Well: A Running Bias Against Really Dedicated Runners

From the moment it appeared online last month, an editorial in the journal Heart became a Rorschach test for opinions about runners.

Do you roll your eyes when they start talking about their races and times? Do you snigger when you see bumper stickers that simply say “26.2,” the number of miles in a marathon, or “13.1,” the half-marathon distance? Do you lose patience with family members who have to go for a run — even if it means waking up at 4 a.m. before leaving on a vacation?

Then perhaps the editorial will appeal to you. It was titled “Run for your life… at a comfortable speed and not too far.” The authors, Dr. James H. O’Keefe Jr. of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and Dr. Carl J. Lavie of the Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, wrote that those who run slowly and keep their mileage down gain health benefits. But those who run for more than about 40 minutes a day and those who run faster than eight minutes a mile actually increase their risk of death.

Too much or too intense running, the two cardiologists said, “appears to cause excessive ‘wear and tear’ on the heart.”

The editorial got extensive news attention, often tinged with schadenfreude. “What do you get if you finish a marathon? A finisher’s medal and a risk of death! ” said MSN-Now. The Wall Street Journal’s article was headlined “One Running Shoe in the Grave.”

On the other side, of course, were aggrieved runners. Runner’s World instantly published a rejoinder titled “The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again.” The Heart editorial, it said, was “twisting the data.”

Meanwhile, some runners panicked. “I got 650 e-mails in four hours,” said Dr. Aaron Baggish, associate director of the cardiovascular performance program at the Massachusetts General Hospital. (Dr. Baggish cycles, he runs — more than 30 marathons so far — and he competes in triathlons. “I certainly exceed any dose of exercise that has been said to be bad for you,” he noted.)

By now the evidence has been thoroughly dissected. Suffice it to say that leading exercise researchers agree with Runner’s World and have stacks of journal articles to bolster their arguments.

Dr. Benjamin Levine, a competitive tennis player and director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Texas Health Resources and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, said: “You can always find one or two papers and studies that, if you spin the right way, can seem to reflect your argument.”

But, he added, while health benefits rise most sharply as people go from sedentary to moderately active, there is no good evidence that they decline, or even level off, for distance runners. “Our data and other data are quite convincing,” Dr. Levine said.

Dr. O’Keefe is not swayed. In an as yet unpublished editorial, he recommends running just two or three miles at a relaxed pace a few times a week, interspersed with days of swimming, a couple of sessions of weight lifting and some yoga. In an interview, he said that was his own exercise regimen.

The real question, though, is why does running arouse such passions? You don’t hear gleeful chortling about the health hazards to master swimmers or cross-country skiers or cyclists who do 100-mile “century” rides.

Dr. Paul Thompson, a cardiologist and exercise researcher at Hartford Hospital who is also an endurance athlete, cites two factors. First, he said, among runners “a lot of people use their athleticism in an attempt to show they are a superior human being.”

Paula Broadwell said she ran in the mountains of Afghanistan with Gen. David H. Petraeus, maintaining a pace of six or seven minutes a mile while interviewing him. The Wall Street Journal published her available race times, in an article that gushed over her speed.

But it was clear to runners that she could not possibly have run that fast, even at sea level. Her best time in a race was 7:21 minutes a mile, and most people race faster than they normally run. Even that pace barely put her in the 70th percentile for her age.

When runners use their prowess, real or exaggerated, to suggest superiority, they generate resentment, Dr. Thompson noted. As a result, he said, “people love to find studies that support the bias that too much exercise is bad.”

Why is this not an issue in other sports? Runners, Dr. Thompson and others say, are just so much more plentiful than other athletes; if you find yourself resenting an athlete who fancies himself superior, odds are that athlete will be a runner. And running appears so easy — anyone can run, it seems. Anyone can finish a marathon, even Oprah Winfrey did it. So those who do not run can feel a little defensive.

