The winter vomiting bug affected about 100,000 people over Christmas with the number of confirmed cases 72% higher than this time last year, Health Protection Agency figures indicate.

The dramatic rise was attributed in part to an early outbreak of the illness, caused by the norovirus, which closed dozens of hospital wards as it struck across Britain.

Laboratory-confirmed incidents of norovirus amounted to 3,877 cases recorded in England and Wales, a rise from the 2,255 tally of last year.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said that for every reported case an estimated 288 were not flagged up, meaning that about 1.12 million people could have contracted the illness this season.

The Archbishop of Westminster, head of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, has ordered that special fortnightly "Soho masses" for gay and lesbian churchgoers in central London are not appropriate and are to be axed.

The services, intended to be particularly welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Catholics, had been held at Our Lady of the Assumption church in the West End for six years with the blessing of senior clergy but had attracted criticism from traditionalists.

The cancellation by Archbishop Vincent Nichols will be seen as a victory for those who lobbied for an end to what they see as an affront to church teachings.

The move comes as the Catholic church fights plans for same-sex marriage. Nichols has been one of the loudest voices opposing government plans to allow same-sex marriage, criticising them as "a shambles" and "Orwellian" in a BBC interview broadcast on Christmas Day.

Statisticians in Germany have said the number of employed people in the country has kept increasing despite the financial crisis. Over the past 12 months, more jobs have been available in many sectors of the economy.

2012 saw another rise in the number of employed people across Germany, the National Statistics Office (Destatis) said on Wednesday on the basis of preliminary calculations.

It said some 41.5 million people were employed in Germany last year, marking a 1.0-percent increase from 2011 levels and a rise for the sixth consecutive year.

Since 2005, the army of employed people in the country has swollen by 6.8 percent, or by 2.66 million people in absolute terms.

Solar energy is on the rise in Germany, with a record 1.3 million photovoltaic systems in 2012. The increase comes as new consumer taxes on energy are to take effect in the country.

The recent solar boom means the alternative form of energy now reaches 8 million homes in Germany, a 45 percent increase compared to 2011, the German Solar Industry Association (BSW) said on Tuesday.

"Germany is now reaping the fruits of its efforts in solar technology," said the BSW's chief executive, Carsten Körnig. "Its share of the power supply has quadrupled in just three years. At the same time, the price of a new solar power system installation has halved."

The new numbers come as a consumer tax increase on energy takes effect. Starting this month, taxes will increase on consumer power bills from 3.6 euro cents ($4.76 cents) to 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour in a bid to help finance the cost of the country's switch to renewable energy.

The Metropolitan police have made two further arrests in their Operation Yewtree investigation into alleged sexual offences by Jimmy Savile and others.

A 53-year-old man was arrested in Hampshire and a 59-year-old man held in west London on suspicion of sexual offences on Wednesday.

The suspects take the total number of people arrested under Operation Yewtree to nine.

The Met police said the two arrests fall under the "others" strand of the investigation, meaning the alleged offences are not connected to Savile.

A French satirical magazine, whose offices were fire-bombed after it published cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad last September, has published a 64-page special issue with cartoons on the life of Islam's founder.

The editor of Charlie Hebdo weekly insisted that the publication titled "The Life of Muhammad", which was published on Wednesday, was a properly researched and educational work prepared by a Franco-Tunisian sociologist.

Prior to publication, Stephane Charbonnier, who was also the illustrator of the book, said "I don't think higher Muslim minds could find anything inappropriate".

He told the AFP news agency last week that "It is a biography authorised by Islam since it was edited by Muslims."

On Monday a senior political advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the work as a deliberate provocation.

"To transform the life of the prophet of Islam into a cartoon is in itself a mistake," Ibrahim Kalin wrote on his Twitter account.

