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

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

Read More..

With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.

Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.

Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.

“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”

Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.

A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.

“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.

Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.

Read More..

Cease-Fire in Myanmar With Kachin Rebels Fails to Take Hold

BANGKOK — A cease-fire ordered by the Myanmar government failed to take hold on Saturday, with rebels and the government blaming each other for fighting that continued through the day.

But ethnic Kachin rebels and at least one independent observer said that the fighting was less intense than in previous days and that the government’s aerial bombardments had stopped. Both the government and the rebels called for a negotiated settlement, although they seemed far from agreeing on the fundamental question of how much autonomy the Kachin ethnic group should have — the emotionally charged issue at the root of the fighting.

“We have been inviting the K.I.O. into the peace process, and here I would like to invite them again,” President Thein Sein said Saturday, referring to the Kachin Independence Organization, the political wing of the group fighting the government.

Mr. Thein Sein spoke as representatives from at least two dozen countries and international organizations including the World Bank gathered in the Myanmar capital, Naypyidaw, for a conference on offering assistance to the country as it moves toward democracy after decades of military rule.

Many observers have said that the government may have decided to offer a unilateral cease-fire on Friday to coincide with the meeting since national reconciliation with Myanmar’s many ethnic groups is seen as a measure of the success of Mr. Thein Sein’s ambitious democratic reforms.

Although the government has signed cease-fire agreements with other minority groups, it has been fighting the Kachin for the last year and a half after an earlier truce collapsed. The conflict had intensified in recent weeks.

Despite the continued battles Saturday, there were some faint but encouraging signs of progress toward a peaceful settlement. The Kachin Independence Organization issued a statement calling for the cease-fire to include all of Kachin State, the mountainous, northernmost part of Myanmar and the homeland of the Kachin, suggesting it welcomed a halt to the fighting.

The government’s announcement on Friday mentioned only the area near the border with China known as Lajayang, but a government spokesman, Ye Htut, said by telephone on Saturday that the cease-fire would encompass “the whole conflict area.”

And yet the developments on Saturday followed a familiar pattern in Myanmar — a seeming disconnect between the orders of the president, who is not the commander in chief under the country’s new constitution, and the actions of the military. Mr. Thein Sein has said before that the army should only defend itself, but some analysts say that leaves it wide latitude.

On Saturday, Mr. Ye Htut acknowledged the fighting but said that it had been initiated by the rebels and that the troops had been acting in self-defense.

La Nan, a spokesman for the Kachin Independence Organization, said there were Myanmar artillery attacks and “skirmishes” on Saturday morning around Lajayang, at the very place and time the cease-fire was supposed to take effect.

Ryan Roco, an American photographer who was in the area, said there were no airstrikes and “minimal ground fighting” on Saturday. “But the shelling continued all day,” he said by telephone.

One fighter who is allied with the Kachin rebels, Min Htay, posted on his Facebook page that the Kachin were broadcasting a message over loudspeakers to government soldiers, telling them to stop fighting because the president had issued a cease-fire. Mr. Min Htay appeared to be suggesting that the government troops were not aware of the order, a possible sign of a rift between the military leadership and the president.

Mr. Ye Htut denied there was any such disagreement. “Government troops always obey President U Thein Sein’s order,” he said.

Myanmar’s many ethnic groups, which make up about one-third of the population, have called for a greater federal system, but Mr. Thein Sein appears to favor a more centralized union that would preserve the pre-eminence of the majority Burmese ethnic group. The current constitution calls for a hybrid system of local administrations and a powerful central government.

Wai Moe contributed reporting from Yangon, Myanmar.

Read More..

The Lede: Live Blog: Inside the Fed's 2007 Deliberations

On Friday the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of its discussions in 2007, the year the housing market, the financial markets, and the broader economy began to unravel. Reporters from The Times are sharing their findings on what the transcripts reveal in the blog entries and tweets below.

Read More..

