Video: Robotic Speakers Track Listeners as Music by The xx Plays

English indie band The xx has more than a few songs above love, and yet so much of the group’s sound can make you feel oddly lonely — like flying solo at a party full of couples. That makes it the perfect soundtrack for Missing, a new art exhibit that incorporates the band’s music into a room full of robotic speakers that pivot to follow listeners as they move through the room.

Missing is part of Coexist, an exhibition cycle at the Sonos Studio in Los Angeles that attempts to explore the “relationship between man and machine.” The Missing part of that exhibit, on display through Dec. 23, uses 50 speakers, two hacked Kinect 3-D cameras, and a whole lot of code and robotics to create an environment where people are moving through the music and interacting with the speakers, without even trying.

“A crowded party is a good metaphor,” said media artist Kyle McDonald, who worked on the project and compared it to “walking through a forest and the trees can hear you and the trees are kind of spirits themselves.”

“It’s kind of like these people that are surrounding you but are only speaking to you with music, and in a way they’re kind of silently watching you,” he told Wired.

Here’s how it works: The camera finds where people are within the exhibit; that information is used to instruct the speakers to turn and face listeners much like sunflowers following the light (see Missing in action in the video below, and also here). The system can also make it so certain sounds come from distinct points in the room, making the listening experience more multidimensional.

The concept for Missing was developed by The xx along with engineer Matt Mets and new media producer Aramique Krauthamer, who brought on board McDonald, the man behind “People Staring at Computers” — a controversial art project that captured people’s photographs at Apple stores. Krauthamer and McDonald handled most of the design of the space, McDonald wrote the code and Mets handled the robotics.

Even though using a Kinect camera to track people at an art exhibit is very different than collecting photos of shoppers in an Apple store in the Big Apple, Missing does address different ways of making people aware of each other. Not to mention some of the camera technology used in the exhibit could just as easily be used for spying on people in another context as it is used to entertain them here.

“It’s something that I feel is a responsibility of artists if they’re working with technology today to be taking the technology that’s around us and appropriating it and thinking of what we want our future to look like by making the things that we want to see,” McDonald said. “For me that means making an installation that’s a new way of listening to music, instead of using 3-D cameras to do other things.”

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Sculptor Gormley wants us to get inside his head

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s foremost living sculptor Antony Gormley wants us to get inside his head with his latest work “Model”, a 100-tonne steel maze of cubes and squares, dark corners and splashes of light on show at the White Cube gallery in London.

The giant grey-black work, based on a human form lying down, is entered via the right “foot”, and combines the fun of an adventure playground with the unnerving quality of a labyrinth often plunged into darkness.

For the first time, the Turner Prize-winning artist who has always been preoccupied with the human form allows us to get inside, and draws parallels between the body and the architectural spaces we inhabit.

“I think we dwell first in this borrowed bit of the material world that we call the body,” Gormley told Reuters, standing beside the imposing structure made up of interlocking blocks.

“It has its own life that is unknowable. But the second place we dwell is the body of architecture, the built environment,” he added.

“We’re the most extraordinary species that decided to structure our habitat according to very, very abstract principles of horizontal and vertical planes.”

Model has plenty of surprises. The more nimble visitor can crawl through its left “arm”, which is a passage around three feet high, or clamber on to a roof bathed in light.

“There are places that you wouldn’t necessarily know are there,” Gormley said. As if to prove his point, he disappeared into a large raised “aperture” invisible in the darkness.

Sound also plays a part, with the resonance of voices and rumble of footsteps giving clues to the size of each space.

PLAYGROUND

The artist said he encouraged people to explore the work rather than just look, unlike most sculptures which are strictly off-limits.

“Psychological architecture suddenly starts to reverberate with human life,” he explained, adding that the sense of unease when entering the dark spaces was part of its appeal.

“I think creepiness is good,” he said in the pitch-black “head”. “I think it’s necessary to get under people’s skin. You don’t want them to easily ingest or accept something.”

Several times he referred to the Seagram murals of American painter Mark Rothko, works that inspired him as an artist and which he had in mind while making Model.

