Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace

THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.

But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.

The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.

Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.

If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.

DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.

“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”

Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)

The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.

“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.

The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.

In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”

Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.

Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.

He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.

“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.

There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.

UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”

The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.

“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.

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Some Economists Doubt Dire Effects From Tax Increases

As anxious investors assess their portfolios in light of expected tax increases on investment income, hedge fund manager Douglas Kass has a simple message: Relax.

Mr. Kass, the founder of Seabreeze Partners Management, thinks much of the investing world has overestimated how hard the markets and investors would be hit if tax rates on dividends and capital gains rise at the end of the year, as the White House has proposed.

Mr. Kass can look for support to several economists who have studied past changes in tax rates and found that the shifts had less of an impact on investor behavior than was initially expected.

That’s largely because a dwindling number of investors are subject to the taxes on investment gains that are set to rise at the end of the year, with most stocks held in accounts that are exempt from taxes.

For example, only 14.7 percent of American households have mutual funds in taxable accounts, down from as high as 23.9 percent in 2001, according to data from the Investment Company Institute. Douglas A. Shackelford, an economist who has examined the 2003 legislation that lowered the tax rates on capital gains and dividends, said that when those changes were being put in place “people thought this would be revolutionary,” sparking a wave of changes in the way companies rewarded their investors, and how investors evaluated companies.

In the end, “it made a difference, but it certainly was not revolutionary,” said Mr. Shackelford, a professor of taxation at the University of North Carolina’s business school. The limited number of investors who were subject to the changes in 2003 has grown even smaller today, he said.

While data on the tax status of all stockholders is hard to come by, many economists agree than an increasing proportion of the entire equities market is now held by retirement investors whose holdings are not subject to current tax law; by foreign investors who don’t pay American taxes, or by institutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds that are exempt from taxes.

Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist at S&P Capital IQ, said that even among individual investors who do pay the taxes, many have incomes under $250,000 and would not be subject to the increased rates on investment income proposed by the White House. The result Mr. Stovall is anticipating is that the coming changes will cause “a lot less of a hit than most people are making it out to be.”

Mr. Stovall and others who share his views are not discounting the potential disruption to the financial markets if the White House and Congress fail to reach any agreement on the broad set of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to hit at the start of the year. The largest of these changes are not on investment income. An increase in the payroll tax, for example, could remove $95 billion from the take-home pay of Americans.

But even if a broad agreement is reached, many strategists are expecting that taxes will rise on investment income, with the White House proposing that for households earning over $250,000 the rate on dividends rise to a peak of 39.6 percent from the current 15 percent, and the rate on capital gains increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent.

Wealthy households will face an additional 3.8 percent charge on most investment income to help pay for the recent health care legislation.

Neil J. Hennessy, the founder of Hennessy Funds, said at a year-end investing event last week that if politicians allow the rates to rise as much as the White House has proposed, dividends will become much less attractive and there could be “disastrous effect” on the willingness of investors to put money into stocks.

Some companies have already acted ahead of the changes, with Costco and Las Vegas Sands leading the way in issuing special dividends before the end of the year so their shareholders can take advantage of current tax rates. Some investors have sold off stocks that issue regular dividends expecting the companies to become less valuable once a greater proportion of dividend income is lost to taxes.

Andrew Garthwaite, an analyst at Credit Suisse, has predicted that if the White House’s view on investment taxes prevails, it could lead to a long-term reduction in the value of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index of as much as 5 percent. Mr. Garthwaite cautioned that the figure is likely to be lower, and that investors have already incorporated some of those losses into the market by selling stocks.

Mr. Kass disputed Mr. Garthwaite’s estimates in a note to clients, and said he was looking at market losses of at most 1.6 percent and more likely closer to 0.8 percent. Part of the disagreement arises from Mr. Kass’s contention that many people who are subject to tax are either uninformed about tax law — and unlikely to respond to changes — or more focused on the long-term performance of their portfolio than on short-term tax payments.

Mr. Kass said that even the losses he has predicted assume that wealthy people will be willing to cash out of their stock positions and stay out, something that he said is unlikely given the small returns available in other financial investments.

But an even larger source of misunderstanding has come from the difficulty of ascertaining the amount of all United States stocks held by people who will have to pay the new, higher tax rates. Foreign investors controlled 12.4 percent of American stocks in 2011, up from 8.8 percent in 2004, Treasury Department data shows.

