety of relationships (including those whittled down to just “Facebook friendships”) with competing social norms on the same platform, along with the online data trails that persist long after we leave them.

Digital social visibility is therefore a double-edged sword: As we transcend the boundaries of physical space and time, we also give up the familiar anchors and cues provided in our face-to-face interactions.

How then do people deal with context collapse? By focusing on the small fraction of our network that does provide visible acknowledgement or cues in the form of likes, re-pins, and votes.

Context collapse is the result of having a variety of relationships with competing social norms on the same platform

The problem is that this approach, however, is that it also changes the products we buy. Our research reveals that people buy more in the categories of products for which they get more feedback.

We’re just beginning to understand the phenomenon of image management as commerce and networks merge. The implications are many: for advertising (how should businesses surface choices for gifting?), for measuring influence (Klout doesn’t even begin to capture tacit persuasiveness and cues), for privacy (losing contextual integrity of our shares); and more.

But for us as individuals, the implications go beyond just buying and gifting. Luxury purchases are only one aspect of conspicuous consumption; individual taste-based goods and services are another. You’ll soon – if you’re not already – spend more time hanging out at hip restaurants or rock concerts, monster car rallies or museums, benefit dinners or book readings. Not just because you want to … but because you’ll detract from your digital visible image if you don’t.

Read More..

‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Hoofs It Into a 10th Season

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Put on your dancing shoes; “So You Think You Can Dance” has been given a 10th season, Fox said Thursday.

Auditions for the upcoming season will begin January 18 in Austin, Texas, before moving on to Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Memphis.

Fox’s president of alternative programming Mike Darnell praised “SYTYCD” creator Nigel Lythgoe in announcing the renewal.

“I couldn’t be more proud of the amazing work that Nigel and the entire ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ team has done over the past nine seasons,” Darnell said. “This show is truly one of the most compelling series on television and I can’t wait to bring it back for Season 10.”

Last season, the series underwent a format shakeup after Fox cut the show from two nights a week to one, eliminating the results shows.

Fox did not say when the new season of “So You Think You Can Dance” will premiere.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Hoofs It Into a 10th Season
Rating:
100%

based on 99998 ratings.
5 user reviews.
Author: Fluser SeoLink
Thanks for visiting the blog, If any criticism and suggestions please leave a comment

Read More..

Your Money: Walking the Tightrope on Mental Health Coverage

Insurance covers more mental health care than many people may realize, and more people will soon have the kind of health insurance that does so. But coverage goes only so far when there aren’t enough practitioners who accept it — or there aren’t any nearby, or they aren’t taking any new patients.

In the days after the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, parents and politicians took to the airwaves to make broad-based proclamations about the sorry state of mental health care in America. But a closer look reveals a more nuanced view, with a great deal of recent legislative progress as well as plenty of infuriating coverage gaps.

The stakes in any census of mental health insurance coverage are high given how many people are suffering. Twenty-six percent of adults experience a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, and 6 percent of all adults experience a seriously debilitating mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Twenty-one percent of teenagers experience a severe emotional disturbance between the ages of 13 and 18.

According to this year’s Society for Human Resource Management survey of 550 employers of all sizes, including nonprofits and government entities, 85 percent offer at least some mental health insurance coverage. A 2009 Mercer survey found that 84 percent of employers with more than 500 employees covered both in-network and out-of-network mental health and substance abuse treatments.

For now, some people who have no health insurance or who buy it on their own may avoid purchasing mental health coverage too, or may avoid seeking treatment for things like addiction or depression. This happens for many of the same reasons that there has historically been less mental health coverage than there has been for other illnesses. The earliest objections among insurance providers and employers had to do with whether mental disorders existed at all, according to Howard Goldman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland school of medicine. Then there were questions about whether treatment actually worked. Next, concerns arose over cost and how often people would avail themselves of costly mental health treatments.

But a subset of adults who have good insurance coverage still avoid treatment for mental illness to this day, according to Edward A. Kaplan, senior vice president and national practice leader for the Segal Company, a benefits consultant that works with many unions. “Culturally, a lot of people driving trucks don’t believe in it and suffer through,” he said. “And a lot of transport unions don’t trust employers and think they will look at it and use it to retaliate against the workers.”

