Son of Nick Van Exel sentenced to 60 years on murder conviction

Nick Van Exel was taken 37th overall by the Lakers in the 1993 draft. (Vince Compagnone / Los Angeles Times / February 2, 2013)

By Eric Pincus

February 2, 2013, 7:06 a.m.

Sad news for a former Lakers All-Star. Nickey Maxwell Van Exel, the son of Nick Van Exel, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murder in Texas on Friday.

The 22-year-old was found guilty Thursday of shooting Bradley Bassey Eyo in 2010.

Nick Van Exel was selected by the Lakers with the 37th overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft.

Before the arrival of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in 1996, Van Exel was the team's leader and go-to player.

Van Exel played with the Lakers until 1998, then was traded after an All-Star season for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue.

He is currently on staff with the Atlanta Hawks in player development.

ALSO:

Lakers top Minnesota for first road win of 2013

Dwight Howard flying home for nonsurgical PRP procedure

Short list of players who fit within Lakers disabled player exception

Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.

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CNN Temporarily Blacked Out in China During Segment on NYT Hacking

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Chinese censors temporarily blocked CNN International’s broadcasting signal Thursday night, during a segment about Chinese hackers infiltrating the New York Times’ computer network, a CNN spokeswoman told TheWrap.

On Wednesday night, the Times reported that it had suffered four months of persistent cyber attacks after publishing a front-page story about the wealth amassed by Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao‘s family.

CNNI reporter Hala Gorani aired a segment on her show about the hacking on Thursday. Her entire six-minute segment was blacked out in China.

It wasn’t the first time CNN faced the wrath of Beijing’s censors. Last May, Anderson Cooper‘s report on a blind dissident was blocked in the country.

Nor is it the first time CNN has been shunned by the Chinese.

In 2009, a 23-year-old student name Rao Jin started a website called Anti-CNN.com, on which he skewered the network and other Western media outlets for critical coverage of the Chinese government’s actions in Tibet.

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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Americans Closest to Retirement Were Hardest Hit by Recession

David Maxwell for The New York Times

Susan Zimmerman, 62, has three part-time jobs.

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Arynita Armstrong, 60, at her home in Willis, Tex. She last worked five years ago. “When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” she says.

In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.

These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.

Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”

New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.

“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare.

In the meantime, Ms. Zimmerman has fashioned her own regimen of home remedies — including eating blue cheese instead of taking penicillin and consuming plenty of orange juice, red wine, coffee and whatever else the latest longevity studies recommend — to maintain her health, which she must do if she wants to continue paying the bills.

“I will probably be working until I’m 100,” she said.

As common as that sentiment is, the job market has been especially unkind to older workers.

Unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are far lower than those for young people, who are recently out of school, with fewer skills and a shorter work history. But once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding another one. Over the last year, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday.

The lengthy process is partly because older workers are more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, like manufacturing. Compared with the rest of the population, older people are also more likely to own their own homes and be less mobile than renters, who can move to new job markets.

Older workers are more likely to have a disability of some sort, perhaps limiting the range of jobs that offer realistic choices. They may also be less inclined, at least initially, to take jobs that pay far less than their old positions.

Displaced boomers also believe they are victims of age discrimination, because employers can easily find a young, energetic worker who will accept lower pay and who can potentially stick around for decades rather than a few years.

“When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” said Arynita Armstrong, 60, of Willis, Tex. She has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company. “They’re afraid to hire you, because they think you’re a health risk. You know, you might make their premiums go up. They think it’ll cost more money to invest in training you than it’s worth it because you might retire in five years.

“Not that they say any of this to your face,” she added.

When older workers do find re-employment, the compensation is usually not up to the level of their previous jobs, according to data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

In a survey by the center of older workers who were laid off during the recession, just one in six had found another job, and half of that group had accepted pay cuts. Fourteen percent of the re-employed said the pay in their new job was less than half what they earned in their previous job.

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Dow closes above 14,000 for the first time since 2007

The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 14,000 for the first time since 2007. (John Moore / Getty)

By Andrew Tangel

February 1, 2013, 1:12 p.m.

NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 14,000 for the first time since October 2007, as stocks continue a rally this year.

The Dow gained 149.21 points, or 1.08%, to close at 14,009.79 in trading Friday.

Stocks were lifted Friday by a host of data pointing to a continued recovery in the U.S. economy. 

The federal government reported early Friday the economy added 157,000 jobs in January, as the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9%. Manufacturing, consumer confidence and construction data also boosted optimism.