Among the stocks that are held in the United States, 48 percent are held directly by households, down from 65 percent in 1988, according to Federal Reserve figures. In contrast, 40.7 percent of households have mutual funds in tax-exempt accounts.

But only some of these have income over $250,000 a year, and a portion of those people have their money in accounts protected from taxes. Eric Toder, a co-director of the Tax Policy Center, said as a result market prices should have little to do with the taxes paid on gains because prices are largely “being determined by tax-exempt investors and by foreign investors.”

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Pete's Harbor live-aboards fight for their way of life

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Pete Uccelli took 20 acres of swampland and transformed it into a boatyard and marina, welcoming visitors and residents of his beloved town to stroll the docks and feed the ducks.

His restaurant on the southern edge of San Francisco Bay became a gathering spot — hosting Rotary Club meetings, business lunches and quinceañeras.

"Pete's Harbor" also was a haven for "live-aboards," who rejoiced in the riches of the wildlife refuge a stone's throw away and often shared their unique lifestyle over barbecue and beers.

But after nearly six decades, it looks like it's all coming to an end.

Boaters and motor home owners — well over 100 of them full-time residents — were told by Uccelli's widow, Paula, that they'd have to clear out by Jan. 15.

Her husband had started talking about selling the land for development more than a decade ago. After several starts and stops, planning commissioners late last month approved a Colorado builder's plan to raze the restaurant, construct more than 400 condos and apartments and restrict the marina's slips to use by the new residents.

Although many boaters gave up and pulled out — their slips have been cordoned off with yellow tape to ensure that they stay vacant — a dedicated group of residents is calling for compromise.

"It's not really about us," said Roger Smith, 68, who used to dine at Pete's restaurant when it was a thatch-roofed hamburger shack. He parked his motor home here for good seven years ago. "It's about Redwood City and the rest of the region — and what it's going to lose."

Just up Redwood Creek from Pete's, the same developer demolished hundreds of live-aboard boat slips a few years back. At marinas with slips directly on San Francisco Bay waters — as some of Pete's are — a state conservation commission limits live-aboards to 10% of the total, and waiting lists for larger vessels tend to be long. Marinas without adequate parking, bathrooms or pump-out facilities don't allow live-aboards at all.

The current residents of Pete's Harbor have appealed the city Planning Commission's decision and suggested that an alternative plan could allow for some development while still preserving a commercial marina that would let them stay. After all, they noted, the city's General Plan pays plenty of lip service to the value of "floating communities" here — both culturally and as affordable housing.

Behind the grass-roots offensive is a history of opposition to bayfront development in Redwood City — a community of 80,000 on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. In fact, voters eight years ago rejected a zoning change that would have allowed a much larger project to be built on the same land.

This time, opponents asserted, the plan was jammed through without adequate public scrutiny at a time when the city is reassessing its vision for its inner harbor area.

"It was a done deal," said Buckley Stone, 54, a boisterous veteran who has lived here for 20 years with his wife, Wendy.

But the city planning manager, Blake Lyon, said the project fit the area's zoning designation and did not warrant greater input because the environmental impact report conducted years ago for the larger project needed only to be amended, not redone.

Still, the appeal will give live-aboard tenants a chance to air their concerns before the City Council in late January.

According to Ted Hannig, a longtime friend and attorney of the Uccellis, the current residents have had month-to-month leases since 2002 and knew the harbor would one day change hands. Ninety percent of them, he added, even signed a lease addendum that noted the marina was up for sale and agreed to leave their slips when asked.

"Pete's Harbor has no obligation to have live-aboards there," said Hannig, who has considered himself a boater since he built his first raft out of bamboo and bedsheets at age 11. "What they don't want to say is that they're not keeping their word to a dead man or to Paula, his widow."

Even some who sympathize with the Pete's Harbor residents said they should have known their paradise wouldn't last forever.

"It's like a hurricane in the Gulf," said Mark Sanders, who recently opened the nearby Westpoint Harbor Marina — the Bay Area's first new facility in decades. "If you're living in Jacksonville, Fla., you know you're going to get whacked with a hurricane. You just don't know when."

When Paula Uccelli told her boating and RV tenants in September that they'd have to be out after the New Year's holidays, they started mobilizing.

Alison Madden — a technology attorney who moved here in an Airstream trailer in May with her two kids while she searched for a boat — kicked into research mode. Leslie Webster, a freelance writer and communications consultant, helped start a blog. Brenda Hattery — who with her husband has cruised the West Coast and parts of Mexico in a pre-World War II schooner and settled here a year ago — put together a video to set the record straight on the kind of people live-aboards are — and aren't.