Added to that is all the running talk by devotees who may not realize how annoying and boring their monologues can be. Dr. Baggish said his patients often bring in huge folders full of decades worth of data — heart rates on various runs, finishing times in races.

“They can talk about it until the cows come home,” he said.

So it might behoove runners to keep their running talk and braggadocio to their running friends. There may be something more than health concerns behind those cracks from friends and family about failing knees and backs and heart attacks among runners.

“When I see runners in my office, I always encourage them to bring their spouses,” Dr. Baggish said. Often a wife, for example, will start to complain: her husband “can’t enjoy Christmas Day with the family because he has to run.” A husband might say he just can’t understand why his wife has to be out there all the time running.

“That sort of inconvenience translates into concerns about health,” Dr. Baggish said.

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E.U. and Google to Discuss Antitrust Issues

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s top antitrust regulator is expected to meet with Google executives early this week as settlement talks between the search giant and the U.S. authorities gain momentum.

The Europeans have been seeking a settlement with Google since May, and Joaquín Almunia, the Union’s competition commissioner, and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, have met on previous occasions trying to reach an accord.

But the Europeans have been pressing Google harder than their U.S counterparts to address accusations that the company biases its search results to favor its own services like mapping and online shopping. That makes the expected talks between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Almunia particularly delicate.

The two men could meet as soon as Tuesday, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity as the meeting was to be private.

While Google is the dominant search engine in the United States, it holds even greater sway in Europe, accounting for more than 90 percent of searches in a number of major markets. That could leave rivals like Microsoft scope to try to set some rules — at least in the European Union, where regulators often rely more on complaints by competitors than in the United States — for how Google ranks competing services.

After a two-year inquiry, Mr. Almunia said in May that Google might have abused its dominance in Internet search and advertising, giving its own products an advantage over those of rivals.

“Google displays links to its own vertical search services differently than it does for links to competitors,” Mr. Almunia said in a statement then. “We are concerned that this may result in preferential treatment compared to those of competing services, which may be hurt as a consequence.”

The accusation that Google biases its search results to favor its own services, which originally was a main issue in the U.S. talks, has been taken off the table there, two people who have been briefed on those discussions said Sunday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations were continuing.

Google has consistently maintained that it offers a neutral, best-for-the-customer result.

Mr. Almunia said in May that Google would need to propose a plan within weeks for changes to various practices, including how it links to competitors’ services. Google made its first formal settlement proposal in July, but the talks have dragged on since.

In September, Mr. Almunia signaled that there were limits to how much longer his office would try to negotiate. But early this month, Mr. Almunia appeared to take a softer tone, saying that time was needed to conclude “conversations” with Google that were going on “quite intensively.”

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts a settlement offer, Google would avoid a possible fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global revenue, about $37.9 billion last year. It would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its business activities in Europe.

A settlement would offer advantages for Mr. Almunia, too. He has sought to speed up resolution of antitrust cases to prevent them from dragging out, particularly in the fast-changing technology marketplace, where proposed remedies often rapidly lose their relevance.

As negotiations stand in the U.S. case, Google would make a set of voluntary commitments, the two people briefed on those discussions said.

Google, according to the people, has agreed to refrain from copying summaries of product and restaurant reviews from other Web sites and including them in Google search results, a practice known as screen scraping.

The company would also agree to make it easier for advertisers to transfer data on products, pricing and bidding to Google’s competitors, including Bing from Microsoft, the two people said. Google, they said, would also refrain from striking exclusive deals with Web sites to use Google’s search service.

In addition, Google would sign a consent decree, agreeing to license patents deemed essential for wireless communications on reasonable terms, the two people said. The patent issue is a late entrant to the case. Subpoenas that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission started sending to Internet companies last year laid out a wide-ranging investigation focusing on Google’s conduct in the search business. The Web site Politico reported Saturday that the talks had moved away from search, adding details to reports that Google was resisting a consent decree in that area.

