Facebook today invited journalists to “come see what we’re building” a week from today, strongly implying it will unveil a new project, but keeping further details to itself.
The vague press invitation (below) is clearly meant to whip up public interest in the company’s offerings. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will meet expectations generated from its teasing invitation or simply use the inevitable wave of press hype to promote pedestrian, incremental improvements to its website or apps. (A Facebook spokesperson declined to provide further details.)
But the timing of invitation, during the hardware-focused Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, hints at the possibility Facebook will debut some sort of gadget like its long-rumored smartphone, smartphone operating system, or set of tweaks to the Android operating system. Announcing a new product, or hinting at one, during a competing trade show (like CES) is a time-honored battle tactic in the computer world. Such a move co-opts the momentum of the competing event while distracting people from it.
Instead of hardware, Facebook might just unveil some sort of update to its iconic home page design. A new single-column news feed design was spotted this week in New Zealand. That would be a bit of a letdown, but nothing compared to the emotional blows Facebook delivered last year to its shareholders.
As a reporter who will have to fight rush-hour traffic for 42 miles to Facebook HQ, I certainly hope the company unveils a shiny new phone that will titillate readers. As a consumer, though, I already have enough smartphone choices — iPhone, all the Android models, various Windows Phone 8 models, the Ubuntu phones, a rumored Amazon phone, etc. etc. — and enough concerns about the amount of data I’m giving to Facebook. Let’s just get the whole social networking thing nailed first, Facebook, then maybe we can talk about hardware.
Most adolescents who plan or attempt suicide have already gotten at least some mental health treatment, raising questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to helping troubled teenagers, according to the largest in-depth analysis to date of suicidal behaviors in American teenagers.
The study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that 55 percent of suicidal teenagers had received some therapy before they thought about suicide, planned it or tried to kill themselves, contradicting the widely held belief that suicide is due in part to a lack of access to treatment.
The findings, based on interviews with a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 teenagers and at least one parent of each, linked suicidal behavior to complex combinations of mood disorders like depression and behavior problems that include attention-deficit and eating disorders, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.
The study found that about one in eight teenagers had persistent suicidal thoughts at some point, and about a third of them had made a suicide attempt, usually within a year of having the idea.
Previous studies have had similar findings, based on smaller, regional samples. But the new study is the first to suggest, in a large nationwide sample, that access to treatment does not make a big difference.
The study suggests that effective treatment for severely suicidal teenagers must address not just mood disorders, but also behavior problems that can lead to impulsive acts, experts said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,386 people between the ages of 13 and 18 committed suicide in 2010, the latest year for which numbers are available.
“I think one of the take-aways here is that treatment for depression may be necessary but not sufficient to prevent kids from attempting suicide,” said Dr. David Brent, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “We simply do not have empirically validated treatments for recurrent suicidal behavior.”
The report said nothing about whether the therapies given were state of the art, or carefully done, said Matt Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the lead author; and it is possible that some of the treatments prevented suicide attempts. “But it’s telling us we’ve got a long way to go to do this right,” Dr. Nock said. His co-authors included Ronald C. Kessler of Harvard, and researchers from Boston University and Children’s Hospital Boston.
Margaret McConnell, a consultant in Alexandria, Va., said that her daughter Alice, who killed herself in 2006, at the age of 17, was getting treatment at the time. “I think there might have been some carelessness in the way the treatment was done,” Ms. McConnell said, “and I was trusting a 17-year-old to manage her own medication; we found out after we lost her that she wasn’t taking it regularly.”
In the study, researchers surveyed 6,483 adolescents from the ages of 13 to 18 and found that 9 percent of male teenagers and 15 percent of female teenagers experienced some stretch of having persistent suicidal thoughts. Among girls, 5 percent made suicide plans and 6 percent made at least one attempt (some were unplanned).
Among boys, 3 percent made plans and 2 percent carried out attempts – which tended to be more lethal than girls’ attempts.
(Suicidal thinking or behavior was virtually unheard-of before age 10.)
Over all, about one-third of teenagers with persistent suicidal thoughts went on to make an attempt to take their own lives.
