Debut of repainted sign is Hollywood event

If there's anything Tinseltown excels at, it's turning a ho-hum event into a made-for-TV spectacle. Witness the fanfare that unfolds each time the Hollywood sign gets a fresh coat of paint.

It's not written off as routine maintenance. No, it's a civic event.

A media scrum gathers. Elected officials gush. Someone cracks jokes about face-lifts. (In 1995, nipped-and-tucked actress Phyllis Diller did the honors.)

PHOTOS: Hollywood sign history

So it was on Tuesday, when reporters were whisked to just below the nearly 90-year-old sign, one of the few landmarks in the crazy quilt of neighborhoods that is Los Angeles.

In a clearing, VIPs fidgeted on white folding chairs. At least a dozen cameras were trained on Chris Baumgart, chairman of the nonprofit Hollywood Sign Trust, who wore a dark suit and sneakers. Behind him loomed the nine 45-foot-tall letters that together, he said, cost about $175,000 to gussy up.

Beginning in October, workers stripped the letters of weathered paint, smeared them with 105 gallons of primer and coated them with 255 gallons of new paint (color: No. 7757, high-reflective white). It's made by Sherwin-Williams, which picked up most of the sign restoration bill.

Baumgart, a veritable encyclopedia of sign knowledge, joked with reporters that its face had been pancaked with two tons of makeup. "A lot was done to her backside, but we're leaving that secret," he said, tongue firmly in cheek.

When it was erected in 1923 with the aid of mule teams, the sign touted a high-end real estate development named Hollywoodland. Its creators expected to take it down after a year, according to the Hollywood Sign Trust, but tourists flocked to the hillside and its stunning view of Los Angeles. In the 1940s, the city folded the sign into Griffith Park and truncated it to hype, simply, "Hollywood."

Over the years, the sign has needed numerous touch-ups. In the 1970s, the termite-weakened O cartwheeled away from the rest of its kin and an L was set ablaze. A who's-who of Hollywood helped raise money to rebuild the sign completely, including Alice Cooper, Gene Autry and Hugh Hefner, who threw a fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion.

When the retooled landmark was unveiled in 1978 on live TV, the trust said, 60 million people watched. After that, it seemed, Los Angeles celebrated its every milestone with a dose of stagecraft.

In 1995, during the media event with Diller, black tarps fell to reveal gleaming letters. In 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in the words of the trust, "rappelled down the hillside and applied the final strokes of coating himself."

Tuesday's event was comparatively sedate. But as Baumgart fielded questions, a handful of people crept along the sign's base — cameramen shooting video of painters.

"They're supposed to be painting the last brush strokes on the sign," Baumgart said, "but it's for show."

He shrugged.

"Hey, it's Hollywood."

ashley.powers@latimes.com

Read More..

iOS users generate double the Web traffic of Android users

According to the latest numbers from Chitika Insights, iOS users generate more than twice the amount of Web traffic as Android users. The six-month study found that while the two operating systems were nearly tied when it came to smartphone Web traffic, Apple (AAPL) has a substantial lead with its iPad tablet. Despite Android’s commanding share of the overall mobile market, the Cupertino-based company’s platform totaled 67% of Web traffic measured in the past six months, compared to Android’s 35% share.

“Despite all the new Android and Apple devices that have been released over the past six months, little has changed in the overall Web traffic distribution between iOS and Android,” the research firm wrote. “iOS’s share has hovered around 65%, while Android largely has stayed around 35%, the OS hit a peak of 40% in late August thanks partially to strong Samsung Galaxy S III sales. Apple then regained some share with the release of the iPhone 5 in the September timeframe.”

To qualify for the study Chitika Insights analysed billions of ad impressions coming from iOS or Android devices from May 27th to November 27th.

Get more from BGR.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Huston's "Infrared" wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It's the prize no author wants to win.

Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel "Infrared," whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.

The choice was announced by "Downton Abbey" actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.

Judges of the tongue-in-cheek prize — which is run by the Literary Review magazine — said they were struck by a description of "flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements," and by a long passage that builds to a climax of "undulating space."