Investors have found more reasons this year to get back into equities. President Obama and Congress helped defuse potentially drastic tax increases and spending cuts threatened by the so-called fiscal cliff. Economists warned the cliff, if left unaddressed, could push the economy back into recession.

The Federal Reserve has also been keeping interest rates to historic lows with multiple rounds of monetary stimulus. That has pushed investors into riskier investments like stocks.

ALSO:

Foreclosures decline nationally in December

Washington Post looking to move headquarters

Outages hit Bank of America electronic and phone banking

 

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Netflix's <i>House of Cards</i> Offers an Uneven But Promising Look at TV's Future

It’s hard to imagine the happiness at Netflix when they realized that House of Cards — the company’s much-heralded premiere of self-produced original programming – would debut its complete 13-episode run on the same week that the U.S. Senate held hearing to confirm John Kerry as Secretary of State. After all, the updated American version of the 1990s BBC political drama launches with Kevin Spacey’s character, Congressman Frank Underwood, learning he won’t be nominated for that very position, a devastating insult that inspires his secret campaign to undermine the newly elected administration he pretends to serve. The show, it seemed, couldn’t be any more topical.

The problem for this new House of Cards is that despite this timely coincidence, the content of the show often feels curiously old-fashioned despite its innovative format. That’s squarely the fault of the writing; for every smart move that writer Beau Willimon (The Ides of March) makes in updating the basic setup and plot of the BBC original for a modern American audience, he undermines his good work with clumsy dialogue and scenes that are too on-the-nose and out-of-step with the kind of sophisticated, layered writing we’ve come to expect from shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad or even Game of Thrones.

How does the show demonstrate that Underwood is ruthless and a man to be reckoned with? In the very first scene, he personally kills a mangled dog that’s been hit by a car, while literally reporting to the viewer that he is the kind of guy who can do what needs to be done. When Underwood’s all-too-willing partner-in-crime, reporter Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), initially tries to get his attention with a cleavage-revealing top, Underwood sneers, “It’s a cheap ploy.” “It’s cheap,” Barnes agrees, “but effective” — the kind of exchange that would feel more at home in 1940s film noir.

Similarly retro, and seemingly unintentionally so, is Barnes’ position at the paper she works for, the fictional Washington Herald. When we first meet her, she’s arguing for her own blog, a place where she can speak truth to power and make a mark as a serious journalist. Her dismissal at the hands of her editor and her peers feels like the sort of “oh, bloggers, they’re not even real journalists” scene that we’ve seen countless times before.

Considering how prevalent the web has become in our culture, and how internet-conscious newspapers are today, it doesn’t just feel redundant; it feels anachronistic. And when Barnes finally gets her big break — thanks to an underhanded scoop from Underwood — it’s hard not to be agog at how eager her editors and bosses are to let her without asking where she’s getting the information or how real it is. In a post-Judith Miller and Jayson Blair world, it feels particularly out of place.

The actors do the best they can with the material, which turns out to be quite a lot. Although Spacey’s smarmy, know-it-all politician initially feels unconvincing, he grows on you as you keep watching. His character has a habit of breaking the fourth wall — a quirk carried over from the BBC original — and every aside to the camera makes the viewer feel complicit in his dealings. There’s a point in the second episode where Spacey doesn’t even need to speak; in the middle of a conversation, he simply raises his eyebrow to the audience as if to say, “Can you believe this?” and you realize that you’ve been won over by his insincere charm despite yourself.

As impressive as Spacey’s somewhat-campy performance is, though, Robin Wright blows him out the water as Underwood’s wife, Claire. Clearly positioned as the Lady MacBeth of this scenario, she is utterly compelling in her brittle coldness and inability to accept any potential failure of the world to bend to her will. “My husband doesn’t apologize,” she tells him after he offers her a mea culpa for his bad behavior. “Even to me.”

What shines most, though, is the direction. David Fincher (The Social Network), who helms the first two episodes of the season, brings a lot of weight to this material, mitigating the script’s melodrama with lovely cinematography and building an appropriate sense of distance and scale into proceedings. This is a surprisingly beautiful series to look at; there’s a stillness and grace to the direction that manages to ground the story in something that isn’t “realism,” but feels naturalistic nonetheless. Despite the heavy-handed script, I found myself drawn into the show, eager to find out and especially to watch what happens next.

That’s one of the wins for the format that Netflix offers. If this were a traditional television series, I would have had to wait a week between the first and second episodes, and that would’ve colored my feelings about it rather differently. Being able to watch the next installment immediately after the first made me retroactively like the premiere more; I got to the pay-off more quickly, and to a second episode with more momentum and less awkward exposition.