They gathered 1,600 signatures in one frenzied week and showed up in force at the Planning Commission hearing Oct. 30. But commissioners were unanimous: The project complied with the area's zoning, and the owner had a right to sell.

Still, the live-aboards are not giving up.

They are lobbying the California State Lands Commission and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, both of which have jurisdiction over some of the land and still must sign off on the development as in the public interest.

"I think what they fail to understand," said Webster, "is that even if we move, we're still going to be pursuing this."

But every day now, said resident Wendy Stone, someone else floats off, making the marina "a little less beautiful."

lee.romney@latimes.com

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Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers

Angelina Jolie extends her reputation as filmdom’s most compelling ass-kicker, Female Division, when Salt opens Friday. Midway through a summer freighted with testosterone, Jolie’s lithe Agent Salt is a potent reminder of the power of feminine fighters.

A minority presence in sci-fi and action realms even in 2010, women warriors remain the exception to the guy-centric rule in film, TV, videogames and comic books. But that’s changing, according to Action Flick Chick blogger Katrina Hill, who moderates the "Where Are the Action Chicks?" panel Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con International.

"Compare the original Predator to this summer’s Predators," she said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. "The original film was a complete boy’s club, with the only woman in the movie being a hostage. Today, Predators has a kick-ass chick mixed in as an equal amongst these other badass men. So there are steps being taken in the right direction. It just takes time."

The rise of the female fighter will be addressed at no fewer than three other female-dominated panels at this year’s Comic-Con (Thursday’s “Divas and Golden Lassoes: The LGBT Obsession with Super Heroines” and Friday’s “Girls Gone Genre: Movies, TV, Comics, Web” and “Women Who Kick Ass: A New Generation of Heroines,” which features Fringe’s Anna Torv and V’s Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Here’s a look at 26 sexy-fierce female ass-kickers who’ve relied on biceps and brains to periodically kick-start geek culture.

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“Hobbit” may bring a Hollywood ending to 2012 box office

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – It took more than a decade, two directors and a lawsuit before “The Hobbit” made it to the big screen. Hollywood executives are crossing their fingers that the culmination of that journey will help smash movie box office records this year.

The film, which opens on December 14, is expected to contribute to the first annual box office increase in North America in three years, a sign that big movie studios have made more films enticing enough to get people into theaters and away from their TVs, games and the Internet.

“The Hobbit” follows this year’s other big box office successes “The Avengers,” which became the industry’s third-largest film with $ 623 million in U.S. sales, and “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Hunger Games” which both passed $ 400 million.

Hollywood analysts predict the two months of the year that include “The Hobbit” and the finale of the “Twilight” vampire series may lift U.S. and Canadian ticket sales above the $ 10.6 billion record set in 2009.

“The fourth quarter is just gangbusters,” said box office watcher Phil Contrino, editor of the boxoffice.com website. “One movie after the other is exceeding expectations.”

Annual receipts are on track to end 5 percent above last year at $ 10.8 billion or more, projects Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst for Hollywood.com. Ten films have already passed $ 200 million in ticket sales, compared to seven last year, when no film passed the $ 400 million mark.

That would be the first yearly box office increase in three years, and would be from a jump in admissions rather than a hike in ticket prices that traditionally fuel box office growth. Ticket prices are averaging $ 7.94, a penny increase from last year, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners.

Hollywood has raked in $ 9.7 billion so far in ticket sales and sold more than 1.2 billion tickets in the North American (U.S. and Canadian) market, 5.5 percent up on a year ago.

The industry thought it had a record in sight last year, only to see underwhelming performances from holiday releases such as thriller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and animated movie “Hugo,” which left ticket sales at a three-year low.

OFF THE COUCH

Studios face a difficult entertainment landscape in which consumers have an array of competing outlets for movie watching that includes DVR recordings, game players and movies streamed over computers and mobile phones.

Services like Netflix Inc have also made a dent in trips to the theater by offering cheap monthly rentals that make it easier to stay on the couch.

What has got people out of their homes, Hollywood moguls say, is a rise in the quality and variety of what is on screen.

This year, studios offered up a rush of big-budget blockbusters including “Skyfall,” the highest grossing of the 23 James Bond films that is still selling well with $ 227 million in domestic sales.