Huston, who lives in Paris, was not on hand to collect her prize. In a statement read by her publicist, the 59-year-old author said she hoped her victory would "incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers' bodies in all states of array and disarray."

The Canada-born Huston, who writes in both French and English, is the author of more than a dozen novels, including "Plainsong" and "Fault Lines." She has previously won France's Prix Goncourt prize and was a finalist for Britain's Orange Prize for fiction by women.

She is only the third woman to win the annual Bad Sex prize, founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of "crude, tasteless and ... redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels."

Some critics, however, have praised the sexual passages in "Infrared." Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday newspaper said there were "none of the lazy cliches of pornography or the purple prose of modern romantic fiction" — though she conceded the book's sex scenes were "more perfunctory than erotic."

Huston beat finalists including previous winner Tom Wolfe — for his passage in "Back to Blood" describing "his big generative jockey" — and Booker Prize-nominated Nicola Barker, whose novel "The Yips" compares a woman to "a plump Bakewell pudding."

Previous recipients of the dubious honor, usually accepted with good grace, include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.

___

Online: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk

Read More..

Software Programs Help Doctors Diagnose, but Can’t Replace Them

SAN FRANCISCO — The man on stage had his audience of 600 mesmerized. Over the course of 45 minutes, the tension grew. Finally, the moment of truth arrived, and the room was silent with anticipation.

At last he spoke. “Lymphoma with secondary hemophagocytic syndrome,” he said. The crowd erupted in applause.

Professionals in every field revere their superstars, and in medicine the best diagnosticians are held in particularly high esteem. Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal, 39, a self-effacing associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered one of the most skillful clinical diagnosticians in practice today.

The case Dr. Dhaliwal was presented, at a medical  conference last year, began with information that could have described hundreds of diseases: the patient had intermittent fevers, joint pain, and weight and appetite loss.

To observe him at work is like watching Steven Spielberg tackle a script or Rory McIlroy a golf course. He was given new information bit by bit — lab, imaging and biopsy results. Over the course of the session, he drew on an encyclopedic familiarity with thousands of syndromes. He deftly dismissed red herrings while picking up on clues that others might ignore, gradually homing in on the accurate diagnosis.

Just how special is Dr. Dhaliwal’s talent? More to the point, what can he do that a computer cannot? Will a computer ever successfully stand in for a skill that is based not simply on a vast fund of knowledge but also on more intangible factors like intuition?

The history of computer-assisted diagnostics is long and rich. In the 1970s, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh developed software to diagnose complex problems in general internal medicine; the project eventually resulted in a commercial program called Quick Medical Reference. Since the 1980s, Massachusetts General Hospital has been developing and refining DXplain, a program that provides a ranked list of clinical diagnoses from a set of symptoms and laboratory data.

And I.B.M., on the heels of its triumph last year with Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer, is working on Watson for Healthcare.

In some ways, Dr. Dhaliwal’s diagnostic method is similar to that of another I.B.M. project: the Deep Blue chess program, which in 1996 trounced Garry Kasparov, the world’s best player at the time, to claim an unambiguous victory in the computer’s relentless march into the human domain.

Although lacking consciousness and a human’s intuition, Deep Blue had millions of moves memorized and could analyze as many each second. Dr. Dhaliwal does the diagnostic equivalent, though at human speed.

Since medical school, he has been an insatiable reader of case reports in medical journals, and case conferences from other hospitals. At work he occasionally uses a diagnostic checklist program called Isabel, just to make certain he hasn’t forgotten something. But the program has yet to offer a diagnosis that Dr. Dhaliwal missed.

Dr. Dhaliwal regularly receives cases from physicians who are stumped by a set of symptoms. At medical conferences, he is presented with one vexingly difficult case and is given 45 minutes to solve it. It is a medical high-wire act; doctors in the audience squirm as the set of facts gets more obscure and all the diagnoses they were considering are ruled out. After absorbing and processing scores of details, Dr. Dhaliwal must commit to a diagnosis. More often than not, he is right.

