Antismoking Outlays Drop Despite Tobacco Revenue

Faced with tight budgets, states have spent less on tobacco prevention over the past two years than in any period since the national tobacco settlement in 1998, despite record high revenues from the settlement and tobacco taxes, according to a report to be released on Thursday.

Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

State antismoking spending is the lowest since the 1998 national tobacco settlement.

States are on track to collect a record $25.7 billion in tobacco taxes and settlement money in the current fiscal year, but they are set to spend less than 2 percent of that on prevention, according to the report, by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which compiles the revenue data annually. The figures come from state appropriations for the fiscal year ending in June.

The settlement awarded states an estimated $246 billion over its first 25 years. It gave states complete discretion over the money, and many use it for programs unrelated to tobacco or to plug budget holes. Public health experts say it lacks a mechanism for ensuring that some portion of the money is set aside for tobacco prevention and cessation programs.

“There weren’t even gums, let alone teeth,” Timothy McAfee, the director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, referring to the allocation of funds for tobacco prevention and cessation in the terms of the settlement.

Spending on tobacco prevention peaked in 2002 at $749 million, 63 percent above the level this year. After six years of declines, spending ticked up again in 2008, only to fall by 36 percent during the recession, the report said.

Tobacco use is the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more than 400,000 Americans every year, according to the C.D.C.

The report did not count federal money for smoking prevention, which Vince Willmore, the vice president for communications at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, estimated to be about $522 million for the past four fiscal years. The sum — about $130 million a year — was not enough to bring spending back to earlier levels.

The $500 million a year that states spend on tobacco prevention is a tiny fraction of the $8 billion a year that tobacco companies spend to market their products, according to a Federal Trade Commission report in September.

Nationally, 19 percent of adults smoke, down from over 40 percent in 1965. But rates remain high for less-educated Americans. Twenty-seven percent of Americans with only a high school diploma smoke, compared with just 8 percent of those with a college degree or higher, according to C.D.C. data from 2010. The highest rate — 34 percent — was among black men who did not graduate from high school.

“Smoking used to be the rich man’s habit,” said Danny McGoldrick, the vice president for research at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, “and now it’s decidedly a poor person’s behavior.”

Aggressive antismoking programs are the main tools that cities and states have to reach the demographic groups in which smoking rates are the highest, making money to finance them even more critical, Mr. McGoldrick said.

The decline in spending comes amid growing certainty among public health officials that antismoking programs, like help lines and counseling, actually work. California went from having a smoking rate above the national average 20 years ago to having the second-lowest rate in the country after modest but consistent spending on programs that help people quit and prevent children from starting, Dr. McAfee said.

An analysis by Washington State, cited in the report, found that it saved $5 in tobacco-related hospitalization costs for every $1 spent during the first 10 years of its program.

Budget cuts have eviscerated some of the most effective tobacco prevention programs, the report said. This year, state financing for North Carolina’s program has been eliminated. Washington State’s program has been cut by about 90 percent in recent years, and for the third year in a row, Ohio has not allocated any state money for what was once a successful program, the report said.

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Apple to Resume U.S. Manufacturing

For the first time in years, Apple will manufacture computers in the United States, the chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, said in interviews with NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, introduced new products in October, including a thinner iMac.

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“Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” he said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday on “Rock Center With Brian Williams” on NBC.

Apple, the biggest company in the world by market value, moved its manufacturing to Asia in the late 1990s. As an icon of American technology success and innovation, the California-based company has been criticized in recent years for outsourcing jobs abroad.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Mr. Cook said in the Businessweek interview. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

The company plans to spend $100 million on the American manufacturing in 2013, according to the interviews, a small fraction of its overall factory investments and an even tinier portion of its available cash.

In the interviews, Mr. Cook said the company would work with partners and that the manufacturing would be more than just the final assembly of parts. He noted that parts of the company’s ubiquitous iPhone, including the “engine” and the glass screen, were already made in America.

Over the last few years, sales of the iPhone, iPod and iPad have overwhelmed Apple’s line of Macinotsh computers, the basis of the company’s early business. Revenue from the iPhone alone made up 48 percent of the company’s total revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter ended Sept. 30.

But as recently as October, Apple introduced a new, thinner iMac, the product that pioneered the technique of building the computer innards in the flat screen.

Mr. Cook did not say in the interviews where in the United States the new manufacturing would occur. But he did defend Apple’s track record in American hiring.

