In burglary-plagued Oakland, it's easy to pick on this workshop

OAKLAND — Burglaries have plagued just about every corner of this beleaguered city of late: Last year, Oakland averaged one break-in every 42 minutes — a 44% increase over 2011.

So when Mayor Jean Quan recently included a workshop on lock-picking in the "Something for Everyone" section of her newsletter, it didn't go over well.

"Of all the incredibly unbelievable things I've witnessed in my life, this tops the list," one resident wrote in a letter that asked Quan to cancel the class. "What next?" another wrote on a neighborhood chat forum. "The fundamentals of armed robbery?"

In a hasty apology, Quan said she regretted the "inappropriate listing," which was part of a 20-page cut-and-pasted newsletter of local events assembled by volunteers. "It strikes the wrong note when we're doing everything we can to bring down crime," she said.

The Introduction to Lock-Picking class, to be held Saturday evening, is part of a downtown Workshop Weekend that includes more than 40 offerings, including Build a Robot, Electroluminescent Wire Projects, DNA Sequencing and Telescope Making.

The event was launched two years ago by a pair of brothers eager to help residents of all ages find their passion and learn how things work. But now Gil and J.D. Zamfirescu have found themselves doing damage control while giving this city a primer in the subculture of "sport-picking."

"We recognize there is a lot of community concern," Gil Zamfirescu said in an interview. "But the best way to combat crime is to educate yourself, to understand locks so you know how to protect yourself better."

Or, in the words of the 19th century locksmith and lock-picker Alfred Charles Hobbs: "Rogues knew a good deal about lock-picking long before locksmiths discussed it … the spread of the knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance."

Hobbs is a legend to the hobbyist lock-picker community. His quote graces the website of the Open Organisation of Lockpickers — or TOOOL — a group that started in the Netherlands and expanded to the U.S. in 2004.

In light of the Oakland brouhaha, the organization — which is hosting the Saturday class — has agreed not to offer the lock-pick kits normally sold at workshops and competitions. And just to ensure that all goes well, U.S. TOOOL co-founder Babak Javadi (a Philadelphia security consultant) and fellow board member Brian Rea (a security expert known in lock-picking circles as Deviant) are making a special trip to Oakland.

TOOOL has a strict code of ethics that association members and workshop participants must follow, including, of course, no lawbreaking.

And instructors abide by guidelines on what they will and won't teach. Rea said they dispense lock-pick kits but don't sell bump keys — which are used to quickly and forcefully open a lock. (They do explain bumping and discuss ways to make locks bump-proof.)

Though Javadi and Rea do provide know-how on covert entry, or the secret sexy stuff of James Bond movies, to their private clients, largely law enforcement and security officials, "we temper how we disseminate information, depending on who the audience is," Javadi said.

As for the risk of educating burglars, he said most can find guidance online without having to "pay $40 and come to an event where you have to use your real name." Besides, he said, the vast majority of burglars enter through open doors, kick them in or are lucky enough to find a key hidden under a rock.

Saturday's workshop description beckons: "In many cases, opening a lock without a key is easier than you think!" Open to participants ages 10-101, it has sold out.

"Sometimes a 12-year-old will come to a meeting and they're great. They just get it," said Michael Fitzhugh, a member of San Francisco's TOOOL chapter, who will be teaching the workshop. "For most people, it takes a lot of time and practice."

As for Quan, she called the class "part of a do-it-yourself, garage-science sort of event, and those are popular in our creative community." Still, she promised to "do a better job reviewing these listings in the future."

lee.romney@latimes.com

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Listen to David Bowie's First Album in 10 Years for Free Online (Legally)

You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.