Almost all of the suicidal adolescents in the study qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis, whether depression, phobias, or generalized anxiety disorder. Those with an added behavior problem – attention-deficit disorder, substance abuse, explosive anger – were more likely to act on thoughts of self-harm, the study found.
Doctors have tested a range of therapies to prevent or reduce recurrent suicidal behaviors, with mixed success. Medications can ease depression, but in some cases can increase suicidal thinking. Talk therapy can contain some behavior problems, but not all.
One approach, called dialectical behavior therapy, has proved effective in reducing hospitalizations and attempts in people with so-called borderline personality disorder, who are highly prone to self-harm, among others.
But suicidal teenagers who have a mixture of mood and behavior issues are difficult to reach. In one 2011 study, researchers at George Mason University reduced suicide attempts, hospitalizations, drinking and drug use among suicidal adolescent substance abusers. The study found that a combination of intensive treatments – talk therapy for mood problems, family-based therapy for behavior issues and patient-led reduction in drug use – was more effective that regular therapies.
“But that’s just one study, and it’s small,” Dr. Brent said. “We can treat components of the overall problem, but that’s about all.”
Ms. McConnell said that her daughter’s depression seemed mild and that there was no warning that she would take her life. “I think therapy does help a lot of people, if it’s handled right,” she said.
The owner of Chelsea Market, a popular food marketplace in West Chelsea, recently ignited a public furor when the city approved plans to add office towers to the squat structure. But before construction on the towers begins, the market now plans to expand by adding eight new spaces for vendors — all without changing the exterior of the neighborhood landmark.
A collection of industrial buildings that once housed the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, Chelsea Market will require no new space to house the new tenants, said Michael Phillips, a chief operating officer of Jamestown Properties, an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta.
Instead, the space for the new stores was created when Amy’s Bread moved most of its baking operations off-site, leaving thousands of square feet open that, along with the conversion of a loading dock and an office, amounted to about 5,700 square feet of space, he said. Construction on the project has already begun and will not disrupt the approximately 35 current tenants of Chelsea Market.
In November, Jamestown received city approval to add two office towers to Chelsea Marketplace, one of them eight stories and the other seven stories, for a total of 300,000 square feet of space that could bring hundreds of new workers to the area, but construction on that project has not yet begun. The market fills the entire block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets.
Leases are currently being negotiated for the eight new retail outlets, and though no leases have been signed yet, Mr. Phillips said he expected that the stores would be up and running by mid-February.
“We’re very focused on ethnic food and spices, and the whole beer growler, homemade beers and wine and spirits business, as well as local, New York-produced products,” he said.
Currently, the market carries everything from fine foods and baked goods to prime meats and fresh lobster, along with a smattering of books, flowers and kitchen and home décor goods.
Under the terms negotiated with the city for approval of the office towers, 75 percent of the vendors at Chelsea Market must remain food purveyors. All the tenants in space converted from Amy’s Bread will involve food products, Mr. Phillips said. A map of the project’s floor plan shows a possible bicycle shop and barbershop in the original loading dock and office space.
Amy’s Bread continues to have a presence at Chelsea Market in its reduced space, where it has a cafe, along with a small baking operation behind a glass panel so shoppers can watch baking demonstrations.
The area formerly occupied by Amy’s Bread is being built into small kiosks, much like an existing wing of the market where tenants like The Filling Station, Tuck Shop and Lucy’s Whey operate. In the new wing, however, the emphasis will be on cooking and food preparation. Two spaces will have food counters where people can sit and watch chefs cook while they dine.
“They’re really sort of fitted-out modern versions of a diner food counter with exhibition kitchens,” Mr. Phillips said.
Spaces will lease for about $200 to $400 a square foot, which is substantially more than typical rents in Chelsea, but the spaces are being delivered as almost completely turnkey, he said.
“They include power supply, water supply, hood systems for cooking, kitchen equipment where there’s cooking, so they’re basically plug-and-play spaces,” Mr. Phillips said. “The natural reaction would be, ‘Wow that’s a high rate,’ but when you look at what comes with it, it makes a lot of sense.”
