The doorbell rings again. With dread (my new companion) I pull myself up from the solitude of my office chair. It's Sept. 16, 2007. Over the eight days since my 21-year-old son Trevor's death, my front door has become a cave entrance for a myriad of callers to my -- to our -- disrupted home. The visits are mostly welcome, as a respite from the constant unfamiliarity of our days.
Of those who come, and frequently, is my dear friend Amalia, who brought over a real coffee pot, one that runs laps around my fancy French press. It can handle the demands of heavy consumption. We drink our coffee in silence in the screened-in porch, freshly painted in deep eggplant and squash hues with overstuffed pillows to soften the heavy wooden furniture. Gauze drapes soften the room, floating slightly with an occasional cool breeze. Coffee with such a friend helps staunch the bleeding of my soul.
Outside is the stone patio, completed only days before Trevor's death -- a poignant stage for his memorial, but, damn it, not what I had in mind when I had the work done. Amalia hands me a smooth, warm stone; I think and feel it is perfect as I hold it in the palm of my hand and then bank it in the pocket of my jeans. She says, "I got this worry-stone from a friend of mine years ago, when I was going through some heavy personal shit, and now I want you to have it."
God, a gesture so plain gave me power for months to come -- the ordinary becomes extraordinary with the thoughtfulness of a friend. Who would have thought that a rock would lighten my load? Whenever I feel a tidal wave of emotion, or find myself entrapped, uncomfortable or sensing flames of grief, or becoming consumed by memories of Trevor, I slip my hand into my pocket, retrieve the stone, rub my fingers over the rock's warm surface until I find my way to the other side of the moment, like finding a way across an empty space.
Friday, March 4, 2011
The heroin addiction that took my son's life - Real Families - Salon.com
“The Human Resourc
"The Human Resources Manager": A dry, hilarious Israeli "As I Lay Dying" - Quick Takes - Salon.com
Another in a long series of fascinating films coming out of contemporary Israel, "The Human Resources Manager" is a tragicomic, memorably gritty road movie with echoes of William Faulkner's great novel "As I Lay Dying." That might not be an accident, since this film from director Eran Riklis (whose other terrific films include "Lemon Tree" and "The Syrian Bride") is based on a novel by prominent Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, who has frequently been described as the Jewish state's answer to the Nobel laureate of Oxford, Miss. For Yehoshua, Riklis and screenwriter Noah Stollman, this tale of an unburied corpse and the middle-aged executive who accompanies it on an unlikely journey becomes an oblique way of looking at recent Jewish history, and exploring fault lines in Israeli society.
At first, the grizzled, eponymous human-resources manager (Mark Ivanir) seems like the laconic hero of a rainy Jerusalem noir. It's 2002, with Palestinian terrorist attacks on the civilian population near a high point, and a worker at his family-owned bakery has lain unclaimed in the morgue for days following a bus bombing. She turns out to be Yulia, a Christian immigrant worker from an unnamed Eastern European country (it's clearly Romania), and the manager has to figure out why nobody noticed her absence, and take enough responsibility for her to fight back a tide of bad P.R. (Yulia is the only person in the story who is ever named -- a literary device handled with such naturalness that I didn't notice it until the movie was over.)
Rob Bell Stirs Wrath
How a 19-Year-Old Ea
How a 19-Year-Old Earned $5 Million to Revolutionize Search
How This 19-Year-Old Is Taking On Google
He's an Israeli who sidestepped military service in favor of moving to the Bay Area to become Y Combinator's youngest founder. Six months later, all eyes are on Daniel Gross, as he has almost $5 million in funding backing his search engine, Greplin. Oh, and he didn’t go to college.
Courtesy company
The 48-Hour Start-up: Daniel Gross developed the idea for Greplin during a breakneck, two-day coding session.
Courtesy company
Robby Walker is the co-founder of Greplin. His first company, Zenter, was acquired by Google.
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Where might you want to search that Google can't reach? The social slice of the Web, plus everything that an individual has password-protected hovering in the cloud, has been largely off-limits to traditional search engines. Well, until an Israeli high-school graduate took a hiatus from Army duty to spend three months at Y Combinator, bombed on a few projects, and then struck gold in his last 48 hours at the start-up incubator. Daniel Gross, along with co-founder Robby Walker, 27, created Greplin, a user-authorized search that can access Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, Salesforce, and more. The site launched in late February. Inc.com's Christine Lagorio spoke with Gross, age 19, about his struggles, raising nearly $5 million in investment after just six months at work, and his unique lack of college experience.