Italian spreads fell to 283bp as markets react euphorically to the fiscal cliff deal, amid unbroken optimism about the eurozone; the latest Italian polls see a massive advantages for Pier Luigi Bersani's PD; Mario Monti's alliance scores between 10 and 12%, but could yet emerge as a king maker if the PD falls short of a majority in both chambers of parliament; Silvio Berlusconi says Monti was part of a criminal conspiracy of international banks to bring down his government; Monti said he keeps having difficulties following Berlusconi logic; the latest forecast show a massive rise in Italian unemployment, especially in the south; while the private sector suffers, the Italian public sector's revenues are increasing; Jonathan Hopkin says Berlusconi will not win the election, but he could still score a surprise; Gavin Jones says Monti's labour market reforms have so far failed to bring any benefits; the Greek general government had a primary surplus between January and November last year; finance minister says country will be within the agreed 2012 deficit target of 1.5% of GDP; the pressure is growing on a former Greek finance minister over allegations that he tampered with a list of tax refugees; the Spanish Socialists are proposing to turn the country into a federal state to counter the threat of regional separatism; the Spanish government is considering a number of measures to reduce SME's dependence on bank loans; a Spanish newspaper writes that the 2012 deficit will come in at 9% of GDP - completely busting the target; Portugal's president has referred the 2013 budget to the Constitutional Court; the eurozone's manufacturing sector purchasing managers' index continued to shrink further in December - while US manufacturing is slowly picking up; German employment reached a new record, despite the economic slowdown; car sales fell dramatically in Italy, Spain and France during 2012; an investors' survey shows that the risk of a eurozone breakdown has fallen dramatically; US money market funds are slowly returning to the eurozone - or rather to Germany - but overall funding levels are still low; Lex, meanwhile, warns that the eurozone crisis is far from over.

Universities will be told they should recruit more white, working-class boys in the wake of figures showing a massive slump in applications from men for courses.

The Universities minister David Willetts wants white, working-class teenage boys put in the same category as students from other disadvantaged communities and ethnic minorities - as groups that should be targeted for recruitment.

Promoting access for boys, particularly for working-class boys, seems pretty uncontroversial. But unless he has numbers indicating that white working-class boys have a lower rate of university access than non-white working-class boys, the introduction of the racial element is completely outrageous.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Documentary proof exists that France's former President Nicolas Sarkozy took more than €50m from the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, a French judge has been told.

The claim, leaked today, was made just before Christmas by a Lebanese-born businessman, Ziad Takieddine, who has been a fixer for legal - and allegedly illegal - dealings between France and the Middle East for 20 years.

Expanding on claims already made by one of Mr Gaddafi's sons and a French investigative website, Mr Takieddine told an investigative judge that he could show him written proof that Mr Sarkozy's first presidential campaign in 2006-7 was "abundantly" financed by Tripoli. The payments, he said, continued after Mr Sarkozy became President.

In total, he said, they exceeded the €50m in illegal payments to Mr Sarkozy claimed by Mr Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam just before the demise of the Libyan regime - thanks partly to French and British airstrikes - in 2011.

Mr Takieddine's claims were rejected today as "outrageous" and "self-interested" by sources close to Mr Sarkozy. Last year President Sarkozy denounced a similar claim by the investigative website Mediapart as "grotesque".

The world's leading economies will have $220 billion less sovereign debt to refinance in 2013, cutting supply after every major government bond market rallied for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis.

The amount of bills, notes and bonds coming due for the Group of Seven nations plus Brazil, Russia, India and China will drop to $7.38 trillion from $7.60 trillion in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Japan, the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Brazil will see a decline, while the U.S., Canada, Russia, India and China will face an increase.

While high debt loads are blamed for curbing global economic growth, bond investors are encouraged by signs that some nations are starting to rein in spending as they extend the average maturity of their obligations. Instead of rising, borrowing costs are falling as supply decreases, inflation remains in check and central banks from the U.S. to Europe cut interest rates to record lows.

"The progress made in fiscal adjustments has been quite significant in a number of countries, perhaps more than the market is realizing," said Mohit Kumar, the London-based head of European interest-rate strategy at Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's biggest bank. "Policy will remain accommodative. I don't expect to see a selloff in core government bonds. There will be enough demand."

At the last European Council summit of 2012, politicians decided to go ahead with the banking union while ending their reflections on fiscal union they had initiated in June, a time of acute market stress. The message: banking union is needed; the rest is not.

This behaviour confirms that the eurozone has little appetite to think about its own future. Like negligent or impecunious homeowners who only contemplate repairs when the roof threatens to collapse, their overriding motivation is to avoid imminent disaster. As market expectations of break-up have abated, even a discussion on whether integration initiatives would make the currency area more resilient or more efficient seems superfluous.

The allure of the fast-growing U.S. market for prepaid debit cards is pitting niche players like pop star Justin Bieber against financial giants including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and American Express Co. (AXP)

Both Bieber and JPMorgan want to sell more of the cards, a part of the financial services business that holds as much as $1.7 billion in potential fees for banks seeking new revenue streams as they face growing competition and regulation.