“Their surfaces give you this idea of space, or an invitation, they seat you at a threshold and allow you to dream of what exists beyond that threshold,” he said.

“You could say this is the literal version of that.”

Gormley, born in 1950, won the Turner Prize in 1994 and is probably best known for his 20-metre high public “Angel of the North” sculpture located near Newcastle in northern England.

He would not say what price the White Cube gallery had put on Model, and the gallery itself could not immediately provide a figure when asked, but Gormley has become one of the most sought-after British artists at auction.

A life-size iron maquette for Angel of the North fetched 3.4 million pounds ($ 5.4 million) at an auction at Christie’s in October last year.

Early critical reaction to Model was mixed.

“We think of the pyramids, of tombs in lightless spaces,” wrote Michael Glover in the Independent. “We have entered this space hoping for a visceral response of some kind, but it never quite happens.”

Model is on display at White Cube, Bermondsey, until February 10, 2013.

(This story has fixed typos in paragraph six)

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Ignoring the Science on Mammograms

Last week The New England Journal of Medicine published a study with the potential to change both medical practice and public consciousness about mammograms.

Published on Thanksgiving Day, the research examined more than 30 years of United States health statistics to determine, through observation, if screening mammography has reduced breast cancer deaths. The researchers found that, as expected, the introduction of mammogram screening led to an increase in the number of breast cancers detected at an early stage.

But importantly, the number of cancers diagnosed at the advanced stage was essentially unchanged. If mammograms were really finding deadly cancers sooner (as suggested by the rise in early detection), then cases of advanced cancer should have been reduced in kind. But that didn’t happen. In other words, the researchers concluded, mammograms didn’t work.

This is a bold claim for an observational study. There are countless reasons why conclusions from such studies are commonly fraught with error. What if, for instance, the lion’s share of advanced cancers occurred among women without access to screening mammograms—a fact often not available in health statistics? Or what if mammography successfully prevented a major increase in advanced cancers, leaving the health statistics unchanged?

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, called experience “delusive.” He recognized that uncontrolled observations may lead to faulty conclusions. For centuries the flawed logic of observational data seemed to validate bloodletting, an unhelpful and often harmful therapy. But most who were bled eventually improved—no thanks to the bloodletting—an observation that led medical authorities to believe in the practice.

Fortunately, we have learned something about bad logic. Today we seek studies designed to neutralize illusions. By enrolling people in a study and assigning them randomly to treatments, for instance, groups tend to be evenly balanced in every way except one: the treatment. Controlled studies led to the discovery that bloodletting is harmful rather than helpful, and randomized trials of screening mammography would therefore be a worthy gold standard to answer once and for all the question of whether the test saves lives.

It may be surprising, therefore, to learn that numerous trials of mammography have indeed randomly assigned nearly 600,000 women to undergo either regular mammography screening or no screening. The results of more than a decade of follow-up on such studies, published more than 10 years ago, show that women in the mammogram group were just as likely to die as women in the no-mammogram group. The women having mammograms were, however, more likely to be treated for cancer and have surgeries like a mastectomy. (Some of the studies include trials from Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, and this major review of the data.)

In other words, mammograms increased diagnoses and surgeries, but didn’t save lives—exactly what the researchers behind last week’s observational study concluded.

It is affirming to see this newest study. But it raises an awkward question: why would a major medical journal publish an observational study about the effects of screening mammography years after randomized trials have answered the question? Perhaps it is because many doctors and patients continue to ignore the science on mammograms.

For years now, doctors like myself have known that screening mammography doesn’t save lives, or else saves so few that the harms far outweigh the benefits. Neither I nor my colleagues have a crystal ball, and we are not smarter than others who have looked at this issue. We simply read the results of the many mammography trials that have been conducted over the years. But the trial results were unpopular and did not fit with a broadly accepted ideology—early detection—which has, ironically, failed (ovarian, prostate cancer) as often as it has succeeded (cervical cancer, perhaps colon cancer).