Tell me how Greplin came about.
I'm originally from Israel. I was in Israel and had graduated high school, and I was all set to go into the Israeli Army. I applied to Y Combinator. And not thinking I'd get in, I was invited to an interview. I thought of it as a fun long weekend in San Francisco. They had an odd reaction—they didn't quite like what I was working on, but I guess they liked me. They wanted me to come back, so I hopped back on a plane.
In my three months there, I built several things, none of which caught on. Right at the end of Y Combinator, you get a cool opportunity to get up on a stage and show your project to the world. And our project had just got shut down, so this was 48 hours before the end of the program. I went over to [Y Combinator co-founder] Paul Graham's house, and he said, "Just build something that you'd want to use today, not something you think people could use somehow." So I created a very, very, very basic demo in that 48 hours.
I got a weird reaction. I was a disheveled 18-year-old kid. But the idea had support. So I spent the next months building a workable product by night and raising $780,000 in angel funding. It was from a pretty cool team, the guy who made Gmail, Paul Buchheit, and Chris Dixon, and the guy who did Square. Also the CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor.
Was there an "a-ha" moment in deciding on working on a search engine for peoples' online documents and social media files?
I had this very long list of things I thought would be cool. Greplin was always near the top. But my mistake at Y Combinator was not listening to my own intuition enough. There's the line "Wouldn't it be cool if this thing existed?" but those aren't often good ideas, because you're not the ideal user. It's also very hard to make a product when you're not the target audience. Because you have to make decisions along the way, and unless you would be the target user, you're going to make the wrong decisions. Understanding that fact was my "a-ha" moment. Greplin was the one project idea I had for which I was the target audience.
Where does the name come from?
The idea came way before the name. The idea was in a sense a headline: A search engine that lets you find all of your stuff online. This guy Adam Goldstein [cofounder of flight-search start-up Hipmunk] and Paul Graham were sitting with me. Adam just threw out this name. And using the word grep, which in CS programming is essentially a command for search. So a lot of nerds get that. Adam threw out the name, and people liked it.
It's also a good one because people can pronounce it, spell it over the phone, and has a backwards inside joke that you'll only get if you a technical person. Total win.
Did you ever have to slow down and think: Wait, what am I doing?
Well, once, and it was wise. More or less, we had some money in the bank and we launched the product. But we had this weird problem where we didn't know so many people would use it. I mean, a lot did. Somehow the code I'd written at 4 a.m. trying to get onto stage didn't scale very well. (Laughter.) At that point you can either monkey-patch everything, or you can start from scratch. We chose to do the latter. So we spent September through last month reworking it all.
And you just launched the site officially last week?
Yeah, we raised $4 million from Sequoia in December, and kept programming, and then just lauched the site, and we're trying to keep it growing since.
You say you're not trying to compete with Google, but what you've created seems a lot like Google for social media and cloud-computing. What portion of your data lives, personally, is in the cloud?
I had this realization a few days ago when I thought I lost my laptop. Then I realized I don't think I have a single piece of information that's solely on my laptop. I think I'm indicitive of a future generation.
You told the Wall Street Journal "We're Switzerland; we're neutral." What does that mean?
I think what I was trying to say is that if you look at a product like this, it's useful. There's a need. And the question is why hasn't someone built it already? The answer is that Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., they're not able to get access to the data other than your own. Google and Apple compete. They're not sharing data anytime soon. We're Switzerland, because any company creating a product like this cannot be biased to any product over another.
Do you think you'll go to college eventually?
The way it works in Israel, you're supposed to go into the Army first, and they have a computer science division, I would have done that. But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak to me. But, really, I've been completely focused on the company, and haven't given it too much thought.
Did you always intend to become an entrepreneur?
I was always fascinated by the greater speed start-ups function at versus larger corporations.
It was always something I wanted to do—the unexpected thing was how quickly that happened. I thought I'd go to the Army, develop relationships with intelligent guys, and then three years later maybe start something.
How does your life and work now compare to what you see yourself doing in five years?