The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both “Where Are We Now?” and “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” debuted on YouTube in the last month with little fanfare, like this stream. Although iTunes’ page for the stream lacks any information about the individual songs, The Next Day’s track listing is as follows:

01. The Next Day 3:51
02. Dirty Boys 2:58
03. The Stars (Are Out Tonight) 3:56
04. Love Is Lost 3:57
05. Where Are We Now? 4:08
06. Valentine’s Day 3:01
07. If You Can See Me 3:16
08. I’d Rather Be High 3:53
09. Boss Of Me 4:09
10. Dancing Out In Space 3:24
11. How Does The Grass Grow 4:33
12. (You Will) Set The World On Fire 3:30
13. You Feel So Lonely You Could Die 4:41
14. Heat 4:25

Deluxe version bonus tracks:
15. So She 2:31
16. Plan 2:34
17. I’ll Take You There 2:44

The stream will remain available until March 11.

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U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.

The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.

The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.

But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.

So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.

In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.

“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.

The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.

“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.

“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”

For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.

“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”

The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.

“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”

At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.

Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.

The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)

In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.

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DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.

Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.

“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.

Those purchases, which cost Mr. Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate. Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said. “Our luck, however, changed earlier this year.”

Mr. Buffett was making a reference to one of his largest-ever deals. Last month, Berkshire, along with a Brazilian investment group, announced a $23.6 billion takeover,of the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz.

Written in accessible prose largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.

“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to his longtime partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.

Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.” He noted that the United States gross domestic product, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had more than quadrupled over the last six decades.

“Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain,” he wrote. “America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-increasing abundance.”

The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses. With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.

Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.

The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as chief executive?

Last year, he acknowledged that he had chosen a successor, but he did not name the candidate.

He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a nonexecutive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.

In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as nonexecutive chairman.

Berkshire’s share price recently traded at a record high, surpassing its prefinancial crisis peak reached in 2007 and rising about 22 percent over the last year.

The company reported net income last year of about $14.8 billion, up about 45 percent from 2011. Yet the company’s book value, or net worth — Mr. Buffett’s preferred performance measure — lagged the broader stock market, increasing 14.4 percent, compared with the market’s 16 percent return.

Mr. Buffett lamented that 2012 was only the ninth time in 48 years that Berkshire’s book value increase was less than the gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. But he pointed out that in eight of those nine years, the S.& P. had a gain of 15 percent or more, suggesting that Berkshire proved to be a most valuable investment during bad market periods.

“We do better when the wind is in our face,” he wrote.

For Berkshire’s largest collection of assets, its insurance operations, the wind has been at its back. We “shot the lights out last year” in insurance, Mr. Buffett said.

He lavished praise on the auto insurer Geico, giving a special shout-out to the company’s mascot, the Gecko lizard.

Investors also keep a keen eye on changes in Berkshire’s roughly $87 billion stock portfolio. Its holdings include large positions in iconic companies like International Business Machines, Coca-Cola, American Express and Wells Fargo. He said Berkshire’s investment in each of those was likely to increase in the future.

“Mae West had it right: ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ ” Mr. Buffett wrote.

He also complimented two relatively new hires, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who now each manage about $5 billion in stock portfolios for Berkshire. Both men ran unheralded, modest-size money management firms before Mr. Buffett plucked them out of obscurity and moved them to Omaha to work for him.

He called the men “a perfect cultural fit” and indicated that the two would manage Berkshire’s entire stock portfolio once he steps aside. “We hit the jackpot with these two,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that last year, each outperformed the S.& P. by double-digit margins.

Then, sheepishly, employing supertiny type, he wrote: “They left me in the dust as well.”

A former paperboy and member of the Newspaper Association of America’s carrier hall of fame, Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.

While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Company, he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.

But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Company, this hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices — and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”

“Papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” wrote Mr. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview last month that he would consider buying The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a paper that the Tribune Company is considering selling. But Mr. Buffett said he had not contacted Tribune executives.

“It’s solely a question of the specifics of it and the price,” he said about the Allentown paper. “But it’s similar to the kinds of communities that we bought papers in.”

Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major deals like Heinz.

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.”

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed

After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member of the panel was dismissed for misconduct and replaced by an alternate.

The original juror, a white-haired woman identified only as Juror No. 3, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy she had gone onto a legal website to look up jury instructions and then asked her daughter to help find a definition for the word "coercion."

