mpany will enter a period of
sustainable growth.
"It will take time before Sanyo
enters a growth phase," Kota Ezawa, an analyst at Nikko Citigroup Ltd.,
wrote in a recent report.
Let's get one thing straight: I'm much
too young for a hearing aid.
I wouldn't even consider it if the
people I live and work with would only speak louder and more clearly. But they
mumble, and they mock me, and words I've misunderstood are the fodder for
family jokes. (Seriously, doesn't 'Wikipedia' sound a lot like 'Wake up,
Edie'?)
[Healthcol]
A hearing aid from Widex is so tiny,
it's virtually invisible. Pictured is the Inteo model.
That's why I've been testing a
"personal communication assistant" -- one of those sleek mini hearing
aids that sits behind the ear, with just a thin, clear tube extending into the
ear canal. It's virtually invisible, and a far cry from the old kind that
looked like a wad of Silly Putty.
These discreet, high-tech models are
tailor-made for baby boomers like me who are starting to lose hearing, but are
otherwise at the top of our game. And our ranks are set to explode, thanks to
demographics and loud music. The industry estimates that the number of
Americans with hearing loss will double, to 60 million, by 2030.
The industry also says that, on
average, people wait seven years after they first suspect a hearing problem to
do something about it. I'm right on schedule.
My first test, in 2001, showed only
mild hearing loss. It's slightly worse now, and just in the high frequencies,
which carry a lot of speech, particularly consonants and word endings. Those
are often the first to go when the tiny hairs in the inner ear deteriorate --
"like when your toothbrush needs replacing," explains Manhattan
otolaryngologist Sarah Stackpole. She says many people with such mild loss find
hearing aids more irritating than helpful. But I'm determined to give it a try.
To start, Jake Marsden, an audiologist
at AudioHelp Associates, fits me with a top-of-the-line Inteo model, made by
Widex of Long Island City, N.Y., just in my left ear. It's tiny -- one inch
long and half-inch wide -- but the price isn't. It's $3,200 per ear. Hearing
aids generally aren't covered by insurance, or Medicare. Medicaid covers only
the most basic kind, which this decidedly is not.
Mr. Marsden programs the Inteo via
computer to amplify the exact frequencies I need. Its "integrated signal
processor" will take it from there, automatically adjusting to maximize
voices and minimize background noise, he explains. He leaves me with a few
instructions: Don't wear it in the shower. Take it off at night, and remove the
battery so it lasts longer. And, he says, "Don't expect miracles."
Day 1. Whoa -- my left ear is now
bionic. I can hear sandwiches being unwrapped and zippers being zipped across
the newsroom. Voices come in loud and clear. I feel more alert than I have in
years. And no one would know I was wearing this thing -- if I didn't show it
off to everyone I see.
Day 2. I must be getting used to it.
I'm no longer hearing sandwiches, but eavesdropping is fun and effortless. It's
like having an Extendable Ear from the Harry Potter books. That night at a
noisy restaurant, though, it's still hard to understand my family across the table.
The directional microphone is supposed to home in on the closest conversation.
But I could have sworn my daughter said "Boston" not
"pasta."
[HEALTH-HearingAid_2.jpg]
Day 3. I discover another downside --
talking on the telephone. Voices sound tinny and far away when I hold the
receiver to my left ear, with the Inteo behind it. With the receiver to my
right ear, sounds I don't want to hear are being amplified in my left.
"Hearing aids and telephones are not friends," says Mr. Marsden, who
suggests holding the receiver farther away or wearing the Inteo selectively in
the office. I do that for the rest of the week, beginning to wonder if it's
worth it.
Day 6. I wear the Inteo on and off
over the weekend. On for the TV, and it's nice not to have to crank up the
volume. Off for the gym, since it's incompatible with earbuds. On for the movie
theater, though it's still hard to understand the dialogue in "Sweeney
Todd." My family votes in favor of the Inteo. "We don't make fun of
you nearly as much when you're wearing it," my husband says helpfully.