“Ted,” about a foul-mouthed stuffed bear, was a surprise winner with $ 219 million. Several mid-sized hits that won critical acclaim, including Steven Spielberg’s historical drama “Lincoln” and the Iran hostage thriller “Argo,” became box office darlings.

“There is something for everyone,” said Chris Aronson, president of domestic distribution at News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio. “When we achieve that as an industry and the movies are of good quality, that’s when good things happen.”

Sony oiled up its Spider-Man franchise and collected $ 262 million by rebooting it with new stars Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Disney’s Pixar unit struck it big again with the animated movie “Brave.”

Hollywood did not escape some box office bombs. Two big-budget bets – board-game inspired thriller “Battleship” and outer space adventure “John Carter” – ranked among the most costly flops in movie history.

The mass killing at a Colorado movie theater in July marred the release of Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.” But the film eventually grossed $ 448 million domestically, ranking as the year’s second-biggest.

Hollywood also overcame summer doldrums. The season that accounts for the bulk of yearly sales slumped 5 percent behind 2011. The second weekend in September produced the lowest-grossing weekend since 2001.

The pace quickened at the start of the holidays – the second-biggest movie going period – with “Twilight” finale “Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ and James Bond movie “Skyfall” leading record Thanksgiving sales of $ 291 million over five days.

“FOUR QUADRANT” FILM

That has got the industry’s hopes up for the Christmas season when families gather and shoppers fill malls. Comcast Corp’s Universal Pictures is releasing the musical adaptation “Les Miserables,” and The Weinstein Company offers up the Leonardo DiCaprio thriller “Django Unchained.” A street-brawling Tom Cruise returns in “Jack Reacher” from Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures.

But it is the dwarves and wizards from “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” that Hollywood is banking on to generate movie going mania. Set 60 years before the Oscar-winning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the movie is the kind that studios love – a “four quadrant” film that appeals to male, female, young and old, said Contrino of Boxoffice.com. He projects $ 137 million in opening weekend domestic sales, rising to $ 475 million through its theatrical run.

The film, based on the fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien about the travels of hobbit Bilbo Baggins, almost did not make it to the screen at all. Director Peter Jackson made the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy when producers could not get “The Hobbit” rights that were held by MGM’s United Artists unit.

“The Hobbit“, also a trilogy, has been produced by MGM and Time Warner Inc but only after Jackson settled a lawsuit against Time Warner’s New Line Cinema unit in a dispute over profits from the “Rings” trilogy.

Now all the film has to do is delight fans with a new hobbit adventure across Middle Earth and deliver a record year for Hollywood.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine. Editing by Jane Merriman)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Opinion: A Health Insurance Detective Story

I’VE had a long career as a business journalist, beginning at Forbes and including eight years as the editor of Money, a personal finance magazine. But I’ve never faced a more confounding reporting challenge than the one I’m engaged in now: What will I pay next year for the pill that controls my blood cancer?

After making more than 70 phone calls to 16 organizations over the past few weeks, I’m still not totally sure what I will owe for my Revlimid, a derivative of thalidomide that is keeping my multiple myeloma in check. The drug is extremely expensive — about $11,000 retail for a four-week supply, $132,000 a year, $524 a pill. Time Warner, my former employer, has covered me for years under its Supplementary Medicare Program, a plan for retirees that included a special Writers Guild benefit capping my out-of-pocket prescription costs at $1,000 a year. That out-of-pocket limit is scheduled to expire on Jan. 1. So what will my Revlimid cost me next year?

The answers I got ranged from $20 a month to $17,000 a year. One of the first people I phoned said that no matter what I heard, I wouldn’t know the cost until I filed a claim in January. Seventy phone calls later, that may still be the most reliable thing anyone has told me.

Like around 47 million other Medicare beneficiaries, I have until this Friday, Dec. 7, when open enrollment ends, to choose my 2013 Medicare coverage, either through traditional Medicare or a private insurer, as well as my drug coverage — or I will risk all sorts of complications and potential late penalties.

But if a seasoned personal-finance journalist can’t get a straight answer to a simple question, what chance do most people have of picking the right health insurance option?

A study published in the journal Health Affairs in October estimated that a mere 5.2 percent of Medicare Part D beneficiaries chose the cheapest coverage that met their needs. All in all, consumers appear to be wasting roughly $11 billion a year on their Part D coverage, partly, I think, because they don’t get reliable answers to straightforward questions.