Also a plus for Netflix: The episodes of the show can be whatever length they need to be, and not edited down (or filled out) to fit a time slot predetermined by broadcast schedules or commercial breaks. It’s not something that is immediately perceptible, but as time goes on you start to notice it; nothing feels rushed, or stretched out of natural shape, and the story flows more naturally.

In the end, House of Cards is a victory for Netflix. It may not be the greatest show on television — how likely was that to be the case with the company’s first try? – but it is a good show, and one that benefits significantly by being freed of the time and scheduling restrictions that television typically imposes. Think of it as the continuing evolution of the television series: As the cable channel model freed dramas from the mandatory demands of 20-odd episodes a season, the Netflix model frees them from mandatory running times or artificial cliffhangers preceding commercials. Whether or not something that doesn’t actually air on television could be described as “the future of television” is perhaps debatable, but if this is the beginning of that future, it’s off to a pretty good start.

All 13 episodes of House of Cards are currently available to watch on Netflix.

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“30 Rock” closes its doors with a sentimental farewell

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Emmy-winning TV comedy “30 Rock” bowed out after seven seasons on Thursday with bittersweet farewells but giving all its zany characters a happy ending.

The satirical show-within-a-show about the inside workings of a fictional television sketch series saw Tina Fey‘s hapless writer Liz Lemon try to round up her unruly cast for a last hurrah.

Along the way, unpredictable sketch star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) causes chaos, self-centered actress Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) attempts to find her true calling on Broadway, and producer Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) finally achieves his dream to disappear without a trace.

The show’s simpleton page-turned-janitor Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) finds himself in his element with his sudden promotion to head of television network NBC.

But under the jokes, the cast showed some real emotion in Thursday’s hour-long series finale.

“There’s a reason people don’t say honest goodbyes. It’s because when stuff is coming to an end, people freak out and they act crazy,” Liz tells Tracy.

Despite small audiences, “30 Rock” became a cult favorite, while Liz has been a hero for single geeky women as she tackled the male-dominated world of network television, with phrases such as “what the what,” “blerg” and “I want to go to there” becoming popular.

The show’s finale comes after perpetual unlucky-in-love Liz finally got her happy ending earlier in the season with her marriage to hot dog vendor Criss Chross (James Marsden) and they adopt two children.

But after grappling with the trials of being a stay-at-home mother, Liz and Criss agree to swap roles and she returns to work.

Liz also finds peace in her dysfunctional relationship with suave, egotistical network executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin).

Thursday’s show also saw the return of guest stars Julianne Moore and Salma Hayek as Jack’s ex-girlfriends, Conan O’Brien as one of Liz’s ex-boyfriends, along with appearances from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” stars Ice-T and Richard Belzer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, as herself.

“30 Rock” was inspired by Fey’s stint as head writer for “Saturday Night Live.” It has won multiple Emmys since its 2006 premiere but has always suffered from low audience ratings.

In the show’s prime in 2008-2009, an average of 7.5 million viewers tuned in each week, but the final season has garnered an average of 4 million viewers per episode.

In honor of the show’s finale, ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s announced a new flavor, the “Liz Lemon Greek Frozen Yogurt,” which will be available this spring.

“30 Rock,” which is aired in more than 20 countries around the world, has skyrocketed Fey’s career, and she has appeared in films including “Baby Mama,” “Date Night” and the upcoming “Admission.”

Both Fey and Baldwin won the best TV comedy actor and actress accolades at the Screen Actor’s Guild awards last Sunday, with Baldwin tweeting, “What a nice note for @nbc30rock to end on.”

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Shumaker)

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Well: Gluten-Free Muffin Recipes

For people who need to eliminate gluten from their diet, baking becomes a challenge. Beginners often find gluten-free baked goods too dense. Even the Recipes for Health columnist Martha Rose Shulman didn’t like the flavor of a commercial gluten-free flour mix, which left her gluten-free cookies and tart-shells with a strong taste of bean flour. As a result, she created her own gluten-free mix for baking muffins. She writes:

My son Liam still doesn’t know that the muffins he has been devouring all week are gluten-free.

I put together my own gluten-free flour mix, one without bean flour, and turned to America’s favorite Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna James Ahem, for guidance. I was already thinking about making muffins, and I wanted a mix that could replace the whole wheat flour I usually use in conjunction with other grains or flours. Her formula for a whole-grain flour mix is simple – 70 percent ground gluten-free grain like rice flour, millet flour, buckwheat flour or teff (the list on her site is a long one) and 30 percent starch like potato starch, cornstarch or arrowroot.