When working on a difficult case in front of an audience, Dr. Dhaliwal puts his entire thought process on display, with the goal of “elevating the stature of thinking,” he said. He believes this is becoming more important because physicians are being assessed on whether they gave the right medicine to a patient, or remembered to order a certain test.

Without such emphasis, physicians and training programs might forget the importance of having smart, thoughtful doctors. “Because in medicine,” Dr. Dhaliwal said, “thinking is our most important procedure.”

He added: “Getting better at diagnosis isn’t about figuring out if someone has one rare disease versus another. Getting better at diagnosis is as important to patient quality and safety as reducing medication errors, or eliminating wrong site surgery.”

Clinical Precision

Dr. Dhaliwal does half his clinical work on the wards of the San Francisco V. A. Medical Center, and the other half in its emergency department, where he often puzzles through multiple mysteries at a time.

One recent afternoon in the E.R., he was treating a 66-year-old man who was mentally unstable and uncooperative. He complained of hip pain, but routine lab work revealed that his kidneys weren’t working and his potassium was rising to a dangerous level, putting him in danger of an arrhythmia that could kill him — perhaps within hours. An ultrasound showed that his bladder was blocked.

There was work to be done: drain the bladder, correct the potassium level. It would have been easy to dismiss the hip pain as a distraction; it didn’t easily fit the picture. But Dr. Dhaliwal’s instinct is to hew to the ancient rule that physicians should try to come to a unifying diagnosis. In the end, everything — including the hip pain — was traced to metastatic prostate cancer.

“Things can shift very quickly in the emergency room,” Dr. Dhaliwal said. “One challenge of this, whether you use a computer or your brain, is deciding what’s signal and what’s noise.” Much of the time, it is his intuition that helps figure out which is which.

Read More..

Lumberyards object to state wood tax

SACRAMENTO — Some California lumber sellers are angry about a new state tax on 2-by-4s, plywood and other forest products, and they want to make sure that their customers blame the governor and legislators for the upcoming hike in building costs.

The 1% special assessment, proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown and approved in September by lawmakers, is expected to raise $35 million a year to pay for the regulation of commercial forest lands and for firefighting and prevention.

Retailers, including home improvement mega stores such as Home Depot and Lowe's and traditional, single-store and small lumberyard chains, call the new tax unfair.

"The new 1% tax singles out the hard-hit housing industry still struggling to recover from the economic recession," said Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes.

"This tax is going to hurt business," said Basil Alexander, manager of Anawalt Lumber in West Hollywood. The new 1% tax hike, combined with a quarter-cent rise in the state sales tax, which will be 9% in the city of West Hollywood, for example, could cause homeowners to scale back remodeling projects, he said.

"It may change their idea of what they are going to do or how they are going to do it or how big it's going to be," Alexander said.

Newly taxable wood products represent about 60% of the cost of home remodeling additions and new residential construction, he estimated. According to his calculations, the tax could add as much as $600 to the cost of a $100,000 room addition.

Anawalt plans to post disclaimers on its cash registers, Alexander said, telling customers the fee "is not an Anawalt Lumber add-on. It's the state law."

But California home builders don't share the retailers' concerns about the small hike in lumber prices.

Mike Winn, president of the California Building Industry Assn., predicted that the tax will add only about $115 to the cost of a typical 2,000-square-foot new home. His 3,200-member organization did not oppose the governor's legislation.

The new measure, to take effect Jan. 1, shifts the cost of forest land regulation from timber companies to consumers. Supporters, including the California Forestry Assn., said it broadens financial support for the program and allows California forest products companies to better compete with out-of-state timber firms.

The bill also includes a controversial provision that put legal limits on the ability of government agencies to sue landowners, timber operators and others whose negligence might have caused forest fires.

"This legislation enacts serious bipartisan reform to even the playing field to protect California's timber industry jobs," Brown said in a Sept. 11 signing statement.

The tax applies to milled lumber, plywood, wood siding and roofing, fencing and other wood products sold in California, whether they are milled here or elsewhere.

California's sales tax collectors, the state Board of Equalization, has compiled a list of taxable products and details of how to collect the levy and remit to the state. The information is being sent in letters to about 200,000 retailers, contractors and consumers explaining how the tax works and to make sure that all affected parties know about the new obligation.

marc.lifsher@latimes.com

Read More..