Steve Lohr reported from New York.

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Connecticut school gunman shot mother multiple times, autopsy finds

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- School shooter Adam Lanza killed his mother with "multiple" shots to her head and killed himself with a single shot to his head, according to a coroner’s report released Sunday.

After killing his mother in the home they shared, Lanza, 20, drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he opened fire in two classrooms Friday morning, killing 20 children and six adults. He then turned the gun on himself.

The autopsy reports were released by Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, who said earlier that all the children had been shot multiple times.

Officials have not identified the make of Lanza's weapon, which Carver has described only as a “long gun.”

As the autopsy reports were being released Sunday, a threatening phone call to a local church prompted a mid-service evacuation that jarred a day of mourning as residents throughout this community grappled with the aftermath of the elementary school massacre.

FULL COVERAGE: Connecticut school shooting

A church spokesman said police gave an all-clear soon after the evacuation at St. Rose of Lima Church. A SWAT team had surrounded the rectory across the parking lot from the main church building and hundreds of parishioners were forced to leave services that had been packed all morning.

"This is a very difficult time for all the families. We have seen incredible dignity in the faces of these people," church spokesman Brian Wallace said. The church was locked following the all-clear to "restore calm," Wallace said.

"I don't think anyone can be surprised about anything after what has happened," he said.

Earlier police said in a morning briefing that they may have to interview the youngest survivors of the school shooting as they try to determine the motive of the gunman.

State Police Lt. Paul Vance and Newtown Police Lt. George Sinko offered few new details of the crime or the investigation into the so-far inexplicable rampage at the elementary school.

Any motive -- speculation about Lanza's video game habits, and his relationship with the school and with his mother -- remained unconfirmed. Two days later, police still aren't saying why he did what he did.

PHOTOS: Connecticut school shooting

“For us to be able to give you the summary of the motive, we have to complete the investigation; we have to have the whole picture to say how and why this occurred," said Vance of the Connecticut State Police, the lead agency on the investigation. "There are weeks’ worth of work left for us to complete this."

Lanza's mother legally purchased the guns later recovered at the scene of the massacre, law enforcement officials have said. Officials have previously said those weapons included a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle, a Glock 9-millimeter pistol and a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol, officials said.

Vance said police would be tracing the weapons' origins "back to their origin" at their manufacturers.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy told CNN on Sunday morning: "What we know is he shot his way into the building, so he penetrated the building -- he wasn't buzzed in. He penetrated the building by literally shooting an entrance into the building."

Sinko, meanwhile, said it was "too early" to say if children ever would return to the two classrooms where the killings occurred. "It's too early to say, but I would find it very difficult for them to do that," he said.

Arrangements were under way for some children to report to another elementary school in Newtown when classes resume.

"We want to keep these kids together," said Sinko, explaining that they hoped children who were moved to new schools could stay with their classmates. "We want to move forward very slowly and respectfully," he added, by way of explaining why it was expected to take so long to interview surviving children.

At the news conference, Vance also said the FBI had been asked to help investigate false postings on social media sites that included "some things in somewhat of a threatening manner," and some that purported to be messages from the shooter himself or others involved in the incident.

"There are quotes by people who are posing as the shooter.... Suffice it to say, the information has been deemed as threatening," he said when asked to elaborate.

ALSO:

Suspect in massacre tried to buy rifle days before, sources say

In Newtown, death's chill haunts the morning after school shooting

Connecticut shooting: Gunman forced his way into school, police say

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Painted Swan Nebula

Astronomers using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, have made an impressive composite of the nebula Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula. The painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars.

The image shows a central region about 15 light-years across, although the entire nebula is even larger, about 40 light-years in total. Messier 17 is in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), about 6000 light-years from Earth. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers, who can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.