Day 8. Back in the office, all the
chatter around me is actually distracting. When there's a lull, I hear faint
scratching sounds. Mice in the floor boards?
Mr. Marsden says he can adjust the
programming to minimize such sounds. My bigger concern is the cost. If my own
hearing were worse, the trade-off would be different. But for now, $3,200 seems
like too much to pay, out of pocket, to imperfectly correct my mild loss. As I
give it back at the end of the trial period, Mr. Marsden says there are less
expensive models, though they are also less sophisticated.
Walking away, I miss the Inteo
already. Did he say "your sister ate it..."?
Six months ago, when Sen. John
McCain's presidential campaign was left for dead at the side of the road to the
White House, he seemed to have perished because he was in the wrong place on
two important issues: Iraq and immigration.
Today, as Republican voters go to the
polls in Florida to determine whether Sen. McCain has become the clear favorite
to win the Republican nomination, it is worth considering how things have
turned around. On Iraq, the about-face is easy to explain: Things got better on
the ground there, and Sen. McCain's support for the war and a new strategy for
fighting it now looks more like wisdom than stubbornness.
But what about immigration? There, the
answer is more subtle. In fact, immigration is a case study in how changing
circumstances can alter the way a hot issue plays in a campaign. Sen. McCain
was in trouble because his support for immigration reform, including a
guest-worker program and a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants,
appeared out of step with a Republican base that had turned hostile to the
immigration overhaul.
Now a combination of factors -- the
disappearance of the issue from Washington's legislative agenda; Sen. McCain's
own quiet shift in posture; the rise of other concerns -- have helped damp the
fires of anger on immigration. Today's vote will show how those forces have
worked in Hispanic-heavy Florida, and Sen. McCain's foes may yet choose to turn
up the heat on the immigration debate as they try to overtake him. But for now
it appears that immigration, while a burning question for some Republicans,
isn't the top issue for most of them. (See article on the Democratic bid for
Florida's Hispanics).
Immigration erupted as a problem for
Sen. McCain last spring, when Congress began debating -- for the third time --
a comprehensive plan urged by President Bush. It would have combined new border-security
measures with steps to bring immigrant workers out of the shadows.
The legislation included both a
guest-worker program and a plan to allow those working in the U.S. illegally to
register, pay a fine and become legally documented workers. The idea was to get
more control over the more than 10 million illegal immigrants already here, and
to lessen the pressure for more illegal immigration.
Sen. McCain, from the border state of
Arizona, supported the legislation. But to a vocal group of critics within his
party, it amounted to giving "amnesty" to those in the U.S.
illegally. At a Republican debate the first week of June, Sen. McCain was
pilloried by his foes for backing the bill.
Sen. McCain's candidacy got a reprieve
on June 7, when the legislation collapsed on the Senate floor and died for the
year. That meant Washington stopped forcing the issue into the spotlight.
"Every time you bring it up, it's just like throwing gasoline on the
fire," says Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a McCain supporter who found
that support for immigration reform was one of the factors that undercut his
own presidential bid. "By the third time we brought it up, people were
flaming mad. Now it's not being brought up and nothing happened."
The death of the bill also allowed
Sen. McCain to subtly alter his position without actually reversing it. Now
when asked about immigration, he replies with a border-security-first
formulation, as he did Sunday on NBC TV's "Meet the Press." The
lesson he drew from the debate last year, he said, is that Americans "want
the border secured first, and I would do that." Only then, he added, would
he move on to other reforms.
Immigration still could be a land mine
on Sen. McCain's route to the White House, of course. It remains a potential
problem for him in some key states, especially California.
It's also clear, though, that if Sen.
McCain can survive those tests and win the nomination, his more nuanced
position on immigration would be an asset, rather than a liability, in a
general election. That's when Republicans will desperately need to win back
some Hispanic voters turned off by the tenor of the immigration debate.
