It's Do or Die for Military's Last Remaining Giant Spy Blimp

It’s 10 minutes to midnight for the U.S. military’s dream of mega-blimps strapped with powerful surveillance gear. There are reports that the last of those lighter-than-air ships is a casualty of the Army’s shrinking budgets. Its operators aren’t so sure — but if it goes, so goes a vision for a different paradigm of aerial spying.

That would be the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV. Built by Northrop Grumman, it’s a dimpled blimp as long as a football field; seven stories high; and carries a price tag of over half a billion dollars. The plan was to use the blimp over Afghanistan, where its gondola could haul seven tons of cargo — including advanced camera gear able to see dozens of square miles of terrain with crystal-clear resolution at a single blink. It would stay 20,000 feet above the warzone for weeks at a time, something beyond the capabilities of any spy plane, manned or piloted. Trials over Afghanistan were slated for early this year.

Now, maybe not so much. A report in InsideDefense citing anonymous sources said LEMV quietly met the Army budget axe last week.

This comes as news to the branch of the Army actually testing the blimp. “The Department of the Army has not notified the Army Space and Missile Defense Command of any programmatic changes to the LEMV program,” spokesman John Cummings told Danger Room on Wednesday. “LEMV continues to be a technology demonstration at SMDC.” Northrop Grumman was surprised by word of the cancellation. An Army spokesman, Dylan Schwartz, said he had no information about the program Wednesday afternoon.

Yet the LEMV is in trouble. A technical analysis in 2011 questioned whether the blimp could actually stay aloft for the 21 days Northrop hyped, and figured it was closer to 10. Although the ship was supposed to head to Afghanistan this year, its only flight has been its maiden August test voyage over New Jersey, which was months late. The Army, once a vocal LEMV booster, began backing away from the blimp in October.

And if the LEMV goes, so too do the military’s dreams of giant spy blimps for the foreseeable future.

Last year, the Air Force abruptly canceled its contract for the Blue Devil, a blimp seven times larger than the Goodyear Blimp and LEMV’s main rival. It was a massive reversal: More than just a lighter-than-air vehicle for spy gear, it was to host 12 different sensors and a supercomputer that made Blue Devil capable of acting as a quarterback coordinating other aerial spy gear. Only the avionics arrived late to the party, and technical challenges mounted.

Not even the backing of the Air Force’s former intelligence chief, whose company built the thing, could spare Blue Devil: As my colleague David Axe reported, the Air Force office running the Blue Devil added requirements in a bureaucratic shanking. The Air Force likes planes, not blimps. With Blue Devil dead, all that remains of the mega-blimps is the LEMV.

Here’s the justification for the mega-blimps. They give the U.S. military a middleweight spy tool, between the heavyweight spy satellites orbiting Earth and the welterweight spy planes taking pictures thousands of feet over a given swath of territory. Each has their functions: Satellites pick up huge, wide views and spy planes, manned and unmanned, provide hours’ worth of imagery. For something in between — say, weeks’ worth of so-called “pattern of life” data, send in something lighter than air, higher and more persistent than a plane, below a satellite, and carrying a ginormous amount of sensors, cameras and data processors.

Lots of people in Congress never bought it. As the budget for spy blimps ticked upward and the Army and Air Force fought over who controlled the mega-airships, the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2011 questioned why two competing airframes were necessary. By the time the two top Senate appropriators — the most important legislators in the chamber — threw their weight behind the Blue Devil, the Air Force had all but decided blimps were a non-starter.

If the LEMV is actually on the chopping block, an entire model of aerial surveillance is stillborn. The future of military blimps will be miniaturized: U.S. bases in Afghanistan often use tethered aerostats strapped with cameras above their fortifications to enhance their ability to spot insurgent threats beyond what the eye can see. But with the U.S. packing up from Afghanistan, the smaller blimps have also lost their rationale. The sound you hear is a lot of military hot air escaping.

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Lady Gaga needs hip surgery, cancels remainder of tour

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Lady Gaga canceled the remainder of her “Born This Way Ball” concert tour to undergo hip surgery, promoters Live Nation said on Wednesday.

The 26-year-old singer announced she was suffering from an inflammation of the joints on Tuesday, but the tour operator said Gaga’s injuries were more serious than she realized.

“After additional tests this morning to review the severity of the issue, it has been determined that Lady Gaga has a labral tear of the right hip,” Live Nation said in a statement.

“She will need surgery to repair the problem, followed by strict downtime to recover. This, unfortunately, will force her to cancel the tour so she can heal,” it added.

Gaga has been on the road for two years, traveling across six continents.

On Tuesday, she postponed four U.S. shows saying she was suffering from synovitis that left her temporarily unable to walk. Synovitis is an inflammation of the joints that sometimes follows a sprain, strain or injury.