Although all but one defense attorney requested that the woman stay, Kennedy said the juror needed to be removed. "She has spoken about the deliberations with her daughter, she has conducted research on the Internet, and I've repeatedly, repeatedly throughout this trial — probably hundreds of times — cautioned the jury not to do that," the judge said.

The removal came after jurors notified the judge that they were deadlocked and that continued deliberations seemed fruitless.

It was unclear how to interpret the day's events, whether the dismissed juror had been a lone holdout or an indication of a fractured jury.

The juror started to tell the judge which way she was leaning in the case, saying she had gone online "looking to see at what point can I get the harassment to stop.... How long do I have to stay in there and deliberate with them when I have made my decision that I didn't think there was —"

Kennedy cut her off before she could finish.

The woman clasped her hands over her mouth and said, "I'm sorry."

Two defense attorneys thought she was leaning toward acquittal and wanted her to stay. "I would have preferred the deadlock to a guilty verdict," said Alex Kessel, the attorney for George Mirabal, one of six former council members charged with misappropriation of public funds.

The council members are charged with inflating their salaries in what prosecutors contend was a far-reaching web of corruption in which fat paychecks were placed ahead of the needs of the city's largely immigrant, working-poor constituents.

When attorneys and defendants were summoned to the courtroom Thursday morning, they were initially told that the jury appeared to be deadlocked.

"Your honor, we have reached a point where as a jury we have fundamental disagreements and cannot reach a unanimous verdict in this case," read a note signed by two jurors, including the foreman, that was given to Kennedy.

A note from another juror alerted the judge that Juror No. 3 had consulted an outside attorney. That did not appear to be the case, but her other actions were revealed under questioning from the judge.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.

On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about "the abuse I have suffered." She said her daughter told her, "Mom, they're trying to find the weak link."

The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word "coercion." After her daughter helped her look up the word's definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

The woman later left the courtroom in tears.

With an alternate in place, Kennedy told the panel to act as if the earlier deliberations had not taken place. The alternate had sat in the jury box during the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations.

Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and Mirabal are accused of drawing annual salaries of as much as $100,000 a year by serving on boards that did little work and seldom met, part of a scandal that drew national attention to the small city in 2010.

Prosecutors said that Bell's charter follows state law regarding council members' compensation. In a city the size of Bell, council members should be paid no more than $8,076 a year.

The trial began in late January, and the case went to the jury last Friday.

As the jury resumed deliberations in downtown Los Angeles, the verdict was clearly in on the streets of Bell.

One resident unfurled old protest banners and signs from the days when the pay scandal was first exposed and then called former members of an activist group that had led the charge for reform in the city.

"We're holding our breaths and waiting," Denise Rodarte, a member of the grassroots group Bell Assn. to Stop the Abuse, said in regard to a verdict.

"It's cut and dry: Local elected officials were supposed to make a certain amount of money, and they made a lot more."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report.

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Crowdsourced 'Maker Map' Charts Nearby Hackerspaces and Hardware Shops

We’ve long been fascinated with makerspaces, the DIY equivalent of co-ops. They make projects possible by offering tools and classes at a shared cost to those who otherwise wouldn’t have access. If you’re lucky enough to live in a maker-dense region, you’ve likely got plenty of options, from niche shops like the Bike Kitchen to multi-use spaces like TechShop.

San Francisco is one such locale, with such a robust community of builder resources that people needed a tool to keep tabs on them all. So The Maker Map was born. Created by Renee DiResta and Nick Pinkston, the open source DIY outlet-tracking Google Map tries to illuminate all the SF makerspaces and related establishments, dividing them by category and plotting them out geographically.

The project, which started at a hackathon at DiResta’s office, is doubly open source. Not only do Pinkston and DiResta draw on the crowd for data (you can add resources that aren’t yet on the map), the whole project is forked on GitHub, so users can help develop the map itself.

“We kept finding ourselves having the same conversations with people,” says DiResta, an associate at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures. “Like, where can I get this done? Or hey, I’ve got my prototype, what do I do next?”