More bluntly, the trial results threatened a mammogram economy, a marketplace sustained by invasive therapies to vanquish microscopic clumps of questionable threat, and by an endless parade of procedures and pictures to investigate the falsely positive results that more than half of women endure. And inexplicably, since the publication of these trial results challenging the value of screening mammograms, hundreds of millions of public dollars have been dedicated to ensuring mammogram access, and the test has become a war cry for cancer advocacy. Why? Because experience deludes: radiologists diagnose, surgeons cut, pathologists examine, oncologists treat, and women survive.

Medical authorities, physician and patient groups, and ‘experts’ everywhere ignore science, and instead repeat history. Wishful conviction over scientific rigor; delusion over truth; form over substance.

It is normally troubling to see an observational study posing questions asked and answered by higher science. But in this case the research may help society to emerge from a fog that has clouded not just the approach to data on screening mammography, but also the approach to health care in the United States. In a system drowning in costs, and at enormous expense, we have systematically ignored virtually identical data challenging the effectiveness of cardiac stents, robot surgeries, prostate cancer screening, back operations, countless prescription medicines, and more.

When Thomas Jefferson described his vision for the institution that would become the University of Virginia, he said:

This place will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth, wherever it may lead.

As we begin down the arduous path of health care reform, requisite to economic success, the question for policymakers and health care authorities is this: Are we ready to stop ignoring science? If so, the road may be smoother than we imagined for there is, and has been, much truth to follow.

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Dr. David Newman is an emergency room physician in New York City and author of the book, “Hippocrates Shadow: Secrets from the House of Medicine.“

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State of the Art: Tablets Are Hot Holiday Gifts, but Which One to Buy? - Review

From left: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times, Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Everett Kennedy Brown/European Pressphoto Agency

From left, the Kindle PaperWhite, the iPad Mini and the  Nexus 7.

The other day, I joined NPR for a segment about high-tech holiday gifts. I was ready for the calls from listeners. I’d brushed up on cameras, phones, laptops, music players and game consoles. I was prepared to talk about limiting screen time, digital addiction, cyberbullying. I knew where to get the best deals.

But all six callers had the same question: “What tablet should I get?”

There were variations, of course. “— for my kid?” “— for my elderly father?” “— just for reading?” “— for not much money?” But in general, it was clear: the gadget most likely to be found under the tree this year is thin, battery-powered and flat.

No wonder people are confused. The marketplace has gone tablet-crazy. There’s practically a different model for every man, woman and child.

There’s the venerable iPad, of course. And now the iPad Mini. There are new tablets from Google, also in small and large. There are Samsung’s Note tablets in a variety of sizes, with styluses. There are $200 touch-screen color e-book/video players. There’s a new crop of black-and-white e-book readers. There are stunningly cheap plastic models you’ve never heard of. There are tablets for children (and I don’t mean baby aspirin).

So how are you, the confused consumer, supposed to keep tabs on all these tablets? By taking this handy tour through the jungle of tablets 2012. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times.

DIRT-CHEAP KNOCKOFFS You can find no-name tablets for $100 or even less. You can also find mystery-brand Chinese tablets in toy stores, marketed to children.

Don’t buy them. They don’t have the apps, the features, the polish or the pleasure of the nicer ones. The junk drawer is already calling their names.

E-BOOK READERS The smallest, lightest, least expensive, easiest to read tablets are the black-and-white e-book readers. If the goal is simply reading — and not, say, watching movies or playing games — these babies are pure joy.

Don’t bother with the lesser brands; if you’re going to get locked into one company’s proprietary, copy-protected book format, you’ll reduce your chances of library obsolescence if you stick with Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Each company offers a whole bunch of models. But on the latest models, the page background lights up softly, so that you can read in the dark without a flashlight. (These black-and-white models also look fantastic in direct sun — now you get the best of both lighting conditions.)

The one you want is the Kindle PaperWhite ($120), whose illumination is more even and pleasant than the equivalent Nook’s.

Of course, plain, no-touch, no-light Kindles, with ads on the screen saver, start as low as $70. But the light and the touch-screen are really worth having.