Here’s a snapshot of my surreal experience:

NOV. 7 A packet from Time Warner informs me that the company’s new 2013 Retiree Health Care Plan has “no out-of-pocket limit on your expenses.” But Erin, the person who answers at the company’s Benefits Service Center, tells me that the new plan will have “no practical effect” on me. What about the $1,000-a-year cap on drug costs? Is that really being eliminated? “Yes,” she says, “there’s no limit on out-of-pocket expenses in 2013.” I tell her I think that could have a major effect on me.

Next I talk to David at CVS/Caremark, Time Warner’s new drug insurance provider. He thinks my out-of-pocket cost for Revlimid next year will be $6,900. He says, “I know I’m scaring you.”

I call back Erin at Time Warner. She mentions something about $10,000 and says she’ll get an estimate for me in two business days.

NOV. 8 I phone Medicare. Jay says that if I switch to Medicare’s Part D prescription coverage, with a new provider, Revlimid’s cost will drive me into Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage.” I’d pay $2,819 the first month, and 5 percent of the cost of the drug thereafter — $563 a month or maybe $561. Anyway, roughly $9,000 for the year. Jay says AARP’s Part D plan may be a good option.

NOV. 9 Erin at Time Warner tells me that the company’s policy bundles United Healthcare medical coverage with CVS/Caremark’s drug coverage. I can’t accept the medical plan and cherry-pick prescription coverage elsewhere. It’s take it or leave it. Then she puts CVS’s Michele on the line to get me a Revlimid quote. Michele says Time Warner hasn’t transferred my insurance information. She can’t give me a quote without it. Erin says she will not call me with an update. I’ll have to call her.

My oncologist’s assistant steers me to Celgene, Revlimid’s manufacturer. Jennifer in “patient support” says premium assistance grants can cut the cost of Revlimid to $20 or $30 a month. She says, “You’re going to be O.K.” If my income is low enough to qualify for assistance.

NOV. 12 I try CVS again. Christine says my insurance records still have not been transferred, but she thinks my Revlimid might cost $17,000 a year.

Adriana at Medicare warns me that AARP and other Part D providers will require “prior authorization” to cover my Revlimid, so it’s probably best to stick with Time Warner no matter what the cost.

But Brooke at AARP insists that I don’t need prior authorization for my Revlimid, and so does her supervisor Brian — until he spots a footnote. Then he assures me that it will be easy to get prior authorization. All I need is a doctor’s note. My out-of-pocket cost for 2013: roughly $7,000.

NOV. 13 Linda at CVS says her company still doesn’t have my file, but from what she can see about Time Warner’s insurance plans my cost will be $60 a month — $720 for the year.

CVS assigns my case to Rebecca. She says she’s “sure all will be fine.” Well, “pretty sure.” She’s excited. She’s been with the company only a few months. This will be her first quote.

NOV. 14 Giddens at Time Warner puts in an “emergency update request” to get my files transferred to CVS.

Frank Lalli is an editorial consultant on retirement issues and a former senior executive editor at Time Warner’s Time Inc.

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Media Decoder Blog: Robert Thomson to Be Chief of News Corporation's New Publishing Company

2:53 p.m. | Updated

Robert Thomson, the top editor at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and a confidante of News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, is expected to be named chief executive of the media conglomerate’s newly spun-off publishing company.

Mr. Thomson will run the separate, publicly traded company, which will include The Journal, The New York Post, HarperCollins and a suite of lucrative television assets in Australia. The announcement is expected as early as Monday, according to a person briefed on the company’s decision-making.

Mr. Thomson took over at The Journal in 2008, soon after News Corporation completed its $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones. He serves as managing editor of The Journal and editor in chief of Dow Jones, which also publishes Barron’s and the Dow Jones Newswires.

Gerard Baker, a deputy managing editor at the Journal, will take over for Mr. Thomson at The Journal, said the person briefed on the decisions, who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

At The Journal, Mr. Baker has overseen Washington and political coverage, among other topics. He previously wrote a neoconservative column for The Times of London, also owned by News Corporation, and served as Washington bureau chief at The Financial Times, where Mr. Thomson was the top editor of the United States edition.

Mr. Thomson began his career at News Corporation in 1979 as a reporter at The Herald in Melbourne, Australia. He and Mr. Murdoch are both Australian, and have taken family vacations together. Mr. Murdoch is often seen in Mr. Thomson’s office in the Journal newsroom.