The spaces are being set up to incubate start-up and smaller, less established businesses, Mr. Phillips said, companies that otherwise might find it hard to get a foothold in a neighborhood where retail rents have grown rapidly in recent years.
California broadcasting legend Huell Howser has passed away at the age of 67.
In a TV arena in which premiums are placed on the fanciful and trendy, screaming housewives and snarling reality-show participants, no one seemed more out of place or less likely to become a popular star than Huell Howser.
His platform was traditional and unflashy -- highlighting familiar and off-the-beaten-track spots all around California in public television series with titles such as "California's Gold," "Visiting," "Road Trip" and "Downtown." But though his shows were focused on points and people of interest, it was Howser who turned into the main attraction, tackling his subjects with an awestruck curiosity and relentless enthusiasm. His upbeat boosterism accompanied an appearance that was simultaneously off-kilter and yet somehow cool with a hint of retro -- a thick, square mane of white hair, sunglasses, shirts that showed off a drill sergeant's build and huge biceps, and expressions that ranged from pleasantness to jaw-dropping wonder with some of his discoveries. Often, he wore shorts.
Topping it all off was a molasses-smooth Tennessee twang that gave an irresistibly folksy flavor to his frequent exclamations of "Oh my gosh" and "Isn't that amazing." The voice and the aw-shucks demeanor were also catnip for comedians who delighted in imitating his tone -- he was once parodied on "The Simpsons," and he was a favorite target of comedian Adam Corolla on his radio shows and podcasts. But he also proved to be a savvy businessman through his deals with broadcasters and sales of his shows on DVDs.
PHOTOS: Huell Howser
Howser, 67, one of public television's most iconic figures, died Sunday night, his assistant Ryan Morris said. No other details were given.
"We are deeply saddened to hear of Huell's passing," Al Jerome, president and chief executive of KCET, said in a statement. "This is a tremendous personal and professional loss to his friends and colleagues as well as his legions of fans. Throughout his more than two decades with KCET, Huell inspired everyone at the station with his enthusiasm and storytelling about this great state in which we live. Huell was able to brilliantly capture the wonder in obscurity. From pastrami sandwiches and scarves loomed from lint to the exoticism of cactus gardens and the splendor of Yosemite -- he brought us the magic, the humor and poignancy of our region. We will miss him very much."
Howser's death came only weeks after the announcement Nov. 27 that he was retiring and not filming any more original episodes of "California's Gold."
PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012
Despite shifts in TV trends and fashions, Howser's approach never varied -- he was merely a man with a microphone and a camera. He played down its simplicity ("It's pretty basic stuff … it's not brain surgery"), and said it fit his strategy: to shine a spotlight on the familiar and the obscure places and people all over California.
"We have two agendas," Howser said in a 2009 interview with The Times. "One is to specifically show someone China Camp State Park or to talk to the guys who paint the Golden Gate Bridge. But the broader purpose is to open up the door for people to have their own adventures. Let's explore our neighborhood, let's look in our own backyard."
His anti-gliltz, aggressively genial approach with people was his trademark. He expressed endless amazement at his subjects, whether it was the making of French dip sandwiches at Philippe's restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, the burgers at the Apple Pan ("This is like … amazing!") or the massive swarm of flies buzzing around Mono Lake. "Look at this, look at this," he would often exclaim, prodding his interviewees to always tell him more.
Some of the people he interviewed had thought it was just an act, but came to discover that Howser was the same on camera and off.
"I had watched him while growing up, and I always thought that aw-shucks stuff was just an act," said Paul Chavez, chairman of the board of directors of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which runs the National Chavez Center in the Tehachapi Mountains. The center, which honors the legacy of farm labor leader Cesar Chavez, was the subject of Howser's "California Gold," two years ago.
"But after a few minutes," said Paul, who is one of Chavez's sons, "Huell was like an old friend that I had known for years. His enthusiasm was contagious. Shortly after the show ran, we got a noticeable increase in visitors."