COLOR E-READERS/PLAYERS Amazon and B.& N. each sell a seven-inch tablet that, functionally, lands somewhere between an e-book reader and an iPad. They have beautiful, high-definition touch screens. They play music, TV shows, movies and e-books. They can surf the Web. They even run a few handpicked Android apps like Netflix and Angry Birds.

They’re nowhere near as capable as full-blown, computerlike tablets of the iPad/Nexus ilk, mainly because there are so few apps, accessories and add-ons. But they cost $200; you’re paying only a fraction of the price.

The big two here are, once again, Amazon and B.& N. If you’re not already locked in to one of those companies’ books and videos because you owned a previous model, the Nook HD is the one to get. It’s much smaller and lighter than the Kindle Fire HD. It has a much sharper screen. And the $200 price includes a wall charger (the Fire doesn’t) and no ads (the Fire does). Or get the classy Google Nexus 7, also $200. Although its book/music/movie catalog is far smaller, its Android app catalog is far larger (but see “iPad versus Android,” below).

BIG COLOR READERS/PLAYERS This year, both Amazon and B.& N. have introduced jumbo-screen (9-inch) versions of their HD tablets. Here again, B.& N. offers a better value than its 9-inch Kindle Fire HD rival. For $270, the Nook HD+ offers a sharper screen, lighter weight, no ads, a memory-card slot and a wall charger.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Yasser Arafat's grave dug up in poisoning probe

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Forensic experts from Switzerland, France and Russia on Tuesday took 20 samples each from the remains of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after his grave in the presidential headquarters here was opened.

The experts will take the samples to their respective countries to carry out tests to determine if Arafat, who died on Nov. 11, 2004, at a military hospital in France, was killed by polonium, a poisonous radioactive material.

French hospital reports at the time said he died from a massive brain hemorrhage, but gave no details on what caused a related blood condition, giving rise to Palestinian suspicions he was killed by Israel. Arafat's wife requested at the time that no autopsy be performed, and Israeli officials have labeled as ridiculous any allegations that they played a role in his death.

The process Tuesday took only hours. The grave, buried 12 feet underground, was opened early in the morning and Palestinian forensic technicians removed samples for the international experts.

After the grave was again closed, Palestinian officials held a short ceremony in which they laid wreaths.

Members of the media were not allowed to witness the grave opening; the site was sealed from view by blue industrial sheeting.

Tawfik Tirawi, head of the Palestinian committee investigating Arafat's death, said at a news conference following the exhumation that the process went smoothly and that "everything was done legally and professionally."

He stressed that the remains of Arafat were handled only by Palestinians and that none of the international experts had touched the corpse.

Abdullah al-Bashir, a Jordanian doctor who heads a Palestinian medical committee empowered to follow up on the circumstances of Arafat’s death, said results should be available in about three months.

"If polonium was evident, we would have reached the truth," he said, "and if it was not, we would want them [the experts] to continue searching until they determine what kind of poison was used."

Bashir, who was Arafat's personal doctor, said he believes that the Palestinian leader died of poisoning and that the French hospital medical reports did not rule out that possibility.

The Palestinians said that if polonium is determined to be the cause of death, they will have hard evidence that Israel was behind it.

"Once we get the evidence, we are going to ask the International Court of Justice to follow up on this matter, and this will be our first case after we become a non-member state in the United Nations," said Tirawi, a former head of Palestinian intelligence.

ALSO:

Syrian warplanes said to strike factory; at least 18 killed

Netanyahu rival unveils new centrist Israeli political party

France announces support for enhanced status for Palestinians at U.N.

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New Nuclear Engine Could Power Deep-Space Exploration

Researchers have tested a small prototype of a nuclear-reactor engine design that could one day power deep-space exploration probes.

The proposed design is based on a Stirling engine – an engine first invented in the 19^th century that uses hot pressurized gas to push a piston. It would use a 50-pound nuclear uranium battery to generate heat that is then carried to eight Stirling engines to produce about 500 watts of power.

Scientists at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory have tested a pared-down prototype of this design using a small nuclear source and a single Stirling engine that produced about 24 watts of energy. Most deep-space probes require about 600 to 700 watts of power, so it will still be a while before this early test produces something capable of powering a spacecraft. This is the first test of a nuclear reactor system to power a spacecraft conducted in the U.S. since 1965.