In his tenure at The Journal, Mr. Thomson increased circulation by broadening the newspaper’s focus beyond business to include more general-interest and lifestyle news. He oversaw an expansion of the newsroom budget, added photographs to go along with the paper’s signature dot drawings and introduced a local New York section.

Mr. Murdoch will serve as chairman of the publishing company and remain chief executive of the entertainment company, which will include News Corporation’s movie studio, Fox Broadcasting and cable channels like FX and Fox News.

News Corporation plans to complete its split, which was announced in June, in mid-2013. Additional announcements about the publishing company’s board and cash structure are expected before the end of the year.

A News Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment. Reuters was the first to report on the expected appointments.

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Tennis umpire Lois Goodman wants job back after murder case dropped

Professional tennis umpire Lois Goodman, who had been accused by prosecutors of killing her 80-year-old husband, will now try to resume her life after a judge dismissed the case against her Friday.

"This is a wonderful woman whose name was tarnished all over this country, and hopefully today everybody knows that she didn't do anything and she is absolutely innocent," defense attorney Alison Triessl, said.

Goodman's husband died in April in what she has maintained was an accidental fall. A coroner's investigator, though, found the death suspicious after determining that Alan Goodman died of "deep penetrating blunt force trauma," and a months-long investigation ensued.

Goodman, a longtime umpire for the United States Tennis Assn., was officiating qualifying matches at the U.S. Open this past summer when police arrested her in New York. The case generated national headlines.

At the request of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which said it "could not proceed," a judge dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning prosecutors have the option to refile charges against her. A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office said it will continue to investigate.

After Friday's court hearing, Goodman said she feels "wonderful" and thanked the D.A.'s office for "doing the right thing." She and her attorneys skirted questions about whether the investigation was shoddy and the charges premature.

"I don't know much about the system," Goodman said. "I feel I have been treated fairly now and it was just a tragic accident."
When asked if she would return to her job as a tennis umpire, Goodman said, "Definitely!"

"And to the USTA," Triessl added, "please rehire this woman. She is an amazing lines judge, and she deserves to work for you."

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Hypersonic Flight 'Breakthrough' Could Have Us in Tokyo by Lunch

The promise of hypersonic flight sending us halfway around the world in a matter of hours is being bandied about again, this time by a British company that declares, with no understatement, that it has made “the biggest breakthrough in aerospace propulsion technology since the invention of the jet engine.”

Reaction Engines Limited says its hypersonic engine will send us streaking across the sky at speeds well over Mach 5, allowing us to have bagels for breakfast in New York and sushi for lunch in Tokyo. The hypersonic engine design reportedly includes new ways of cooling the air for an engine that will use oxygen in the atmosphere up to Mach 5.5  before switching to rocket power for the ride in space.

Hypersonic flight has long topped the list of dreamy aerospace ideas. The military loves the idea of super-fast missiles and even bombers, while the rest of us dream of flying from the Big Apple to Tokyo in just a few hours. The big problem has been propulsion. At speeds beyond Mach 2 or so, a jet engine has trouble getting the oxygen needed for combustion. It’s sorta like trying to take a deep breath by sticking your head out the window at 200 mph.

Solving this problem is not impossible, but neither is it terribly practical. Kelly Johnson’s SR-71 Blackbird design used very creative ways to handle the incoming air needed to achieve a record-setting Mach 3+ speeds. But past that it gets really tough, and dealing with all that heat poses another challenge.

So far, only rocket engines have been capable of practical hypersonic flight, but the vehicles that use them require multiple stages to reach space. To avoid the cumbersome need to carry a supply of oxygen, as is done on rockets and was used by the space shuttle, engineers have struggled with an air-breathing design that can operate in the hypersonic speed range as a first stage.

Reaction Engines claims it’s cracked the problem with a design that could allow a vehicle to take off, reach orbit using a combination of an air-breathing engine and rocket, then return to Earth. The secret is cooling the air as it enters the hypersonic SABRE engine.

“[The] pre-cooler technology is designed to cool the incoming airstream from over 1,000 Celsius to minus 150 Celsius in less than 1/100th of a second, without blocking with frost,” the company claimed in its press release.

It’s a promising design that tackles one of the bigger problems facing hypersonic engines: the enormous amount of heat generated when you compress air at extremely high speeds. The air-breathing engine will accelerate a vehicle to about Mach 5.5, according to the company, after which a liquid oxygen tank will supply a rocket engine for the portion of the flight in space. But unlike current space vehicles, there will only be one stage involved for the entire flight thanks to the boost from the SABRE design.