Real estate executive Kimberly Lucero echoed Chavez's assessment about Howser's enthusiasm. As vice president of marketing and sales for the Kor Group, a real estate and development company, Lucero was the host's guide in 2005 for a show on downtown Los Angeles' historic Eastern Columbia Building, Howser was almost breathless, surveying the gold-leaf entrance: "Look at this … look at this entrance! What in the world were they thinking when they built things like this?"
"His excitement was truly infectious," said Lucero, who is currently vice president of marketing and sales for the Ritz Carlton Residences. "Nothing was staged."
But even those who poked fun at his upbeat attitude were seldom mean-spirited or cruel -- their affection for him was evident through the wisecracks.
He was such a local fixture that a Pink's hot dog was named after him. Though those who came into contact with him said he was the same on-camera as he was on, he maintained a sense of mystery. He was a savvy businessman who was very conscious of his gift. One local reporter once said that Howser's easy-going manner should not be underestimated: "He would be real tough."
And though he was generous, Howser, who was never married, was intensely private, rarely giving glimpses into his own life. He had an apartment on Rossmore Boulevard, but also lived in his "dream house" in Twentynine Palms, which he decorated with mid-century furniture he bought from second-hand stores in Palm Springs.
Howser was aware that his ever-present cheerfulness was an eyebrow-raiser: "Sometimes, people say, 'Are you putting that on?'" he said in 2009. "That's kind of a sad commentary, don't you think? Like there's got to be something wrong with someone who's enthusiastic and happy like that. Do I have bad days? Yes. Do I get depressed? Yes. Am I concerned about the state of the California economy and budget? I'm not some Pollyanna who doesn't recognize that there's hunger and poverty and racism in the world."
Howser was born Oct. 18, 1945, in Gallatin, Tenn., near Nashville. His father, Harold, was a lawyer, and his mother, Jewel was a homemaker. "Huell" is a combination of both their names.
His Los Angeles TV career began when he joined KCBS in 1981 as a reporter. In 1987, he moved to KCET-TV to produce "Videolog," a series of short programs featuring unique human-interest stories. That show evolved into "Visiting … With Huell Howser". In 1990, he started traveling for his "California's Gold" segments.
In 2011, Howser announced that he was donating all episodes of his series to Chapman University, a private Christian college in Orange, to be digitized and made available for a worldwide online audience.
LAS VEGAS – Ford wants to make AppLink the Android of automotive app architectures.
In an unprecedented move for the auto industry, Ford is giving the system underpinning its Sync AppLink system to any automaker who wants it, at no cost and with no restrictions on what they do with it. That would help automakers quickly and easily advance their infotainment systems, bring countless new developers into the automotive sector and provide consumers with more apps and options.
Ford’s motives aren’t entirely altruistic. It wants to dominate the emerging infotainment space by leveraging the success of AppLink and Sync, much like Google used Android in the smartphone sector.
“We want to create the highest-volume architecture in the industry,” Doug VanDagens, Ford’s director of connected services, told Wired. “The ease at which [developers] can develop is important to them, and we believe we’re leading in tools and implementation.”
Automotive app developers find themselves in much the same position smartphone developers did a few years ago. Not long ago, Apple’s iOS was the top priority, Android was just coming to the fore and everyone else was an afterthought because it was simply too big a hassle to develop a product for every OS.
The automotive app space is following a similar pattern. Every automaker features a different consumer-facing platform, so developers must work with a variety of APIs and SDKs. It’s annoying but doable for a massive outfit like Pandora, but damn near impossible for small developers. That’s where AppLink comes in. By offering AppLink to any automaker or Tier 1 supplier (the folks who build the hardware) and providing a universal API and SDK, Ford expands an app’s footprint across the industry and brings more developers into the Ford fold.
“It’s a bold move by Ford, which may lead to faster industry adoption of in-vehicle applications,” said Thilo Koslowski, an auto industry analyst at Gartner. “But it also underlines the challenge for automakers to attract application developers. No developer can afford to do custom work for every automaker.”
