Monday, October 13, 2014
Dancing Through Life
"In Germany, the Expressionist current triggered a wealth of exchanges between painters and dancers. While Laban embodied the new figure of the dancer as educator and theoretician, Mary Wigman, one of his pupils at the free community of Monte Verità , best epitomized the figure of woman beset with life and death urges, as illustrated in her famous Witch's dance. Wigman, who viewed herself as a dancer of humanity, proved equally fascinating to painters Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, not to mention her pupil Gret Palucca."
What If Gluten Sensitivity Isn’t Just About Gluten?
Gluten sensitivity — the kind that’s not associated with celiac disease — is a mysterious thing. An estimated 18 million people don’t fit the criteria for celiac disease, the genetic disorder that erodes the small intestine and causes digestive symptoms like bloating and stomach pain. And yet consuming gluten still makes them feel awful, notes health writer Jane Brody in a two-part series on the protein for the New York Times this week. But what if gluten is only a piece of the puzzle?
A bit buried in her second article, Brody nods to some overlooked nutrition research published last year, which indicates that for many who are currently considered to have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, gluten may not be the only thing that’s causing their health issues. The real culprit, this study suggests, may be a group of sugars represented by the somewhat unwieldy acronym FODMAPs, which Brody defines like so:
The idea of non-celiac gluten sensitivity was established in the scientific community back in 2011, when a study published in Nature by a team of Australian researchers concluded that it “may exist.” This research was among the first to show that people who did not have celiac disease could still suffer from celiac-like symptoms after consuming gluten, including bloating, intestinal pain, and tiredness.
But many of the people in this study still experienced these symptoms long after switching to a gluten-free diet. And so the researchers decided to continue to follow these folks. They asked the participants to switch from their gluten-free diet to a diet low in FODMAPs, which means avoiding a pretty extensive list of fruits, veggies, and grains containing those sugars that are harder for some to digest. Some of those foods do contain gluten, but many do not. For more detail, here’s a list of foods considered to be high and low in FODMAPs.
by Melissa Dahl, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A bit buried in her second article, Brody nods to some overlooked nutrition research published last year, which indicates that for many who are currently considered to have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, gluten may not be the only thing that’s causing their health issues. The real culprit, this study suggests, may be a group of sugars represented by the somewhat unwieldy acronym FODMAPs, which Brody defines like so:Fodmaps is an acronym for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, sugars that draw water into the intestinal tract. They may be poorly digested or absorbed, and become fodder for colonic bacteria that produce gas and can cause abdominal distress.And this is a big deal, some nutrition scientists say, because so far non-celiac gluten sensitivity has mostly been defined by what it isn’t: It’s not a wheat allergy, and it’s not celiac disease. It does result in the same gastrointestinal issues that plague celiac patients, but it’s also often accompanied by symptoms outside the gut: headache, joint pain, foggy mind.
The idea of non-celiac gluten sensitivity was established in the scientific community back in 2011, when a study published in Nature by a team of Australian researchers concluded that it “may exist.” This research was among the first to show that people who did not have celiac disease could still suffer from celiac-like symptoms after consuming gluten, including bloating, intestinal pain, and tiredness.
But many of the people in this study still experienced these symptoms long after switching to a gluten-free diet. And so the researchers decided to continue to follow these folks. They asked the participants to switch from their gluten-free diet to a diet low in FODMAPs, which means avoiding a pretty extensive list of fruits, veggies, and grains containing those sugars that are harder for some to digest. Some of those foods do contain gluten, but many do not. For more detail, here’s a list of foods considered to be high and low in FODMAPs.
by Melissa Dahl, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Copenhagen Wheel: If an Electric Bike Is Ever Going to Hit It Big in the U.S., It's This One
On a sunny but brisk spring morning near the Charles River in Cambridge, I took a test ride on the bicycle of the future. No rockets or lasers (alas), the bicycle of the future looks pretty much like the bicycle of the present. But with the first pumps of my feet on the pedals, I felt the difference. The bike wasn't just moving, it was pushing, adding extra propulsion to my own pedaling, giving me a boost with every revolution of the pedals. Faster than expected, I reached the end of a quiet block leaning into a corner. I took a straightaway for a few blocks and pushed 20 miles an hour without hardly trying. My feet were putting out a solid paper-route effort, but the bike had me racing in the Tour de France.