Myriad players, including a firm catering to recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, are stepping up with their own products on the theory that some consumers may pay a slight premium for a card with novel functions -- or Bieber's visage printed on it.

"The market for prepaid debit cards and payroll card products continues to grow at lightning speed, with new products racing to compete with mainstream consumer services like checking accounts," Madeline Aufseeser, senior analyst with the Boston-based Aite Group, said in an e-mail.

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Natural gas futures in New York tumbled the most in more than three years on forecasts of moderating temperatures that may reduce demand for the power- plant fuel.

Gas dropped as much as 9 percent after Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland, said colder-than-average weather in most of the lower-48 states this week would give way to above-normal temperatures from Jan. 7 through Jan. 11. The low in New York on Jan. 9 may be 38 degrees Fahrenheit (3 Celsius), 11 higher than usual, according to AccuWeather Inc.

"We're going to see some warm weather across the primary gas-consuming regions," said Gene McGillian, an analyst and broker at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut. "As we get into the new year without signs of sustained cold weather, the fundamental picture is going to force us lower."

Natural gas for February delivery fell 15.8 cents, or 4.7 percent, to $3.193 per million British thermal units at 12:33 p.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The intraday percentage decline was the most since Sept. 11, 2009. The futures have risen 6.8 percent from a year ago. Trading volume was up 16 percent from the 100-day average at 10:15 a.m.

Industrial metals rallied, leading commodities higher, as a U.S. budget agreement that averted higher taxes and spending cuts brightened the outlook for demand.

The House approved a measure skirting income-tax increases for most households in the country, the world's second-largest metals consumer. President Barack Obama said he would sign the bill into law. Global equities advanced, and lead, aluminum and nickel led gains on the Standard & Poor's GSCI Spot Index of 24 raw materials. Copper rose the most in more than three months.

"This does help growth prospects, because if the tax increases went into play, it definitely would have taken a huge chunk out of gross domestic product," Bill O'Neill, a partner at Logic Advisors in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, said in a telephone interview. "We're looking for improved demand this year for industrial metals."

Copper futures for delivery in March increased 2.3 percent to settle at $3.736 a pound at 1:22 p.m. on the Comex in New York, the biggest gain since Sept. 14. China is the largest metals consumer.

WASHINGTON -- Just a few years ago, the tax deal pushed through Congress on Tuesday would have been a Republican fiscal fantasy, a sweeping bill that locks in virtually all of the Bush-era tax cuts, exempts almost all estates from taxation, and enshrines the former president's credo that dividends and capital gains should be taxed equally and gently.

But times have changed, President George W. Bush is gone, and before the bill's final passage late Tuesday, House Republican leaders struggled all day to quell a revolt among caucus members who threatened to blow up a hard-fought compromise that they could have easily framed as a victory. Many House Republicans seemed determined to put themselves in a position to be blamed for sending the nation's economy into a potential tailspin under the weight of automatic tax increases and spending cuts.

The latest internal party struggle on Capitol Hill surprised even Senate Republicans, who had voted overwhelmingly for a deal largely hashed out by their leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The bill passed the Senate, 89 to 8, at 2 a.m. on Tuesday, with only 5 of the chamber's 47 Republicans voting no

At least 60,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, the UN human rights commissioner has said, citing an "exhaustive" study which has sharply increased the number of those believed killed.

Before the latest UN-commissioned survey it had been estimated that up to 45,000 people had perished during the conflict; the up-to-date calculation increases the death toll by a third.

The revised estimate came as it was reported that dozens had been killed on Wednesday after a government war plane bombed people queuing at a petrol station in a suburb of Damascus.

According to the UN report, almost three-quarters of those listed as killed on both sides of the conflict were men. Estimating casualties is a notoriously difficult process in the midst of an ongoing war, but in this case the UN says it has established the name, place and date of death of each of those it says it has counted.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - To go down fighting in the Andean Community (CAN), with a combined market of 92 million consumers, or move up to the big leagues of Mercosur, with 275 million? This was the dilemma faced by Bolivia's foreign trade strategists when it came to pursuing full membership in the bloc formed by its neighbours to the south.