For this week’s recipes, I used what I had, which was brown rice flour, potato starch and cornstarch – 20 percent potato starch and 10 percent cornstarch — and that’s the basis for the nutritional analyses of this week’s recipes. I used this mix in conjunction with a gluten-free meal or flour, so the amount of pure starch in the batters is much less than 30 percent.

When you bake anything it is much simpler and results are more consistent if you use grams and scale your ingredients. This is especially true with gluten-free baking, since you are working with grain and starch formulas. Digital scales are not expensive and I urge you to switch over to this method if you like to bake. I have given approximate cup measures so the recipes will work both ways, but scaling is more accurate.

Here are five ways to bake gluten-free muffins:

Gluten-Free Banana Chocolate Muffins: These dark chocolate muffins taste more extravagant than they are.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal, Fig and Orange Muffins: A sweet and grainy cornmeal mixture makes for a delicious muffin.

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Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins: A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.

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Gluten-Free Buckwheat, Poppy Seed and Blueberry Muffins: The buckwheat flour is high-fiber and makes a dark, richly-flavored muffin.

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Gluten-Free Cornmeal Molasses Muffins: Strong molasses provides a good source of iron in an easy-to-make muffin.

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Bits Blog: The Origins of 'Big Data' : An Etymological Detective Story

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reached 170 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day.

The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers. But the plan is that it soon will be. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides “a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.”

The new digital forms of communication — Web sites, blog posts, tweets — are often very different from the traditional sources for the study of words, like books, news articles and academic journals.

“It’s almost like oral language instead of edited text,” said Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the “Yale Book of Quotations” and an associate librarian at the Yale Law School. “It’s the way of the future.”

The unruly digital data of the Web is a big ingredient in what is now being called “Big Data.” And as it turns out, the term Big Data seems to be most accurately traced not to references in news or journal archives, but to digital artifacts now posted on technical Web sites, appropriately enough.

To our modest tale of word sleuthing: Last August, I wrote a Sunday column about 2012 being the breakout year for Big Data as an idea, in the marketplace, and as a term.

At the time, I did some reporting on the roots of the term, and I asked Mr. Shapiro of Yale to dig into it. He scoured data bases and came up with several references, including in press releases for product announcements and one intriguing use of the term by a now-famous author (more on that later).

But Mr. Shapiro couldn’t find anything as crisp and definitive as he had done for me years earlier when I asked him to try to find the first reference to the word “software” as a computing term. It was in 1958, in an article in “The American Mathematical Monthly,” written by John Tukey, a Princeton mathematician.

So, without a conclusive answer, I didn’t write about the origins of the term Big Data in that Sunday column. But afterward, I heard from people who had ideas on the subject.

Francis X. Diebold, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, got in touch and even wrote a paper, with the mildly tongue-in-cheek title, “I Coined the Term ‘Big Data’ ” I had not thought of economics as the breeding ground for the term, but it is not unreasonable. Some of the statistical and algorithmic methods now in the Big Data tool kit trace their heritage to economic modeling and Wall Street.

Mr. Diebold staked a claim based on his paper, “Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting,” presented in 2000 and published in 2003. The economic-modeling paper was first academic reference found to Big Data, according to research by Marco Pospiech, a Ph. D. candidate at the Technical University of Freiberg in Germany.

By then, I had heard from Douglas Laney, an veteran data analyst at Gartner. His said the father of the term Big Data might well be John Mashey, who was the chief scientist at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

I replied to Mr. Diebold that I thought from what I had seen he probably had plenty of competition. And I passed along the e-mail correspondence I had received. Mr. Diebold said thanks much, and added that he had a University of Pennsylvania research librarian looking into it as well.

The term Big Data is so generic that the hunt for its origin was not just an effort to find an early reference to those two words being used together. Instead, the goal was the early use of the term that suggests its present connotation — that is, not just a lot of data, but different types of data handled in new ways.

The credit, it seemed to me, should go to someone who was aware of the computing context. That is why, in my view, a very intriguing reference, discovered by the Yale researcher Mr. Shapiro, does not qualify.

In 1989, Erik Larson, later the author of bestsellers including “The Devil in the White City” and “In The Garden of Beasts,” wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine, which was reprinted in The Washington Post. The article begins with the author wondering how all that junk mail arrives in his mailbox and moves on to the direct-marketing industry. The article includes these two sentences: “The keepers of big data say they do it for the consumer’s benefit. But data have a way of being used for purposes other than originally intended.”

Prescient indeed. But not, I don’t think, a use of the term that suggests an inkling of the technology we call Big Data today.