Well: Your Twitter Tips for Going Vegan

In this week’s Well column, “How to Go Vegan,”, we asked you to send in your favorite tips and tricks for adopting a solely plant-based diet on Twitter. We received a range of responses, from quirky ingredient combinations that replicate a nonvegan dish to simple mantras to get you in a vegan frame of mind. Here are some of our favorites. To see the entire list of submissions, visit the hashtag, #vegantips.

Let’s start with some simple recipes that may satisfy your vegan craving:

---

Add some of your favorite ingredients:

---

Don’t forget to love your legumes:

---

And what about some tips to keep you on the vegan path?

---

And don’t forget to serve a healthy side of humor with that vegan dish:

Read More..

Well: Your Twitter Tips for Going Vegan

In this week’s Well column, “How to Go Vegan,”, we asked you to send in your favorite tips and tricks for adopting a solely plant-based diet on Twitter. We received a range of responses, from quirky ingredient combinations that replicate a nonvegan dish to simple mantras to get you in a vegan frame of mind. Here are some of our favorites. To see the entire list of submissions, visit the hashtag, #vegantips.

Let’s start with some simple recipes that may satisfy your vegan craving:

---

Add some of your favorite ingredients:

---

Don’t forget to love your legumes:

---

And what about some tips to keep you on the vegan path?

---

And don’t forget to serve a healthy side of humor with that vegan dish:

Read More..

Bits Blog: Facebook's Other Big Disruption

Facebook just made a potentially game-changing announcement. It got less fanfare than Tuesday’s announcement that it is going into the social search business, but this other announcement may have bigger long-term implications for the technology industry.

Put simply, some of the world’s biggest computing systems just got a little cheaper, and a lot easier to configure. As a consequence, the companies that supply the hardware to these systems may have to scramble to remain as profitable. The reason is a Facebook-led open source project.

In 2011 Facebook began the Open Compute Project, an effort among technology companies to use open-source computer hardware. Tech companies similarly shared intellectual property with Linux software, which lowered costs and spurred innovation. Facebook’s project has attracted many significant participants, including Goldman Sachs, Arista Networks, Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

At a user summit on Wednesday Intel, another key member of the Open Compute Project, announced it would release to the group a silicon-based optical system that enables the data and computing elements in a rack of computer servers to communicate at 100 gigabits a second. That is significantly faster than conventional wire-based methods, and uses about half the power.

More important, it means that elements of memory and processing that now must be fixed closely together can be separated within a rack, and used as needed for different kinds of tasks. There is a lot of waste in data centers today simply because, when there is an upgrade in servers, lots of other associated data-processing hardware has to be changed, too.

There were other announcements, like a computer motherboard called Grouphug that allows different manufacturers’ chips to be interchanged without altering other parts of the machine. Before, they were custom made. Put together, such innovations potentially lower the cost and complexity of running big and small data centers to an extent that works for a lot of companies.

“Who wouldn’t want a cheaper, more efficient server?” said Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design at Facebook, and the chairman of Open Compute. “The problem we’re solving is much larger than Facebook’s own challenges. There is a massive amount of data in the world that people expect to have processed quickly.”

To be sure, it’s in Facebook’s interest to attack expensive hardware. The company makes money from a service that requires hundreds of thousands of computer servers distributed in big centers around the world. Google and Amazon.com, which are not members of the project, maintain proprietary systems which they apparently felt gave them a competitive edge.

For Facebook, the difference seems to be more in the software. To the extent hardware costs drop, that’s great for them. Mr. Frankovsky argued that, while “this puts challenges on the incumbents” in hardware, “it also helps them. They have a finite number of engineering resources, and this way they hear from a community about whether there is an interest for a product.” Intel may hope to benefit from its open-source release, since it could see an overall rise in demand for its chips with the move toward cheaper computing.