Nuclear engines are important because they make possible exploration of the entire solar system. Beyond Mars, sunlight is so weak that solar panels would have to be football-field-sized in order to eke out enough power to run a spacecraft and transmit data back to Earth.

For the last few decades, NASA has used plutonium-238 to power its deep-space probes, including the Voyager spacecrafts and the Cassini mission currently in orbit around Saturn. But beginning in the early 1980s, the U.S. began decommissioning its plutonium production sites and by 1992 had no way to generate new plutionium-238. NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is right now driving around Mars, carried some of the last bits of American plutonium with it to the Red Planet.

In 2011, NASA and the Department of Energy received about $10 million to restart plutonium production, and should soon be capable of generating a few pounds of the material each year. This tiny amount will be highly coveted for deep-space missions. A nuclear Stirling engine that generates electricity using more-abundant uranium would reduce the demand for plutonium-238.

If they are created, such reactors would help keep scientists busy exploring the giant outer planets and all their moons for decades to come. Stirling engines could also be used to power a robotic probe on Venus, generating enough power to keep the machine cool in the midst of the planet’s hellish surface temperatures.

Video: Los Alamos National Laboratory

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Disney Channel to debut ‘Sofia the First’ Jan. 11

NEW YORK (AP) — Disney says its animated children‘s series “Sofia the First” will premiere Jan. 11 on the Disney Channel and Disney Junior networks.

Created for kids ages 2 to 7, “Sofia the First” is about a young girl who becomes a princess and learns that honesty, loyalty and compassion are what makes a person royal.

Sofia is voiced by “Modern Family” actress Ariel Winter, and her mother is played by “Grey’s Anatomy” star Sara Ramirez.

Last week’s premiere of the “Sofia the First” animated movie drew a total audience of more than 5 million viewers. It was the year’s top-rated cable TV telecast among kids ages 2 to 5.

In the series’ debut episode, Sofia strives to become the first princess to earn a spot on her school’s flying derby team.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Amid Hurricane Sandy, a Race to Get a Liver Transplant

It was the best possible news, at the worst possible time.

The phone call from the hospital brought the message that Dolores and Vin Dreeland had long hoped for, ever since their daughter Natalia, 4, had been put on the waiting list for a liver transplant. The time had come.

They bundled her into the car for the 50-mile trip from their home in Long Valley, N.J., to NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan. But it soon seemed that this chance to save Natalia’s life might be just out of reach.

The date was Sunday, Oct. 28, and Hurricane Sandy, the worst storm to hit the East Coast in decades, was bearing down on New York. Airports and bridges would soon close, but the donated organ was in Nevada, five hours away. The time window in which a plane carrying the liver would be able to land in the region was rapidly closing.

In a hospital room, Natalia watched cartoons. Her parents watched the clock, and the weather. “Our anxiety was through the roof,” Mrs. Dreeland said. “It just made your stomach into knots.”

The Dreelands, who are in their 60s, became Natalia’s foster parents in 2008 when she was 7 months old, and adopted her just before she turned 2. They have another adopted daughter, Dorothy Jane, who is 17.

Natalia is a “smart little cookie” who loves school and dressing up Alice, her favorite doll, her mother said. At age 3, Natalia used the word “discombobulated” correctly, Mr. Dreeland said.

Natalia’s health problems date back several years. Her gallbladder was taken out in 2010, and about half her liver was removed in 2011. The underlying problem was a rare disease, Langerhans cell histiocytosis. It causes a tremendous overgrowth of a type of cell in the immune system and can damage organs. Drugs can sometimes keep it in check, but they did not work for Natalia.

In her case, the disease struck the bile ducts, which led to progressive liver damage. “She would have eventually gone into liver failure,” said Dr. Nadia Ovchinsky, a pediatric liver transplant specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian. “And she demonstrated some signs of early liver failure.”

The only hope was a transplant.