The European Space Agency says it has evaluated the pre-cooler design and says it is satisfied that the design should move forward. The agency is negotiating a contract to help support the further development of Reaction Engines’ design.

Reaction Engines said it has completed more than 100 test runs of the cooling system and it hopes to have a sub-scale ground engine running by 2015. But as the X-51 Waverider team has discovered, it’s a long road, er, flight from a new component breakthrough to hypersonic flight.

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Korean pop rides “Gangnam Style” into U.S. music scene

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Gangnam Style,” the catchy Korean song by rapper Psy, may have danced its way into the American charts but the Korean pop industry isn’t horsing around when it comes to capitalizing on the singer’s phenomenal U.S. success.

With “Gangnam Style” topping the current Billboard Digital Songs chart and becoming the most-watched video on YouTube ever with more than 800 million views, fellow Korean pop, or K-pop, artists are positioning themselves for similar U.S. breakthroughs.

Korea’s pop music industry is thriving. Over the past two years, a handful of K-pop acts including girl group 2NE1, boy band Super Junior and nine-piece band Girls Generation have embarked on mini-promotional tours around the United States to build their audience.

“Psy has opened doors and is shining a spotlight on K-pop. People are paying attention to what’s being done there,” Alina Moffat, general manager at YG Entertainment group, which manages Psy, told a recent entertainment industry conference in Los Angeles.

Psy’s vibrant music video, featuring his invisible pony-riding dance, also featured K-pop artists Kim Hyun-a of girl band 4Minute, and Deasung and Seungri of boy band Big Bang, all of whom are attempting to crack the U.S. market.

“YouTube has really changed the awareness of K-pop. Both American kids and second-generation Korean American kids are discovering it,” Kye Kyoungbon Koo, director of the Korea Creative Content Agency, told a panel at a Billboard and Hollywood Reporter conference in Los Angeles in October.

MARKETING THE NEXT BIG THING

For U.S. companies looking to invest, K-pop is being marketed as the next big thing, boasting young, stylish and influential artists who command devoted fan followings.

Moffat said car companies and mobile phone brands were among those being courted at KCON, a convention held in October in Irvine in Southern California that showcased K-pop artists.

“Kids are coming, they’re engaged, they want to spend money and sponsors saw that,” Moffat said.

Whether Psy or other K-pop artists can command a global following to rival Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber or Rihanna remains to be seen, but John Shim, senior producer at MTV World, believes it is the right genre to compete with pop music’s biggest names.

“K-pop admittedly is a very niche genre but I also think it’s the best equipped of Asian pop to cater to the U.S. audience,” Shim told Reuters.

Psy has helped to break down language barriers, keeping “Gangnam Style” in its original Korean form instead of adapting it to English when it became an international hit.

The singer told Reuters he was persuaded to keep it that way by his manager Scooter Braun, the talent scout responsible for Justin Bieber’s success, who signed Psy to his record label.

“I thought, ‘Should I translate this or not?’ because (the fans) have got to know what I’m talking about, and lyrics are a huge part,” Psy said.

CHATTING IN ENGLISH

But industry executives say at least one member of each K-Pop group is usually taught to be fluent in conversational English.

“The investment in language is costly, but effective,” said Ted Kim, president of South Korean music television channel Mnet. “It really matters that Psy can go on the Ellen DeGeneres TV show and have a conversation.”

Psy said he was proud his song succeeded in Korean, but he now wants to branch out into English.

“‘Gangnam Style’ is not the sort of thing that’s going to happen twice. I’ve definitely got to make something in English so I can communicate with my fans right now,” the singer said.

In Korea, bands such as SM Entertainment’s Super Junior and Girls Generation have became branding powerhouses, scoring endorsements ranging from cosmetics, fashion, video games, electronics and beverages.

In the United States, companies such as Samsung have already jumped on the K-pop train, sponsoring Korean boy band Big Bang’s U.S. tour.

But while the genre is gaining steam in the charts, it has yet to spill into ticket sales for tours, according to Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief at Pollstar.com, which tracks concert sales.

“Psy may be able to sell out arenas in Asia, but not yet here. For the American audience, he has to prove that he’s more than a novelty act,” Bongiovanni said.

“K-pop has to prove itself before large companies spend money on it,” he added.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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