The Boss: New Leaders Inc. C.E.O. on Giving Children a Chance

I AM the youngest of 10 children in my family, and the only one born in the United States. My father was a municipal judge who fled Haiti during the Duvalier regime. He and my mother settled in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, but could not initially afford to bring over my four brothers and five sisters, who stayed in Haiti with relatives.

Jean S. Desravines is the chief executive of New Leaders Inc. in New York.

AGE 41

FAVORITE PASTIMES Karate and taekwondo

MEMORABLE BOOK "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character," by Paul Tough

Since he did not speak English fluently, my father worked as a janitor and had a second job as a hospital security guard. He later took a third job driving a taxi at night to pay for my tuition at Nazareth Regional High School, a Roman Catholic school in Brooklyn. My parents were determined that I was going to get a good education, and wanted to keep me away from local troubles, which did claim two of my childhood friends.

Working so many jobs overwhelmed my father. He had a heart attack and died at age 59 behind the wheel of his taxi. My mother found it difficult to cope without my father and moved back to Haiti in 1989 with two of my siblings. I thought I would have to leave school because I had no money for tuition, but Nazareth agreed to pay my way.

I wound up sleeping in my car for almost three months, showering at school after my track team’s practice. I also held down two jobs, both in retailing, and one of my sisters and I rented a basement apartment in East Flatbush.

After graduating from high school in 1990, I attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn, on athletic and academic scholarships. I worked first at the New York City Board of Education, where H. Carl McCall was president, then in his office after he became New York State comptroller. I later worked in the office of Ruth Messinger, then the Manhattan borough president.

I broadened my nonprofit organization experience at the Faith Center for Community Development while earning my master’s of public administration at New York University. I married my high school sweetheart, Melissa, and we now have two children.

In 2001, I began to work toward my original goal — improving educational opportunities for children — and joined the city’s Department of Education. I was later recruited under the new administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to help start a program as part of his Children First reforms.

In 2003, I became the Department of Education’s executive director for parent and community engagement, and, two years later, senior counselor to Joel I. Klein, then the school chancellor. He taught me a great deal about leadership and how to change the education system. But I began to realize public education could not be transformed without great principals who function like C.E.O.’s of their schools.

So in 2006 I returned to the nonprofit world, to New Leaders, a national organization founded in 2000 to recruit and develop leaders to turn around low-performing public schools. Initially, I managed city partnerships and expanded our program in areas like New Orleans and Charlotte, N.C.

In 2011, I became C.E.O., and revamped our program to produce even stronger student achievement results, streamlined our costs, diversified funding sources and forged new partnerships. We have an annual budget of $31.5 million, which comes from foundations, businesses, individuals and government grants, and a staff of about 200 people at a dozen locations.

We have a new partnership with Pearson Education to provide greater learning opportunities to public school principals. The goal of these efforts is to have a great principal in each of our nation’s public schools — to make sure that, just as I did, all kids get a chance at success.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

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A backyard nuclear shelter? Yes, paranoia does sell

One sterling quality of American businesses is that they'll try to make money from anything.

Paranoia, for instance. So say hello to Ron Hubbard, the owner of Montebello-based Atlas Survival Shelters, which converts huge corrugated metal tubes up to 50 feet long into fully equipped, all-the-comforts-of-home underground shelters at a price of up to about $78,000 each, not including shipping and interment.

You may have spotted the Atlas shop from the 5 Freeway as you're heading into downtown. There's a corrugated tube out front, painted bright yellow and looking like a tipped-over corn silo. High on the exterior wall facing the road is a banner declaring that the shelters offer protection from nuclear blasts, nuclear fallout, EMP (that's electromagnetic pulses, which can foul electrical systems), solar flares, mobs, looters, earthquakes and chemical warfare. If there's anything left off that list, it's probably not worth worrying about.

"People who buy my shelters are not radical crazy people," Hubbard told me recently as he guided me around the Montebello shop. "I get maybe three crazy calls a year. They're practical people."

Hubbard, 50, is a big Texan with a toothy grin and the friendly enthusiasm of someone trying to sell you something. He'll expound cheerily on the basic practicality, not to mention the sheer joy, of having a 40-foot corrugated steel drum buried 20 feet deep in your yard and tricking it out with a big-screen TV and Internet connection for those long days and nights hunkered down against nuclear blasts, the Chinese army or domestic looters. His shelters also offer such necessities as microwave ovens, space for a year's worth of provisions and high-grade air filtration.