For many of the people who do have mental health coverage, there is now a bit more of it at a lower cost than there might have been five years ago, even if mental health insurance over all remains much less generous than it was many years ago when employees did not pay as much out of pocket. That’s because a 2008 federal law requires employers with more than 50 employees that do offer mental health coverage to have no more restrictions than there are for physical injuries or surgery, and no higher costs.

This so-called parity bill now applies to a crucial provision of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Insurance plans in the exchanges that will offer health coverage to millions of uninsured individuals starting in 2014 must cover many items and services, including mental health disorders and substance abuse.

The combination of parity and expanded care is crucial, according to Anthony Wright, the executive director of Health Access, a consumer advocacy organization in California. After all, parity doesn’t do much good if the mental health coverage need only be equivalent to a meager health insurance plan that covers very little.

Then again, what good is parity in mental health insurance if you can’t get the treatment you need? Plenty of psychiatrists in private practice accept no insurance at all, though it is not clear how many; their professional organizations claim to have no recent or decent data on the percentage of people in private practice who take cash on the barrelhead, write people a receipt and send them off to their insurance company to request out-of-network reimbursement if they have any at all.

According to a 2008 American Psychological Association survey, 85 percent of the 2,200 respondents who said they worked at least part time in private practice received at least some third-party payments for their services. That doesn’t mean they take your insurance, though.

Nor does it guarantee that they or other mental health practitioners are anywhere near you or have any imminent openings for appointments. This can be a challenge for people who live far from major cities or big medical centers and need treatment for mental illnesses like severe depression or schizophrenia or disorders like autism.

But it is a particular problem for parents of autistic children who need specialized treatment that is relatively new or that not many people are trained to do. Amanda Griffiths, who lives in Carlisle, Pa., and is the mother of two autistic boys, called 17 providers within two hours of her home before finding one who was qualified to evaluate her younger son and was accepting new patients his age.

“No amount of insurance is going to magically make a provider appear,” she said.

And it remains a struggle to persuade insurance companies and employers to cover treatment that is new or expensive, even if it’s likely to be effective. Ira Burnim, legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, points to something called assertive community treatment, a team-based approach that has proved useful for adults with severe mental illness and holds promise for children, too. There, the challenge is to define what kinds of interaction with a patient outside of an office setting is billable and write rules for coverage.

Autistic children can benefit from an intensive treatment called applied behavior analysis, but many insurance companies haven’t wanted to cover what can be a $60,000 or $70,000 annual cost. They claim that the treatment, which can include intensive one-on-one interaction and assistance with both basic and more complex skills, is either too experimental or an educational service that schools should provide. This can be a tricky area for parents to navigate, because it isn’t always clear which part of an overall health insurance policy ought to cover various possible treatments.

A law school professor named Lorri Unumb faced a bill that big several years ago when her son Ryan was found to be autistic and she discovered that her insurance would not pay for treatment. After moving to South Carolina and meeting families there who had not been able to afford the therapy, she spent two years persuading state legislators to pass a law that forced insurance companies to pay for the treatment. “I did not really know how to write a bill,” she said. “I had watched ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ before, and that was kind of my inspiration and guidance.”

Autism Speaks, a national advocacy organization, saw what she accomplished and hired her to barnstorm the country in an effort to get similar laws passed. There are now 32 states that have them, though there’s a crucial catch: they don’t apply to the many large employers who pool their own resources in so-called self-funded insurance plans.

If you work in such a company, it may be up to you to lobby your human resources department to cover applied behavioral analysis or whatever mental health therapy you or your child may need. Sometimes a personal appeal will succeed; Mr. Kaplan, the benefits consultant, noted that when a parent called about a child, an employer might be particularly sensitive.

But a part of Ms. Unumb’s job these days is to assist parents with appeals where employers have said no or appear likely to. She has accompanied parents to meetings with their human resources departments all over the country to request that the employer expand coverage for everyone. She has a 115-page presentation that she draws on, pointing out that at its core, autism is a medical condition diagnosed by a doctor, the very thing health insurance is supposed to cover.

At $60,000 or more annually for children with particularly acute treatment needs, the coverage does not come cheaply. But Autism Speaks estimates that that expense, spread over thousands of employees, raises premium costs 31 cents a month.

Ms. Unumb notes that for many autistic children, intensive early intervention can allow them to function in mainstream classrooms and prevent a host of problems there and once they finish school. “You pay for it now or you pay for it later,” she said. “And you pay for it a lot more if you choose later, in more ways than just financial.”

Read More..