“When you back up and look at Apple’s effect on job creation in the United States, we estimate that we’ve created more than 600,000 jobs now,” Mr. Cook told Businessweek. Those jobs include positions at partners and suppliers.

An Apple spokesman could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Foxconn Technology, which manufactures more than 40 percent of the world’s electronics, is one of Apple’s main overseas manufacturing contractors. Based in Taiwan, Foxconn is China’s largest private employer, with 1.2 million workers, and it has come under intense scrutiny over working conditions inside its factories.

In March, Foxconn pledged to sharply curtail the number of working hours and significantly increase wages. The announcement was a response to a far-ranging inspection by the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group that found widespread problems — including numerous instances where Foxconn violated Chinese law and industry codes of conduct.

Apple, which recently joined the labor association, had asked the group to investigate plants manufacturing iPhones, iPads and other devices. A growing outcry over conditions at overseas factories prompted protests and petitions, and several labor rights organizations started scrutinizing Apple’s suppliers.

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Secure Communities is optional, Harris says

SAN FRANCISCO — California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris told local law enforcement agencies Tuesday that they were not obligated to comply with a federal program whose stated goal is to deport illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes.

It was Harris' first public assessment of Secure Communities. Under the program launched in 2008, all arrestees' fingerprints are sent to immigration officials, who may ask police and sheriff's departments to hold suspects for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release so they can be transferred to federal custody.

Although the intent may have been to improve public safety, Harris said that a review of data from March through June showed that 28% of those targeted for deportation in California as a result were not criminals. Those numbers, she noted, had changed little since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a year earlier pledged to reform the program to focus on the most serious offenders.

"Secure Communities has not held up to what it aspired to be," Harris said. The law enforcement bulletin she issued Tuesday stated that "immigration detainer requests are not mandatory, and each agency may make its own decision" about whether to honor them.

Harris said her office conducted its analysis after dozens of agencies across the state inquired about whether they were compelled to honor the ICE requests.

Some elected officials and local law enforcement have complained that — in addition to pulling in those found guilty of minor offenses or never convicted — Secure Communities had made illegal immigrants fearful of cooperating with police, even when they were the victims.

Harris, a former prosecutor, echoed that view Tuesday.

"I want that rape victim to be absolutely secure that if she waves down an officer in a car that she will be protected … and not fear that she's waving down an immigration officer," Harris said

While immigrant-rights advocates applauded her announcement, they said it did not go far enough. Allowing police chiefs and sheriffs to craft their own policies without state guidance, they said, could lead to disparate enforcement and enable racial profiling.

This "should eliminate the confusion among some sheriffs about the legal force of detainers," said Reshma Shamasunder, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. "The only logical next step is a strong, statewide standard that limits these burdensome requests."

One attempt by legislators to do just that unraveled in October with Gov. Jerry Brown's veto of the Trust Act. The proposed law by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) would have forbidden police departments to honor federal detainer requests except in cases in which defendants had been convicted of a serious or violent crime.

Ammiano on Monday reintroduced a modified version of the measure. Harris said she had opposed the bill's last iteration for going "too far" and had not seen the current version, but looked forward "to working with the governor and any of our lawmakers to take a look at what we can do to improve consistency."

"It's very difficult to create formulas for law enforcement," she said, noting that local agencies should have the freedom to determine which federal hold requests to honor. For example, she said, an inmate with five previous arrests for forcible rape but no convictions might still be deemed too great a risk for release.

Some law enforcement agencies, including the San Francisco Sheriff's Department and the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, have declined to comply with federal requests to hold non-serious offenders. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck followed suit last month, announcing that suspected illegal immigrants arrested in low-level crimes would no longer be turned over for possible deportation.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who opposed the Trust Act, is among those who have argued that compliance with Secure Communities was mandatory.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said that Harris' opinion was welcome guidance that may offer sheriffs more flexibility in how they deal with immigration detainees.

"The attorney general's opinion is going to be taken very seriously," Whitmore said. "The sheriff applauds it and is grateful for it." Baca, he added, has been working with the attorney general and the governor on the issue.

In a written response to Harris' announcement, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency's top priorities were the deportation of criminals, recent border-crossers and repeat violators of immigration law.

"The federal government alone sets these priorities and places detainers on individuals arrested on criminal charges to ensure that dangerous criminal aliens and other priority individuals are not released from prisons and jails into our communities," the statement said.

lee.romney@latimes.com

cindy.chang@latimes.com

Romney reported from San Francisco and Chang from Los Angeles.