"We don't know where our country will go," he said. "If we're going to be attacked, my shelters will protect you from Sarin gas or super flu. If we go bankrupt and we don't pay China, that could be the start of World War III. We could attack Iran or back Israel, and that could start a war. This is insurance. Why do we carry insurance on our homes? Just. In. Case."

Hubbard doesn't describe these dystopias as though he actually believes in them, but rather with the air of a salesman trying out any buzzword that might trigger a deal. During the couple of hours we were together, he described his products serially as underground condos, second homes, combination second homes and bomb shelters, man caves, man caves that happen to be bombproof, weekend cabins and hunting cabins.

Atlas Survival Shelters hasn't turned a significant profit yet. Hubbard said it made no money in the start-up year of 2011, was modestly in the black last year and may show a profit for 2013. But the business is unusual enough that it has won featured spots on several reality shows. An episode on A&E Network's "Shipping Wars" shows a team of moving experts trying to figure out how to transport a 32-foot shelter on their flatbed truck. During the episode Hubbard regales them with the virtues of the unit's escape-hatch feature, a second portal that opens only from the inside, in case of an attack.

"Somebody sees you going down; while they're trying to smoke you out, you're going to the back tunnel, you're gonna come up through an escape hatch that's hidden underground, you can shoot 'em in the back. Pretty cool, huh?" (Remarked one of the show's plainly creeped-out female cast members, "Remind me to never pay him a visit.")

More recently, Atlas was featured on an episode of the National Geographic Channel series "Doomsday Preppers," which chronicles the lifestyles of the scared and nervous. Hubbard's customer is described in network publicity as Brian Smith, a father of 12 "preparing for a total collapse of the U.S. monetary system."

Hubbard got into the underground shelter business a little more than a year ago after years of selling wrought-iron doors from the same location, operating as Hubbard Iron Doors. That business was brought low by the poor economy and cheap Chinese knockoffs, Hubbard says. It filed for bankruptcy in 2011; Hubbard says it's now owned and run by his brother, though the two companies share space with each other.

While he was casting about for a new business, Hubbard said, he happened across a brochure for Radius Engineering International, a Texas company that manufacturers fiberglass shelters mostly for business, government and military buyers. But the Radius products were expensive — they run from $150,000 up to millions, depending on the design and capacity. Hubbard thought he could do better on price while turning out a more appealing hideaway.

He's still trying to get a feel for the market, however. With his six or seven full-time workers, he can turn out one shelter a week. Orders, he said, come in at somewhere between one a month and one a week, more in periods of publicity-driven paranoia — during the run-up to the supposed Mayan apocalypse at the end of December, he said, calls jumped up to one a day.

The joke was on the callers, however, because Hubbard's six-week lead time meant that no one who called because they had just seen a Mayan feature on TV could get a shelter built, much less on site and in the ground, in time to beat the end of the world. Luckily, the apocalypse was a bust.

And for all that he plays up Armageddon in all its possible varieties in his sales pitch, doomsday may not be that great a marketing tool. "If I just sold bomb shelters, there would be about this big of a market." Hubbard holds his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. "But if I say, 'man cave,' 'wine cellar,' 'getaway,' then I get the recreational shelter owner too."

He says most of his calls come from retired military men, doctors, lawyers and business owners — possibly because the latter are among the few categories of buyers with the wherewithal to plunk down $60,000 or $70,000 for a man cave/bomb shelter, plus installation.

The size of the overall shelter market is unclear, in part because its promoters make a point of secrecy about whom they sell to and where. Privately held Radius has claimed to sell more than $30 million worth of shelters a year, but you have to take their word for it.

Then there are firms like Vivos Group, a Del Mar, Calif., company that claims to have started survivalist communities in three states — but they appear to be sort of co-op arrangements in which you have to apply to be considered for "co-ownership" of your refuge community. Once you're chosen, they'll let you know where to go when the end times come.

"This is just the threshold of something that's going to become common," Hubbard said, putting a hopeful spin on his words as though aware that paranoia may be peaking today, but gone tomorrow. "So I say, don't buy a bomb shelter. Buy an underground cabin, and enjoy it."

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Jan. 19

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @geekdads on Twitter.

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John Powers, author who wrote about growing up Catholic, dies

(Reuters) – John Powers, a U.S. author and motivational speaker who wrote about his experiences growing up Catholic in Chicago including the novel “Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?” has died, his family said on Thursday.