The bike I tested was equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel, an electric pedal-assist motor fully contained in the oversized red hub of an otherwise normal back bicycle wheel. Inside that red hub is a delicately crammed array of computing equipment, sensors, and a three-phase brushless direct current electric motor that can feel the torque of my pedaling and add appropriately scaled assistance.
Replace the back wheel of any bike with the Copenhagen Wheel and it's instantly an electric bike—one that not only assists the rider but senses the surrounding topography and can even collect and share data about environmental, traffic, and road conditions. First developed in 2009, through a partnership between MIT's Senseable City Lab and the City of Copenhagen, the wheel is now in its first stages of commercial production. By the end of 2014, thousands will be shipped out to fulfill pre-orders around the world.
With its focus on design and simple application of complex technology, the Copenhagen Wheel is perhaps the sleekest version of the electric bike. But it's hardly the only one. Millions of electric bicycles are being used in cities all over the world, offering cheap and accessible forms of transportation in developing countries and dense urban environments. And though bicycling has long been considered recreation in the United States, the electric bicycle is about to become the next big thing in urban transportation.
The bike I tested was equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel, an electric pedal-assist motor fully contained in the oversized red hub of an otherwise normal back bicycle wheel. Inside that red hub is a delicately crammed array of computing equipment, sensors, and a three-phase brushless direct current electric motor that can feel the torque of my pedaling and add appropriately scaled assistance.Replace the back wheel of any bike with the Copenhagen Wheel and it's instantly an electric bike—one that not only assists the rider but senses the surrounding topography and can even collect and share data about environmental, traffic, and road conditions. First developed in 2009, through a partnership between MIT's Senseable City Lab and the City of Copenhagen, the wheel is now in its first stages of commercial production. By the end of 2014, thousands will be shipped out to fulfill pre-orders around the world.
With its focus on design and simple application of complex technology, the Copenhagen Wheel is perhaps the sleekest version of the electric bike. But it's hardly the only one. Millions of electric bicycles are being used in cities all over the world, offering cheap and accessible forms of transportation in developing countries and dense urban environments. And though bicycling has long been considered recreation in the United States, the electric bicycle is about to become the next big thing in urban transportation.
by Nate Berg, CityLab | Read more:
Image: Michael D. Spencer / Superpedestrian
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Marriage Is an Abduction
The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.
“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.
Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.
The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.
Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.
But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)
Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.
“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.
The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.
Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.
But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)
Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.
by Elif Batuman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: 20th Century Fox
Scheherazade
"I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.
“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.
He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.
“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”
“Huh? Eels have jaws?”
“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.
“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”
“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”
Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.
“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”
“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.
“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”
Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.
“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”
“Can you remember eating them?”
“No, I can’t.”
“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”
“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”
“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.
“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.”
“And you can see all these things now?”
“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”
“To what you were thinking then?”
“Yeah.”
“What do lampreys think about?”
“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”
“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”
“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”
No, he said. He couldn’t.
“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”
“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.
“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.
“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”
“Huh? Eels have jaws?”
“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.
“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”
“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”
Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.
“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”
“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.
“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”
Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.
“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”
“Can you remember eating them?”
“No, I can’t.”
“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”
“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”
“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.
“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.”
“And you can see all these things now?”
“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”
“To what you were thinking then?”
“Yeah.”
“What do lampreys think about?”
“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”
“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”
“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”
No, he said. He couldn’t.