The other McCain advantage is the
emerging evidence that immigration isn't quite the leading issue it once
seemed. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, illegal immigration
ranked fourth among issues cited by voters overall, and third among
Republicans, behind the economy and terrorism. "There are people who talk
about it and are angry about it, but when you get down to it, it's not the No.
1 for very many voters," says Frank Donatelli, a longtime Republican
activist and a McCain backer.
The lingering problem for Sen. McCain
is California, where anything resembling a soft-on-immigration image could be a
problem with Republicans who vote in the state's Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primary.
"The issue of illegal immigration is of great concern to California, and
has been historically," says Bill Jones, chairman of the McCain campaign
in California. Thus, he stresses the new McCain formulation: "The
senator's position is: Secure the border first."
More intriguing is the possibility
that Sen. McCain's profile on immigration might become an asset if he wins the
nomination. Here are the statistics that should concern Republicans: More than
18 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in the U.S., and a survey by the Pew
Hispanic Center late last year showed them leaning Democratic by a 57%-to-23%
margin. The Republican goal this year, says Kenneth Duberstein, former White
House chief of staff under President Reagan, ought to be to build a new
"Reagan coalition" that broadens the party beyond its traditional
base to just such groups as Hispanics. Could John McCain's record of being more
open on immigration help there?
Biologist Craig Venter and his team
replicated a bacterium's genetic structure entirely from laboratory chemicals,
moving one step closer to creating the world's first living artificial
organism.
The scientists assembled the synthetic
genome by stringing together chemicals that are the building blocks of DNA. The
synthetic genome was constructed so it included all the genes that would be
found in a naturally occurring bacterium.
The research was published in the
online version of the journal Science by a team of scientists from the J. Craig
Venter Institute in Rockville, Md. The authors include Hamilton Smith, who won
the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978.
"It's the second significant step
of a three-step process to create a synthetic organism," said Dr. Venter,
in a conference call with reporters. The final step could prove far trickier,
though Dr. Venter defied his critics and deciphered the human genome with
startling speed about eight years ago.
The larger quest is to make artificial
life forms with a minimum set of genes necessary for life. It is hoped that
such organisms could one day be engineered to perform commercial tasks, such as
absorbing carbon dioxide from the air or churning out biofuels. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
The scientific challenge of creating
synthetic life isn't trivial, nor are the ethical and legal concerns. There is
little government oversight, and researchers involved in such experiments
regulate themselves. Detractors worry that the lack of safeguards increases the
risks that a potentially dangerous man-made organism might run amok. (In
creating the artificial genome of Mycoplasma, Dr. Venter's team disrupted the
genes that would enable it to infect other organisms.)
Nonetheless, the science is pushing
forward at a rapid pace. In June, a Venter-led team published details of an
experiment in which it inserted the DNA of one species of bacteria into the
cells of another bacteria species. That process almost magically "booted
up" the genome of the donor bacteria, sparking it to life.
The team hopes to use a similar trick
to boot up the artificially created genome, to create a man-made living
organism. But, Dr. Venter said, "there are multiple barriers" to
achieving that goal. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
Dr. Venter now believes that the
challenge of creating a synthetic organism is within his grasp. "I'll
be...disappointed if we can't do it in 2008," he said.
David Colby was one of corporate
America's most admired executives before he was abruptly fired last spring for
what was vaguely described at the time as misconduct of a "non-business
nature." Now details about his personal life are spilling out, and it's
clear he was more than just Wall Street's darling.
In a cluster of lawsuits, the former
chief financial officer of health insurance giant WellPoint Inc. is depicted as
a corporate Casanova — a world-class, love-'em-and-leave-'em sort of guy who
romanced dozens of women around the country simultaneously, made them
extravagant promises and then went back on his word with all the compassion of
a health insurance company denying a claim.
One woman says Colby got her pregnant
and harangued her via text message ("ABORT!!") to terminate the
pregnancy. He also allegedly gave some of his girlfriends sexually transmitted
diseases, and proposed to at least 12 women since 2005.