Powers, 67, died late Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, his daughter Jacey Powers said.

A product of a working-class neighborhood, Powers wrote what he called humorous social portraits in columns to novels, a musical based on “Black Patent Leather Shoes” and more recently wrote and performed one-man shows.

“He cherished every moment and lived with tremendous passion and motivated others to do the same,” Jacey Powers said.

Powers lived the last 25 years in Lake Geneva, spending almost all of his time writing on the front porch, she said.

“He had just finished rewriting his one-man show and wanted to put it up,” Jacey Powers said. “(He) was always looking for new ways to reinvent himself and to find the next challenge and to live life better.”

A self-described “horrible” student at a Catholic high school – his motivational speaking website says he graduated in the bottom 3 percent of his class – he liked to say he was the only student in school history to fail music appreciation.

Powers went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University Chicago, and a master’s and doctorate from Northwestern University and became a college professor himself for six years.

Other books by Powers include “The Last Catholic in America” and “The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God.”

Visitation and services are planned for Sunday at The Chapel on the Hill in Lake Geneva.

Powers is survived by his wife, JaNelle Powers, and daughters Jacey Powers and Joy Powers.

(Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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Business Briefing | Medicine: F.D.A. Clears Botox to Help Bladder Control

Botox, the wrinkle treatment made by Allergan, has been approved to treat adults with overactive bladders who cannot tolerate or were not helped by other drugs, the Food and Drug Administration said on Friday. Botox injected into the bladder muscle causes the bladder to relax, increasing its storage capacity. “Clinical studies have demonstrated Botox’s ability to significantly reduce the frequency of urinary incontinence,” Dr. Hylton V. Joffe, director of the F.D.A.’s reproductive and urologic products division, said in a statement. “Today’s approval provides an important additional treatment option for patients with overactive bladder, a condition that affects an estimated 33 million men and women in the United States.”

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DealBook: Despite Improving Profits, Morgan Stanley's Path Is Uncertain

8:40 p.m. | Updated

Morgan Stanley has taken aggressive action to bolster profit. Over the last year, the Wall Street bank has cut thousands of employees, sold costly assets and retooled major businesses.

Those efforts worked. In the fourth quarter, Morgan Stanley reported earnings of $481 million, in contrast to a loss of $275 million in 2011. Profit was equally strong for the year.

But the path to future growth is less clear. While the financial firm can find other ways to cut costs, its core operations face significant challenges, from both internal and external forces. Reflecting those issues, revenue was flat last year, excluding charges related to its debt.

“They are doing everything they can to boost returns,” said Glenn Schorr, an analyst at the Japanese bank Nomura. “But given the environment and the state of their franchise, they can only do so much.”

Investors are assessing the progress versus the prospects.

After Morgan Stanley beat analysts’ expectations, the bank’s shares increased nearly 8 percent, to close at $22.38 on Friday. Morgan Stanley’s stock is up nearly 50 percent since early 2012.

“The company has been steadily chipping away at areas of investor concern, and has shown evidence of that progress,” Roger Freeman, a Barclays analyst, wrote in a note to investors.

Still, investors don’t value the investment bank as highly as some of its peers.

Morgan Stanley is trading at approximately 70 percent of its book value, a crucial financial measure that refers to the liquidation value of a company’s assets if it were forced to sell everything. Goldman, in contrast, is trading at book value.

More than four years after the financial crisis, Morgan Stanley has emerged as a much stronger, albeit smaller, bank.

After getting badly bruised during the crisis, Morgan Stanley, under the leadership of James P. Gorman, the chief executive, has moved to remake itself. He has diversified operations, emphasizing less risky businesses like wealth management.

That group was a particular bright spot. In the latest quarter, wealth management, with its 16,780 financial advisers, posted decent revenue growth. Pretax profit margin rose to 17 percent, up from 7 percent a year ago. That trumped the firm’s internal goals of 15 percent.

Investment banking, too, showed signs of strength. The group posted revenue of $1.23 billion in the fourth quarter, up 26 percent from the previous year.

The bank has also cut expenses significantly to help drive profitability. In 2012, Morgan Stanley reduced its head count by 7 percent, to 57,061 employees. It laid off 1,600 people this month.

The firm has also been bringing its pay levels down modestly. The firm’s compensation ratio, excluding certain charges, came in at roughly 51 percent, down from 57 percent a year ago.