Since I first looked at how he used the term, I liked Mr. Mashey as the originator of Big Data. In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was the giant of computer graphics, used for special-effects in Hollywood and for video surveillance by spy agencies. It was a hot company in the Valley that dealt with new kinds of data, and lots of it.

There are no academic papers to support the attribution to Mr. Mashey. Instead, he gave hundreds of talks to small groups in the middle and late 1990s to explain the concept and, of course, pitch Silicon Graphics products. The case for Mr. Mashey is on the Web sites of technical and professional organizations, like Usenix. There, some of his presentation slides from those talks are posted, including “Big Data and the Next Wave of Infrastress” in 1998.

For me, looking for the origins of Big Data has been a matter of personal curiosity, something to get back to someday and write up on a weekend.

When I called Mr. Mashey recently, he said that Big Data is such a simple term, it’s not much a claim to fame. His role, if any, he said, was to popularize the term within a portion of the high-tech community in the 1990s. “I was using one label for a range of issues, and I wanted the simplest, shortest phrase to convey that the boundaries of computing keep advancing,” said Mr. Mashey, a consultant to tech companies and a trustee of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Diebold kept looking into the subject as well. His follow-up inquiries, he said, proved to be “a journey of increasing humility.” He has written to two papers since the first one.

His most recent paper concludes: “The term Big Data, which spans computer science and statistics/econometrics, probably originated in the lunch-table conversations at Silicon Graphics in the mid-1990s, in which John Mashey figured prominently.”

Tracing the origins of Big Data points to the evolution in the field of etymology, according to Mr. Shapiro. The Yale researcher began his word-hunting nearly 35 years ago, as a student at the Harvard Law School, poring through the library stacks. He was an early user of databases of legal documents, news articles and other documents, in computerized archives.

The Web, Mr. Shapiro said, opens up new linguistic terrain. “What you’re seeing is a marriage of structured databases and novel, less structured materials,” he said. “It can be a powerful tool to see far more.”

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Senate Democrats huddle on gun measures

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden seemed intent to emphasize that the most politically challenging of the initiatives he has  recommended – an assault weapons ban – was still a priority for the administration, mentioning it first in remarks to reporters afterward.

“My message was to lay out for my colleagues what our game plan was, what we thought needed to be done,” Biden said after the more than hourlong meeting. “I made the case for not only assault weapons but for the entire set of recommendations the president laid out.”

Biden said he also asked to sit down with the key parties on Capitol Hill to plot strategy going forward.

All 23 of President Obama's gun policy proposals

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on guns, the vice president said there has been a “sea change” in public opinion since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, calling it the “straw that broke the camel’s back” to get the public behind gun measures for the first time in decades.

“I’m not saying there’s an absolute consensus on all these things,” he said. “But there is a sea change in attitudes of the American people. And I believe that the American people will not understand – and I know everyone in that caucus agrees with me – will not understand if we don’t act.”

Participants in the meeting said the vice president indicated he will continue to travel to make the administration’s case, as will the president. A week ago Biden traveled to Richmond, Va., to focus on the call for universal background checks, which is seen as the most likely of the slate of proposals to pass.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

At that time, Biden did not mention the assault weapons ban in remarks to reporters afterward, though aides said it did come up in the private discussion with officials present.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Biden told the caucus Thursday that the administration is still behind the ban, a priority of her California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“He said this is something that they support. And that the reports that he’s seen have shown that it did make a difference,” Boxer said.

That remains a challenge though, even in the Democratic-controlled Senate because the Democrats must defend 21 seats in 2014.

“Until I see the bills and the language, the only thing I’m going to say is I’m a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. We’ve got to find a balanced approach, and I will take each amendment and bill as it comes,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who will be seeking reelection next year in a deeply Republican state.

Biden maintained that while there is no way to eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting, “there are things that we can do … that have virtually zero impact on your 2nd Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives.”

“I’ve always been confident we can reach a consensus on a broad cross-section of issues that can reduce some of this violence, even knowing it will be imperfect,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

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Amazon.com Goes Down, Takes Break From Retail Biz

Amazon hosted a new kind of online door-crasher sale on Thursday. That is to say, its front door crashed.

For about a half-hour, starting just before noon Pacific time on Thursday, the main Amazon.com webpage was inaccessible to web surfers.

Visitors were greeted with a white page and the error: “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.”

The problem appeared to affect only the front page of Amazon.com. Other pages on the site were accessible here at Wired.