“People would ask me for this stuff constantly,” says Pinkston, who has founded several companies including Cloudfab, a distributed manufacturing company, and the upcoming Plethora, an automated manufacturing company. “And I was like oh, it would be nice to have a place I could send them, that they would know where to get it instead of bothering me.”

Pinkston also likes to build. His latest creation was a prototype machine tool-tending robot for Plethora, built primarily at TechShop in San Francisco. As a transplant from Pittsburgh (he founded Hackpittsburgh.org), Pinkston didn’t know as many places to source materials for it. Hence, the map.

Initially limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, the map expanded rapidly as makers kept adding their favorite shops, suppliers, and fabricators around the world. And although their help has helped the project reach new users, the growth may ultimately require community organizers around the world to help keep the information accurate and up to date.

“Otherwise, somebody sitting in San Francisco is going to have to try to validate data that’s being input from France,” says DiResta. “People who are on the ground there have a better sense of what’s going on in France than I do in San Francisco.”

“The hardest thing is the curation,” Pinkston says. “It can become like Yelp. And I mean that in a pejorative way. Stuff doesn’t mean anything, it’s not really useful.”

But with the right people involved, that’s more of a boon than a detriment.

“The coolest thing about what you’re seeing now is how totally different it looks from what I pushed a month ago,” says DiResta. “And that’s because of the community around it.”

People jumped in with design and UX know-how, helping turn it into a collaborative effort that continues to spread.

“It’s nice to have a work in progress that a community is really excited about,” DiResta says.

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The New Old Age Blog: Why Can’t I Live With People Like Me?

“Aging in place” is the mantra of long-term care. Whether looking at reams of survey data, talking to friends or wishing on a star, who among us wouldn’t rather spend the final years — golden or less so — at home, surrounded by our cherished possessions, in our own bed, no cranky old coot as a roommate, no institutional smells or sounds, no lukewarm meals on a schedule of someone else’s making?

That works best, experts tell us, in dense cities, where we can hail a cab at curbside, call the superintendent when something breaks and have our food delivered from Fresh Direct or countless takeout restaurants. We’d have neighbors in the apartment above us, below us, just on the other side of the wall. Hearing their toilets flush and their children ride tricycles on uncarpeted floors is a small inconvenience compared to the security of knowing they are so close by in an emergency.

Urban planners, mindful that most Americans live in sprawling, car-reliant suburbs, are designing more elder-friendly, walkable communities, far from “real” cities. Houses and apartments are built around village greens, with pockets of commerce instead of distant strip malls. Some have community centers for congregate meals and activities; others share gardens, where people can get their hands in the warm spring dirt long after they can push a lawn mower.

All of this is a step in the right direction, despite the Potemkin-village look of so many of them. But it doesn’t take into account those who are too infirm to stay at home, even in cities or more manageable suburban environments. Some are alone, others with a loving spouse who by comparison is “well” but may not be for long, given the rigors of care-taking. It doesn’t take into account people who can’t afford a home health aide, who don’t qualify for a visiting nurse, who have no adult children to help them or whose children live far away.

But by now, aging in place, unrealistic for some, scary or unsafe for others and potentially very isolating, has become so entrenched as the right way to live out one’s life that not being able to pull it off seems a failure, yet another defeat at a time when defeats are all too plentiful. Are we making people feel guilty if they can’t stay at home, or don’t want to? Are we discouraging an array of other solutions by investing so much, program-wise and emotionally, in this sine qua non?

Regular readers of The New Old Age know that I am single, childless and terrified of falling off a ladder while replacing a light bulb, breaking a hip and lying on the floor, unattended, until my dog wails so loudly a neighbor comes by to complain. A MedicAlert pendant is not something that appeals to me at 65, but even if I give in to that, say at 75, I’m not sure my life will be richer for digging my heels in and insisting home is where I should be.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about the alternatives. I know enough to distinguish between naturally-occurring-retirement communities, or NORCs (some of which work better than others); age-restricted housing complexes (with no services); assisted living (which works fine when you don’t really need it and not so fine when you do); and continuing care retirement communities (which require big upfront payments and extensive due diligence to be sure the place doesn’t go belly up after you get there).