These deep VLT observations were made at near-infrared wavelengths with the ISAAC instrument. The filters used were J (1.25 µm, shown in blue), H (1.6 µm, shown in green), and K (2.2 µm, shown in red). In the centre of the image is a cluster of massive young stars whose intense radiation makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow. To the lower right of the cluster is a huge cloud of molecular gas. At visible wavelengths, dust grains in the cloud obscure our view, but by observing in infrared light, the glow of the hydrogen gas behind the cloud can be seen shining faintly through. Hidden in this region, which has a dark reddish appearance, the astronomers found the opaque silhouette of a disc of gas and dust. Although it is small in this image, the disc has a diameter of about 20 000 AU, dwarfing our Solar System (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is thought that this disc is rotating and feeding material onto a central protostar — an early stage in the formation of a new star.

Image: ESO/R. Chini [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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“Hobbit” film sets December record in U.S., Canada debut

(Reuters) – “The Hobbit” brought home a big box office treasure over the weekend, setting a December movie record with $ 84.77 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales as legions of fans turned out for the long-awaited big-screen return to Middle Earth.

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” also rung up sales of $ 138.2 million in international markets. Global receipts for the prequel to the smash “Lord of the Rings” trilogy stood at $ 222.97 million through Sunday, distributor Warner Bros. said.

The current projection for the total box office take in 2012 is $ 10.8 billion, according to an estimate from Hollywood.com, which would beat the $ 10.6 billion record in 2009.

The 3D “Hobbit” directed by Oscar-winning “Rings” filmmaker Peter Jackson is the first of three films based on a 1937 classic novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Warner Bros. is aiming to build on the success of the “Rings” series, one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises with $ 2.9 billion in global ticket sales.

The “Lord of the Rings” movies debuted in theaters from 2001 to 2003. After that, production on “The Hobbit” ran into delays, leaving fans waiting a decade for another look at the fantasy story of dwarves, wizards and elves.

The opening weekend “Hobbit” sales proved interest remained high. North American (U.S. and Canadian) receipts toppled the old record for December set by Will Smith sci-fi flick “I Am Legend,” which pulled in $ 77.2 million when it debuted in 2007.

“The best we were hoping for was to reach or exceed the $ 77 million set by that movie and we did it by quite a lot. It was all good and we’re very happy about it,” said Dan Fellman, president of theatrical distribution for Warner Bros.

“You have to assume that by the time this first week is over we are going to have around $ 110 million in the bank before the holiday even starts,” he added.

The new film follows the epic journey of hobbit Bilbo Baggins, played by Martin Freeman, as he travels through the treacherous Middle Earth with a band of dwarves to steal treasures from the dragon Smaug.

The movie also stars Richard Armitage and Benedict Cumberbatch, while Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett and Elijah Wood reprise their “Rings” roles.

Opening-weekend audiences embraced “The Hobbit,” awarding an “A” grade in polling by survey firm CinemaScore. Critics had a mixed response to the nearly three-hour film. Sixty-five percent of reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website recommended the movie, although some objected to Jackson’s decision to shoot it using a 48-frames-per-second format rather than the usual 24.

SOME VIEWERS NAUSEOUS

The faster frame rate delivers clearer pictures, but some critics called the format cartoonish and jarring. Some fans at early screenings in New Zealand complained it made them feel nauseous and dizzy, according to The New Zealand Herald. Only a fraction of theaters showed the film in the new format.

The next two “Hobbit” movies are schedules to reach theaters in December 2013 and July 2014. The films were financed by MGM and Warner Bros.‘ New Line Cinema unit for an estimated $ 500 million.

“The Hobbit” took a bumpy, years-long journey to the big screen that included two directors and a lawsuit. Jackson made the “Rings” trilogy when producers could not get “The Hobbit” rights that were held by MGM’s United Artists unit.

Guillermo del Toro was first hired to direct “The Hobbit” but he left the project when financial woes at MGM caused delays. The movie went into production only after Jackson settled a lawsuit against New Line in a dispute over profits from the “Rings” films.