The fly in the ointment is the fact many automakers have invested great time and money developing their own app platforms. They want to control and maintain their own ecosystem, just like Google, Apple and Microsoft. A General Motors exec, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about Ford’s plan, said adopting AppLink would be immensely risky because of the resulting loss of control.
“Will we get the latest updates or will we have to wait until Ford is willing to share?” he said.
That is one of many questions competing automakers have. The other big issue is how AppLink will fit into current architectures. If it has access to core vehicle services such as vehicle diagnostics, it won’t gain any traction. Automakers don’t want a competitor’s nose that far into their business. And of course, there’s the issue of branding. No one but Ford wants Ford’s logo on a product.
Ford says AppLink can be platform-agnostic and insists that it has no interest in contributing branding, only the underlying architecture.
Developers have shown plenty of interest in AppLink. Well over 4,000 have registered for access, and that undoubtedly will climb as Ford’s pushes to make AppLink an industry standard. To that end, Ford is extending its API support, bringing multiple languages to market, and will even offer an emulator so coders can test apps without having to get an infotainment system – or an entire vehicle – from Ford.
And then there’s the aftermarket, which with the exception of Pioneer, has been slow to integrate apps into their head units. That could change with a more robust architecture, but Ford will wait until others get on board. That may be a conservative first step, but courting the aftermarket has the potential to get even more developers into the fray.
“Ford’s move could allow other automakers, [consumer electronics] companies and developers to stop reinventing the wheel,” says Koslowski. “But those automakers that want to achieve strong brand differentiation with mobile apps will likely continue with their own effort.”
That would be a shame for consumers, but the automotive OS war is just heating up, and only a handful of platforms will win out in the long-term.
NEW YORK (AP) — “Mary Poppins” is closing up its big umbrella on Broadway.
An official close to the show’s producers said Monday that the 6-year-old musical will end performances in March at the New Amsterdam Theatre and eventually be replaced by a musical adapted from the film “Aladdin.”
The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak before the official announcement. The New York Post first reported the news, citing an anonymous source. A Disney representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Mary Poppins,” co-produced by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, is based both on the children’s books by P.L. Travers and the 1964 movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. It tells the story of the world’s most practically perfect nanny in Edwardian London.
With a big cast, lavish sets and stunts that include Mary flying with her umbrella and Bert the chimney sweep tap dancing upside-down, the show was a hit after opening in 2006, two years after debuting in London.
When it closes, it will have been performed 2,619 times and have been seen by more than 4 million people. It recouped its initial Broadway investment within a year, and has gone on to be among the top 10 grossing shows for the past six years and top five for attendance. It will rank as the 22nd longest-running show in Broadway history.
Its soon-to-be vacant home at the New Amsterdam Theatre will be taken by the musical “Aladdin,” which has melodies by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice — the same team who created the animated film version that starred Robin Williams. The musical, with a book by Chad Beguelin, had its premiere in Seattle in summer 2011.
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SURVIVORS Lucinda Marker and John Tull at home a decade after having the plague.
It was November 2002, little more than a year after planes had been flown into the World Trade Center and anthrax mailings had killed five Americans. New York City was still on edge, in a state of high alert for suspected terrorists.
Suddenly all eyes were on a middle-aged married couple from Santa Fe, N.M., on a brief vacation to New York, who had the remarkably ill luck to come down with the city’s first case of bubonic plague in more than a century. Television news trucks surrounded Beth Israel Medical Center North, where they had dragged themselves after being stricken in their hotel room with rampaging fevers, headaches, extreme exhaustion and mysterious balloonlike swellings.
It took just over a day for public health officials to dispel fears about bioterrorism; there had been no unusual rise in the number of very high fevers that could have suggested an attack.
It turned out that the couple, Lucinda Marker and John Tull, had been bitten by fleas infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. Their home state, New Mexico, accounts for more than half of the average seven cases of plague in the country every year. (In 2012, just one case was reported in the state.)
“It was an absolute fluke,” Ms. Marker, now 57, said during a recent visit to New York. “Just rotten luck.”
Like most people who contract the disease and are quickly treated with antibiotics, she recovered in a few days. But 10 years later, her husband is still badly scarred.