Two Mexican nationals charged in killing of U.S. Coast Guardsman

Federal prosecutors charged two Mexican nationals in connection with killing U.S. Coast Guardsmen Terrell Horne III after they allegedly rammed his vessel with a drug-smuggling panga boat.

The two men, boat captain Jose Mejia-Leyva and Manuel Beltra-Higuera, are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to face charges that they killed a federal officer.

Horne, 34, of Redondo Beach, was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers in a panga rammed his vessel off the Ventura County coast. He died of severe head trauma, officials said.

The Redondo Beach resident was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had come under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat, a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Read More..

News Corp shutting down iPad newspaper ‘The Daily’ on December 15th

News Corp’s iPad newspaper “The Daily” is officially dead. Launched in February 2011, The Daily was a “ bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” but like so many pioneering ideas, it “could not find a large enough audience quickly enough” to keep the publication going, according to Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman of News Corporation and Chairman and CEO of Fox Group. The Daily will officially cease publishing on December 15th and will see Jesse Angelo, its Editor-in-Chief and Executive Editor of The New York Post move into the role of Publisher for the latter. The Daily was supposed to signal a new era of app-based interactive newspapers, but alas, in a world of Flipboard, Instapaper and social media, finding a new channel to distribute and aggregate news has proven to be challenging, even for corporations with plenty of resources.

Get more from BGR.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Additional copies of 'Lincoln' headed to theaters

LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Lincoln" is marching to more movie theaters.

Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg's historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.

"To say that we're encouraged by the results to date or that they've exceeded our expectations is an understatement," said Dave Hollis, head of distribution at the Walt Disney Co. "We're in the midst of making additional prints to accommodate demand and will have them available to our partners in exhibition by mid-December for what we hope will be a great run through the holiday and awards corridor."

The film, which opened in wide release Nov. 9 and has earned $83.6 million in North America so far, has been unavailable at some smaller venues, such as the Gross Alaska theaters in Juneau.

But the extra prints are coming a little too late to fit the movie into the five-screen Glacier Cinemas theater during the holiday season, said Kenny Solomon-Gross, general manager of the Gross Alaska, which runs two theaters in Juneau and one in Ketchikan, Alaska.

"When we had the room for 'Lincoln,' Disney didn't have a copy for us," Solomon-Gross said Monday.

His film lineup is pretty booked through the end of the year, and he probably can't screen "Lincoln" until after the first of the new year. Yes, the excitement over the film will have dimmed, but then the Academy Awards season will be stirring up, he said. That should kick up the buzz.

In the meantime, Solomon-Gross plans to head to Las Vegas this week and catch the film there.

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang . Associated Press writer Rachel D'Oro in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

___

Online:

http://www.thelincolnmovie.com

Read More..

Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index

Sang Tan/Associated Press

GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.

Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.

Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.

The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.

The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.

Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.

The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.

Read More..

U.S. auto sales zoom in the wake of Superstorm Sandy

With the presidential election and Superstorm Sandy behind them, car shoppers headed for dealer lots last month in the biggest numbers since early 2008.

Multiple brands, including Honda, Nissan, Hyundai and BMW, had their best Novembers ever last month. The import nameplates generally reported stronger gains than the domestic brands, helped by new products such as the new-generation Honda Accord and a new Nissan Pathfinder sport utility vehicle.

Automakers sold more than 1.1 million vehicles last month, a 15% gain over November 2011. Bolstered by shoppers replacing some of the 250,000 vehicles estimated to have been destroyed by Sandy, that translated into a seasonally adjusted annual rate of about 15.5 million, the highest since January 2008, according to industry research firm Autodata Corp.

Consumers leaned toward fuel-efficient cars and small SUVs. With gas prices around $3.50 a gallon in much of the nation, and even higher in car-crazy California, sales of hybrid vehicles also appear to be taking off.

Led by its hot-selling Prius line of hybrids, Toyota Motor Corp. posted November hybrid vehicle sales of 24,682 in the U.S., a 29% increase over the same month last year.

