Step to the Beat

Going out for a run used to just be about lacing up your sneakers. Now when you head out, you can feel like you’re drowning in tech: GPS watches, sports bands, sweat-proof earbuds, smartphone apps with cadence-matching playlists. And that’s before we even talk about what’s on your feet.

But we wouldn’t subject ourselves to this mountain of gadgetry if it didn’t really help. As our goals become more minute and more ambitious, training “by feel” doesn’t cut it anymore — you need the hard performance data and sophisticated tracking abilities only things like wearable sensors can provide.

Wahoo Fitness, a longtime favorite among plugged-in fitness freaks, has recently introduced a few new activity-monitoring gadgets. I tested the company’s latest real-time pace monitor, called the Stride sensor ($55), as well as a couple of heart-rate monitors. I also tested the Wahoo Key, a $60 dongle for your iPhone that links up to your sensors and passes the data along to your favorite fitness-tracking apps.

I started by setting up the Wahoo Key, which plugs into an iPhone’s 30-pin dock connector. According to Wahoo, iPhone 5 users will need to use a Lightning adapter until the company makes a new design. Setup is pretty easy, but the app guides you through the process, making the instruction manual (which is annoyingly reliant on QR codes) mostly redundant. Once the key was plugged in, I had the Wahoo Fitness app running smoothly in less than a minute. Links to download all the major compatible apps, such as MapMyRun and RunKeeper, were displayed as well.

Although a “keychain” is available for the Wahoo Key, it’s small enough to lose easily. Also, I was nervous about how it protrudes awkwardly from the end of my phone, and I bet it would snap right off if I dropped the phone.

Next, I strapped on the Stride Sensor, which you attach to your shoelaces. I clipped the sensor onto my shoe and it stayed comfortably in place through an entire half-marathon.

The sensor tracks your running pace using a pair of 3-axis accelerometers. It easily links to the phone (via the Wahoo Key), where all the data is displayed and recorded. There’s a slight delay in pace monitoring of only a few seconds, which is totally acceptable. Also, Wahoo lets you program your height to make its readings more accurate. It only lets you go up to 7 feet, so very few runners are going to feel left out.

The collected data could be very helpful to runners trying to teach themselves what various paces feel like. The stats of distance, time and pace are all displayed on the iPhone in large enough text to make them easy readable at the gym or mid-race.

Not content to stop there, I also strapped on a couple of the company’s heart-rate devices: the Wahoo Blue HR Heart Rate Strap ($80), and the Wahoo Soft Heart Rate Strap ($50). The biggest difference between them is that the Blue HR is Bluetooth-enabled (hello, iPhone 5 people!) while the other strap requires the Wahoo Key, in all of its last-generation technological glory.

Of all the goodies Wahoo currently offers, the ability to monitor your heart rate and have your BPM displayed on your phone is the most useful. Target heart rates are essential to a well-structured training program, so this is critical data, and Wahoo delivers it with great accuracy.

According to the Wahoo website, the Blue HR will connect to the iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, the latest-generation iPads and the iPad mini. Be warned: The sensors only talk to each other for a distance of up to 10 feet, and carrying an iPad around the gym could get awkward. I could see a paired iPad being useful on a treadmill, or if you work with a trainer who’s holding one while hovering nearby.

The straps that hold the heart-rate monitors against your chest are also comfortable and shouldn’t bother runners (or cyclists) on even their longer workouts. Wahoo also offers an armband to carry your iPhone while you sweat ($30). The longest run I completed while testing the band was 4 miles long, and the neoprene never chaffed or got uncomfortable, but it kept my iPhone 4 very stable.

For athletes who devour tech like GU on mile 10, Wahoo Fitness is a well-known name. If you’re just getting into tracking your runs or bike rides, the company’s gear is a good place to start. I’d recommend looking at the Bluetooth stuff first, since it works with the newer devices via wireless pairing, and you can avoid the annoyance of the protruding 30-pin dongle.

WIRED Real-time pace monitoring is valuable for undertaking tempo runs. Heart-rate sensors give the number junkies the accuracy and reporting they crave. Gear is comfortable and keeps everything in place without fuss.

TIRED Everything is iOS-centric. Wahoo Key sticks out too far, and doesn’t work with newer Apple devices unless you have an adapter. The Wahoo Key could easily be lost. Uploading music to the Wahoo app isn’t worth the hassle.

Read More..

“Zero Dark Thirty” wins best film award a second time

NEW YORK (Reuters) – “Zero Dark Thirty,” filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow‘s action thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was named best film of 2012 on Wednesday by the National Board of Review – the second accolade for the movie in one week.

Bigelow was named best director and Jessica Chastain, who plays the starring role of a young CIA officer pursuing bin Laden, was named best actress by the NBR.

Bradley Cooper took home best actor honors for his portrayal of a bipolar, former teacher in the film “Silver Linings Playbook.”

” ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is a masterful film,” NBR President Annie Schulhof said in a statement. “Kathryn Bigelow takes the viewer inside a definitive moment of our time in a visceral and unique way. It is exciting, provocative and deeply emotional.”

Wednesday’s awards for the Hollywood treatment of the decade-long operation to hunt and kill bin Laden, based on firsthand accounts, boosts the prospects for the movie to win an Oscar in February. The film, not yet publicly released, also took the top award from the New York Film Critics Circle on Monday.

Leonardo DiCaprio won best supporting actor from the NBR for his role in Quentin Tarantino’s new slavery era drama, “Django Unchained,” while Ann Dowd took the best supporting actress honors for her role in “Compliance,” as a fast-food restaurant manager duped by a prank caller scam.

The NBR, a 100 year-old U.S.-based group of movie industry watchers and film professionals, gave its original screenplay award to Rian Johnson for “Looper,” and adapted screenplay to David O. Russell for “Silver linings Playbook.”

“HOBBIT,” “LIFE OF PI” OVERLOOKED

“Les Miserables,” the first big movie adaptation of the popular stage musical featuring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway was named best ensemble, and the group gave its best animated feature prize to “Wreck-It-Ralph.”

Each year the board also issues a list of top 10 movies, which this year besides Bigelow’s film included Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage thriller “Argo,” “Django Unchained,” “Les Miserables,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” and “Looper.”

“Lincoln,” Steven Spielberg’s biopic of President Abraham Lincoln, the mystical indie film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Gus van Sant’s fracking drama “Promised Land,” and coming of age film “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” rounded out the list.

Absent from the list were some films that had been touted for honors ahead of awards season, including Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit,” Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” indie film “The Sessions” starring Helen Hunt, and Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi.”

In other categories, NBR gave its best documentary award to “Searching for Sugarman,” and chose Austrian director Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” as best foreign language film.

Child-actress Quvenzhane Wallis from “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” and “The Impossible” actor Tom Holland each won awards for breakthrough performances.

Benh Zeitlin received the award for best debut director for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” while documentary “Central Park Five” and drama “Promised Land” were both honored with the Freedom of Expression award.

The National Board of Review was formed in New York in 1909 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting movies as an art form and entertainment.

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, editing by Jill Serjeant and Leslie Gevirtz)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

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.

Read More..

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.

The iEconomy

Articles in this series are examining challenges posed by increasingly globalized high-tech industries.

Explore More in the Series »

“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.

Read More..

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.

Read More..

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

Read More..

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

Read More..

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.

Read More..

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.

Read More..

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.

Read More..