Dr. Tomoaki Kato, Natalia’s surgeon, knew that the liver in Nevada was a perfect match for Natalia in the two criteria that matter most: blood type and size. The deceased donor was 2 years old, and though Natalia is nearly 5, she is small for her age. Scar tissue from her previous operations would have made it very difficult to fit a larger organ into her abdomen.

Though Dr. Kato had considered transplanting part of an adult liver into Natalia, a complete organ from a child would be far better for her. But healthy organs from small children do not often become available, Dr. Kato said. This was a rare opportunity, and he was determined to seize it.

But as the day wore on, the odds for Natalia grew slimmer. The operation in Nevada to remove the liver was delayed several times.

At many hospitals, surgery to remove donor organs is done at the end of the day, after all regularly scheduled operations. The Nevada hospital had a busy surgical schedule that day, made worse by a trauma case that took priority.

At the hospital in New York, Tod Brown, an organ procurement coordinator, had alerted a charter air carrier that a flight from Nevada might be needed. That company in turn contacted West Coast carriers to pick up the donated liver and fly it to New York.

Initially, two carriers agreed, but then backed out. Several other charter companies also declined.

Mr. Brown told Dr. Kato that they might have to decline the organ. Dr. Kato, soft-spoken but relentless, said, “Find somebody who can fly.”

Dr. Kato used to work in Miami, where pilots found ways to bypass hurricanes to deliver organs. Even during Hurricane Katrina, his hospital performed transplants.

“I asked the transplant coordinators to just keep pushing,” he said.

Mr. Brown said, “Dr. Kato knew he was going to get that organ, one way or another.”

As the trajectory of the storm became clearer, one of the West Coast charter companies agreed to attempt the flight. The plan was to land at the airport in Teterboro, N.J. The backup was Newark airport, and the second backup was Albany, from where an ambulance would finish the trip.

The timing was critical: organs deteriorate outside the body, and ideally a liver should be transplanted within 12 hours of being removed.

Early Monday, as the storm whirled offshore, the plane landed at Teterboro. Soon a nurse rushed to tell the Dreelands that she had just seen an ambulance with lights and sirens screech up to the hospital. Someone had jumped out carrying a container.

At about 5 a.m., the couple kissed Natalia and saw her wheeled off to the operating room.

Three weeks later, she is back home, on the mend. The complicated regimen of drugs that transplant patients need is tough on a child, but she is getting through it, her father said.

Recently, Mr. Dreeland said, he found himself weeping uncontrollably during a church service for the family of the child who had died. “Their child gave my child life,” he said.

Though only time will tell, because the histiocytosis appeared limited to Natalia’s bile ducts and had not affected other organs, her doctors say there is a good chance that the transplant has cured her.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 27, 2012

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of the family whose daughter received a liver transplant. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is Dreeland, not Vreeland.

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Dark Warnings About Future of Internet Access

PARIS — Every time an Internet user watches “Gangnam Style” on YouTube, packets of digital data course through the global telecommunications system, converging on an iPhone, a tablet or a laptop.

Having missed out on most of the lucrative revenue that the explosion of digital content has generated for Internet companies, telecommunications providers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere now want to charge them for carrying this traffic.

No way, the content providers say.

This commercial and ideological clash is set for a showdown next week, when representatives of more than 190 governments, along with telecommunications companies and Internet groups, gather in Dubai for a once-in-a-generation meeting.

The ostensible purpose of the World Conference on International Telecommunications is to update a global treaty on technical standards needed to, say, connect a telephone call from Tokyo to Timbuktu. The previous conference took place in 1988, when the Internet was in its infancy and telecommunications remained a highly regulated, mostly analog business.

Critics of the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ agency that is organizing the meeting, see a darker agenda. The blogosphere has been raging over supposed plans led by Russia to snatch away control of the Internet and hand it to the U.N. agency.

That seems unlikely. Any such move would require an international consensus, and opposition is widespread. Terry Kramer, the U.S. ambassador to the conference, has vowed to veto any change in how the Internet is overseen.