The contrast is remarkable: last year, Bolivia's exports to its partners in CAN - Colombia, Ecuador and Peru - totalled $774m, resulting in a trade surplus of $88m.

In the meantime, Bolivia purchased $2.427bn in goods from the countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), while its sales to the bloc - excluding the main export, natural gas - were a mere $232m, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics.

It should be kept in mind, as well, that these figures refer to trade with the founding members of Mercosur - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - and do not include Venezuela, which did not become a full member until mid-year.

The gang of rapists, who brutally assaulted a 23-year old  woman on a bus in New Delhi last month, had tried to run her over with the vehicle after the attack, according to reports which cite a grisly police account of the incident.

The victim's boyfriend, who was beaten up and thrown off the bus after the woman had been repeatedly raped, managed to pull her to safety just in time, police are set to allege in a 1,000-page charge sheet to be presented in court on Thursday.

"The woman and her friend were stripped and thrown out of the bus," The Indian Express reported. "Her friend pulled her away when he saw the bus reversing to run her over."

India rape survivor's long wait for justice

The victim, a medical student, died from her injuries in a Singapore hospital on Saturday after a 13-day struggle to survive injuries so grievous that her intestines had to be removed.

Venezuela's vice-president has said that President Hugo Chavez, who underwent surgery for cancer in Cuba for a fourth time, is "completely conscious of the complexity of his post-operative state". 

In a televised interview in Cuba, Maduro said he had met Chavez twice and that the president seemed to have "the same strength as always". 

Maduro's comments came amid rumours, some of which circulated online, that Chavez's health had deteriorated and that he was in coma. 

"All the time we've been hoping for his positive evolution. Sometimes he has had light improvements, sometimes stationary situations," Maduro said in the prerecorded interview, which was broadcast on Tuesday night by the Caracas-based television network Telesur. 

"I was able to see him twice, converse with him. He's totally conscious of the complexity of his post-operative state and he expressly asked us ... to keep the nation informed always, always with the truth, as hard as it may be in certain circumstances," said Maduro who was handpicked by the president before he travelled for Cuba for his latest round of surgery. 

Rebels in Central African Republic have said they have halted their advance on the capital, Bangui, and would participate in dialogue, as head of regional African forces warned them against making further moves.

The announcement on Wednesday gave only a limited reprieve for President Francois Bozize as the rebels told Reuters news agency they might insist on his removal in the negotiations in Gabon's capital Libreville.

"I have asked our forces not to move their positions starting today because we want to enter talks in Libreville for a political solution," Eric Massi, rebel spokesman, told Reuters by telephone from Paris.

"I am in discussion with our partners to come up with proposals to end the crisis, but one solution could be a political transition that excludes Bozize," he said.

On Wednesday, the commander of the regional African force, FOMAC, warned rebels against any attempt to take Damara, the last strategic town between them and the country's capital Bangui.

"Let it be clear, we will not give up Damara," General Jean-Felix Akaga said.

"If the rebels attack Damara that would amount to a declaration of war and would mean that they have decided to engage the 10 central African states," he told reporters in Bangui.

Residents of the Great Plains over the last year or so have experienced storms reminiscent of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Experts say the new storms have been brought on by a combination of historic drought, a dwindling Ogallala Aquifer underground water supply, climate change and government farm programs. 

Nearly 62 percent of the United States was gripped by drought, as of Dec. 25, and "exceptional" drought enveloped parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. 

There is no relief in sight for the Great Plains at least through the winter, according to Drought Monitor forecasts, which could portend more dust clouds. 

A wave of dust storms during the 1930s crippled agriculture over a vast area of the Great Plains and led to an exodus of people, many to California, dramatized in John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath." 

While few people believe it could get that bad again, the new storms have some experts worried that similar conditions -- if not the catastrophic environmental disaster of the 1930s -- are returning to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado. 

CONKLIN, Alberta--The challenge of pulling oil from sand near here has typically required scraping away the boreal forest and underlying peat to expose the tar sand deposits below. The thickened sand is scooped out, then boiled to separate out the bitumen, with the leftover contaminated water and muck dumped in vast holding ponds the size of small lakes. From orbit the enormous strip mines and tailings lakes created by this process stand out, like a spreading sore--a scar on the planet evidencing the American thirst for oil. But the future of this Canadian province's oil sands leaves less of a visible mark, as can be seen near this town that is not so much a community as an intersection of roads that lead to camps for oil sands workers. That means fewer strip mines, tailings lakes and even giant trucks, but it also means more of the invisible greenhouse gas carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

This future is melting bitumen where it lies at least 200 meters below the surface rather than mining tar sands. In 2011 more than 11,000 barrels of bitumen were melted out of the frozen ground not far from here each day, where the airstrip sees more human traffic than the town as workers commute in and out by plane from as far away as Newfoundland.