What I find so unappealing about all these choices is that each means growing old among people with whom I share no history. In these congregate settings, for the most part, people are guaranteed only two things in common: age and infirmity. Which brings us to what is known in the trade as “affinity” or “niche” communities,” long studied by Andrew J. Carle at the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mr. Carle, who trains future administrators of senior housing complexes, was a media darling a few years back, before the recession, with the first baby boomers approaching 65 and niche communities that included services for the elderly — not merely warm-weather developments adjacent to golf courses — expected to explode. In newspaper interviews as recently as 2011, Mr. Carle said there were “about 100 of them in existence or on the drawing board,” not counting the large number of military old-age communities.

Mr. Carle still believes that better economic times, when they come, will reinvigorate this sector of senior housing, after the failure of some in the planning stages and others in operation. In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Carle said there were now about 70 in operation, with perhaps 50 of those that he has defined as University Based Retirement Communities, adjacent to campuses and popular with alumni, as well as non-alumni, who enjoy proximity to the intellectual and athletic activities. Among the most popular are those near Dartmouth, Oberlin, the University of Alabama, Penn State, Notre Dame, Stanford and Cornell.

At the height of the “affinity” boom, L.G.B.T.-assisted living communities and nursing homes were all the rage, seen as a solution to the shoddy treatment that those of different sexual orientations in the pre-Stonewall generation experienced in generic facilities. A few failed, most never got built and, by all accounts, the only one to survive is the pricy Rainbow Vision community in Sante Fe, N.M.

A handful of nudist elder communities, and ones for old hippies, also fell by the wayside, perhaps too free-spirited for the task. According to Mr. Carle, despite the odds, at least one group of RV enthusiasts has added an assisted-living component to what began as collections of transient elderly, looking only for a parking spot and necessary water and power hook-ups for their trailers. Native Americans have made a go of an assisted-living community in Montana, and Asians have done the same in Northern California.

But professional affinity communities, which I find most appealing, are few and far between.

The storied Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, a sliding-scale institution in the San Fernando Valley since 1940, survived near-closure in 2009 as a result of litigation, activism by the Screen Actors Guild and the local chapter of the Teamsters, and news media pressure. Among film legends who died there — along with cameramen, back-lot security guards and extras — were Mary Astor, Joel McCrea, Yvonne De Carlo and Stepin Fetchit.

New York State’s volunteer firefighters are all welcome to a refurbished facility in the Catskill region that offers far more in the way of care and activities, including a state-of-the-art gym, than when I visited there five years ago. At that time, the residents amused themselves by activating the fire alarm to summon the local hook and ladder company, which didn’t mind a bit.

Then there is Nalcrest, the retirement home for unionized letter carriers. Even as post offices nationwide are preparing to eliminate Saturday service, and snail mail becomes an artifact, the National Association of Letter Carriers holds monthly fees around the $500 mark, is located in central Florida so its members no longer have to brave rain and sleet to complete their appointed rounds, and bans dogs, the bane of their existence.

So why not aged journalists? We surely have war stories to embroider as we rock on the porch. Perhaps a mimeograph machine to produce an old-fashioned, dead-tree newspaper, which some of us will miss once it has given way to Web sites like this one. Pneumatic tubes, one colleague suggested, to whisk our belongings upstairs when we can no longer carry them. Other colleagues wondered about welcoming both editors and reporters. How can these two groups, which some consider natural adversaries, complain about each others’ tin ears or missed deadlines if we’re not segregated?

I disagree. The joy of this profession is its collaboration. We did the impossible day after day when young. We belong together when old.

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Off the Charts: Globalization, as Measured by Investment, Takes a Step Backward

A FEW years ago, capital was flying around the globe faster than it ever had. The world economy became more tightly integrated and technology contributed to making it easier for banks and investors to deploy their money on the other side of the world if prospects looked more attractive there.

Then came the financial crisis, which, the McKinsey Global Institute noted in a report issued this week, “upended many of the world’s assumptions about the inevitability of growth and globalization.”