The allegations are contained in
lawsuits filed before and after Colby's departure by three women who say they
were ill-used by the businessman.
Colby and his attorneys have refused
to comment, though in court papers he has disputed some of the allegations, and
one of the lawsuits was thrown out a few months ago by a judge who found
insufficient grounds for legal action.
By all accounts, the 54-year-old Colby
— a pudgy, bespectacled figure with salt-and-pepper hair — charmed attractive
women by showering them with compliments and gifts. While at least one of his
accusers was a WellPoint underling, it appears he met many of the other women
outside of work, via online dating sites, and he has not been accused of
workplace sexual harassment.
"I'm not surprised that there are
women who would come forward with the same story, because that appears to be
Dave's modus operandi," said Mark Hathaway, a lawyer for two of the women
who sued. "We've been contacted by a number of women."
His ouster is the latest, and perhaps
the most lurid, in a string of cases in which corporate chieftains were bounced
for alleged misbehavior outside the boardroom.
Last year, HBO's chief executive was
forced out after being charged with throttling his girlfriend. Before that, a
Boeing CEO lost his job after admitting to an affair with a female underling.
"There's no question companies
are much more sensitive to ethical conduct on the part of their
executives," W. Michael Hoffman, executive director for the Center for
Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., said after Colby's
ouster.
It was Colby who helped put together
the $16.4 billion deal that created Indianapolis-based WellPoint in 2004. He
was named best CFO in managed care for four years in a row by Institutional
Investor magazine. Stockholders and Wall Street professionals saw the Columbia
University graduate as someone who "gave it to you straight," said
stock analyst Thomas Carroll.
"He would give you the good news
along with the bad news," Carroll said. "If he said something, you
could really hang your hat on it."
After the company passed him over for
its CEO last February, it gave Colby thousands of stock options to stick
around. But three months later, to Wall Street's surprise, he was out. All
WellPoint has ever said was that he was ousted over a nonbusiness violation of
the company code of conduct.
Days before Colby was fired, a California
woman, Rita DiCarlo, sued him for possession of a $4.4 million house in
exclusive Lake Sherwood, Calif., that she said he had promised her. (He has
denied making such a promise.)
Exactly what his marital status was at
the time of some of the alleged romances is unclear, but as of last month, he
was going through a divorce from wife No. 2.
Some of the allegations of his
philandering began surfacing in the months after his ouster, but the extent of
his alleged womanizing and the details of how he supposedly wooed his
girlfriends are only now coming out.
DiCarlo and the other women suing him
tell similar stories of aggressive courtship, big promises and broken hearts.
They say that Colby was carrying on
with more than 30 women in the last half of 2007 alone and that he would tell
them all the time them how beautiful they were or how much he loved them.
"You forever!" read one text message, included in court files.
"I chose you! Goodnight!" another message read.
Colby would supplement such
declarations with gifts such as jewelry or trips, the women say. DiCarlo says
in court papers that he gave her $100,000 "to make me feel more
secure" three days after she found out he wasn't divorced.
Another lawsuit was filed last month
by Elizabeth Cook, a Los Angeles woman who met Colby in 2006 at a function for
a California school their children attended.
A single mother with two children, she
says in court papers that she dodged his initial advances but relented under a
bombardment of calls, texts and e-mails, many of them containing sexually
explicit propositions.
She says she soon broke her lease at
his urging, with plans to move into his Lake Sherwood home. She says she
stopped searching for ways to afford the brain surgery her severely epileptic
6-year-old son needed after Colby promised to pay. Then, she says, she got
pregnant, and the text messages abruptly changed tone.
"ABORT!!" Colby allegedly
told her in flurry of text messages included in the lawsuit. "Get rid of
it. Have an abortion and we can be together."
(Her attorney would not comment on the
case. According to court papers, Cook was still pregnant as of Dec. 31.)
Cook accuses Colby of infecting her
and other women with STDs, including herpes and chlamydia. She also accuses him
of breach of contract over the surgery she says he never paid for. She never
moved into the multimillion-dollar home — which DiCarlo still occupies.