“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”
“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.
by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Merlin
Marc Marquez
A few years back, MotoGP fans and press began referring to the top four or five riders as "aliens" due to their consistent ability to be so much faster than what you'd otherwise refer to as the best riders in the world. The moniker essentially implied that this group of elite racers were from another planet. Consider them superhuman.
And then Marc Marquez came along, winning the MotoGP World Championship in his first attempt and then the first 10 races of the 2014 season. That begs the question: If alien is the term used to describe the top four or five riders (Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa, Valentino Rossi, and—previously—Casey Stoner), then what title could you possibly give Marc Marquez?
by Staff, Sport Rider | Read more:
Image: via:
Before the Advice, Check Out the Adviser
When Elaine and Merlin Toffel, a retired couple in their 70s, needed help with their investments, they went to their local U.S. Bank branch. The tellers knew them by their first names. They were comfortable there.
So when a teller suggested that they meet with the bank’s investment brokers, the Toffels made an appointment. After discussions and an evaluation, the bank sold them variable annuities, in which they invested more than $650,000. The annuities promised to generate lifetime income payments.
“We wanted to make the most amount of interest we could so if we needed it to live on, we could use it,” said Ms. Toffel, 74, of Lindenhurst, Ill.
What she says they didn’t fully understand was that the variable annuities came with a hefty annual charge: about 4 percent of the amount invested. That’s more than $26,000, annually — enough to buy a new Honda sedan every year. What’s more, if they needed to tap the money right away, there would be a 7 percent surrender charge, or more than $45,000.
Michael Walsh, a spokesman for U.S. Bank, said that the investments were appropriate for the Toffels, that fees were disclosed and that the sale was completed after months of consultations. But the Toffels now question whether they were given financial advice that was truly in their best interests. Like many consumers, they say they didn’t realize that their broker wasn’t required to follow the most stringent requirement for financial professionals, known as the fiduciary standard. It amounts to this: providing advice that is always 100 percent in the consumer’s interest.
Many people think that they are getting that kind of advice when they are not, said Arthur Laby, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law and a former assistant general counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Brokerage customers are, in a certain sense, deceived,” he said. “If brokers continue to call themselves advisers and advertise advisory services, customers believe they are receiving objective advice that is in their best interest. In many cases, however, they are not.”
Brokers, like those at the Toffels’ bank, are technically known as registered representatives. They are required only to recommend “suitable” investments based on an investor’s personal situation — their age, investment goals, time horizon and appetite for risk, among other things. “Suitable” may sound like an adequate standard, but there’s a hitch: It can mean that a broker isn’t required to put a customer’s interests before his own.
There are some specific situations when brokers must act as fiduciaries — for example, when they collect a percentage of total assets to manage an investment account, or when they are given full control of an investor’s account. But under current rules, a broker can take off his fiduciary hat and recommend merely “suitable” investments for the same customer’s other buckets of money. Confusing? Absolutely.(...)
It's a bewildering situation for consumers, particularly as they try to figure out which advisers do follow a fiduciary standard: Investment advisers, who generally must register with the S.E.C. or a state securities regulator, must put their customers’ interests first, regardless of what accounts they are working with.
This creates a muddle for investors. Say you sit down with a broker — one who isn’t legally required to act as a fiduciary — and the broker has access to a dozen mutual funds, all of which are deemed “suitable” for a particular customer. The broker can recommend the most expensive fund, even if it makes him more money at the consumer’s expense and isn’t preferable in any other way, Professor Laby said.
On the other hand, if advisers are following a fiduciary standard, the proper course is clear: “They have to recommend the one that is the lowest cost” because that will be in a consumer’s best interest, he added.
by Tara Siegel Bernard, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nathan Weber
So when a teller suggested that they meet with the bank’s investment brokers, the Toffels made an appointment. After discussions and an evaluation, the bank sold them variable annuities, in which they invested more than $650,000. The annuities promised to generate lifetime income payments.“We wanted to make the most amount of interest we could so if we needed it to live on, we could use it,” said Ms. Toffel, 74, of Lindenhurst, Ill.