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Machine Gun Expo Is Down-Home Americana Gone Ballistic

There are thousands of gun shows in America each year, but machine gun shows are a rare spectacle. At the two-day hands-on shootfest that is the Oklahoma Full Auto Shoot & Trade Show (OFASTS) exhibitors rent out fully automatic weapons to the public so that they may annihilate refrigerators, ovens and other household appliances.

Photojournalist Pete Muller recently scratched a years-long itch to visit OFASTS and documented his trip.

“I grew up in a congested and heavily regulated area of the northeast and consequently had little exposure to guns and gun culture,” says Muller. “What was happening at OFASTS was unlike anything I’d seen or experienced.”

Muller has seen a lot of guns. Between 2009 and 2012, he lived in Sudan documenting the tense transition from civil war to independence for the South — even now the peace agreement on which independence rests remains fragile and not without skirmish. While Muller pursued his long-term story in Sudan, he was also thinking of gun culture in the United States, specifically the recreational use of machine guns. That’s when OFASTS came on his radar.

Held annually in Wyandotte, Okla., OFASTS is — alongside the Knob Creek Machine Gun Show (Kentucky) and the Big Sandy Shoot Out (Arizona) – one of the largest machine gun shows in the country. Over a hundred vendors trade machine guns there, with prices in the thousands and sometimes in the tens of thousands. Though prices are high, the opportunity for machine gun enthusiasts to shoot others’ weapons is a big draw.

Whether your fancy is the M248 SAW, which fires 750 rounds per minute, or the FN M240B, which is the U.S. armed forces current-issue medium machine gun, there’s a firearm for everyone. There’s also a dynamite crew on hand to beef up the explosions. At $10 a day or $18 for the weekend (under-10s get in free), it’s good bang for your buck. Gun and magazine rental prices vary.

“Given the politicized nature of the gun discussion, I wanted to better understand this fundamental element of our national ethos,” says Muller, who was skeptical of others’ viewpoints on gun issues and wanted to see OFASTS for himself.

South Sudan and Oklahoma are extremely far apart in both geography and culture, yet Muller says that generally communities’ proximity to state security institutions shape their affinity for and possession of firearms. OFASTS is the type of exposition special to rural America; permits for machine gun shows aren’t very likely to be passed out in urban areas.

“People living in the periphery are often more likely to possess weapons as a means of insuring their personal security. This propensity increases, of course, if the isolation in which they live is, or is perceived to be, fraught with danger,” says Muller.

OFASTS culminates in “Kill the Car,” a moment when every gun-wielding attendee takes aim at a free-wheeling, explosives-packed car rolling down a hillside. Within a minute, tens of thousands of bullets pepper the condemned beater. Heaps of empty shells scatter the mainline shooting gallery.

During Muller’s stay, attendees ranged from lawyers and investors to IT experts and even an unnamed former Apple executive.

“Owning legal machine guns is an expensive hobby. Most of the gun owners are pretty well-heeled,” he says.

For those accustomed to guns, especially automatics, events like OFASTS can be as welcoming and innocuous as a state fair. For outsiders, the shows and the photos from them can be quite shocking and, in some cases, disturbing.

“I find it somewhat peculiar when people seem surprised by the ongoing American love affair with guns. The country was acquired in a way that required guns. Expansion of the American frontier was a severely violent process in which the gun played a central role, its sanitized memory has since become a pillar of white American nostalgia. It represents notions of freedom, individualism and valor and all of those things are tied to patriotism,” says Muller.

Follow Pete Muller on his blog on Twitter and Facebook.

All images: Pete Muller

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Lady Gaga buys Michael Jackson’s costumes at auction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop star Lady Gaga purchased 55 items belonging to late singer Michael Jackson in a weekend auction that raised more than $ 5 million, a portion of which will be donated to charity, Julien’s Auctions said.

The auction, held in Beverly Hills, showcased 465 lots of items spanning Jackson’s career through the years, including costumes and props used on tour and in music videos.

Highlights from the sale included the late singer’s “BAD” tour jacket raising $ 240,000, a white glove selling for $ 192,000 and one of the singer’s Pepsi and Awards jacket garnering more than $ 68,000, the auction house said in a statement.

Following Sunday’s auction, Gaga told her 31 million Twitter followers that “the 55 pieces I collected today will be archived & expertly cared for in the spirit & love of Michael Jackson, his bravery, & fans worldwide.”