“The Hobbit” was the only new nationwide release over the weekend. The rest of the top five were films that have been playing for weeks.

In second place was the animated family film “Rise of the Guardians” with $ 7.4 million, followed by historical drama “Lincoln” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the revered U.S. president, which grabbed $ 7.2 million from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates.

James Bond movie “Skyfall” landed in fourth place with $ 7 million.

Next on the box office chart was “Life of Pi,” which captured $ 5.4 million. Teen vampire tale “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ earned $ 5.17 million.

Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros. released “The Hobbit.” “Lincoln” was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Co. Sony Corp’s movie studio released “Skyfall.” Dreamworks Animation distributed “Rise of the Guardians,” which was released by Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures. Summit Entertainment, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment, released “Breaking Dawn.”

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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Nickelodeon and PBS Pursue Preschool Apps Alongside TV Shows

In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

But the show, “Wallykazam,” will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets. Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making “Wallykazam” Nickelodeon’s first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers’ hands and laps.

According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS’s “Sesame Street,” mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines. Eighty-eight percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.

Twenty-one percent said their children first interacted with “Sesame Street” someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources. (PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.)

“On-air does still drive digital,” said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop’s vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame’s research will now be conducted every six months instead of every two years.

Nickelodeon’s research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use. In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April. In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.

The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.

“Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids,” said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, “makes everybody feel better.”

Parents’ feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS’s children’s programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

While television “is somewhat of a passive experience” for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.

Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon’s. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

“We were hearing kids say in testing: ‘I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,’ ” said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon’s senior director of preschool games.

Nickelodeon’s educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company’s preschool shows, officials said.

The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. “That really brings it to life, and you know what you’re getting,” Mr. Scull said.

A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.

It proved so popular that “we definitely feel there’s something here we want to invest in,” Mr. Cheng said.

Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS’s newest property, “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” came out as an app — already the company’s third best-selling — the day of the television premiere in September.

Ms. Rotenberg said her team had “sent away” a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, “ ‘Come back when you have a plan.’ ”

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Apple takes investors on a wild ride

SAN FRANCISCO — With only modest expectations, Robert Leitao of Santa Clarita made a decision in 1994 that would change his life. He bought Apple stock.

This was several years before Steve Jobs returned to resurrect Apple, long before the iPod, the iPhone or the iPads that would make Apple the most valuable company in the world. A $1 investment in Apple at the start of 1994 is now worth about $70.

"Even with the recent sell-off, I'm still doing very well with the stock," said Leitao, who works as director of operations at a Catholic church in Burbank. "Apple provided for a down payment on our home for our blended family of four kids."

Leitao is one of the countless people whose lives have been touched by Apple's stock, which has become a global economic force. It is now one of the most widely held stocks, and the most valuable. Even as Apple Inc.'s market value fell to $480 billion on Friday, it was still larger than the gross domestic product of Norway or Argentina, and more than the combined value of Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Yet that astonishing size and economic influence is also what, many analysts believe, contributes to the extraordinary volatility that can make owning Apple's stock a hair-raising experience.

It was inevitable, analysts say, that after Apple's stock rose 74% in the first nine months of this year, a huge wave of selling would occur as fund managers locked in their profits. And yet, in recent years, these huge dips have been followed by even bigger run-ups that led to new record highs, a dynamic that one trader refers to as the "Apple slingshot."

That pattern has some analysts betting Apple will soar above $1,000 a share in 2013, a scenario almost guaranteed to drive the global obsession with the company's stock into an even greater frenzy.

"The impact on shareholders and on the economy is incredible," said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. "We've not seen anything like this in the modern trading era. Ever."

Even after the remarkable decade of Apple's revival, the company's stock managed to reach new milestones this year. Early in 2012, Apple became the sixth company ever to surpass $500 billion in market value. In August, it became the only company in history with a market value topping $622 billion.