Such efforts will most likely continue. On Friday, the bank said it might cut expenses by as much as $1.6 billion over the next two years.

Mr. Gorman called this quarter “pivotal,” on Friday. “I am confident we are on the path to increasing shareholder value that will be evident regardless of the macro environment,” he said in a statement.

Even so, the latest results underscored the growing gap between the bank and its rivals.

Revenue was flat for the quarter at Morgan Stanley, while it increased by 19 percent at Goldman Sachs during the same period. Excluding charges related to its debt, Morgan Stanley’s return on equity, a measure of profitability, was 5 percent. That compares with 10.7 percent at Goldman. To simply cover its debt expenses and other capital costs, Morgan Stanley needs to achieve a return on equity closer to 10 percent.

The firm’s problem child is the fixed income department.

Fourth-quarter revenue from fixed income sales and trading, headed by Ken deRegt, was $811 million, excluding the charges related to the firm’s debt. This was well below analysts’ forecasts. The bank was hurt by poor results in commodities trading, Mr. Gorman said in an interview on CNBC. He said it was a “terrible quarter,” citing factors like Hurricane Sandy, adding that it was one of the worst for the commodities business since 1995.

Despite its successes, Morgan Stanley faces a tough road.

The bank, which has had its credit rating cut deeper than its rivals, is also adjusting to a new regulatory environment. It now has to put up more capital against its operations, forcing the bank to leave certain businesses, reducing profitability.

Morgan Stanley is also trying to build market share in less-capital-intensive businesses like interest rates trading. But it is a highly competitive area, with lower margins.

“They have made some clear progress, but still have their work cut out for them in fixed income,” said Mr. Schorr of Nomura.

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Algeria raid puts a lawless region in the spotlight

CAIRO — The offensive by Algerian soldiers to free hostages at a natural gas complex has refocused world attention on the dangers of a lawless desert region bristling with gunrunners, smugglers and a virulent strain of Islamic ideology.

Coming days after French airstrikes on Islamist militants in neighboring Mali, the raid Thursday killed or wounded many militants and an unspecified number of Western and Algerian hostages, the Algerian government said. Officials in Algiers, the capital, said late in the evening that they had wrapped up the assault on the compound near the Algerian-Libyan border deep in the Sahara desert.

"The operation resulted in the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and the freeing of a considerable number of hostages," Communications Minister Mohamed Said Belaid told state-run media. "Unfortunately we deplore also the death of some.... We do not have final numbers."

The Algerian news agency said 45 hostages, including Americans, escaped the site. But later Algerian media reports indicated that only four to six foreign hostages were freed and that there were a number of "victims."

A Mauritanian news organization quoting a militant spokesman suggested that gunfire from Algerian military helicopters struck two vehicles attempting to flee the compound, killing 35 foreigners and 15 kidnappers, including the militant group's commander. The differing accounts were impossible to confirm or reconcile and epitomized a chaotic day that appeared to raise questions from Western leaders over the operation's planning.

In addition to as many as seven Americans, captives included Algerians, Britons, Japanese, Norwegians and other foreigners.

The army raid marked a surprising twist in a drama that had raised fears of a long siege and highlighted the revived Islamist extremism in the region.

To the west of Algeria lies Mali, where Islamist rebels have intensified their fight in recent days to overthrow the government, prompting French military action backed by American logistical support. To the east lie Tunisia and Libya, where revolutions beginning in 2010 overthrew President Zine el Abidine ben Ali in Tunis and Moammar Kadafi in Tripoli.

Since then, militant and radical Islamist groups, including Algeria's Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, have become more emboldened amid the political upheaval of new governments. Western countries have grown increasingly concerned that North Africa could become a seedbed for international terrorism.

The hostage drama unfolded in a gas field known as In Amenas, close to the border with Libya, a country of particular concern to Algeria. Extremists and weapons looted from Kadafi's military and police have flowed across the border for months.

Farther east, Egyptian authorities are concerned that militants from Algeria and Libya have joined terrorist cells in the Sinai Peninsula along the Israeli border.

It was the strife in Mali, however, that apparently led to the militant takeover of the Western-run gas compound Wednesday. The Algerian militants, who belonged to an Al Qaeda-linked group called the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, said they were acting in retaliation for French airstrikes against advancing Malian rebels. They reportedly threatened to blow up the plant if Algerian commandos attempted to free the hostages.