Jackson died aged 50 in June 2009 in Los Angeles from an overdose of the anesthetic propofol and sedatives.

The collection of outfits, designed by Los Angeles-based collaborators Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush and gifted back to them by the late singer, were taken on a world tour earlier this year, traveling across South America, Europe and Asia.

In September, British hat designer Philip Treacy designed his first London fashion week show in a decade around Jackson’s auction costumes, which were worn by the models down the runway and accessorized with hats inspired by the late singer’s life.

Gaga not only attended Treacy’s show but was on hand to introduce the milliner’s collection.

The auction exceeded pre-sale estimates of $ 1 million to $ 2 million, and a portion of the final amount raised will benefit the Guide Dogs of America and Nathan Adelson Hospice in Las Vegas.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs as well might be taken for a longer duration.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them would be in premenopausal women with ER-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing nine years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

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Mexico port picks up slack from strike at L.A., Long Beach complex

ENSENADA — This sluggish port city is coming alive.

Standing atop a pier with a hulking cargo ship behind him, dock manager Rogelio Valenzuela Gonzalez motioned Monday toward four cranes as they plucked metal containers from the vessel.

Operators swiveled the cranes toward a line of flatbed trucks. Supervisors in reflective vests and hard hats watched from below, using two-way radios to dispatch trucks as they filled up.

Not even during the peak fall shipping season is this port so busy.

But a strike that has effectively shut down rival ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach has diverted ships south of the border. It has become a windfall for the port located about 50 miles from the border, its workers and the region's struggling economy.

"It's good for the workers' families," said Gonzalez, adding that the extra work will pay for additional Christmas presents. "We all know it's temporary, but it definitely helps out at the end of the year."

The Southern California strike ended its first week Monday, with negotiations continuing but no signs of an immediate resolution.

The strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit, which handles paperwork for incoming and outgoing ships, has crippled the nation's two busiest cargo ports.

The dispute centers on the charge by the union that employers — large shipping lines and terminal operators — have steadily outsourced jobs through attrition. The union says the employers have transferred work from higher-paid union members to lower-paid employees in other states and countries.

The employers dispute that claim, saying they've offered the workers full job security and generous wage and pension increases. Though the union has only 800 members, the 10,000-member dockworkers union is honoring the picket lines.

Economists estimate the effect of the work stoppage at $1 billion a day in forfeited worker pay, missing revenue for truckers and other businesses and the value of the cargo that hasn't been able to reach its destination. The two ports are directly responsible for an estimated 595,000 jobs in Southern California.

But while thousands of Southern California workers sit idle in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the walkout is giving Ensenada a hoped-for chance to showcase itself.

Collectively, Los Angeles and Long Beach handle 100 times more cargo each year than Ensenada.

Long seen as a backup port, Ensenada is eager to win more business from shippers inconvenienced by the second major work dispute at the L.A. and Long Beach ports in a decade.

"It's a great opportunity to show that the Port of Ensenada presents an alternative method for bringing in products from Asia and the Pacific Rim," said Kenn Morris, president of Crossborder Group, a San Diego consulting firm. "The Ensenada port can really show itself off as being something a lot of people hadn't expected."

Uncertain how long the strike may last, retailers have scrambled to find alternate ways to get their products onto shelves. Given their typically thin profit margins, retailers are concerned about the added shipping costs.

"These blockages are dead-weight losses to the system," said Carl Voigt, an international business professor at USC. "They raise costs for everybody. Everybody's goods and services are more expensive."

Ensenada is used to seeing the occasional cruise ship and maybe half a dozen cargo ships a week. Two ships have made unplanned dockings and unloaded cargo here in the last week. Three others have docked in Manzanillo, a Mexican port city 1,200 miles to the south of Ensenada.

Altogether, 17 ships bound for the L.A. or Long Beach port have been diverted elsewhere, including nine to Oakland, one to Mazatlan, Mexico, and one to Panama.

In Ensenada, dockworkers made quick work unloading 100 cargo containers from the Maersk Merlion. The giant cargo vessel was diverted over the weekend and docked early Monday morning.

Since late last week, Ensenada has been preparing for a hoped-for influx of diverted ships. The port has 200 dockworkers when operating at capacity, and an additional hundred clerical and customs workers.

Equipment is on standby. Workers are at the ready. And trucking lines have been placed on alert that cargo may need to be hauled.

"It's hard to guess how many ships we'll receive, but we are preparing for more," said Juan Carlos Ochoa, the port's trade development manager.