That performance affects just about anyone who has a 401(k) account or a pension. According to FactSet, a research firm that tracks investment funds, 2,555 institutional investors — mutual funds, hedge funds and pension funds, among others — owned stock in Apple, just behind the 2,590 that held Microsoft stock, as of Sept. 30, the most recent date funds had to disclose their holdings. However, the value of that Apple stock held by institutional investors on that day was $427 billion, compared with $172 billion for Microsoft, according to FactSet.

Silverblatt said the only company that has come close to having such a strong influence on the broader stock markets since World War II is IBM in the early 1980s, when the PC revolution was just getting started. But not only is the value of Apple's stock remarkable, so is its volatility. Such large stocks rarely have such big, quick swings.

Apple shares peaked at $702.10 on Sept. 19, up from $401.44 at the start of the year, a run that astonished analysts. But just as remarkable has been its collapse, falling as low as $505.75 in intra-day trading Nov. 16.

"It's just amazing because it's such a large company," said Brian Colello, a senior research analyst at Morningstar. "The company lost about $35 billion in market cap in one day. That's the size of some large-cap stocks."

Yet such swings have become commonplace for Apple stock. Before its latest swoon of 23.4% since its September high, Apple had experienced three previous corrections of more than 10% over the last two years.

The value of Apple's stock and its extreme swings have made researching it and trading it almost a full-time job for some people. Jason Schwarz of Marina del Rey edits EconomicTiming.com, which sends out up to five newsletters each week to its 1,000 clients that focus in large measure on Apple. He also helps run Lone Peak Asset Management, which has about $500 million in assets.

Schwarz says that what he calls the "Apple slingshot" is actually a virtue of the shares.

"The extraordinary volatility is the result of Apple's strength," Schwarz said. "People try to blame the volatility on Apple's weaknesses."

Schwarz and many other Apple believers argue that people are making a big mistake when they try to understand the stock's behavior by focusing on various bits of bad news such as an executive shake-up, the Maps controversy or questions about market share or competition. They have almost nothing to do with the regular hits taken by Apple shares, the argument goes.

Instead, folks like Schwarz say more technical factors are at work, such as the fact that the fiscal year for many stock funds ends Oct. 31. When the stock peaked in September, many fund managers rushed to sell to lock in profits for the year. Apple stock makes so much money for so many people, then plummets when shareholders pause to reap their profits, Schwarz says.

The volatility has continued in recent weeks, the argument goes, because fears of higher taxes next year have many fund managers trying to take advantage of short-term swings to make bigger profits. That volatility offers tantalizing windows for huge, short-term profits for investors willing to take the risk.

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Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space

To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years.

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures.

Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites.

Above: Bear Glacier, Alaska

This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.

The grey stripe down the middle of the glacier is called a medial moraine. It is formed when two glaciers flow into each other and join on their way downhill. When glaciers come together, their lateral moraines, long ridges formed along their edges as the freeze-thaw cycle of the glacier breaks off chunks of rock from the surrounding walls, meet to form a rocky ridge along the center of the joined glaciers.

Image: GeoEye/NASA, 2005.

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As Conn. story unfolds, media struggle with facts

NEW YORK (AP) — The scope and senselessness of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting challenged television journalists’ ability to do much more than lend, or impose, their presence on the scene.

Pressed with the awful urgency of the story, TV, along with other media, fell prey to reporting “facts” that were often in conflict or wrong.

How many people were killed? Which Lanza brother was the shooter: Adam or Ryan? Was their mother, who was among the slain, a teacher at the school?

Like the rest of the news media, television outlets were faced with intense competitive pressures and an audience ravenous for details in an age when the best-available information was seldom as reliable as the networks’ high-tech delivery systems.