"Most of what's going on happens 375 meters below the surface," says Greg Fagnan, director of operations and production at Cenovus's Christina Lake oil sands production facility, during a recent tour. Cenovus extracts bitumen by employing a technique called steam-assisted gravity drainage, which can be thought of as the opposite of mining. Instead of melting the bitumen out of sand in an industrial plant after clawing the tar sands out of the ground, Cenovus melts it out in place with steam. That means Christina Lake is, in a sense, a giant water-processing facility "that happens to produce oil," Fagnan says. "It's not a complicated business, it's just complex."

Conklin is one of the frontier towns of a new tar sands boom, given that 80 percent of the at least 170 billion barrels in the Canadian province's tar sands are only accessible this way rather than by mining. In 2011, for the first time, oil production from such in situ operations surpassed that of mining for oil in the tar sands--a trend that is only likely to increase as more oil sands production comes online in Canada. Already, plumes of steam billow from the boreal forest across northeastern Alberta where a host of developers work--from Nexen, recently acquired by the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), to oil majors such as Royal Dutch Shell--like mushrooms springing up from the ground after rain.

I always forget that Los Angeles has a subway at all, let alone the fact that it used to have a much more extensive one.

Parts of that old subway have sat, abandoned, beneath streets and buildings for decades. They've become part of the stratigraphy of the city, as humans do what humans have always done -- build the new on top of the old and forget about what we covered up under there. It's no different than the way Rome was built, with the columns of old buildings serving as the foundations of new ones.

GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free.

Following the initial inspiration of using gravity, and years of perspiration, we have refined the design and it is now ready for production. We need your help to fund the tooling, manufacture and distribution of at least 1000 gravity powered lights. We will gift them to villagers in both Africa and India to use regularly. The follow-up research will tell us how well the lights met their needs, and enable us to refine the design for a more efficient MK2 version.

To achieve this we launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo and we have been thrilled by the support shown during the first 24 hours of the campaign start. But it's not yet over we still need your support by contributing to the project and spreading the word.

Contribute to this effort here: indiegogo.com/projects/282006/x/1848870

Grocery store aisles are awash in foods and beverages that contain high-fructose corn syrup. It is common in sodas and crops up in everything from ketchup to snack bars. This cheap sweetener has been an increasingly popular additive in recent decades and has often been fingered as a driver of the obesity epidemic.

These fears may be well founded. Fructose, a new study finds, has a marked affect on the brain region that regulates appetite, suggesting that corn syrup and other forms of fructose might encourage over-eating to a greater degree than glucose. Table sugar has both fructose and glucose, but high-fructose corn syrup, as the name suggests, contains a higher proportion of fructose.

To test how fructose affects the brain, researchers studied 20 healthy adult volunteers. While the test subjects consumed sweetened beverages, the researchers used fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure the response of the hypothalamus, which helps regulate many hunger-related signals, as well as reward and motivation processing.

he first meteor shower of 2013 will kick off the year's night sky events this week, giving stargazers a chance to ring in the New Year with a celestial fireworks display.

The Quadrantid meteor shower is an annual meteor shower every January. While this year's "shooting star" show is not expected to outshine some of the more spectacular meteor showers of 2012, it may give stargazers with clear, dark skies a great start to the New Year.

"Those who brave the cold might see up to 40 meteors per hour, although moonlight will make faint meteors harder to spot," officials with the Hubble Space Telescope explained in a January skywatching video guide.

The waning gibbous moon will be out in full force during the shower's peak, but skywatchers in dark areas of the Northern Hemisphere during the wee hours of Thursday morning might still get a decent show.

Jan. 2, 2013 -- Newborns are much more attuned to the sounds of their native language than first thought. In fact, these linguistic whizzes can up pick on distinctive sounds of their mother tongue while in utero, a new study has concluded.

Research led by Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University, shows that infants, only hours old showed marked interest for the vowels of a language that was not their mother tongue.