In the days after they were bitten, Mr. Tull, a burly, athletic lawyer — a former prosecutor who volunteered with search-and-rescue teams — developed septicemic plague, as the infection spread throughout his body.
His temperature rose to 104.4, his blood pressure plummeted to 78/50. His kidneys were failing, and so much clotted blood collected in his hands and feet that they turned black.
Mr. Tull was put into a medically induced coma. When he was brought out of it, nearly three months later, he found out that both his legs had been amputated below the knee to drain the deadly infection. The surgery that saved his life radically changed it, but did not dampen his resilient spirit.
Even before he was released from the hospital to begin a long rehabilitation, he vowed he would once again be hiking on the rustic trails above his home.
Today Mr. Tull, 63, drives his own car, sometimes takes over the controls of a private plane, and goes on an annual trout-fishing trip to Colorado with friends. But he has not been able to hike that trail.
“That is one of the things I miss most,” Mr. Tull, now retired and receiving a disability pension, said in a telephone interview from his home. “Every single hour of every single day, the plague affects our lives, but about the only time I really get angry these days is when, because of my physical condition, there is something I want to do but can’t.”
He has appeared in several television documentaries, speaking to medical researchers around the world and dealing with a posse of journalists as his very private ordeal has been played out in public.
“Basically Lucinda and I surrendered our privacy to the press and the people who make documentaries,” Mr. Tull said. “But you know what? That didn’t bother us a bit. Lucinda had been an actress and I had been a trial lawyer. We were used to it.”
Ms. Marker, who has started to write about their ordeal, says that after 10 years she is coming to terms with it emotionally and psychologically. Yet many aspects of their case still puzzle medical experts.
In particular, no one knows why she was so easily cured while he nearly died.
Bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas that feed off pack rats, ground squirrels and prairie dogs in the mountains of New Mexico and several other states. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the disease probably came to the United States around 1900, in Asian rats that escaped from ships in the port of San Francisco.
Initially, plague was restricted to cities. The worst outbreak came in 1907, after the San Francisco earthquake. Vermin control programs prevented further outbreaks, but fleas hitched onto other animals in the wild.
Dr. Paul Ettestad, public health veterinarian for the New Mexico Department of Health, said prairie dogs became an “amplification host,” carrying the disease to their burrows and spreading it throughout their territory. Today, the easternmost limit of the plague roughly corresponds to the 100th meridian, which passes through central Texas. Known as the plague line, is it also the extent of the prairie dog population.
By the numbers, the endowment at Dartmouth had a banner year. The $3.49 billion fund returned 5.8 percent for the 12 months that ended in June — the best in the Ivy League.
But the performance has been clouded by controversy. Last year, an anonymous letter signed by “the friends of Eleazar Wheelock,” referring to the university’s founder, asked New Hampshire state officials to investigate the endowment over potential conflicts of interest raised by trustee-related investments.
Although the state attorney general’s office decided that an investigation was not warranted, the situation highlights a thorny problem for college endowments.
Trustees’ connections can prove profitable for the universities, offering access to top-performing hedge funds and private equity firms that may not be open to other investors. But they can also create the appearance that the colleges may have nonfinancial motives for picking investments. And if the investments do not perform well, it can be stickier to fire the money manager.
“It’s probably better not to” engage in such transactions, said John S. Griswold, executive director of the Commonfund Institute, the research arm of a money manager that caters to educational endowments in Wilton, Conn. “It avoids the perception of conflict of interest and self dealing.”
Universities like Dartmouth rely on endowments to help pay for financial aid, academics and operations. As part of their core fund-raising, colleges hunt for big donations from their most successful alumni, a group that is often heavily populated by financiers and professional investors. The trustees at Dartmouth, a board that oversees the university, include James G. Coulter, a founding partner of the private equity firm TPG Capital and Stephen F. Mandel Jr., the head of the hedge fund Lone Pine Capital.