Ensenada is still handicapped by longer-standing obstacles, primarily its lack of railway access to move goods.

And for now, the cargo unloaded from the Maersk Merlion will sit at the port as the shipping line weighs whether to move it by truck to its final destination or have another ship pick up the containers at a later date.

The strike "is an extraordinary situation," Gonzalez said. "But it'll show our clients that this port is a good option. It's efficient, reliable and secure."

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

Lopez reported from Ensenada, and Hamilton from Los Angeles.

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Meet the Dancing Otter That Helped Obama Win the Presidency

It would happen a couple of times each month at the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Ben Hagen would giggle and then send out a web link to his coworkers, the geeks who ran the technology operation for the Obama reelection campaign.

Soon, the sound of Kenny Loggins’ inspirational 1979 hit “This Is It” would fill the office, and the dancing Otter would pop up on machine after machine. It was Hagan’s way of telling the team he’d found another bug in their web code.

The geeks who built Obama’s internet infrastructure sat side-by-side, in a long row in the campaign’s Chicago headquarters, and sometimes, you could hear Kenny Loggins echo down the line. “The laughing would kind of work its way down the row and you’d see people’s screens light up with dancing otters and the sound progressing down the row,” Hagen says. “It was a pretty gratifying experience.”

It was gratifying because Hagan — a security engineer with the campaign — was helping to lock down Obama’s websites, securing them from a common web programming error called a cross-site scripting bug. The otter was the campaign’s version of the RickRoll — an annoying internet joke — but it also carried a message. In essence, Hagan was publicly shaming people into writing better code.

“I think public embarrassment is a very important part of security,” Hagan said last week, at a conference in Las Vegas dedicated to Amazon’s cloud services. “Once you find a problem, embarrass the person who made it and then help them understand how to fix it.”

It’s an unusual method, but it seems to work — and it’s indicative of the campaign’s overall approach to technology. Traditionally, political campaigns are far from the cutting edge of tech, but Obama 2012 was different. The team operated very much like a Silicon Valley startup. They grew quickly, building an enormous code base using many of the popular open-source tools that underpin companies such as Google and Facebook and Twitter, and they built it atop Amazon’s cloud platform, unafraid to put their code on third-party servers.

Hagan chose the Kenny Loggins music because “This is it” was a popular sound sample in the team’s Campfire chat software, and he chose the dancing otter because, well, he just liked it. We laugh every time we see it. But make no mistake: it aimed to solve a serious problem for the campaign. Hagen was plugging security holes that could allow hackers to post anything they wanted on one of the campaign’s websites, which were used by tens of millions of Obama supporters.

Whenever he’d find a cross-site scripting flaw on a website being tested on the campaign’s staging network, he’d exploit the flaw and insert the otter. It was slightly humiliating to the web programmers, but they enjoyed it too. “You can only describe the otter dance as erotic,” said Scott VanDenPlas, the tech team’s development and operations lead, speaking last week at the same conference.

The move to AWS was equally unusual. VanDenPlas called it a first for a presidential campaign. “All of us came from a traditional ops world,” he said. “It was a little bit of a gamble in that we didn’t have the full experience at the time. We just kind of trusted that we would hire very smart people that would figure it out.”

It all worked out pretty well. While the Republican’s get-out-the-vote system bugged out on election night, the Obama campaign nailed it on the tech side. And thanks to Kenny Loggins and the dancing otter, they had more than a little fun too.

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“Boardwalk Empire” creator on legalizing drugs and making Nucky likeable again

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – The prohibition drama “Boardwalk Empire” wrapped its spectacular third season Sunday night just weeks after the states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana.

To “Boardwalk” creator Terence Winter, who has immersed himself in the history of prohibition to research his gangster epic, the votes feel like a move in the right direction.

“It’s great. I think they should legalize drugs in general,” Winter told TheWrap. “The war on drugs is clearly not working, and I think they should take the profit motive out of being a drug dealer. And maybe kids will go to college and do something else.”

Winter, who reassembled his writers a few weeks ago to begin work on the show’s fourth season, talked to us about whether they ever go out of their way to slow down the action, making Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) likable again, and whether things are worse today than they were in the 1920s.

TheWrap: Is ‘Boardwalk’ making a case for drug legalization?

Winter: Well, I think history made it for us with prohibition. We’re just reflecting the reality of how it went down. I’m not trying to bend the reality or the truth of what happened. It clearly didn’t work. I don’t think people were more disposed to drink when alcohol was legal.