What she says they didn’t fully understand was that the variable annuities came with a hefty annual charge: about 4 percent of the amount invested. That’s more than $26,000, annually — enough to buy a new Honda sedan every year. What’s more, if they needed to tap the money right away, there would be a 7 percent surrender charge, or more than $45,000.
Michael Walsh, a spokesman for U.S. Bank, said that the investments were appropriate for the Toffels, that fees were disclosed and that the sale was completed after months of consultations. But the Toffels now question whether they were given financial advice that was truly in their best interests. Like many consumers, they say they didn’t realize that their broker wasn’t required to follow the most stringent requirement for financial professionals, known as the fiduciary standard. It amounts to this: providing advice that is always 100 percent in the consumer’s interest.
Many people think that they are getting that kind of advice when they are not, said Arthur Laby, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law and a former assistant general counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Brokerage customers are, in a certain sense, deceived,” he said. “If brokers continue to call themselves advisers and advertise advisory services, customers believe they are receiving objective advice that is in their best interest. In many cases, however, they are not.”
Brokers, like those at the Toffels’ bank, are technically known as registered representatives. They are required only to recommend “suitable” investments based on an investor’s personal situation — their age, investment goals, time horizon and appetite for risk, among other things. “Suitable” may sound like an adequate standard, but there’s a hitch: It can mean that a broker isn’t required to put a customer’s interests before his own.
There are some specific situations when brokers must act as fiduciaries — for example, when they collect a percentage of total assets to manage an investment account, or when they are given full control of an investor’s account. But under current rules, a broker can take off his fiduciary hat and recommend merely “suitable” investments for the same customer’s other buckets of money. Confusing? Absolutely.(...)
It's a bewildering situation for consumers, particularly as they try to figure out which advisers do follow a fiduciary standard: Investment advisers, who generally must register with the S.E.C. or a state securities regulator, must put their customers’ interests first, regardless of what accounts they are working with.
This creates a muddle for investors. Say you sit down with a broker — one who isn’t legally required to act as a fiduciary — and the broker has access to a dozen mutual funds, all of which are deemed “suitable” for a particular customer. The broker can recommend the most expensive fund, even if it makes him more money at the consumer’s expense and isn’t preferable in any other way, Professor Laby said.
On the other hand, if advisers are following a fiduciary standard, the proper course is clear: “They have to recommend the one that is the lowest cost” because that will be in a consumer’s best interest, he added.
Image: Nathan Weber
Saturday, October 11, 2014
A Promising Pill, Not So Hard to Swallow
[ed. Talk about a "no-brainer". If pharmaceutical companies ever figure out how to get into the action, approval might occur quite a bit sooner. See also: this Washington Post story.]
This pill goes down easier if you forget what is in it.
Inside the experimental capsule is human feces — strained, centrifuged and frozen. Taking them for just two days can cure a dangerous bacterial infection that has defied antibiotics and kills 14,000 Americans each year, researchers said Saturday.
If the results are replicated in larger trials, the pill, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, promises an easier, cheaper and most likely safer alternative to an unpleasant procedure highlighted in both medical journals and on YouTube: fecal transplants.
Studies show that transplanting feces in liquid form from healthy people to patients with stubborn Clostridium difficile infections can stop the wrenching intestinal symptoms, apparently by restoring healthy gut bacteria.
But fecal transplants are not easy. The procedure requires delivery of a fecal solution via the rectum or a tube inserted through the nose. As with colonoscopies, patients must flush their bowels first.
Finding and screening donors is time-consuming and can delay the transplant. And the costs can be significant, certainly higher than taking a simple pill.
“Capsules are going to replace the way we’ve been doing this,” said Dr. Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist with the Women’s Medicine Collaborative in Providence, R.I., who was not involved in the study. Dr. Kelly performs five or six fecal transplants a month, but demand is so great she is booked through January.