After the compound was seized by the militants, hundreds of Algerian soldiers firing warning shots ringed the remote compound as helicopters skimmed overhead. The militants asked for safe passage to Libya, with the hostages accompanying them. Algerian officials, who over the years have cracked down harshly on Islamic radicals, said they would not consider such requests.

"The authorities do not negotiate, no negotiations," Interior Minister Daho Ould Kabila said on state television. "We have received their demands, but we didn't respond to them."

The Algerian government was under pressure from the U.S., Britain and other countries whose nationals were taken hostage. But the raid caught some by surprise and appeared to irritate some Western leaders. British Prime Minister David Cameron's office said he would have preferred to have been told in advance of the operation.

"I think we should be prepared for the possibility of further bad news, very difficult news in this extremely difficult situation," Cameron said.

The State Department declined to provide details of the Algerian offensive, saying it could endanger hostages, some of whom were reportedly forced to wear explosives-laden belts.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, "We are certainly concerned about reports of loss of life and we are seeking clarity from the government of Algeria."

The Algerians are "used to fighting terrorism, in their own, quite hard way," said Mathieu Guidere, a professor of "Islamology" at the University of Toulouse in France and author of "The New Terrorists." "It's likely the deaths at the petrol base were as a result of the assault by the Algerian security forces."

Reports have suggested that as many as 41 foreigners were being held along with scores of Algerians. An Irishman who was among them contacted his family to say he had been freed.

The natural gas field complex at In Amenas, which supplies Europe and Turkey, is a joint venture operated by BP; Statoil, a Norwegian firm; and Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company.

The assault on the compound dramatically changed the dynamics of Algeria's decades-long campaign against radicals. Militants had rarely, if ever, targeted oil and gas operations, even during the 1990s civil war, when few rules applied amid beheadings and massacres. Their seizure of the compound was a direct strike at the government and the nation's economic and political stability.

The civil war in Algeria, a country rich in oil and gas and with a spectacular coast and vast deserts, killed more than 100,000 people. The conflict began when the military, fearing Islamists would come to power, shut down parliamentary elections and the country collapsed into turmoil.

The government offered an amnesty program more than a decade ago. Thousands of militants accepted, but hard-core members of what had become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb resisted. The group publicly joined Al Qaeda in 2006, sending recruits to fight U.S. forces in Iraq while expanding its suicide bombings and kidnappings of businessmen and Westerners for ransom in Algeria.

AQIM and other Algerian radicals are heavily armed and fluid, shifting much of their attention last year to neighboring Mali, where they joined rebels and Islamists in a war to overthrow the government. Mali has attracted extremists from across Africa and the Middle East who are attempting to exploit the country's instability to create an Islamist state.

Two top radicals are believed to be connected to the gas field seizure: Abdelmalek Droukdel, AQIM's leader, who has called for militants to target France over its intervention in Mali, and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a mercurial, one-eyed smuggler and kidnapper who runs the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, an AQIM splinter group that claims to have carried out Wednesday's predawn attack.

The hostages at the complex "who managed to reach loved ones abroad said the terrorists that captured them have Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan accents," said an Algerian risk-assessment analyst who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of his job.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Special correspondents Kim Willsher in Paris and Reem Abdellatif in Cairo and Times staff writers Henry Chu in London and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.

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Facebook Wants New Breed of Flash Memory for Storing Old Pics

With each passing day, more than 350 million digital photos find their way onto Facebook, joining the more than 240 billion that are already there. Jay Parikh is the man who makes sure all those photos can remain online from now until the end of time, and that’s going pretty well. But he wants a little help. He wants the world to build him a new kind of flash memory ideally suited to storing all those old pics you rarely look at anymore.

The way things are going, he’ll probably get it. As Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering, Parikh oversees the development of both the software and the hardware needed to operate the world’s most popular social network, and in recent months, he and his colleagues have developed a certain knack for convincing the world’s hardware companies to build stuff that suits Facebook’s particular needs — and the needs of other massive online operations. Just yesterday, Intel, AMD, and two other chip makers put their weight behind Facebook’s effort to create a new type of server that lets you add and remove processors whenever you like.

In the spring of 2011, Facebook founded something called the Open Compute Project, hoping to remake the hardware industry through communal collaboration, and on Wednesday, even as the company was showing off the latest fruits of the project, Parikh was calling for more.

Today, Facebook stores all your photos on good old-fashioned mechanical hard disks. This works well enough, but now that the company is juggling hundreds of billions of photos, many of them dating back three or four years, it makes less sense by the day. Those older photos aren’t accessed that often, and if they remain on hard drives, they continue to sap relatively large amounts of power.