Others reported Amazon coming back within a few minutes of the outage, but at Wired’s offices in San Francisco, the site’s main page was inaccessible for a half-hour. Online, others reported similar problems. Amazon couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

It was an unusual outage for Amazon.com, but over the past year, the company has endured several high profile crashes at Amazon Web Services, where it sells online computing power to companies such as Netflix. Amazon’s web services — including a critical Elastic Load Balancing service that keeps webservers from being overwhelmed — knocked Netflix offline in June and again on Christmas Eve.

That prompted this zinger from Netflix Engineer Adrian Cockcroft Thursday as the outage was happening, “Maybe the guy who broke the ELB got moved sideways to a new job in Amazon retail.” At least part of Amazon’s own site now runs on AWS, but it’s unclear how much.

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A Minute With: Rapper T.I. dips into comedy in “Identity Thief”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Rapper Tip “T.I.” Harris has seen and done it all – three Grammy Awards, a novel, time in jail, a fashion line, TV reality show, businessman and several movies.

Now the Atlanta-based singer is dipping into comedy, appearing in the film “Identity Thief” as an armed enforcer on the trail of a character played by Melissa McCarthy who is on the run from many of those she’s swindled.

T.I., 32, sat down with Reuters ahead of the movie’s February 8 release to talk about the film, what’s left on his to-do list, and his personal views on gun control.

Q: How did you wind up in a comedic film?

A: “I met with (director) Seth (Gordon) and learned he was the director of one of my favorite comedies, ‘Horrible Bosses.’ I asked him how would this movie compare to ‘Horrible Bosses’ and he said it’s going to be better. I said, ‘I’m in.’”

Q: Were you OK taking a supporting role rather than a lead?

A: “I actually enjoyed the fact that all of the heavy lifting was not on my shoulders. It was Jason (Bateman) and Melissa’s show, so the stage was set for me to not screw it up, you know what I mean?”

Q: Last year you appeared on television’s “Hawaii Five-O” and “Boss.” Do you have role models of hip-hop stars who have successfully crossed over to acting?

A: “Will Smith and Ice Cube. Looking at the roles Cube has been able to acquire, he created those opportunities for himself. So I think I could take that approach.”

Q: Is there a certain perception of you out there that might hinder you from being taken seriously as an actor?

A: “I think people might wonder whether or not T.I. can be anything other than T.I., so it’s constantly having to reassure people that I’m able to do what I already know I can do.”

Q: For some, T.I. is a successful recording artist and for others he’s someone who had several stints in jail on drugs and weapons charges. Can you confidently say that the past is the past?

A: “I’m not gonna say anything. It’s day by day, you know what I’m saying? I’m saying today this is how I am, this is where I am. And tomorrow hopefully will be better than today.”

Q: In 2011 after your last prison term, you showed a softer side by starring in the VH1 reality series “T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle,” with your wife and six kids. Was that an attempt to right your past transgressions?

A: “Nah. I think it’s a showcasing of who I am today. I don’t think that it any way diminishes the mistakes of yesterday. It just makes a correction if people assume that the mistakes of yesterday are ever-present today. It gives people a stage of truth and knowledge to judge from. So if you must judge, at least you can judge from fact.”

Q: You’ve just released your eighth album, “Trouble Man II: He Who Wears the Crown.” You also have a your own urban fashion line, A.K.O.O. What else do you need to check off your to-do list?

A: “Just to remain relevant and meaningful to the cool young consumer of today. The cool kids are out there being admired by others in their peer group, so you want to find ways to continue to put yourself on their minds.”

Q: How do you do that?

A: “(Social media) is a big aspect for those kids. … So with Instagram, if you take pictures it has to be a picture worthy of showing. If you say something on Twitter, it has to be something that’s worthy of listening to.”

Q: With gun control being a hot-button topic today, and with your own experiences with firearms, what are your thoughts on gun ownership?

A: “I can’t possess a firearm (due to previous convictions), so whether they make them illegal or not is gonna be the same thing for me. But I see a need for them. I’ve been in circumstances where I’ve had them every day and nothing happened. I’ve been in circumstances where I didn’t have them, and I needed them. In certain areas of society, having a firearm is just as common as having bottled water.”

Q: In what way?

A: “If you’re a shopkeeper, a barbershop owner, a convenience store owner and you handle cash in and out of this area, if everyone knows that you don’t have a firearm, then you are basically prey. In these areas, bullets are just as common as sticks of gum, you know what I’m saying? So I think I speak for those people.”

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Will Dunham)

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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Anti-Wal-Mart Labor Groups Agree to Stop Picketing the Chain

(Reuters) - Labor groups that have long spoken out against Wal-Mart Stores Inc will stop much of their picketing against the world's largest retailer, though they still plan to continue to push the company to improve working conditions.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UFCW, and OUR Walmart reached an agreement with the National Labor Relations Board, the groups and Walmart U.S., said on Thursday.