It'd be really great for me personally if we were able to keep growing Greplin in the next five years. If we can create something that's a household name and that people use every day, that's a dream.
Rob Bell Stirs Wrath With New Views On Old Questions
In a book to be published this month, the pastor, Rob Bell, known for his provocative views and appeal among the young, describes as “misguided and toxic” the dogma that “a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.”
Such statements are hardly radical among more liberal theologians, who for centuries have wrestled with the seeming contradiction between an all-loving God and the consignment of the billions of non-Christians to eternal suffering. But to traditionalists they border on heresy, and they have come just at a time when conservative evangelicals fear that a younger generation is straying from unbendable biblical truths.
Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.
His book comes as the evangelical community has embraced the Internet and social media to a remarkable degree, so that a debate that once might have built over months in magazines and pulpits has instead erupted at electronic speed.
The furor was touched off last Saturday by a widely read Christian blogger, Justin Taylor, based on promotional summaries of the book and a video produced by Mr. Bell. In his blog, Between Two Worlds, Mr. Taylor said that the pastor “is moving farther and farther away from anything resembling biblical Christianity.”
“It is unspeakably sad when those called to be ministers of the Word distort the gospel and deceive the people of God with false doctrine,” wrote Mr. Taylor, who is vice president of Crossway, a Christian publisher in Wheaton, Ill.
By that same evening, “Rob Bell” was one of the top 10 trending topics on Twitter. Within 48 hours, Mr. Taylor’s original blog had been viewed 250,000 times. Dozens of other Christian leaders and bloggers jumped into the fray and thousands of their readers posted comments on both sides of the debate, though few had yet seen the entire book.
One leading evangelical, John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, wrote, “Farewell Rob Bell.” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a blog post that by suggesting that people who do not embrace Jesus may still be saved, Mr. Bell was at best toying with heresy. He called the promotional video, in which Mr. Bell pointedly asks whether it can be true that Gandhi, a non-Christian, is burning in hell, “the sad equivalent of a theological striptease.”
Others such as Scot McNight, a professor of theology at North Park University in Chicago, said they welcomed the renewed discussion of one of the hardest issues in Christianity — can a loving God really be so wrathful toward people who faltered, or never were exposed to Jesus? In an interview and on his blog, he said that the thunder emanating from the right this week was not representative of American Christians, even evangelicals. According to surveys and his experience with students, Mr. McNight said, a large majority of evangelical Christians “more or less believe that people of other faiths will go to heaven,” whatever their churches and theologians may argue.
“Rob Bell is tapping into a younger generation that really wants to open up these questions,” he said. “He is also tapping into the fear of the traditionalists — that these differing views of heaven and hell will compromise the Christian message.”
Mr. Bell, who through his publisher declined to comment on the book or the debate, has resisted labels, but he is often described as part of the so-called emerging church movement, which caters to younger believers and has challenged theological boundaries as well as pastoral involvement in conservative politics.
As the controversy exploded last week, HarperOne moved up to March 15 the publication date of Mr. Bell’s book, “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
Judging from an advance copy, the 200-page book is unlikely to assuage Mr. Bell’s critics. In an elliptical style, he throws out probing questions about traditional biblical interpretations, mixing real-life stories with scripture.
Much of the book is a sometimes obscure discussion of the meaning of heaven and hell that tears away at the standard ideas. In his version, heaven is something that begins here on earth, in a life of goodness, and hell seems more a condition than an eternal fate — “the very real consequences we experience when we reject all the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us.”
While sliding close to what critics consider the heresy of “universalism” — that all humans will eventually be saved — he never uses the term .
Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, in a blog posting called for all sides to temper their rhetoric. and welcome more debate.
“We won’t be able to discern where the Spirit is leading if we don’t listen and respond respectfully to one another,” he wrote.
“God once used a donkey to make his will known,” he added, “so surely he is able to speak through both traditionalists and gadflies.”
World’s sixth mass
BBC News – Oil wea
Pharmacists Fight Ma
Pharmacists Fight Mandatory Mail-Order Prescriptions
Community pharmacists in New York are lobbying state lawmakers to pass legislation that would prevent health plans from requiring patients taking medications for chronic ailments to fill their prescriptions through the mail.