“It’s so labor-intensive,” she said. “You have to find a donor, have to screen a donor. If you can just open a freezer and take out a poop pill, that’s wonderful.”
While the pills are not being marketed yet, the authors of the study, published in JAMA, are already making them available to qualified patients without requiring participation in clinical trials.
Their study was small and preliminary, but results were striking: 19 of 20 patients with C. difficile infections were cured of diarrhea and related symptoms. Most saw improvements after one two-day round of pills, the rest after two or three rounds, said Dr. Ilan Youngster, the lead investigator.
Other research teams, and at least one private company, are developing and testing fecal pills. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration effectively permits doctors to give fecal transplants to qualified patients with recurrent C. difficile infections. Pills marketed commercially would have to meet F.D.A. drug-licensing regulations.) (...)
Deirdre, 37, a technology consultant in Boston, acquired C. difficile after receiving antibiotics for a breast infection and struggled with recurrences for months before learning of the study.
“At first I was kind of grossed out,” said Deirdre, who asked that her last name be withheld because of privacy concerns. But about a week after taking the capsules, which “kind of felt like small ice cubes,” her digestive system began to normalize.
“If this is a treatment that was 90 percent effective and you can get over the gross factor, it seems to be kind of a no-brainer,” she said.
This pill goes down easier if you forget what is in it.Inside the experimental capsule is human feces — strained, centrifuged and frozen. Taking them for just two days can cure a dangerous bacterial infection that has defied antibiotics and kills 14,000 Americans each year, researchers said Saturday.
If the results are replicated in larger trials, the pill, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, promises an easier, cheaper and most likely safer alternative to an unpleasant procedure highlighted in both medical journals and on YouTube: fecal transplants.
Studies show that transplanting feces in liquid form from healthy people to patients with stubborn Clostridium difficile infections can stop the wrenching intestinal symptoms, apparently by restoring healthy gut bacteria.
But fecal transplants are not easy. The procedure requires delivery of a fecal solution via the rectum or a tube inserted through the nose. As with colonoscopies, patients must flush their bowels first.
Finding and screening donors is time-consuming and can delay the transplant. And the costs can be significant, certainly higher than taking a simple pill.
“Capsules are going to replace the way we’ve been doing this,” said Dr. Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist with the Women’s Medicine Collaborative in Providence, R.I., who was not involved in the study. Dr. Kelly performs five or six fecal transplants a month, but demand is so great she is booked through January.
“It’s so labor-intensive,” she said. “You have to find a donor, have to screen a donor. If you can just open a freezer and take out a poop pill, that’s wonderful.”
While the pills are not being marketed yet, the authors of the study, published in JAMA, are already making them available to qualified patients without requiring participation in clinical trials.
Their study was small and preliminary, but results were striking: 19 of 20 patients with C. difficile infections were cured of diarrhea and related symptoms. Most saw improvements after one two-day round of pills, the rest after two or three rounds, said Dr. Ilan Youngster, the lead investigator.
Other research teams, and at least one private company, are developing and testing fecal pills. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration effectively permits doctors to give fecal transplants to qualified patients with recurrent C. difficile infections. Pills marketed commercially would have to meet F.D.A. drug-licensing regulations.) (...)
Deirdre, 37, a technology consultant in Boston, acquired C. difficile after receiving antibiotics for a breast infection and struggled with recurrences for months before learning of the study.
“At first I was kind of grossed out,” said Deirdre, who asked that her last name be withheld because of privacy concerns. But about a week after taking the capsules, which “kind of felt like small ice cubes,” her digestive system began to normalize.