“We can’t say: ‘Hey, you want to look at that picture from Halloween five years ago? We’ll go grab the tape and put it on the drive and send it to you in the week.’”

— Jay Parikh

Traditionally, companies have moved their older digital data to, say, magnetic tape. With Facebook, there’s an added rub. Even those older photos must be stored in a way that lets you instantly retrieve them. “We can’t say: ‘Hey, you want to look at that picture from Halloween five years ago? We’ll go grab the tape and put it on the drive and send it to you in the week,’” Parikh explained on Wednesday, during a speech at the Open Compute Project’s latest summit meeting. “That just doesn’t work.”

Parikh and company could move those older photos to the sort of flash memory devices that are now invading other parts of the computer data center — devices that consumes far less power than hard disks — but these carry relatively high price tags. Today’s super-speedy flash devices are a great to store information that’s accessed all the time, but they’re too expensive for the kind of “cold storage” Facebook needs for old photos.

So Parikh wants someone to build him some flash storage that’s cheaper. Basically, today’s flash is built to maximize the number of reads and writes you can make — the medium tends to degrade as you read and write — but he wants a version that specifically designed for data that’s accessed only occasionally.

“We want something with a low write-endurance,” he told us on Wednesday. “We want to get to something with a much, much lower unit cost per gigabyte.” This will also reduce the company’s power consumption, and according to Parikh, it will give his engineers more flexibility when it comes to writing software. “You play all sorts of neat software tricks in terms of how you optimize it.” When you’re reading and writing data on spinning hard drive platters — and you want to keep speeds up — there are tight restrictions on how you can do so.

On stage, during his speech, Parikh likened storage devices to cars. Right now, he said, it was as if his only options were a minivan and a high-end sports car. What he really wants is a third option — something more like a Prius. “We want is a continuum of options,” he said. “Today, the spectrum is very coarse. There’s tape on one end. There’s flash on the other end. And spinning disks in the middle. And that’s it.”

That may seem like a tall order, but Facebook is now so large — and so influential — it can make such requests in earnest. According to Facebook hardware design and supply chain guru Frank Frankovksy, Facebook engineers have long worked hand-in-hand with the Utah-based flash storage outfit Fusion-io, playing directly into the company’s latest designs, including the new 3.2 terabyte flash introduced on Wednesday at the Open Compute Summit, and Fusion-io chief David Flynn is only too happy to advertise this relationship.

Fusion-io’s high-speed flash cards are already driving Facebook’s database software — where so much of your text-based today is stored — but someday, Facebook will also move flash into the cold storage facility it’s building outside its data center up in Prineville, Oregon. It needs to get its hands on an entirely new type of flash before that can happen. But that shouldn’t be a problem.

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Eclectic opening for Sundance with films about Mideast, Chile, U.S. Southwest

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) – The Sundance Film Festival opens Thursday with movies and documentaries from around the world, including a feature that examines the cultural divide between the Middle East and the United States.

The 10-day Sundance Film Festival, founded by actor-director Robert Redford and now in its 35th year, will showcase 119 films from 32 countries.

“May in the Summer,” the U.S. dramatic competition opener, comes from writer-director Cherien Dabis, who caught the eye of Sundance organizers in 2009 with her directorial debut “Amreeka,” about a Palestinian family‘s experiences living in post 9/11 America.

Palestinian-American Dabis, 36, reverses the perspective on the Middle East, showing a Jordanian woman who has established a successful life in America but undergoes an identity crisis when she returns to her family in Jordan to plan her wedding.

“May in the Summer” will join U.S. documentary “Twenty Feet from Stardom” about back-up singers, Chilean drama “Crystal Fairy,” “Who is Dayani Cristal,” about a mysterious corpse found in the Arizona desert, and five short films as part of the opening day roster at the world’s leading independent film festival.

“We want the kind of films that will really set the tone for the rest of the festival. Those four films do that perfectly. They’re very different in what they are, but they collectively represent what’s going to be unfolding over the next days,” festival director John Cooper told Reuters.

OPENING UP TO THE WORLD

Festival organizers are making efforts this year to encourage more international stories and filmmakers to come to Sundance.

“They saw the value in the continuing changing world we live in and that even American stories are coming from all over the world,” Dabis said.