As for DiCarlo, she says that she met
Colby through Match.com and that he proposed the first time they met in person.
An engagement announcement for the couple ran in The Indianapolis Star in
February 2006. But the two never wed. DiCarlo says she discovered he was living
a "secret life," with multiple fiancees.
She also accuses him of stopping
payment on her health insurance even though she had a kidney removed for
donation last fall.
Another woman, Sarah Waugh of Ventura
County, Calif., sued Colby last June, accusing him of causing her emotional
distress and exposing her to sexually transmitted diseases by sleeping with
others.
Waugh says her relationship with Colby
started with office shoulder rubs and offers for dinner in 2001 when she was a
22-year-old employee and he a 48-year-old married executive at California's
WellPoint Health Networks Inc. Waugh says Colby promised monthly support and
private school for the children of his many other girlfriends.
Late last year, U.S. District Judge
Gary Klausner threw out the lawsuit.
"Although Colby's conduct may be
ungallant, it simply does not rise to the level of being `utterly intolerable
in a civilized community,'" Klausner wrote, referring to Waugh's claim of
emotional distress.
Still, Hollywood producer Larry
Garrison thinks there's an audience for the lurid stories. Garrison, president
of SilverCreek Entertainment, said he plans to put together a book and movie
deal.
At WellPoint, Colby was paid more than
$700,000 in salary and received a $1.1 million bonus in 2006. He left with a
severance payment of $666,190 and later bought a $4.7 million home in
Scottsdale, Ariz. His Indianapolis home, which he shared with a woman who
identified herself as Angela Colby, is on the market for $1.6 million.
A former neighbor, Chad Christensen,
said the couple were "very nice people, very down to earth and open."
He also recalled an awkward moment at a neighborhood picnic last summer, a few
months after Colby's romantic entanglements first became public.
A magician who was entertaining children
asked the kids to reach into a bag and pull out some scarves. Then he turned to
Colby.
"David reaches in and what he
pulls out is some panties," Christensen said. "I'm just thinking,
`How uncomfortable does he feel right now?'"
129129129129
Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of
Constantinople, can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol
of unity, of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so
adherents make it the second-largest body of Christians in the world, after
Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of
Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops
of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St.
Andrew, brother of St. Peter, in a part of the world where the Christian faith
has existed since New Testament times.
In December 2006, Bartholomew,
patriarch since 1991, was thrust under the world-wide media spotlight when he
celebrated the Orthodox Divine Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in
the tiny Church of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in
Istanbul, all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus
so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called
itself the "new Rome."
Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming
book, in English, "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the
Orthodox Church" (Random House). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy,
with short chapters on ritual, theology, icons and so forth. What it really is,
perhaps inadvertently, is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a church that,
venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be, is in a state of crisis.
And the book reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its
leader seemingly feels compelled to take in order to cultivate the sympathy of
a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity.
The Orthodox community, rooted mostly
in Russia and Eastern Europe, is in "apparently irreversible demographic
decline," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006, thanks to
falling birthrates, cultural secularization, turf battles between the various
ethnically focused Orthodox churches, and past communist ravages. The historic
Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have
fared even worse, their numbers reduced as members frantically immigrate to the
West under pressure from terrorism, persecution and religious discrimination.
The historic fate of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural
annihilation, whether gradual over the centuries or, as in recent decades,
swift.
Nowhere does the plight of Christians
look so pitiful as in Turkey, nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of
the 20th century, some 500,000 Orthodox Christians, mostly ethnic Greeks, lived
in Constantinople, where they constituted half the city's residents, and
millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today, Bartholomew has
only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in
Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal
Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly
Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential
component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.
"Kemalist ideology regarded
Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua
Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings,
population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale
destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in
2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals, two of
whom were Turkish converts, in 2007, together with threats and assaults against
other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants, indicate
that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore, the current
government refuses to allow the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox
seminary, closed in 1971, which means that there have been no replacements for
Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch
to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself, whose
death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see.
Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the
bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his
own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential
relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname
"the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the
ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West.
"Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of
eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our
ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and
globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's
secular progressives love to read.
Regarding globalization, Bartholomew
cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well
as winners") or good ("We must learn, therefore, both to think and to
act in a global manner"). Plus, we must "transcend all racial competition
and national rivalry," "promote a peaceful resolution of
disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda, yadda, yadda.
Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for
"interfaith dialogue."
On first reading, this exercise in
fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a
church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot
speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his
doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of
aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on
at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront
its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and
culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the
homicide of the East.
On the other hand, Bartholomew's
"green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd
last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his
beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's
admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will
condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.
"The EU are secularists,"
says the Rev. Alexander Karloutsos, an administrator for the Greek Orthodox
Archdiocese of America, based in New York. "They won't do anything out of
religious reasons, but they will do it out of secular reasons if they can be
persuaded that what's best for Europe is to have a Muslim state that's
pro-Western in values, such as freedom of religion." The bureaucrats of
Brussels may care little about Christianity, but they care deeply about global
warming and multiculturalism, and on those issues Bartholomew has carved out
common ground.
Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet.
Its famous monastery on Mount Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently,
and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the
glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's
spiritual leader feels compelled to position the Orthodox with a Western Europe
that is, in fact, spiritually dead.
Florida's big push to slash homeowner
insurance premiums, a major issue in a state hurt by a sinking real estate
market, has turned to bust in the face of stiff opposition from the powerful
property-insurance industry.
"It certainly didn't pan
out," said Bob Milligan, the state's consumer insurance advocate.
"At best we've seen kind of a
reduction in the increases, not really decreases from what they were prior to
2006," Milligan said in an interview.
He was referring to the huge increases
many homeowners have seen since eight hurricanes crisscrossed Florida in 2004
and 2005, when insurers paid out about $35 billion in insured losses in the
state.
Prodded by Gov. Charlie Crist, who has
had several insurers subpoenaed over rate issues after campaigning aggressively
last year on a promise to fix the insurance problem, state lawmakers have enacted
a sweeping package of property insurance reforms.
Among other measures, they doubled the
size of Florida's state hurricane catastrophe fund to $32 billion and
authorized state-controlled Citizens Property Insurance Corp. to compete
directly with private insurers.
Through the catastrophe fund,
lawmakers also agreed to provide state-subsidized reinsurance -- backup
coverage for property -- to insurers on the understanding that savings would be
passed on to their customers.
Though expected to result in a
statewide cut in homeowners' insurance premiums averaging 24 percent, Bob
Hunter, insurance director at the Consumer Federation of America, said the new
laws were now seen cutting rates only about 12 percent.
"It's the big national companies
that are balking," Hunter told Reuters, saying they had failed to pass on
reinsurance savings to consumers despite record profits in recent years.
One such company is Allstate Floridian
Insurance, a unit of Allstate Corp, the nation's largest publicly traded
insurer, which recently filed to raise homeowner rates in Florida by nearly 42
percent.
Allstate Floridian spokesman Adam
Shores said the increase, partly prompted by a decision to buy additional
reinsurance on the private market, was in line with harsh economic realities
and the costs associated with catastrophic risk.
"We fully recognize that this is
a difficult time for a lot of Floridians; people are hurting; and they're experiencing
a lot of high costs with property insurance, property tax, things of that
nature. But we need to be in a position of financial strength to protect
customers when a major catastrophe strikes, like we know it will," Shores
said.
"There have been a lot of
promises that have been made by the political leaders in Tallahassee about
where rates would be and what those rates would look like," he added.
"The promise that we have made, and the promise that we will continue to
stand by, is to be there for our customers when it comes time to pay their
claims."