“If this is a treatment that was 90 percent effective and you can get over the gross factor, it seems to be kind of a no-brainer,” she said.
by Pam Belluck, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hohmann Lab
Friday, October 10, 2014
The 'Homeland Generation'
This data is credited to the Census Bureau, but presumably only the raw population numbers—the “Homeland Generation” is not, apparently, an official census designation.The choice to use it, then, fell to the people handling communications for the White House.
These people would have been presented with a number of options, none of them appealing: Generation Z. Post-millennials. Plurals. These are early and over-eager names concocted by marketers, and it is obvious. Gen X didn't know it was Gen X until it was teenaged; the first millennials were old enough to roll their eyes at the term as soon as people started using it earnestly. Coinages are deliberate. Winners are decided in retrospect. There was no need for the White House to use a distinct name, here, except to fill a blank label in a chart. Not the current administration's problem!
This was what a political operative might call an unforced error. The Homeland Generation is not just an unnecessary choice but a jarring one. Its optics are conspicuously clumsy considering that optics are the sole concern of this document. Read it from the perspective of a non-American to get the full effect: The "Homeland Generation" sounds paranoid, xenophobic, and ready to fight. It's almost like something out of speculative fiction, what a writer might call the first generation of people after some great collapse shattered the modern world into nationalist tribes. It would be very useful in this context—it would convey fear and selfishness and reversion, instantly, to use such a darkly coded word. It's the kind of name you would give to a lost generation, seeing as the "Lost Generation" is already taken. The reader would get it. (...)
The name doesn't have some clever double-meaning, and there's nothing arch about it. The Homeland Generation is a generation named in language of a terror-obsessed era that it was too young to experience acutely; a generation subjected to crushing surveillance by suddenly and unaccountably insane parents, fixated on their own pre-war-on-terror, pre-millenial childhoods. The Homeland Generation: It's what it sounds like! The first sentence of the next section in the piece, by the way, which was published in the Harvard Business Review, begins: "If you are a marketer planning the next generation of consumer products or services…"
by John Herman, The Awl | Read more:
Image: U.S. Government
Inside the American Terrordome
It happened so fast that, at first, I didn’t even take it in.
Two Saturdays ago, a friend and I were heading into the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., to catch a show of neo-Impressionist art when we ran into someone he knew, heading out. I was introduced and the usual chitchat ensued. At some point, she asked me, “Do you live here?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m from New York.”
She smiled, responded that it, too, was a fine place to live, then hesitated just a beat before adding in a quiet, friendly voice: “Given ISIS, maybe neither city is such a great place to be right now.” Goodbyes were promptly said and we entered the museum.
All of this passed so quickly that I didn’t begin rolling her comment around in my head until we were looking at the sublime pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and his associates. Only then did I think: ISIS, a danger in New York? ISIS, a danger in Washington? And I had the urge to bolt down the stairs, catch up to her, and say: whatever you do, don’t step off the curb. That’s where danger lies in American life. ISIS, not so much.
The Terrorists Have Our Number
I have no idea what provoked her comment. Maybe she was thinking about a story that had broken just two days earlier, topping the primetime TV news and hitting the front pages of newspapers. On a visit to the Big Apple, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi,claimed that his intelligence services had uncovered a plot by militants of the Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS or ISIL), the extremists of the new caliphate that had gobbled up part of his country, against the subway systems of Paris, New York, and possibly other U.S. cities. (...)
The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee. The result by the time I met that woman: 71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S. (shades of “Homeland”!) and at least the same percentage, if not more (depending on which poll you read), were ready to back a full-scale bombing campaign, promptly launched by the Obama administration, against the group.
If, however, you took a step out of the overwrought American universe of terror threats for 30 seconds, it couldn’t have been clearer that everyone in the grim netherworld of the Middle East now seemed to have our number. (...)