Last year, the report estimated, world capital flows were 13 percent below the levels of the previous year. And while they were higher than during the depths of the credit crisis, they are still 61 percent below the peak levels of 2007.

“Some of the shifts under way represent a healthy correction of the excesses of the bubble years,” the report stated, but there is a risk the reversal of globalization will be overdone.

“If we move to a system where the global financial system is more balkanized, that will raise the cost of capital for more borrowers and perhaps slow economic growth,” said Susan Lund, a principal of McKinsey Global Institute and the primary author of the report.

The accompanying charts show the institute’s estimates of global capital flows, which totaled $4.6 trillion in 2012, down from $11.8 trillion in 2007. Of the 2007 total, $10.2 trillion went to developed countries, and $1.6 trillion went to developing countries. Last year, capital flows were $3.1 trillion, a decline of 69 percent, for the developed countries, and $1.5 trillion, a decline of 10 percent, for the others.

The charts break out the flows into four types. The most stable is foreign direct investment, in which a company either builds a business or acquires at least 10 percent of an existing business. By far the least stable is loans, which are often short term and can be withdrawn on short notice, creating havoc. The others are bonds and equity, meaning stock market investments.

The Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s taught developing countries the potential hazards of loans that can be here today and gone tomorrow — a lesson that some European countries ignored to their regret. The institute calculated that in 2006 and 2007, the amount of capital flowing into Ireland was more than twice as large as the country’s gross domestic product. Moreover, most of that was in loans and bonds, debt instruments that in many cases could not be repaid.

International loans and bond issuances have particularly declined in Western Europe, where the euro crisis led many to withdraw funds and caused banks to concentrate on local markets. During four years in the middle of the last decade, more than $1 trillion in Western European bonds were purchased by foreigners each year. In each of the last two years, more bonds were sold back to the issuing country than were newly sold internationally.

For a number of years, China was the largest recipient of foreign direct investment, and that continues, with as estimated $260 billion flowing in last year. But it also sent $120 billion in such investment to other countries, about the same as Japan and more than was sent by any other country except the United States, according to the estimates.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

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DNA science points to better treatment for acne

Ancient Egyptians were vexed by it, using sulfur to dry it out. Shakespeare wrote of its "bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire."

Today, acne plagues us still. Doctors can cure some cancers and transplant vital organs like hearts, but they still have trouble getting rid of the pimples and splotches that plague 85% of us at some time in our lives — usually, when we're teenagers and particularly sensitive about they way we look.

But new research hints that there's hope for zapping zits in the future, thanks to advances in genetic research.

Using state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques to evaluate the bacteria lurking in the pores of 101 study volunteers' noses, scientists discovered a particular strain of Propionibacterium acnes bacteria that may be able to defend against other versions of P. acnes that pack a bigger breakout-causing punch.

As best as dermatologists can tell, zits occur when bacteria that reside in human skin, including P. acnes, feed on oils in the pores and prompt an immune response that results in red, sometimes pus-filled bumps. But the study subjects who had the newly discovered bacterial strain weren't suffering from whiteheads or blackheads, according to a report published Thursday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Someday, the realization that "not all P. acnes are created equal" might help dermatologists devise treatments that more precisely target bad strains while allowing beneficial ones to thrive, said Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute who conducted the study with colleagues from UCLA and Washington University in St. Louis.

Doctors might prescribe probiotic creams that deliver "good" P. acnes to the face the same way a daily serving of yogurt helps restore healthy bacteria in the digestive tract.

"There are healthy strains that we need on our skin," Craft said. "The idea that you'd use a nuclear bomb to kill everything — what we're currently doing with antibiotics and other treatments — just doesn't make sense."

The research is part of a broad effort backed by the National Institutes of Health to characterize the so-called human microbiome: the trillions of microbes that live in and on our bodies and evolve along with us, sometimes causing illness and often promoting good health.

Most of the microbiome attention so far has gone to studying species in the gut, said study leader Huiying Li, an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine. But the NIH's Human Microbiome Project, which funds her research, also looks at microbial communities in the nasal passages, the mouth, the urogenital tract and the skin.