The labor groups claim that they were not trying to unionize Walmart workers with their actions, which included a small number of Walmart's more than 1.3 million U.S. employees engaging in protests outside of Walmart stores.

The agreement comes after Wal-Mart filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UFCW in November, asking the NLRB to halt what the retailer said were unlawful attempts to disrupt its business.

The UFCW and OUR Walmart - a UFCW-supported group of current and former Wal-Mart workers - said that they do not intend to have Wal-Mart recognize or bargain with them as the representative of Wal-Mart employees.

Walmart said that many of the union's demonstrations and pickets before Black Friday were illegal, a claim that the UFCW denied. OUR Walmart said its protests were legally protected.

The UFCW and OUR Walmart will stop any unlawful recognitional picketing, will stop encouraging unlawful disruptions by other affiliated groups and will stop any picketing at Walmart stores and facilities for at least 60 days.

Recognitional picketing is done to try to get an employer to recognize a union as the bargaining representative for its employees and is subject to certain restrictions under the National Labor Relations Act.

The groups also said they would not fight it if the NLRB sought a temporary injunction against any future activity that it found to be the equivalent of picketing.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Wal-Mart filed with the NLRB after groups planned major protests at its stores for Black Friday, a busy shopping day. The NLRB did not issue any ruling before that day, and while several protests took place they did not hurt sales, as the Walmart chain of thousands of stores across the United States said it had its best Black Friday ever.

The agreement is unlikely to make a huge difference to the campaign, as OUR Walmart, the UFCW and others can still publicly voice their concerns without doing anything that would be legally defined as picketing, said John Logan, professor of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.

OUR Walmart said the agreement does not limit its ability to help employees in their dealings with Walmart over labor rights and standards. The UFCW said that the pact allows the union to continue its support of OUR Walmart and its supporters. The groups said that they are not trying to unionize at Walmart.

"It seems to me they're trying to come very close to the edge," said Ronald Meisburg, a partner at law firm Proskauer, who was the NLRB's general counsel from 2006 to 2010 and also served a recess appointment as a board member for one year.

The agreement is "a big victory for the company," he added.

In mid-January, Walmart said that it would give part-time workers the first shot at full-time positions. It also plans to make scheduling more transparent, giving part-time workers the ability to choose more of their own hours.

"Walmart is hearing us and at least starting to make changes that will improve the lives of workers and their families and our communities, and we will continue to raise our voices until there is real change at Walmart," Colby Harris, a member of OUR Walmart from Dallas, said in a statement provided by the group.

Members of OUR Walmart pay dues of $5 per month.

(Reporting by Jessica Wohl in Chicago; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Carol Bishopric)

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Syrian state media report airstrike by Israeli military

JERUSALEM – Amid rising fear that Syrian President Bashar Assad could lose control of his nation’s stockpiles of chemical and advanced weapons, Israel bombed and destroyed a military research center outside Damascus, the capital, Syrian state media reported Wednesday.

Israeli and U.S. military and government officials declined to comment on the report.

If it occurred, the attack would mark Israel’s most aggressive military strike against its neighbor during the Syrian uprising against Assad's rule that began nearly two years ago.

Earlier in the day, international news agencies and Arab news outlets reported that the Israeli strike had targeted a weapons convoy along the Syrian-Lebanese border as it attempted to deliver cargo to the militant group Hezbollah. Those reports could not be confirmed. Syrian officials denied the reports of a convoy as “baseless.”

Israeli officials have been voicing concern in recent days that Syria’s advanced weapons might fall into the hands of militant groups that could use them against Israel.

Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu raised the issue during a Cabinet meeting this week and officials have repeatedly said that any transfer of such weapons outside Syria might trigger a military response.

According to Syrian TV, the research facility and an adjacent building were destroyed in the dawn attack Wednesday. Two people were killed and five were injured, Syrian news reports said.

It was unclear what sort of military research was being carried out in the center, in Jamraya, northwest of the capital. There were no initial reports of chemical contamination in the area.

Syrian officials characterized the center as scientific and said Israel’s “blatant aggression” proved that it has been behind the effort to oust Assad, according to statement from the Syrian military, carried by the official Syrian Arab News Agency.

“It has become clear to everyone that Israel is the motivator, beneficiary and sometimes executor of the terrorist acts that target Syria and its resistant people,” the statement said.

To date Israel has tried to steer clear of the Syrian conflict, fearing that any actions it might take, such as supporting opposition forces or launching a military strike, might backfire or become a propaganda coup for Damascus.