Terror-Phobia and a Demobilized Citizenry
This sort of soundtrack has been the background noise in our lives for the last 13 years. And like familiar music (or Muzak), it evokes a response that’s almost beyond our control. The terror about terror, sometimes quite professionally managed (as in the case of the Khorasan Group), has flooded through our world year after year after year. ISIS is just a recent example of the way the interests of a group of extremists in making themselves larger than life and the interests of groups in this country in building up or maintaining their institutional power have meshed. Terror as the preeminent danger to our American world now courses through the societal bloodstream, helped along by regular infusions of fear from the usual panic-meisters.
On that set of emotions, an unparalleled global security state has been built (and funded), as well as a military that, in terms of its destructive power, leaves the rest of the world in the dust. In the process, and in the name of protecting Americans from the supposedly near-apocalyptic dangers posed by the original al-Qaeda and its various wannabe successors, a new version of America has come into being -- one increasingly willing to bulldoze the most basic liberties, invested in the spread of blanket secrecy over government actions, committed to wholesale surveillance, and dedicated to a full-scale loss of privacy.
You can repeat until you're blue in the face that the dangers of scattered terror outfits are vanishingly small in the “homeland,” when compared to almost any other danger in American life. It won’t matter, not once the terror-mongers go to work. So, in a sense, that woman was right. For all intents and purposes, without ever leaving Iraq and Syria, ISIS isin Washington -- and New York, and Topeka, and El Paso (or, as local fear-mongers in Texas suggest, ready to cross the Rio Grande at any moment), and Salt Lake City, and Sacramento. ISIS has, by now, wormed its way inside our heads. So perhaps she was right as well to suggest that Washington and New York (not to speak of wherever you happen to live) are not great places to be right now.
Let’s be honest. Post-9/11, when it comes to our own safety (and so where our tax dollars go), we’ve become as mad as loons. Worse yet, the panic, fear, and hysteria over the dangers of terrorism may be the only thing left that ties us as a citizenry to a world in which so many acts of a destructive nature are being carried out in our name.
Two Saturdays ago, a friend and I were heading into the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., to catch a show of neo-Impressionist art when we ran into someone he knew, heading out. I was introduced and the usual chitchat ensued. At some point, she asked me, “Do you live here?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m from New York.”She smiled, responded that it, too, was a fine place to live, then hesitated just a beat before adding in a quiet, friendly voice: “Given ISIS, maybe neither city is such a great place to be right now.” Goodbyes were promptly said and we entered the museum.
All of this passed so quickly that I didn’t begin rolling her comment around in my head until we were looking at the sublime pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and his associates. Only then did I think: ISIS, a danger in New York? ISIS, a danger in Washington? And I had the urge to bolt down the stairs, catch up to her, and say: whatever you do, don’t step off the curb. That’s where danger lies in American life. ISIS, not so much.
The Terrorists Have Our Number
I have no idea what provoked her comment. Maybe she was thinking about a story that had broken just two days earlier, topping the primetime TV news and hitting the front pages of newspapers. On a visit to the Big Apple, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi,claimed that his intelligence services had uncovered a plot by militants of the Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS or ISIL), the extremists of the new caliphate that had gobbled up part of his country, against the subway systems of Paris, New York, and possibly other U.S. cities. (...)
The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee. The result by the time I met that woman: 71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S. (shades of “Homeland”!) and at least the same percentage, if not more (depending on which poll you read), were ready to back a full-scale bombing campaign, promptly launched by the Obama administration, against the group.
If, however, you took a step out of the overwrought American universe of terror threats for 30 seconds, it couldn’t have been clearer that everyone in the grim netherworld of the Middle East now seemed to have our number. (...)
Terror-Phobia and a Demobilized Citizenry
This sort of soundtrack has been the background noise in our lives for the last 13 years. And like familiar music (or Muzak), it evokes a response that’s almost beyond our control. The terror about terror, sometimes quite professionally managed (as in the case of the Khorasan Group), has flooded through our world year after year after year. ISIS is just a recent example of the way the interests of a group of extremists in making themselves larger than life and the interests of groups in this country in building up or maintaining their institutional power have meshed. Terror as the preeminent danger to our American world now courses through the societal bloodstream, helped along by regular infusions of fear from the usual panic-meisters.