Here was the normal gestation of an unfolding story. But with wall-to-wall cable coverage and second-by-second Twitter postings, the process of updating and correcting it was visible to every onlooker. And as facts were gathered by authorities, then shared with reporters (often on background), a seemingly higher-than-usual number of points failed to pan out:

— The number of dead was initially reported as anywhere from the high teens to nearly 30. The final count was established Friday afternoon: 20 children and six adults, as well as Lanza’s mother and the shooter himself.

— For hours on Friday, the shooter was identified as Ryan Lanza, with his age alternatively reported as 24 or 20. The confusion seemed partly explainable when it was determined that 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the shooter who had then killed himself, was carrying identification belonging to his 24-year-old brother.

This case of mistaken identity was painfully reminiscent of the Atlanta Olympics bombing case in 1996, when authorities fingered an innocent man, and the news media ran with it, destroying his life. Such damage was averted in Ryan Lanza’s case largely by his public protestations on social media, repeatedly declaring “It wasn’t me.”

— Initial reports differed as to whether Lanza’s mother, Nancy, was shot at the school, where she was said to be a teacher, or at the home she shared with Adam Lanza. By Friday afternoon, it was determined that she had been shot at their home.

Then doubts arose about whether Nancy Lanza had any link to Sandy Hook Elementary. At least one parent said she was a substitute teacher, but by early Saturday, an official said investigators had been unable to establish any connection with the school.

That seemed to make the massacre even more confusing. Early on, the attack was said to have taken place in her own classroom and was interpreted by more than one on-air analyst as possibly a way for Adam Lanza to strike back at children with whom he felt rivalry for his mother’s affection.

— Lanza’s weapons were listed as two pistols (a Glock and a Sig Sauer) as well as a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, but whether that rifle was used in the school or left in the trunk of Lanza’s car remained unclear.

— There were numerous versions of what Lanza was wearing, including camouflage attire and black paramilitary garb.

With so many unanswered questions, TV correspondents were left to set the scene and to convey the impact in words that continually failed them.

However apt, the phrase “parents’ worst nightmare” became an instant cliche.

And the word “unimaginable” was used countless times. But “imagine” was exactly what the horrified audience was helpless not to do.

The screen was mostly occupied by grim or tearful faces, sparing everybody besides law enforcement officials the most chilling sight: the death scene in the school, where — as viewers were reminded over and over — the bodies remained while evidence was gathered. But who could keep from imagining it?

Ironically, perhaps the most powerful video came from 300 miles away, in Washington, where President Barack Obama delivered brief remarks about the tragedy. His somber face, the flat tone of his voice, the tears he daubed from his eyes, and his long, tormented pauses said as much as his heartfelt words. He seemed to speak for everyone who heard them.

But TV had hours to fill.

Children from the school were interviewed. It was a questionable decision for which the networks took heat from media critics and viewers alike. But the decision lay more in the hands of the willing parents (who were present), and there was value in hearing what these tiny witnesses had to say.

“We had to lock our doors so the animal couldn’t get in,” said one little boy, his words painting a haunting picture.

In the absence of much hard information, speculation was a regular fallback. Correspondents and other “experts” persisted in diagnosing the shooter, a man none of them had ever met or even heard of until hours earlier.

CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” scored an interview with a former classmate of Lanza’s — with an emphasis on “former.”

“I really only knew him closely when we were very, very young, in elementary school together,” she said.

Determined to unlock Lanza’s personality, Morgan asked the woman if she “could have ever predicted that he would one day flip and do something as monstrous as this?”

“I don’t know if I could have predicted it,” she replied, struggling to give Morgan what he wanted. “I mean, there was something ‘off’ about him.”

The larger implications of the tragedy were broached throughout the coverage — not least by Obama.

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” he said, which may have gladdened proponents of stricter gun laws.

But CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes noted, “There’s often an assumption that after a horrific event like this, it will spark a fierce debate on the issue. But in recent years, that hasn’t been the case.”

Appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor” Friday night, Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera voiced his own solution.

“I want an armed cop at every school,” he said.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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