Crist, a Republican, is still pressing
for relief in a state saddled with what industry insiders rate as the second-
or third-highest priced homeowner's insurance of any state in the country. He
appeared to win at least a partial victory last week when State Farm agreed to
cut its property insurance rates in Florida by an additional 2 percent, on top
of the 7 percent cut it implemented earlier this year.
State Farm, one of three companies hit
with subpoenas by officials probing high insurance costs, has also agreed to
cooperate with authorities on further investigations into potential collusion
between insurers, trade associations and rating organizations aimed at
preventing homeowner premiums from going down.
Since more dramatic rate cuts have
failed to materialize so far, however, many Floridians say they back a measure
proposed by two of the state's Democrats, who recently submitted a bill in
Congress calling for the creation of a federal catastrophe fund where states
could pool their risks against future storm damage.
"The citizens of Florida are
really fed up," said Teri Johnston, who heads a grass-roots organization
known as Fair Insurance Rates in Monroe that has pushed for insurance cuts in
the Florida Keys.
"They're very frustrated and
angry right now," said Johnston, who noted that skyrocketing premiums have
been driving residents out of a place once considered a sun-drenched, tropical
paradise at a rate of about 17 people a day.
Like other homeowners in southernmost
Key West, Johnston said she currently pays more than $1,000 a month to insure
her 1,200-square-foot house there.
"It's something that's supported
by a number of important insurers," Bob Hartwig, president of the
Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade association, said when asked
about a federal catastrophe fund.
"I think the issue is getting
somewhat more traction and interest in Congress," he added. "As we
move along I think we'll hear more about this."
Patients with multiple clogged arteries are better off getting bypass surgery than stents, a study found.
The analysis, published in the New
England Journal of Medicine, isn't likely to settle the dispute between cardiac
surgeons, who perform bypasses, and the interventional cardiologists who
implant stents. But it gives further ammunition to those who argue that stents
-- metal scaffolds that keep arteries propped open -- are overused.
Both procedures fall under the
umbrella of revascularization -- attempts to relieve chest pain by opening up
arteries clogged by heart disease. In the most severe cases, revascularization
has also been shown to reduce heart attacks and deaths.
The study looked at the newest kind of
stents, those coated with drugs to keep arteries open, made by Johnson &
Johnson and Boston Scientific Corp. in the U.S. Previous studies saw similar
results with older, bare stents.
In stenting, introduced in the 1990s,
doctors thread a stent up through a small incision in the leg, widening clogged
arteries instead of replacing them. A patient can be back at work the next day.
A bypass requires open-heart surgery and has patients laid up for weeks.
As a result, bypass surgeons have been
left to treat only the most severe cases of heart disease. The number of bypass
surgeries has declined and bottomed out recently at about 300,000 procedures in
the U.S. last year, according to Millennium Research Group. That compares to
about a million stentings. The average cost of a multivessel bypass surgery and
office follow-up visits over two years was put at about $28,000 in one study,
versus about $20,000 for multivessel stenting.
But patients who opt for stenting may
be paying a price down the road. In this week's study, doctors at the
University at Albany looked at patients who received a stent or bypass in New
York state in 2003 and 2004, comparing subsequent rates of death and heart
attacks. The actual death rates between the competing procedures didn't differ.
But after adjusting for risk factors -- bypass patients were sicker to start
out -- the study found substantial differences.
After adjustments, New Yorkers with
two clogged arteries who received a bypass had a 29% lower death rate over the
next 18 months than those who received stents. Three-quarters of such patients
had opted for stenting. For the sickest patients -- those with three clogged
arteries -- surgery yielded a 20% lower death rate. Two-thirds of those
patients received surgery.
Donald Baim, Boston Scientific's chief
scientist, said the fact that the differences in death rates arose only after
statistical adjustment is cause for skepticism. The company has funded a study
that will assign patients randomly to stenting or surgery, eliminating the need
for such adjustments. "People are voting with their feet that they would
rather have the less-invasive procedure," Dr. Baim said.
You wouldn't expect to learn much
about the properties of water by watching a square dance. But think again.