According to her website, the singer was due to play another 20 dates in the United States.

Live Nation said ticket holders would have their money refunded, starting on Thursday.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

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Higher Prices Help PepsiCo to 17% Gain in Profit

Investors in PepsiCo saw glimmers of the end of the tunnel on Thursday when the company reported a 17 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit after a long lackluster performance.

Net income was $1.66 billion, or $1.06 a share, lifted by higher prices for the company’s products, significant investments in marketing of crucial brands like Pepsi and Lay’s and strong sales in Latin America and other emerging markets. Earnings were $1.42 billion, or 89 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.

Signs that PepsiCo was moving out of what Indra K. Nooyi, the chief executive, called a transition year — as well as her announcement on a call with analysts that the company plans to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of a new, lower-calorie sweetener — moved it share price up more than $2 by midday before it closed at $72.28, up 78 cents.

“It was an encouraging quarter,” said Kevin V. Dreyer, associate portfolio manager of the $2 billion Gabelli Asset Fund, which owns PepsiCo shares. “It looks like things might be getting a bit better.”

He said the news of Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of Heinz for $23 billion, or more than 13 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, suggested that the value of PepsiCo’s vast Frito-Lay business was higher than the company’s stock price suggested. “That other announcement may be having an impact as well,” he said.

Investors were also heartened by a slight improvement in the North American beverage business, which grew 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter even though sales of carbonated beverages were down a bit.

The company introduced several twists on various products last year, including a Gatorade chew, Doritos dressed up with new, spicier flavors and Pepsi Next, which has roughly half the calories of a regular Pepsi.

The picture for the full year that ended in December was less uplifting. Earnings of $6.18 billion, or $3.92 a share, failed to match profits of $6.44 billion, or $4.03 a share, in 2011. Revenue slipped to $65.49 billion from $66.5 billion.

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Dorner manhunt: Investigators work to ID charred human remains

After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying the human remains found in the charred cabin where fugitive ex-cop Christopher Dorner was believed to have been holed up after trading gunfire with officers, authorities said.

If the body is identified as Dorner’s, the standoff would end a weeklong manhunt for the ex-LAPD officer and Navy Reserve lieutenant suspected in a string of shootings following his firing by the Los Angeles Police Department several years ago. Four people have died in the case, allegedly at Dorner’s hands.

Beck said he would not consider the manhunt over until the body was identified as Dorner. Police remained on tactical alert and were conducting themselves as if nothing had changed in the case, officials said.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

The latest burst of gunfire came Tuesday after the suspect, attempting to flee law enforcement officials, fatally shot a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and seriously injured another, officials said. He then barricaded himself in a wooden cabin outside Big Bear, not far from ski resorts in the snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, according to police.

"This could have ended much better, it could have ended worse," said Beck as he drove to the hospital where the injured deputy was located. "I feel for the family of the deputy who lost his life."

The injured deputy is expected to survive but it is anticipated he will need several surgeries. The names of the two deputies have not been released.

TIMELINE: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Just before 5 p.m., authorities smashed the cabin's windows, pumped in tear gas and called for the suspect to surrender, officials said. They got no response. Then, using a demolition vehicle, they tore down the cabin's walls one by one. When they reached the last wall, they heard a gunshot. Then the cabin burst into flames, officials said.

Last week, authorities said they had tracked Dorner to a wooded area near Big Bear Lake. They found his torched gray Nissan Titan with several weapons inside, the said, and the only trace of Dorner was a short trail of footprints in newly fallen snow.

According to a manifesto that officials say Dorner posted on Facebook, he felt the LAPD unjustly fired him several years ago, when a disciplinary panel determined that he lied in accusing his training officer of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest. Beck has promised to review the case.

DOCUMENT: Read the manifesto

The manifesto vows "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against law enforcement officers and their families. "Self-preservation is no longer important to me. I do not fear death as I died long ago," it said.

On Tuesday morning, two maids entered a cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive and ran into a man who they said resembled the fugitive, a law enforcement official said. The cabin was not far from where Dorner's singed truck had been found and where police had been holding news conferences about the manhunt.

The man tied up the maids, and he took off in a purple Nissan parked near the cabin, the official said. About 12:20 p.m., one of the maids broke free and called police.

FULL COVERAGE: Sweeping manhunt for ex-cop

Nearly half an hour later, officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife spotted the stolen vehicle and called for backup, authorities said. The suspect turned down a side road in an attempt to elude the officers but crashed the vehicle, police said.

A short time later, authorities said, the suspect carjacked a light-colored pickup truck. Allan Laframboise said the truck belonged to his friend Rick Heltebrake, who works at a nearby Boy Scout camp.