While some plans had shifted to mail delivery long ago because it was often cheaper for both employers and consumers, drugstores have been offering more competitive prices and pushing lawmakers to level the playing field by ensuring that people can still visit their local pharmacy for their drugs.
The proposed legislation, which was introduced in both state chambers in late February, would ban mandatory mail-order programs.
It would also forbid plans from demanding that people pay more for drugs if they buy them at the drugstore. “What we are asking is to make mail order an option, not mandatory,” said Craig M. Burridge, the executive director of the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York, whose members traveled to Albany on Wednesday to plead their case. “We are not opposed to mail order as a convenience to the patients. But right now, they don’t have a choice.”
Pennsylvania is considering similar legislation. The federal Medicare program already requires drug benefit plans to allow members the option of filling their prescriptions at the drugstore.
In making their argument, the pharmacists say some people, particularly the elderly who are taking multiple medications, benefit from going into a store and having a pharmacist oversee their prescriptions. They say many customers prefer being able to shop at places where they have longtime relationships with pharmacists.
The large companies that manage prescription drug programs, known as pharmacy benefit managers, say mail order is attractive because it is less expensive and more convenient.
“There’s going to be use of more home delivery, not less,” said Mark Merritt, the president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents the pharmacy benefit managers. “It saves money and is pretty popular with consumers.” He says employers choose mail-order programs because they believe them to be a better alternative, and the legislature should not take away their choice of plans.
But as the business of filling prescriptions also shifts from expensive branded pharmaceuticals to much cheaper generic alternatives, retail pharmacists, particularly large chains like Walgreen’s, are having much more success in persuading employers and health plans to allow people the choice of using drugstores for their medications for chronic ailments.
To increase sales at their stores, “retail pharmacies can offer and compete with mail order” by being willing to make less profit on the prescriptions they fill, said Adam J. Fein, an industry consultant in Philadelphia. “They are essentially trying to offer these products at mail-order pricing,” he said.
The decision by Wal-Mart several years ago to offer generic drugs for only $4 and the move by retailers to compete aggressively on price has damped the enthusiasm for mail order as the least expensive option, Mr. Fein said. Medicare’s insistence on including retail drugstores as an option has also helped slow the growth in prescriptions being filled by mail-order pharmacies, which he said lost market share in 2009.
Mr. Fein also points to Walgreen’s new marketing campaign, promoting its ability to fill prescriptions for the 90 days, the same as mail order. Walgreens, which claims many customers do not know their plans allow them to get three months’ worth of medicine at a drugstore, says it filled nearly 700,000 more 90-day prescriptions in January than it did at the same time last year.
Some benefit managers say they are now less convinced that mail is always better than retail, even in trying to save money. “I don’t know if mail service is a vastly superior cost containment tool today,” said David R. Kwasny, the president of Restat, an independent pharmacy benefit manager that does not have a mail delivery service. He says employers and insurers can instead try to steer patients to certain retail pharmacists, including independent stores, that are willing to compete on price.
But he also emphasized the personal touch of a retail pharmacist. “We feel there’s a lot of value and underutilization behind the pharmacy counter,” he said.
Take the case of an elderly patient who came into Family Medical Pharmacy, an independent drugstore in Williamsville, N.Y., near Buffalo. The patient had run out of Aricept, to treat dementia. She had already been to a chain drugstore where the pharmacists told her they could not help because she had mandatory mail-order prescriptions. Dennis C. Galluzzo, a pharmacist who is the co-owner of Family Medical Pharmacy, said he called her plan to try to get permission to refill her prescription.
“I relentlessly stayed on the phone for hours until we finally get it resolved and had to get an override from two supervisors,” he said. Only after he threatened to send the woman to a hospital to get the medication did the plan give the drugstore permission to fill her prescription, he said.
For their part, the prescription benefit managers say mail-order programs are better able to convert a patient to a less expensive generic drug, and that the plans they offer are better equipped to oversee a patient’s prescriptions.
Because these companies have invested in sophisticated computer systems to monitor all prescriptions, they argue they can intervene when someone is taking drugs that interact. If a patient has a particular question and needs privacy, they can simply telephone one of the plan’s pharmacists. In a drugstore, someone may feel rushed or uneasy about asking a question. “It’s just not an optimal environment,” said Timothy C. Wentworth, a senior executive at Medco Health Solutions, a large pharmacy benefit manager.