Following the caller's lead, the dancers meet, separate, weave, and swing in a
perfectly fluid manner.
It turns out that similar coordinated
maneuvers—with water molecules taking the places of the dancers—may be
responsible for some of water's most puzzling features, an array of recent
research findings suggest.
As liquids go, water is a radical
nonconformist—differing from other liquids in dozens of ways (see the latest
count at www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/anmlies). Most famous among water's peculiarities
is its density at low temperatures. While other liquids contract and get denser
as they cool toward their freezing points, water stops contracting and starts to
expand. That's why ice floats and frozen pipes burst.
Confining water molecules in
nanometer-size pores has provided new evidence that, in addition to its many
other oddities, H2O may exist in two distinct liquid phases at ultralow
temperatures.
Nicolle Rager Fuller
Water gets even weirder at colder
temperatures, where it can exist as a liquid in a supercooled state well below
its ordinary freezing point. Recent evidence suggests that supercooled water
splits its personality into two distinct phases—another oddity unseen in other
liquids. And last year, water surprised scientists yet again, when they found
that at –63 degrees Celsius, supercooled water's weird behavior returns to
"normal."
That discovery, scientists say, may
help explain some aspects of water's peculiar personality, such as its ability
to transition from gas to liquid to solid and back to liquid again. Findings
from related experiments have important implications for understanding how
water interacts with biological molecules, such as proteins, and may lead to
better ways of freezing and storing biological tissues such as sperm and human
oocytes.
Water's ability to exist in a liquid
state well below its freezing point has been studied for centuries. What's new,
scientists say, is growing evidence about what happens to water at superlow
temperatures. Under these extraordinary conditions, there is not just one kind
of water, but two.
This two-phase phenomenon was first
predicted in 1992 by physicist H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University and his
graduate student Peter Poole, now at St. Francis Xavier University in
Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Using computer simulations to study the behavior of
liquid water at very low temperatures, the scientists suggested that water
could exist as either a high-density liquid or as a low-density liquid.
Stanley and Poole also proposed that
the dividing line between these two liquid forms might end in a "critical
point," where the two liquids would become indistinguishable, changing
from one form to the other.
In a series of experiments in recent
years, scientists have begun to close in on this critical point. These advances
offer a glimpse of possible explanations for water's unusual behaviors, and
suggest that Stanley and Poole may have been on to something.
Some of water's odd properties have
traditionally been explained as consequences of the hydrogen bonds that form
between water molecules (and sometimes other molecules). Each V-shaped molecule
of water contains one oxygen atom centered between two hydrogen atoms. The
chemical bonds holding the molecule together create a slightly negative charge
on the oxygen atom and a small positive charge on each of the hydrogen atoms.
FORCES OF ATTRACTION. Water molecules
are held together in a flexible, but stable network of hydrogen bonds. The
bonds, though weak, help keep water liquid over a wider temperature range than
one would expect for molecules of its size.
Nicolle Rager Fuller
These unequal charges make water
molecules extremely "sociable"—eager to bond with each other. Because
hydrogen bonds are much weaker than normal chemical bonds, the water molecules
move about freely, binding briefly with adjacent molecules before moving on to
others. Stanley likens this fast-paced network to a square dance taking place
in a large dance hall.
"In square dancing, you're always
releasing one partner and grabbing another, and that is a hydrogen bond
network, exactly," he says.
In the case of water, the square dance
occurs among molecules that have four arms, instead of two. That's because each
water molecule has the potential to form four hydrogen bonds. The result is a
network of tetrahedrons, or pyramids with a triangular base.
This tetrahedral arrangement creates a
peculiar tension, permitting structural changes in response to different
temperatures and pressures. In liquid form, the tetrahedral structures allow
unrestrained hydrogen bonding to occur as numerous molecules pack into and
around the tetrahedron. (Imagine a swift square dance with dancers moving in
and out of the center of the square and circling around it as well.) The result
is a dense, fluid structure, such as that of everyday tap water.
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