Dartmouth has frequently tapped that pool to fill its endowment portfolio. In July, the university said that 13.5 percent of the assets were in funds led by trustees or members of the college’s investment committee. Those included investments managed by Lone Pine, whose chief, Mr. Mandel, has been a Dartmouth trustee since 2007; by Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a private equity firm whose co-founder, Russell L. Carson, was a Dartmouth trustee until 2009; and Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm run by Leon D. Black, a Dartmouth trustee until 2011.
Dartmouth is not an outlier in the practice. A 2011 study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute found that 56 percent of the 823 endowments surveyed allowed board members to do business with their university, as long as the relationship is disclosed.
But Dartmouth, which has six funds with trustee ties, appears to be among the more aggressive. Among the Ivy League universities, Brown and Cornell have disclosed five trustee-related investments. Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Pennsylvania have reported just one. Harvard has not reported any trustee investments, but its reports do not include investments managed by firms of board members of Harvard Management, which runs the university’s endowment.
“Dartmouth is proud that some of the world’s leading money managers are Dartmouth alumni,” said the college’s general counsel, Robert B. Donin, adding that the picks were “based on a manager’s strategy, expertise and performance history,” rather than ties to the university.
Over all, the strategy has been sound. The Dartmouth-related managers produced average annual returns of 11.1 percent over the 10 years that ended in mid-2011. By comparison, the endowment as a whole is up 7 percent on average in the same period.
Even so, the practice has prompted concern within the ranks of the Dartmouth trustees. Roughly five years ago, the group debated such transactions, according to Charles E. Haldeman Jr., a Dartmouth trustee from 2004 to 2012 and the former chief executive of Freddie Mac. “We understood there was a potential negative perception,” Mr. Haldeman said. But the trustees concluded that the potential for “a higher return on the endowment” justified the risk of a “perception issue.”
In the depths of the financial crisis, the issue came up again. Like many colleges, Dartmouth saw its endowment suffer during the market downturn, forcing the fund to sell assets and cut staff to bolster its cash cushion.
At the time, one trustee raised concerns that the endowment was overly invested in illiquid high-fee products, which could not be easily sold. By then, Dartmouth’s exposure to alternative investments like hedge funds, private equity funds and venture capital had swelled to 48.5 percent of assets, well above its target of 35 percent.
The cash squeeze also prompted questions from the trustee, Todd J. Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University, about the amount of alternative assets that were devoted to firms led by Dartmouth trustees.
Initially, Mr. Zywicki said in an interview, he got the impression that such investments were a “special opportunity.” But by the time of the downturn, he said that it had become routine. “Every year they would bring more of these things,” he said.
After Mr. Zywicki was voted off the board in 2009, the endowment issue was swept up into a larger, decade-long battle between alumni factions over whether Dartmouth should try to compete globally by expanding its top graduate schools, or focus on its traditional undergraduate core.
But the concerns did not go away. In February 2012, a group sent an anonymous letter to the office of the New Hampshire attorney general. “Who really runs Dartmouth College and for whose benefit?” the letter asked. “For years, Dartmouth has been run by and has paid sky-high fees to a group of investment manager trustees, all Dartmouth graduates, who have then recycled some portion of the fees” back to the college “as generous ‘donations,’ ” often getting a building named for them in the process.
The letter cited donations by some of the same trustees. For example, Mr. Black contributed $48 million for a Black Family Visual Arts Center, and a building to house Dartmouth’s history department was named for Mr. Carson in 2002. An Apollo spokesman declined to comment. Neither Mr. Carson nor another Welsh, Carson official returned calls.
The anonymous letter noted that Pamela J. Joyner, a Dartmouth trustee from 2001 to 2010, had served as a placement agent for Apollo, receiving commissions for investments in its funds. Ms. Joyner, whose San Francisco firm Avid Partners is an alternative investment marketing consultant, declined to comment, referring questions to a Dartmouth spokesman. The college spokesman, Justin Anderson, confirmed her placement work for Apollo, and said she had also “explored” such work for the money management firm Welsh, Carson, but did not benefit from any Dartmouth investments.