Some companies, however, are trying to develop programs that provide more flexibility. CVS Caremark, for example, has made use of its CVS retail drugstore chain to offer a program called maintenance choice, where people can go to one of their stores or use mail order to fill a long-term prescription. Express Scripts says it has developed a program that allows customers to choose whether to use mail order for all or some of their medications, and many people decide they would rather have their drugs delivered.
And while mandatory programs are still relatively rare, consultants say employers are increasingly likely to use financial incentives to try to steer workers to the least expensive options. In some cases, plans may have programs where customers pay less when they go to a limited network of retail pharmacists that are willing to offer less expensive prices or they may ask customers to pay more when they go to the drugstore.
Edward A. Kaplan, a benefits consultant with the Segal Company, recalls a recent client that instituted a co-payment when any of its employees used a retail pharmacist to fill a long-term prescription. Many of the employees happily paid for the privilege. “They didn’t vote with their wallets,” he said.
BBC News - Oil wealth 'must be shared' with citizens says Soros
Citizens of oil producing nations must see more benefit from their country's national resources, billionaire investor George Soros has told the BBC.
Revolts in Libya were partly the result of "revulsion against a corruption" fed by the misuse of oil money, he added.
More "transparency and accountability" was needed from other producers such as Russia and Saudi Arabia he said.
Mr Soros also predicted the Iranian regime would be overthrown in the "bloodiest of the revolutions".
World's sixth mass extinction may be underway: study - Yahoo! News
PARIS (AFP) – Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth's history, according to a paper released by the science journal Nature.
Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events.
But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study.
Evidence from fossils suggests that in the "Big Five" extinctions, at least 75 percent of all animal species were destroyed.
Palaeobiologists at the University of California at Berkeley looked at the state of biodiversity today, using the world's mammal species as a barometer.
Until mankind's big expansion some 500 years ago, mammal extinctions were very rare: on average, just two species died out every million years.
CBS Agrees To Acquire Clicker Media, Names New Interactive Pres
DOW JONES NEWSWIRESCBS Corp. (CBS) said it agreed to acquire Clicker Media Inc.--an Internet guide of legal broadcast programming content that can be found online--and named its co-founder as the head of the broadcasting company's interactive division.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
Jim Lanzone, who is also the former CEO of Ask.com, will become president of CBS Interactive, a role that oversees all of that unit's worldwide operations. The company's interactive segment has benefited as advertisers are buying across both TV and the Web. The business is also expanding its presence across mobile platforms.
Lanzone held various executive roles at Ask.com, which was acquired by IAC/InteractiveCorp. (IACI) in 2005, and according to CBS, he was one of the executives most responsible for turning around Ask Jeeves prior to its sale.
He succeeds Neil Ashe, who served as president of CBS Interactive since the company acquired CNET Networks Inc. in June 2008. Ashe in December announced he would leave CBS upon the naming of a successor.
Launched in late 2009, Clicker has indexed more than 1 million online television shows, movies and videos, from free and paid services. The company has growth potential as more video content is streamed online. Clicker.com will be folded into the interactive unit's roster, which includes TV.com, CBS.com, CBSSports.com and other Internet properties.
Last month, CBS reported its fourth-quarter profit more than quadrupled as revenue and core earnings rose in each of its business segment. The company's interactive unit's display advertising revenue was up 18%, and CBS said its namesake website has been the number one TV network website for 25 straight months in terms of unique viewers.
Shares were down 3.2% at $23.58 in recent trading, amid a broad market downturn. The stock is up 24% this year.
-By John Kell, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2480; john.kell@dowjones.com
Saab Unveils First Android Infotainment System, IQon | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Saab has announced the first Android-based, in-dash "infotainment" system for a car.
Called 'IQon,' the platform was demoed in a Saab Phoenix concept car at the 2011 Geneva motor show. See a video promo below
iPad 2 Debate: Specs Vs. Experience? -- InformationWeek
On the surface, the iPad 2 is a spec bump from the original iPad. All the basics of the device have been improved in some small way (except for the display), and Apple is pricing the iPad 2 aggressively compared to the competition. Since the Apple keynote concluded, I've seen a half-dozen charts and tables thrown together that compare the specs of all the major tablets. Is that the right way to consider which tablet to get?