Heltebrake was driving on Glass Road with his Dalmatian, Suni, when a hulking African American man stepped into the road, Laframboise said. Heltebrake stopped. The man told him to get out of the truck.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Searching for suspected shooter

"Can I take my dog?" Heltebrake asked, according to his friend.

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Fitness Tracker

Marathon, half-marathon, 10k and 5K training plans to get you race ready.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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'Hundreds of rounds' fired during Dorner gun battle

Christopher Dorner was engaged in a shootout with federal authorities in the Big Bear area.

"Hundreds of rounds" were exchanged in about half an hour during the gun battle between fugitive former police officer Christopher Dorner and law enforcement officers Tuesday afternoon, sources said.

At least two San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies were wounded, sources said. Their conditions were not immediately known.

Days ago, Dorner broke into a cabin off Route 38, a source said. He allegedly tied up the couple inside and held them hostage until Tuesday morning when he left. It is unclear whether Dorner stole their vehicle or another, but Fish and Wildlife officers knew to be on the lookout for a white pickup truck when they spotted Dorner driving one and attempted to stop him, the source said.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Dorner crashed the truck during the ensuing chase and allegedly exchanged gunfire with the officers as he fled into another cabin, where he was quickly surrounded by San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies. The source said one deputy was hit as Dorner fired out of the cabin and a second was injured when Dorner exited the back of the cabin, deployed a smoke bomb and opened fire again in an apparent attempt to flee. Dorner was driven back inside the cabin, the source said.

There was initial confusion as to where a helicopter should land to evacuate the injured officers,  so deputies used their own smoke bombs to provide enough cover to carry the wounded to a pickup truck that took them to the waiting helicopter.

Officers have crisscrossed California for days pursuing the more than 1,000 tips that poured in about Dorner's possible whereabouts — including efforts in Tijuana, Mexico, San Diego County and Big Bear — and serving warrants at homes in Las Vegas and Point Loma.

PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer

Statewide alerts were issued in California and Nevada, and border authorities were alerted. The Transportation Security Administration also issued an alert urging pilots and other aircraft operators to keep an eye out for Dorner.

At the search's height, more than 200 officers scoured the mountain, conducting cabin-by-cabin checks. It was scaled back Sunday — about 30 officers were out in the field Tuesday, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said.

Dorner allegedly threatened "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against police in a lengthy manifesto that authorities say he posted on Facebook. The posting named dozens of potential targets, including police officers, whom Dorner allegedly threatened to attack, according to authorities.

His alleged slayings began Feb. 3 with the deaths of Monica Quan, a Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, a USC public safety officer. Quan was the daughter of a retired LAPD captain whom Dorner allegedly blamed in part for his firing from the force in 2009.

While on the run Thursday, Dorner allegedly shot three police officers in Riverside County, killing one and wounding the others. Riverside Officer Michael Crain, 34, a married father of two who served two tours in Kuwait as a rifleman in the Marines, was killed in the attack.

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Intel Teases Set-Top Box to Compete With Cable

Intel is developing a set-top box that delivers video on demand and live TV over the internet, a move that would place it in competition with the likes of Roku and your local cable company.

There’s no word on who’ll provide the all-important content we’d see on such a box or what we’d pay for it when it appears later this year, but Erik Huggers, Intel’s corporate vice president of media, promises a “superior experience” to what is already hooked up to your TV.

Huggers, speaking at the Dive Into Media event Tuesday, said the new device will launch under its own brand under Intel’s new media division. The service and set-top box are a huge departure for a company that has made its name supplying chipsets to just about everyone and has a less-than-stellar track record bringing products to the consumer market.

The device and web-TV service will compete directly with cable and satellite providers by delivering live TV via the internet. The box also will offer video on demand and a feature called Catch Up TV, which also is available in the BBC iPlayer. That means everything that is broadcast on network or cable TV would be available to play whenever you like, making it something like a cloud-based DVR that records everything on your TV. In that way, Intel isn’t just gunning for content providers, but also for the Apple TV and Roku box.

That’s because Intel thinks you have too many devices plugged into your TV, and it’s positioning its as yet unnamed box as “an all in one solution” to handle all your content. Huggers mentioned Netflix, suggesting we might see the streaming service as a partner.

The chipmaker had long been rumored to be working on its own streaming service and device. Tuesday’s announcement puts those rumors to rest but raises many new questions. The most pressing is how is this different than what’s already on the market. For example, how will this be different than subscribing to cable and will it save viewers money?

Current cable and satellite services package channels and sell them as bundles. These bundles have been a huge financial pain for viewers, because you’re often paying for channels you don’t watch. And while Huggers was quick to point out that bundles aren’t going away, he did say, “if bundles are done right, I think there is real value in that. An opportunity to create a more flexible environment.”  A la carte programming is still a long way off, but Huggers hinted at a bundling scenario somewhere between a la carte and the current cable and satellite offerings.