"We have known for over 30 years that we begin learning prenatally about voices by listening to the sound of our mother talking," Moon said. "This is the first study that shows we learn about the particular speech sounds of our mother's language before we are born." 

Before the study, the general consensus was that infants learned about the small parts of speech, the vowels and the consonants, postnatally. Moon added. "This study moves the measurable result of experience with individual speech sounds from six months of age to before birth," she said. The findings will be published in Acta Paediatrica in late December.

For the study Moon tested newborn infants shortly after birth while still in the hospital in two different locations: Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., and in the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital in Stockholm. Infants heard either Swedish or English vowels and they could control how many times they heard the vowels by sucking on a pacifier connected to a computer.

In the United States, medical marijuana programs exist in 18 states but remain illegal under federal law. In Israel, the law defines marijuana as an illegal and dangerous drug, and there is still no legislation regulating its use for medicinal purposes.

Yet Israel's Ministry of Health issues special licenses that allow thousands of patients to receive medical marijuana, and some government officials are now promoting the country's advances in the field as an example of its pioneering and innovation.

"I hope we will overcome the legal obstacles for Tikkun Olam and other companies," Yuli Edelstein, the minister of public diplomacy and diaspora affairs, told journalists during a recent government-sponsored tour of the farm, part of Israel's effort to brand itself as something beyond a conflict zone. In addition to helping the sick, he said, the effort "could be helpful for explaining what we are about in this country."

Israelis have been at the vanguard of research into the medicinal properties of cannabis for decades.

In the 1960s, Prof. Raphael Mechoulam and his colleague Yechiel Gaoni at the Weizmann Institute of Science isolated, analyzed and synthesized the main psychoactive ingredient in the cannabis plant, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Later, Professor Mechoulam deciphered the cannabinoids native to the brain. Ruth Gallily, a professor emerita of immunology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied another main constituent of cannabis -- cannabidiol, or CBD -- considered a powerful anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety agent.

When Zach Klein, a former filmmaker, made a documentary on medical marijuana that was broadcast on Israeli television in 2009, about 400 Israelis were licensed to receive the substance. Today, the number has risen to about 11,000.

The quest to draw useful insights from business measurements is nothing new. Big Data is a descendant of Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" of more than a century ago. Taylor's instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, timing and monitoring a worker's every movement. Taylor and his acolytes used these time-and-motion studies to redesign work for maximum efficiency. The excesses of this approach would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." The enthusiasm for quantitative methods has waxed and waned ever since.

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

At the M.I.T. conference, a panel was asked to cite examples of big failures in Big Data. No one could really think of any. Soon after, though, Roberto Rigobon could barely contain himself as he took to the stage. Mr. Rigobon, a professor at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, said that the financial crisis certainly humbled the data hounds. "Hedge funds failed all over the world," he said.

The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modeling came out of the sciences, where the behavior of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.

I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking "Is this some kind of a joke?" I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require.

...

They were quite clear in their demands. They told Women's Aid "a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website."

Recap: The Newspapers' agent demanded an annual payment from a women's domestic violence charity because they said they owned copyright in a link to the newspapers' public website.