That very issue might lead the Syrian government, which has long claimed that U.S. and “Zionist” forces are behind the rebellion against Assad, to accuse Israel of attacking its territory.

Each side in the Syrian conflict has portrayed itself as an implacable enemy of Israel.

There is also concern that an Israeli strike could drag others into the Syrian conflict. Iran, Syria’s close ally, said early this week that any foreign attack against Syria would be regarded as an attack on Iran.

In addition to chemical weapons, Israeli officials have been particularly worried about Syria’s stockpile of Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. If such weapons were obtained by the militant Hezbollah movement, it would weaken Israel’s regional military power and hinder its ability to launch airstrikes in Lebanon.

“The initial speculation was about chemical weapons, but Israel is deeply concerned about Hezbollah acquiring this kind of advanced anti-aircraft missile,’’ said Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Center for Global Research in International Affairs in Herzliya, Israel. “It would transform Hezbollah’s game and potentially end Israel’s air superiority over Lebanon. This is entirely about Hezbollah, not about Syria.”

Officials in Lebanon denied knowledge of any Israeli attack, but complained that Israeli jets had violated their airspace for several hours, beginning Tuesday afternoon and continuing until Wednesday morning. Though Israel routinely flies over Lebanon for reconnaissance missions to keep a close eye on Hezbollah's arms stocks and movements of weapons, the activity overnight was reportedly heavier than usual.

It is often Israel’s policy to refuse to confirm or deny its activities in the region, partly out of a belief that silence might reduce the pressure on its enemies to react or retaliate.

ALSO:

Vietnam releases American activist accused of subversion

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France, Western allies likely to be mired in Mali for years

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<em>Game of Thrones</em> Fans Create Spectacular <em>Minecraft</em> Version of King's Landing

The amazing Minecraft builders at at WesterosCraft are at it again, this time releasing spectacular new renderings of King’s Landing — the capital of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones — recreated with the distinctive blocks of the popular sandbox game.

The WesterosCraft team of Will Blew and Jacob Granberry posted the images of their latest work on reddit… and nearly brought their whole house down. (“Annnnnnnnnd you guys broke the server! Please be patient we’re working on keeping it up :),” the creators posted in the thread showing off the latest images.

The folks at WesterosCraft are slowly but surely working to build the entire universe of Game of Thrones in Minecraft and with this latest installment they estimate they’re about 70 percent done with the entire continent of Westeros. The team also notes that the the latest section of George R.R. Martin’s world took some 100 builders four months to complete and includes roughly 3,000 unique buildings.

At least the hard work paid off. In a final edit to the reddit posting, creator “pizzainacup” responded to the online feedback to the images saying, “holy crap: is that what it feels like to be an internet celebrity?”

Check out Minecraft King’s Landing in the gallery above. See you in the Red Keep.

Images courtesy WesterosCraft, via Imgur

[via Kotaku]

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Lindsay Lohan could face jail after March trial in California

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Lindsay Lohan will stand trial on March 18 on charges she lied to California police about a June car crash and violated probation, raising the possibility she could be sent back to jail.

A judge in Los Angeles on Wednesday set the trial date on charges related to the car crash and said the court will hold a hearing at the same time on whether Lohan in the incident violated probation from a 2011 jewelry theft.

The star of the movie “Mean Girls,” who has been in and out of rehab and jail since 2007, wore a black sleeveless dress and looked tired at the brief court hearing. She arrived in Los Angeles late Tuesday from New York and has abandoned her longtime lawyer in favor of new attorney Mark Heller.

Lohan has pleaded not guilty to three misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, lying to police and obstructing police when she said she was not behind the wheel of her sports car, which smashed into a truck in Santa Monica, California in June.

Lohan, 26, left court without speaking to the media.

The former “Parent Trap” child star has been in and out of trouble since a 2007 arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession.

Sautner warned Lohan that she could be found in violation of probation even if she is acquitted on charges connected to the car crash because the standard of proof is lower.

Lohan was ordered to appear at Wednesday’s hearing because she decided to switch lawyers, firing longtime attorney Shawn Holley this month.

She was arrested in New York on a misdemeanor assault charge on the same day in November that the Santa Monica car crash charges were filed. The Manhattan district attorney‘s office has not filed a criminal complaint in the assault case.

Lohan’s appearance in Los Angeles had been in doubt after Heller wrote to the court earlier this week saying was suffering from an upper respiratory infection and could not appear.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” Judge Stephanie Sautner told Lohan at the hearing.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Cynthia Osterman)

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

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