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the telecommunications union, has repeatedly said that it has no desire to take over the Internet or to stifle its growth. On the contrary, he says, one of the main objectives of the conference is to spread Internet access to more of the four and a half billion people around the world who still do not use it.

And yet, groups as diverse as Google, the Internet Society, the International Trade Union Confederation and Greenpeace warn that the discussions could set a bad precedent, encouraging governments to step up censorship or take other actions that would threaten the integrity of the Internet.

“This is a very important moment in the history of the Internet, because this conference may introduce practices that are inimical to its continued growth and openness,” Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, said during a conference call.

Google set up a Web site last week, “Take Action,” encouraging visitors to sign a petition for a “free and open Internet.” The campaign is modeled on the successful drive last winter to defeat legislative proposals to crack down on Internet piracy in the United States.

Analysts say the outcry over censorship and Internet governance is a red herring; the real business of the conference is business.

“The far bigger issue — largely obscured by this discussion — are proposals that are more likely to succeed that envision changing the way we pay for Internet services,” Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, said by e-mail.

In one submission to the conference, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels that represents companies like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, proposed that network operators be permitted to assess charges for content providers like Internet video companies that use a lot of bandwidth.

Analysts say the proposal is an acknowledgment by telecommunications companies that they cannot compete in the provision of digital content.

“The telecoms realize that they have lost the battle,” said Paul Budde, an independent telecommunications analyst in Australia. “They are saying, ‘We can’t beat the Googles and the Facebooks, so let’s try to charge them.”’

The European lobbying group says that without the new fees, there will be no money to invest in the network upgrades needed to deal with a surge in traffic. Regulators have required European telecommunications operators to open their networks to rivals, and the market for broadband is fiercely competitive, with rock-bottom prices.

In the United States, by contrast, most telecommunications companies have been permitted to maintain local monopolies — or duopolies, with cable companies — in broadband, keeping prices higher. And U.S. regulators have ordered broadband providers to give equal priority to all Internet traffic. Such “network neutrality” is incompatible with charging content providers for carriage.

Analysts say this may explain why U.S. telecommunications companies have not joined the European call for a new business model.

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Congress returns as 'fiscal cliff' talks slow

WASHINGTON – Congress returned in a lame duck session with no signs of quick compromise to prevent a tax hike for most Americans early next year.

Talks between the White House and Republican leaders in the House continued behind closed doors. Current tax rates expire Dec. 31.

Emboldened by his re-election, President Obama took his case for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans to the public on Monday. He warned that the threat of higher taxes on middle-class Americans could dampen the Christmas shopping season.

"The President has called on Congress to take action and stop holding the middle class and our economy hostage over a disagreement on tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 per year," the White House said in a statement.

Quiz: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff?

The White House got a boost from billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who said the wealthy – himself included – should pay more. Noting the nation’s growing gap in income disparity, Buffett dismissed the Republican argument that tax hikes would hamper investments.

“In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust,” Buffett said. “So let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if — gasp — capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased.”

Key Republicans, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, have signaled they are willing to put new tax revenues on the table, creating the outlines of a possible deal. Several Republican lawmakers used the Sunday talk shows to distance themselves from their party’s anti-tax pledge, publicly breaking with conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, although they insisted any agreement must include spending cuts.

A so-called grand bargain of tax hikes and spending cuts has eluded Washington in the past, but both political parties are wary of rattling the financial markets and sparking a crisis in consumer spending. Wall Street has signaled a bold deficit-reduction plan is needed to prevent a credit downgrade.

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

No talks between the president and congressional leaders have been scheduled. The parties had agreed to meet this week to put the framework of a two-part deal on the table.

If Republicans continue to fight higher tax rates for the wealthy, Boehner will face pressure to propose an alternative way to raise new revenue – either by closing individual loopholes or capping deductions in a way that produces new money.

“Congressional and White House staff continue to work to find common ground that is consistent with the ‘balanced approach’ the White House says it wants – with significant spending cuts, and without job-killing small business tax hikes,” said a senior House leadership aide.

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Lisa.Mascaro@latimes.com

CParsons@latimes.com

Twitter: @LisaMascaroinDC

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