The real test is whether Facebook can increase the number of potential buyers for Open Compute equipment. “The question is, can they extend this beyond a few Web businesses like Facebook and Rackspace, or a few financial exercises at Goldman, and bring this to industries like oil or aerospace?” said Matt Eastwood, an analyst with IDC, a technology research firm. “That will take it from 20 or 30 companies to hundreds of companies.”

The issue isn’t so much a technical one, he argues, as it is one of getting corporate information technology professionals interested in radical design changes. Mr. Frankovsky is aware of the problem. Recently he and his colleagues led a seminar in Texas for BP, Shell and other oil giants on how they could use Open Compute hardware in their data centers.

This will not change things dramatically this year, and possibly even next, but over the long haul it could remake a lot of businesses. Linux, remember, was around for several years as a minor player, but eventually undid Sun Microsystems and others.

Read More..

IHT Rendezvous: How Far Will Europeans Support France's Counter-Jihad?

LONDON — It did not require a crystal ball to foresee, as Rendezvous did in our 2013 preview, that Mali would be in the news and that France might be the first to intervene there to counter a perceived terrorist threat to Europe.

Less predictable, however, is the extent to which the French can rely on the support of their European allies now that they have decided to go it alone.

The crisis had been building for the best part of a year since mutinous soldiers staged a coup in Bamako, the Malian capital, last March, and separatist Tuareg tribesmen took the opportunity to seize the north of the country. The tribesmen were quickly pushed aside by radical Islamists, including those behind this week’s hostage-taking in neighboring Algeria.

They were poised to extend their rule this month beyond the two-thirds of the country they already control when the French stepped in at the request of the Bamako government.

As early as last April, Alain Juppé, the then French foreign minister, was warning of the “extremely grave threat” posed by the Qaeda-linked insurgents and their aim of establishing a jihadist regime in northern Mali.

In early September, António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was telling readers of the IHT:

If unchecked, the Mali crisis threatens to create an arc of instability extending west into Mauritania and east through Niger, Chad and Sudan to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, characterized by extended spaces where state authority is weak and pockets of territorial control are exercised by transnational criminals.

So, did the international community, and Europe in particular, react too slowly to the escalating crisis? Or has France acted precipitously in opting for a military solution to contain the threat?

David Rohde writes elsewhere on Rendezvous that regional experts believe the French had to act.

But, as French troops launched ground operations this week in support of local forces, how far are France’s European allies prepared to be sucked into a potential Malian quagmire?

Germany, Denmark and Britain are among European Union partners that have offered logistical support in Mali.

However, as David Cameron, the British prime minister, assured Parliament when he announced the offer of transport aircraft to assist the French mission, there was no question of putting British boots on the ground.

The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is being even more cautious, limiting its assistance to supplying planes to airlift African troops from the regional ECOWAS alliance.

“Under no circumstances does Germany want to become involved in a messy conflict with no clear end in sight,” Germany’s Der Spiegel commented, “particularly not in an election year.”

Germany held out against intervention in Libya in 2011, eventually spearheaded by France and Britain, siding with Russia in a crucial United Nations vote in defiance of its European allies.

Libya underlined the lack of a common foreign policy, let alone a common defense policy, among the 27 European partners who now face a new crisis in North Africa.

Facing recriminations from some in France that it was only its soldiers who were doing the fighting, European foreign ministers agreed on Thursday to speed up the dispatch of more than 200 military personnel to train Malian government forces to confront the Islamists.

But that was an option that had been on the table since October, when European Union officials said the alliance was considering such a move.

The E.U. also stressed that the trainers, due to be deployed by mid-February at the latest, would not be involved in combat operations.

Commenting on the outcome of Thursday’s meeting, Christophe Giltay of Belgium’s RTL broadcaster, said, “More and more French people are asking themselves if the Europeans have really understood the gravity of the situation.”

Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer and Martin Michelot of the Washington-based German Marshall Fund of the United States wrote this week that “the glacial pace at which decisions are taken at the national level to support France’s efforts in Mali only underscores the need for European leaders to be willing to discuss common security issues.”

Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, said on Thursday some of France’s partners were “willing to help and support France in every way and they did not rule in or rule out any aspect of that, including military support.”

But, according to the German Marshall Fund experts: “The French military is nevertheless facing the hard reality of acting on its own, with very little support from other European allies.”

Read More..

Lawmakers Seek Data on Energy Drinks

Three Democratic lawmakers on Thursday sent letters to 14 marketers of high-caffeinated energy drinks requesting data about the products’ ingredients and any company studies showing their risks and benefits to children and young people.

In recent months, the Food and Drug Administration has begun examining the safety of energy drinks following reports of several deaths and numerous injuries potentially associated with the products. The number of annual hospital emergency visits involving the drinks doubled from 2007 to 2011, according to a federal report released last week.

In addition, claims by drink producers that their proprietary “energy” formulations provide consumers with a physical and mental edge are coming under scrutiny. There is little scientific evidence, researchers say, that the drinks provide anything more than a high dose of caffeine similar to that found in a cup of strong coffee.

The letters were sent by Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts to companies including Monster Beverage, Rockstar, Red Bull and Living Essentials, the distributor of 5-Hour Energy, a small, concentrated energy “shot” drink. Letters were also sent to PepsiCo, which sells Amp; Coca-Cola, which sells NOS; and Dr Pepper Snapple, which sells Venom Energy.

Among other questions in the letter, the lawmakers asked the companies to specify the total amount of caffeine in the energy beverages. Products like 5-Hour Energy that are marketed as supplements do not list the amount of caffeine used and producers use caffeine from a variety of sources such as synthetic caffeine, the guarana plant and tea extracts.

They also asked why the companies chose to market their energy product as either a beverage or a dietary supplement. The two regulatory categories have separate rules about ingredient disclosures and reporting of potential health risks.

The lawmakers also asked the companies to provide any studies that they have run or underwritten that examine the effect of energy drink use in children or young adults.

The few studies cited by energy drink companies to back their marketing claims have taken place among adults and have compared the effect of an energy drink to that of a placebo like flavored water.

Other public officials are looking into marketing claims of energy drink makers, including the attorney general of New York State and the city attorney for San Francisco.

Read More..

Ask Well: Help for the Deskbound

One of the problems with office work is that many of us are using chairs that don’t fit our bodies very well or give adequate support to the back, said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences in Boston who specializes in ergonomics and safety. If you are experiencing back pain, you may be able to adjust your chair to increase its lumbar support. A good office chair will have an adjustable seat pan that you can slide back and forth as well as adjustable back and height features. First, sit in the chair so the lumbar region of your back, your lower back, is resting on the back support. At the same time, your feet should be resting comfortably on the ground and the back of your knees should be about three-finger widths from the edge of the chair, said Dr. Dennerlein.

Some high-end chair brands have adjustable seat pans, including the Steelcase Leap chair, which retails for between $800 and $900 and offers an adjustable seat and plenty of lumbar support.

The Steelcase Criterion chair sells anywhere from $350 to $850 online, depending on the model, and boasts seven different adjustments “to offer support through the full range of dynamic seating postures.”

The HumanScale Freedom chair is the winner of several design awards and also has an adjustable seat pan as well as “weight-sensitive recline, synchronously adjustable armrests, and dynamically positioned headrest.” ($400 to $1,400)

The Herman Miller Aeron chair is also popular because it comes in small, medium and large sizes and claims a PostureFit design that “supports the way your pelvis tilts naturally forward, so that your spine stays aligned and you avoid back pain.” ($680 to $850)

If all that sounds really wonderful and really too expensive, there may be a simpler solution to ease your back pain at work. Invest $15 to $30 in a lumbar chair pillow to make sure your back is getting the support it needs even when you are not sitting in a $900 chair.

Read More..