The letter, made public in May, prompted a review by the state attorney general’s office. In October, officials concluded that an investigation wasn’t warranted. The review, in part, found that Dartmouth had complied with state rules. Regulations require that such transactions be approved by a two-thirds vote of the board, without any participation by the trustee involved with the investment.
Since the issue arose, Dartmouth has bolstered its controls over such investments. In addition to the previous requirements, the audit committee now votes on such investments to ensure they don’t pose “an unreasonable risk of appearance of conflict of interest.”
“We could have had a blanket prohibition, and if we did, we would never be second-guessed,” said Mr. Haldeman, the former Dartmouth trustee. “But returns on our endowment would have been substantially lower,” he added, “and the institution would not be as strong as it is today.”
LA JOLLA — There's a political stink rising in this seaside community, blown ashore from the rocks of La Jolla Cove, where myriad seabirds and marine mammals roost, rest and leave behind what animals leave behind.
The offal accumulation is offending noses at trendy restaurants, tourist haunts, and expensive condos perched on some of the most pricey real estate in the country. But finding a solution to the olfactory assault has proved elusive.
Environmental regulations have thwarted proposals to cleanse the rocks with a non-toxic, biodegradable solution. Even a low-tech idea to scrub the rocks with brooms may need official approval.
The state-protected cove area falls under the permitting jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission and San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since wildlife is involved, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also have authority.
The normally low-key Sherri Lightner, who represents La Jolla on the San Diego City Council, has challenged — some say dared — Gov. Jerry Brown to tour the cove area in high stink season.
"Everybody is pointing fingers, and nobody is doing anything," said a La Jolla resident who strolled the sidewalk along the community's famed corniche on New Year's Day, tissue to her nose to battle the smell.
A San Diego park ranger assigned to the La Jolla beaches takes a more philosophic approach toward the excretory matter. "It's a natural process," said ranger Richard Belesky. "But would I want to buy a multimillion-dollar condo with the stink nearby? I don't think so."
The difficulty of reconciling the habits of sea creatures and the needs of humankind is not new to La Jolla. South of the La Jolla Cove is the Children's Pool where harbor seals lounge on the beach.
For two decades a legal and political dispute has raged between people who say the seals should be removed because they are blocking access to the water and those who say the seals should be allowed to stay, particularly during pupping season. Signs warn bathers that seal excrement has resulted in a high bacteria count that can cause disease.
At the La Jolla Cove, the droppings began to pile up after restrictions were put in place to keep people from climbing down the delicate bluffs to the rocks below. The birds and mammals suddenly had no reason to scatter.
The La Jolla Village Merchants Assn. gathered more than 1,000 signatures demanding an immediate solution. But immediate is not in the governmental lexicon when it comes to issues involving the ocean and wildlife.
To wash down the rocks would require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. The city, probably the full City Council, would need to endorse a specific wash-down proposal — but that, according to Lightner's staff, would mean submitting the issue to an application process that could take at least two years, given the backlog at the water board.
And even if the water board approved the application, the issue would then proceed to the Coastal Commission, an agency not known for its speed.
In hopes of finding a faster, if more limited, solution, city officials are considering arming Park and Recreation Department employees with brooms to scrub down the rocks. They assure that steps will be taken to ensure that no runoff reaches the ocean and no birds or mammals are hurt.
Talks are planned with regional, state and federal agency staff members to see if such a limited approach could be taken without a full-tilt application process. A radio talk-show host has shown the way, taking his own broom to the cove.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs say the smell continues to discourage patrons. Some tourists complain that it mars their vacations. Shirley Towlson, a bookkeeper who arrived in La Jolla from Phoenix, was shocked at the smell along the promenade and outside her hotel.
"I thought La Jolla meant 'The Jewel,' '' she said. "This smells more like 'The Toilet.' "
Other tourists find the smell but a small downer amid the other joys of La Jolla as a seaside place of visual beauty, fine dining and chic shopping.
"It smells like fish," said Mark Bain, a general contractor from Sacramento, enjoying a New Year's week idyll. "It happens."
He said the smell is not nearly as noxious as when dead fish line the banks of the Sacramento River. "Now, that's really bad," he said.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