Actually, it had the opposite effect. Women didn’t start drinking until prohibition was enacted and college students didn’t start drinking until prohibition was enacted. Leaving the mystery aside might have had a better impact on the country – keeping it legal. In my personal opinion I don’t think making drugs legal would make anybody more likely to become a heroin addict, for example.

This is going to sound strange, but I mean it as a compliment. “Boardwalk” has a way of lulling you into looking at the costumes, and listening to the dialogue, and marveling at how pretty everything is. There are times when I almost want to nod off, it’s so comforting – and then suddenly someone gets set on fire. I feel you’re making a conscious effort to use boredom to really shock us at other times. Do you ever put in a scene that’s deliberately slow?

No, we don’t. I would disagree and say – slow or boring – there is dialogue that needs to be attended to and I think you need to pay attention to what’s going on. The pacing can sometimes be slower than certainly an action scene or a scene with incredible violence. Because we have such wide-ranging characters and such wide-ranging circumstances, some things might seem slower by comparison.

Obviously a scene involving a political figure or Margaret’s storyline, as opposed to something Al Capone is doing, is just by the very nature of it going to feel slow. But no, none of it is done by design.

I mean it in a good way. If you think things are slowing down, they’re not. It’s almost a trick.

The audience is so wide-ranging, too. We have people who can’t stand the violence and they’re much more entertained by the family stuff. One person’s slow is another person’s fascinating.

With the final episodes we got to see Nucky become really likable again. He’s always been generous, but at times he seemed a little too caught up in himself to care about the people around him. Was there an effort to make him a good guy again?

One of the points of this season is that he does get caught up in himself. That all comes home to visit in a big way in episode 11. He doesn’t know anything about Eddie Kessler the guy who works really closely with him. He doesn’t know if he has a family. He doesn’t know Chalky White’s phone number. It becomes apparent that he’s spent way too much time concerned with himself and his own affairs.

If you depict any character honestly, and show all of their colors, you’re going to find something relatable or likeable with anybody. And that’s certainly the truth with Al Capone or Luciano or Tony Soprano or any other famous character.

And certainly Steve Buscemi has an inherent likable quality to him. So when you add that to the mix you can’t help but like the guy.

Imagery is so important to the show, and I feel like at one point this season you did something just because it was gorgeous. When Billie changes her hair color to blonde, was there any reason to do that besides how incredible it looked in the explosion?

Well, she was sort of finally coming to terms with who she really was. That was the episode where she dropped the façade of Billie Kent and told Nucky her real name. She was going through a metamorphosis and that sort of illustrated that a little bit. They were sort of not pretending with each other any more.

Is Billie a natural blonde?

That color wasn’t natural. She wasn’t being Billie Kent that night. She was being the real person underneath. … But I agree it did look great in the explosion. Meg Chambers Steedle, who plays Billie Kent, is absolutely one of those people the camera just falls in love with. Unfortunately the context was terrible. But it was extremely cinematic.

Harrow kind of became the hero of the show this season. His scene of taking down the entire house full of gangsters: Wow. We’ve always been fascinated with the character and for me this season I was more interested in seeing who he is as a person and seeing him take that journey and fall in love and really explore that side of him. Given the way the story was, we knew it would end in violence.

But following the trajectory from the end of season 2, we knew this guy was very loyal to Jimmy and Angela and we knew he would stick around and take care of that kid. And of course Gillian being who she is, it wasn’t going to end well.

Is Gillian kaput at this point? The last time we saw her she was in a heroin daze, and she’s kind of lost everything.

She will be back on the show. She’s certainly still alive.

Is there anybody on the show you think you can’t kill?

Nope. Everybody’s up for grabs and that’s from the top on down. Anything can happen.

We hear so much about how much trouble our country is in. Do you think things are worse than they were in the 1920s?

No, and if anything, reading about how bad things were in the 1920s is strangely comforting in terms of how we think about things today. The level of corruption and the whole idea of going to hell in a hand basket is certainly nothing new. You look back and think, this pales in comparison. I think the more things change the more they stay the same.

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

Since at least the 1970s, deaf scientists have tried to address the lack of uniformity by gathering common signs for scientific terms in printed manuals and on videotapes. The problem has always been getting deaf students and their interpreters to adopt them.

Often, at science conferences, “local interpreters that we never met before would often use different signs for the same terms, leading to confusion,” said Caroline Solomon, a biology professor at Gallaudet University who is deaf.

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