On that set of emotions, an unparalleled global security state has been built (and funded), as well as a military that, in terms of its destructive power, leaves the rest of the world in the dust. In the process, and in the name of protecting Americans from the supposedly near-apocalyptic dangers posed by the original al-Qaeda and its various wannabe successors, a new version of America has come into being -- one increasingly willing to bulldoze the most basic liberties, invested in the spread of blanket secrecy over government actions, committed to wholesale surveillance, and dedicated to a full-scale loss of privacy.
You can repeat until you're blue in the face that the dangers of scattered terror outfits are vanishingly small in the “homeland,” when compared to almost any other danger in American life. It won’t matter, not once the terror-mongers go to work. So, in a sense, that woman was right. For all intents and purposes, without ever leaving Iraq and Syria, ISIS isin Washington -- and New York, and Topeka, and El Paso (or, as local fear-mongers in Texas suggest, ready to cross the Rio Grande at any moment), and Salt Lake City, and Sacramento. ISIS has, by now, wormed its way inside our heads. So perhaps she was right as well to suggest that Washington and New York (not to speak of wherever you happen to live) are not great places to be right now.
Let’s be honest. Post-9/11, when it comes to our own safety (and so where our tax dollars go), we’ve become as mad as loons. Worse yet, the panic, fear, and hysteria over the dangers of terrorism may be the only thing left that ties us as a citizenry to a world in which so many acts of a destructive nature are being carried out in our name.
by Tom Englehardt, Tomdispatch.com | Read more:
Image: Tom Englehardt
The Physical Web
[ed. See also: Google wants to turn urbanites into beta testers of a ‘Physical Web’.]
What is this?
The Physical Web is an approach to unleash the core superpower of the web: interaction on demand. People should be able to walk up to any smart device - a vending machine, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car - and not have to download an app first. Everything should be just a tap away.
The Physical Web is not shipping yet nor is it a Google product. This is an early-stage experimental project and we're developing it out in the open as we do all things related to the web. This should only be of interest to developers looking to test out this feature and provide us feedback.
The Physical Web is an approach to unleash the core superpower of the web: interaction on demand. People should be able to walk up to any smart device - a vending machine, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car - and not have to download an app first. Everything should be just a tap away.
The Physical Web is not shipping yet nor is it a Google product. This is an early-stage experimental project and we're developing it out in the open as we do all things related to the web. This should only be of interest to developers looking to test out this feature and provide us feedback.
Why is this important?
The number of smart devices is going to explode, and the assumption that each new device will require its own application just isn't realistic. We need a system that lets anyone interact with any device at any time. The Physical Web isn't about replacing native apps: it's about enabling interaction when native apps just aren't practical.
The number of smart devices is going to explode, and the assumption that each new device will require its own application just isn't realistic. We need a system that lets anyone interact with any device at any time. The Physical Web isn't about replacing native apps: it's about enabling interaction when native apps just aren't practical.
Why is this open source?
The Physical Web must be an open standard that everyone can use. By creating a common web standard that any device can use to offer interaction, a new range of services becomes possible.
The Physical Web must be an open standard that everyone can use. By creating a common web standard that any device can use to offer interaction, a new range of services becomes possible.
How does this change things?
Once any smart device can have a web address, the entire overhead of an app seems a bit backward. The Physical Web approach unlocks tiny use cases that would never be practical:
Once any smart device can have a web address, the entire overhead of an app seems a bit backward. The Physical Web approach unlocks tiny use cases that would never be practical:
- A bus stop tells you the next bus arrival
- Parking meters and vending machines all work the same way, letting you pay quickly and easily
- Any store, no matter how small, can offer an online experience when you walk in
- A ZipCar broadcasts a signup page, allowing you to immediately drive away
Thursday, October 9, 2014
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