“The movie is a universal story that’s set in the Middle East, and we all know the Middle East is a place where we all need to expand our perceptions of what life is like there,” she added.

Sundance founder Robert Redford said the festival was all about encouraging diversity in filmmaking.

“As long as we go forward and we adapt to change, we keep in touch with our original purpose which is simply to support and develop new voices to be seen and heard,” Redford told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.

In addition to the usual film competition and premiere categories, festival organizers have expanded their slate of edgier films and projects, including actor James Franco’s sexually explicit films “kink” and “Interior. Leather Bar.”

There is also a thriving short film initiative, with more than 40 films showcased.

Outside of the films, Sundance has become a hot spot for the film industry to escape the hustle of Hollywood’s awards season and relax in Sundance’s more relaxed vibe.

Live music will feature prominently, with a spotlight on electronic dance music and four pop-up clubs featuring DJs such as Nero and Afrojack.

VIPs can take private snowboarding lessons or take part in the culinary event ChefDance, in a fusion of food and film.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: The Fallout of a Chance Medical Finding

An incidental finding — I was convinced of it. My patient had undergone a CT scan of the abdomen at another hospital because of stomach pains and “incidentally noted” was a 2-centimeter mass in her adrenal gland. She brought in the report for me to see, nervous that she might have cancer.

I reassured her that it was exceedingly unlikely that she had cancer. Benign masses in the adrenal gland are nearly as common as birthmarks. They almost never cause symptoms and we stumble across them only because we do so many scans for other reasons. They’ve even earned their own appellation: incidentalomas, and that’s what I was sure she had.

Of course a tiny fraction — 1 to 2 percent — of these adrenal masses can wreak havoc by churning out an excess of adrenal hormones or by being cancerous. Luckily, the mass on my patient’s scan possessed all the reassuring characteristics of benignity: it was small, low-attenuating, well circumscribed, with smooth borders. And she had no symptoms to suggest adrenal hyperactivity or cancer. It was most likely a benign adrenal adenoma that would never cause her harm.

Nevertheless, once the incidentaloma had been given life, so to speak, it was no longer incidental. We were now obliged to run some highly complicated — and expensive — lab tests. I winced as I ordered urinary metanephrines to test the adrenaline-producing capacity of the adrenal. The computer warned me with exclamation points and asterisks that this was a “greater-than-$100-send-out test.” Explaining how to correctly collect a 24-hour urine sample was its own involved discussion. Then I had to explain the even more complicated logistics of the overnight dexamethasone-suppression test to evaluate the cortisol-producing capacity of the adrenal.

After that, I considered the follow-up CT scans, recommended at six months, one year and two years, to ensure that the mass wasn’t growing. What about all that radiation? One group of endocrinologists estimated that the chance of uncovering a malignant cancer in patients like mine was roughly equal to the chance of causing a fatal cancer from the radiation of these follow-up CT scans. And might these CT scans pick up other incidental findings, opening yet more Pandora’s boxes of medical evaluation?

And what about the issue of skyrocketing medical costs? The evaluation of this incidentaloma was going to cost more than a thousand dollars. Tens of millions of CT scans are done every year in the United States. It doesn’t take many back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how quickly the costs of incidental findings, and their subsequent evaluations, add up. How much should the societal obligation weigh into the decisions for my patient?

My thoughts flitted back to the doctor who had ordered this CT in the first place. Perhaps if the doctor had had more time to spend on the history and physical, the CT would not have been necessary. From my 15 years with this patient, I knew that her symptoms could be voluminous in quantity and quality. This wasn’t to say that something serious couldn’t squeak in, but over the years I have learned that it takes immense perseverance and patience to tease out the significance of each symptom. Otherwise we’d be doing a CT every week for her.

But I could understand how a doctor in a busy ER on a weekend might have been overwhelmed by the plethora of symptoms and simply ordered a CT “to be on the safe side.” I wished that doctor had tried to call me before ordering the scan, but what’s done was done. The fallout of that decision was now in my lap.

By now we had run well over our allotted time and my patient was utterly overwhelmed by the complex testing procedures and schedules. The adrenal mass was an incidental finding, after all, but it had completely steamrolled our visit. My patient’s diabetes, obesity, depression, arthritis and elevated cholesterol all ended up with the short end of the clinical stick — an outcome that surely is not incidental to her health.

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Danielle Ofri is an associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine and editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her most recent book is “Medicine in Translation: Journeys With My Patients.”

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