But for the first time since it started selling hybrids in the U.S. in 2000, Toyota has serious competition in the hybrid market.

Ford Motor Co. said it sold nearly 5,000 of its new C-Max hybrid in November, up about 50% from the car's first full month of sales in October. Combined with its other offerings, the automaker sold about 6,500 hybrids in November, its best month ever for those vehicles, which use both gas and electric motors to increase fuel efficiency.

Ford has sold 9,000 of the C-Max models since they first went on sale a little more than two months ago. That amounts to about a quarter of the hybrid volume the automaker sold in all of 2011 and underscores how important the vehicle is to Ford's hybrid strategy. If C-Max sales keep on pace, the automaker will easily double its hybrid sales in the current model year.

Certainly hybrids are starting to catch on with consumers. Sales of hybrids by Toyota and Ford and General Motors Co.'s Chevrolet Volt — technically a plug-in hybrid that runs on gasoline once its electric battery charge runs out — were nearly 35,000 last month, up about 40% from November 2011.

Sales of hybrids and plug-in electric cars are expected to top 500,000 in the U.S. for the first time both in this calendar year and in the 2013 model year, said Alan Baum of the Baum & Associates research firm. That would be about 3.5% of the U.S. auto market.

One buyer is Kate Ochsman, a West Hollywood actress who recently purchased a white C-Max. Ochsman said she now spends about $50 to fill up the Ford every two weeks instead of the $80 a week she spent to gas up a BMW X5 SUV with a V-8 engine.

"I really like it," Ochsman said. The car is "great getting around anywhere in L.A., and it is almost eerily quiet. It has a lot of bells and whistles, but it does drive like a hybrid. It doesn't have the power my BMW had."

About a quarter of Ford's C-Max sales are in California, a market dominated by Toyota, especially in the hybrid market.

"That's strategically important to Ford, because California is a market where our share has been traditionally lower," said C.J. O'Donnell, the automaker's electrified-vehicle marketing manager. "The No. 1 trade-in is a Prius, followed by some of the Honda products."

In its marketing efforts, Ford is pitching the C-Max as a head-to-head competitor with the Prius V, a small station wagon. Toyota sold about 2,700 of the Prius V last month, about 2,300 fewer than Ford's C-Max sales.

Toyota has responded by pointing out that the C-Max is closer in size to the smaller Prius hatchback model, yet gets about 6% poorer fuel economy and has a base price about 15% higher.

"The Prius V has more versatility and cargo space than C-Max," said Bill Fay, general manager of the automaker's Toyota division in the U.S.

Overall, Toyota's November sales rose to 161,695 vehicles, up 17.2% from the same month last year. Ford sales rose 6.4% to 177,092 vehicles.

General Motors Co. reported its highest November U.S. sales volume since 2007, with deliveries up 3.4% from a year earlier to 186,505 vehicles. Chrysler Group sales rose 14.4% to 122,565 units, its best November since 2007.

Volkswagen Group sales — including Audi — rose 28.2%, to 49,062 vehicles. It was the VW brand's best November since 1973.

American Honda Motor Co. sales jumped 38.9% in November, reaching 116,580 vehicles, an all-time record for the month.

"We are now surpassing sales records set pre-recession, a true sign that our business has recovered," said John Mendel, executive vice president of sales at American Honda.

Nissan North America reported record November U.S. sales of 96,197 vehicles, up 12.9%.

Hyundai Motor America also posted a record November, with U.S. sales up 7.8% to 53,487 vehicles.

And BMW reported its best U.S. sales month ever, with November sales of 31,213, an increase of 45% from a year earlier.

Whether the industry can continue to sell at this pace depends largely on the federal budget negotiations underway between Congress and the Obama administration, executives at several automakers said Monday.

"Exactly how much growth we can expect next year will depend in part on how Congress and the president resolve the 'fiscal cliff' issue. We are certainly not going to prescribe policy fixes," said Kurt McNeil, GM's vice president of U.S. sales operations. "But I will say that markets and consumers hate the uncertainty."

jerry.hirsch@latimes.com

Read More..