Even with a smarter bundle, don’t expect to save money on your bill. The unnamed Intel box that isn’t an Intel-branded-box is “not a value play but a quality play to create a superior experience,” Huggers said. That experience includes a redesigned electronic program guide and camera that determines who is watching TV and adjusts the environment and suggestions based on who is watching. If you’re concerned about privacy and you watch TV in your underwear, you can turn it off. Other superior features and pricing were not discussed, but Intel has its work cut out for it. Winning this game is all about providing solid content.

This is a huge leap for a company known more for the silicon powering computers than selling devices directly to consumers. Intel has produced reference designs for ultrabooks, smartphones and Windows 8 device hybrids for third parties, but its own consumer products and services have been largely ignored. Most would be surprised, for example, to learn that Intel has an app store called AppUp and a small Mac mini competitor called the NUC. Intel’s problem isn’t necessarily making good products, it’s marketing them.

And while the company has been recruiting employees from Apple, Jawbone, BBC and Microsoft to create this new device and new division, it’s going to have to make sure people actually know about it. Plus it really will have to deliver a substantially superior experience to cable and other set-top boxes to end up connected to the HDMI ports of viewer’s HDTVs.

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Director Panahi defies Iran ban to make another film

BERLIN (Reuters) – Iran‘s Jafar Panahi has defied a 20-year ban on filmmaking to secretly co-direct “Closed Curtain“, a multi-layered portrayal of how restrictions on his work and movement have brought on depression and even thoughts of suicide.

The movie, in competition at the Berlin film festival, has its premiere on Tuesday, but Panahi was not expected on the red carpet despite festival organizers saying the German government had requested he be allowed to travel.

His co-director and compatriot Kamboziya Partovi did attend a press conference along with actress Maryam Moghadam, but would not be drawn on what the consequences of making the movie could be for Panahi or others involved.

“Nothing has happened up until now,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “We do not know what the future holds for us.”

Moghadam acknowledged she was taking a risk by acting in a project involving Panahi, a darling of the Western film festival circuit and best known for his 2000 movie “The Circle” and “Offside” released six years later.

His socially engaged films about issues such as women’s rights in Iran and support for the political opposition have made him a target of the Iranian authorities.

In 2010 he was banned from making films for 20 years and sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the system”, although he is now under house arrest.

Moghadam, who has dual Swedish and Iranian nationality, told Reuters she would try to continue travelling to Iran, where she had family. “I am not the only one (taking risks),” she said.

“Closed Curtain” is the second picture Panahi has made in defiance of the ban, and it remains to be seen whether the 52-year-old faces further punishment for a movie that has drawn major attention in Berlin.

“This is Not a Film”, made in 2011, was reportedly smuggled out of the country on a USB stick hidden inside a cake.

EMPTY VILLA, FEAR, FRUSTRATION

“Closed Curtain” is set in an empty villa in Iran, presumably beside the Caspian Sea.

A man, played by Partovi, arrives with his dog, and proceeds to draw the curtains and black out the windows, sealing himself off from the world outside and preventing the authorities – real and imagined – from seeing what was happening.

When the dog accidentally switches on the television, we see footage of stray dogs being rounded up and killed, explaining why he had to be smuggled in inside a bag and kept indoors.

A young man and woman, on the run from the police, burst in and the woman stays, but her existence and that of the man becomes unclear as viewers must decide if they are fictional characters in Panahi’s script or actual people.

The layers of reality multiply as Panahi himself arrives, and posters advertising some of his past movies are revealed beneath sheets before being covered up again.

In the allegory of Panahi’s life under house arrest and inability to work freely, we see him walking into the sea at one point, a reference to taking his own life.

“He was not constantly thinking about suicide, no, because then he wouldn’t have been able to make the film,” Partovi said. “But if I imagine myself unable to work and just sitting at home, then I am sure I would start to think about suicide.”

According to Partovi, “Closed Curtain” was made out of a desire to express oneself, even though it was unlikely to be seen by people inside Iran.

“It’s difficult to work, but not being able to work is even more difficult, and especially when you are at the height of your career. You become depressed, and I believe this is shown in the film and it comes through.”

The mood is one of frustration, fear and anger, as young people are rounded up for having parties and drinking alcohol.

“She is a young woman like many other women in my country,” Moghadam said of her character Melika.

“She is a symbol of many other young women who struggle,” added the actress, who was wearing a hat to cover her hair.

She said her character represented “the dark side of his (Panahi’s) mind … that part that doesn’t hope any more and wants to give up.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia

At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.

A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.

Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.

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Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.

A transcript of this interview can be found here.

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Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.

“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.

In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.

What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.

Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”

A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.

A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.

Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.

In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.

Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.

Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.

“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.

“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”

Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.

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Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.

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