Throughout my life I had tried the traditional therapies: behavioral cognitive counseling, mainstream psychiatrics, and psychotherapy. I tried hypnosis, progressive relaxation, Jungian psychology and dream interpretation, and the practice of affirmations. I tried supplements of flaxseed oil, fish oil, borage oil, evening primrose oil, vitamins B6, B12, C. I let homeopathic doses of calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous melt between my inner lip and gum, dropped herbal extracts of motherwort, passion flower, skullcap, wild oat, valerian, ashwaganda, lemon balm, and chamomile under my tongue. I mixed flower essences of violet, sweet chestnut, oak, elm, rock rose, mimulus, willow, and cherry plum into my water. I tried a vegan diet and a raw-food diet and a macrobiotic diet and an ayurvedic diet and a three-season diet and a sugar-free diet. I worked with shamans, herbalists, rolfers, hypnotists, chiropractors, astrologers, intuitives, Chinese energetics practitioners, Reiki healers, acupuncturists, and myofascial-release massage therapists. I studied ecopsychology to understand how the degradation of the Earth and the spoiling of our natural resources impacts our psyches. I sat in forests of logged trees and wailed. I sat alone three days in the desert without food, trying to grasp the root of my problem. I sweated for hours in sweat lodges, covering myself in mud in the pitch-black, airtight heat while men chanted and banged on drums and burned sage, and I emerged to feel wet and new under clear, deep-night skies. I sat several weeklong silent meditation retreats watching tree limbs breathe and the sun travel its daily arcs overhead. I lived on biodynamic farms and organic farms in the mountains of Arizona and the deserts of New Mexico and the forests of California and the hills of the Berkshires to heal any rift between my body and the rest of the natural world. I lived on yoga ashrams. I lived at retreat centers where people come to learn to be the most empowered and happy people they can be. I hiked sections of the Appalachian Trail and climbed down to the flat bottom of the Grand Canyon to listen to wind and rivers. I slept alone in the Superstition Wilderness. I lived in New York City and fed off intellectual stimulation and sex and sushi. I lived in Boston and did nothing but write and read as a way to channel my discomfort. I studied astrology, numerology, the Enneagram, and the Tarot deck to understand what basic influences are contributing to my problem. I experimented with celibacy. I rubbed sesame oil on my body after every shower. I anointed my head with sacred Indian Brahmi oil for protection. I spent days eating nothing but bananas and vanilla yogurt, flavors that are shown to have a calming affect on babies. I carried quartz and amethyst in my pockets for their reputed peace-inducing qualities and wore moonstone rings for serenity and turquoise rings for understanding and aventurine necklaces for bravery. I tried doing nothing and just seeing if my condition would improve on its own. I listened to meditation CDs before going to bed and meditation CDs before getting out of bed. I practiced yoga and tai chi and tapping on meridian points for emotional balance and release. I soaked in hot baths infused with sage and rose and lavender and pine. All of these things have helped. And still.

Because you've gotten the calls, you already knew that Obama's fundraising machine hits people up more than once. The campaign's fundraising is built to do this. In the eyes of the machine, if you give $50, you're still $150 under the public disclosure limit, and even if you hit $200, you're well under the individual-giving maximum of $2500. Not that Obama uses public matching funds--he opted out in 2008 and again in 2012.

Also, history is on the side of the Obama money vacuum. In 2008 slightly more than half of Obama's donors who gave an aggregate of $200 or more started out giving amounts less than $200. In other words, the Obama fundraisers were able to up-sell a substantial percentage of givers. Overall, the repeat donors were lucrative, giving $100 million to Obama in 2008. The campaign makes it easy, allowing you to save your credit card information at barackobama.com. Just like shoppers do at their favorite online retailer.

Yet there's a bigger reason why Favorite Candidate keeps calling: Fundraising has become a form of stealth get-out-the-vote strategy. Not because they use your donations to buy pizzas for dopey students, but because donating gives you a stake in a candidate's outcome. A joint paper produced by CFI, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that eyed the future of publicly financed campaigns in the age of the Internet small donor put donating-as-political-seed this way: "The evidence seems to suggest that giving and doing are reciprocal activities: volunteering stimulates giving, while giving small amounts seems to heighten nonfinancial forms of participation by people who feel more invested in the process."

"It's really a commonly accepted community organizing device," Michael Malbin told me. As a grad student in Chicago, he went to see radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who talked about getting poor people to sign up for 25 or 50 cents (about three bucks today). "The big deal isn't how much the money means to the organization but what it does to the person," Malbin remembered Alinsky saying. Malbin said he's seen only the Obama campaign build an integrated money mobilizing machine on these precepts. Romney hasn't done it and Congressional campaigns haven't done it, and it's probably rare state-wide elections.

Local independent station KDOC-TV certainly started off 2013 with a bang, specifically in the form of the bomb known as "First Night," their live New Year's Eve programming.

Channel 56, based in the OC but hailing themselves as an L.A. station, put together a NYE show hosted by funnyman Jamie Kennedy, who seemed to struggle, along with most of the folks involved in the production, with the notion of live TV. Hence this compilation of fails via YouTube that includes the many f-bombs dropped live on air, the camera flubs, some "underboob" views, Macy Gray unable to tell time while on stage, and the final fail: a brawl.

Folks were pretty peeved about Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper's shenanigans on CNN, but their antics pale in comparison to this hot mess that aired here in L.A.

Gérard Depardieu, the French actor who has been sparring with his native country over taxes, has been granted Russian citizenship.

A brief announcement on the Kremlin website said the president, Vladimir Putin, signed the citizenship grant on Thursday.