Li said she became interested in studying acne because the skin microbiome seemed particularly understudied.

The research team recruited 101 patients in their teens and 20s from dermatology clinics in Southern California. Among them, 49 had acne and 52 had "normal skin" and were not experiencing breakouts but had come to the clinics for other problems.

Doctors used adhesive pore strips to remove skin bacteria from patients' noses. The researchers then collected the waxy plugs — a combination of bacteria, oils, dead skin cells and other stuff — and used DNA to figure out which bacteria were present.

They found that the P. acnes species accounted for about 90% of the bacteria in pores, in both healthy patients and acne sufferers. Digging a little deeper into the DNA, they found that two particular strains appeared in about 20% of acne sufferers, while a third strain was found only in acne-free patients.

"Dogs are dogs, but a Chihuahua isn't a Great Dane," Craft said. "People with acne had pit bulls on their skin. Healthy people had poodles."

The team then sequenced the complete genomes — about 2.6 million base pairs apiece — of 66 of the P. acnes specimens to explore in more depth how the good and bad strains differed.

The two notable bad strains had genes, probably picked up from other bacteria or viruses, that are thought to change the shape of a microbe to make it more virulent. The researchers hypothesized that the foreign DNA, perhaps by sticking more effectively to human host tissues, may help trigger an inflammatory response in the skin: acne.

The good strain, on the other hand, contained an element known to work like an immune system in bacteria, Li said. Perhaps it allows this P. acne to fight off intruders and prevent pimples from forming.

Li said the researchers did not know why some people had the bad P. acnes strains and others did not, and whether genetics or environment played a bigger role.

Dr. Vincent Young, who conducts microbiome research at the University of Michigan Medical School but wasn't involved in the acne project, said advances in sequencing technology and analysis made the new study possible. In the past, he said, scientists wouldn't have tried to sequence dozens of genomes in a single species.

"They'd say, why waste the money?" he said. "Now you can do this in a couple of days."

Li and Craft — neither of whom suffered bad acne as teens — plan to keep up the work.

More research is needed to come up with super-targeted anti-microbial therapies, or to develop a probiotic cream for acne sufferers.

Craft continues collecting samples from patients' pores. He hopes to study whether twins share the same microbial profiles, how acne severity is reflected in bacteria populations, and how things change in a single patient over the course of a treatment regimen.

One of the study volunteers, 19-year-old UC Santa Cruz student Brandon Pritzker, said he would have loved to have treated his acne without affecting the rest of his body. When he took Accutane, he suffered back pain and mood shifts.

Now off the drug, Pritzker said he is at peace with his pimples. "I still have breakouts, but I figure I'm 19, that's the way it's going to be," he said.

But, he added, "it hindered my confidence at the time. Kids with clear skin are probably a little happier."

eryn.brown@latimes.com

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Rodent Mind Meld: Scientists Wire Two Rats' Brains Together

It’s not exactly a Vulcan mind meld, but it’s not far off. Scientists have wired the brains of two rats together and shown that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.

The rats were in different cages with no way to communicate other than through the electrodes implanted in their brains. The transfer of information from brain to brain even worked with two rats separated by thousands of kilometers, one in a lab in North Carolina and another in a lab in Brazil.

“We basically created a computational unit out of two brains,” says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, who led the study.

Nicolelis is a leading figure in brain-machine interface research and the man behind a bold plan to develop a brain-controlled exoskeleton that would allow a paralyzed person to walk onto the field and kick a soccer ball at the opening ceremony of next year’s World Cup in Brazil.

He says the new findings could point the way to future therapies aimed at restoring movement or language after a stroke or other brain injury by using signals from a healthy part of the brian to retrain the injured area. Other researchers say it’s an interesting idea, but it’s a long way off.

But Nicolelis’s group is known for pushing the envelope. Previously, they have given monkeys an artificial sense of touch they can use to distinguish the “texture” of virtual objects. More recently, they gave rats the ability to detect normally invisible infrared light by wiring an infrared detector to a part of the brain that processes touch. All this work, Nicolelis says, is relevant to developing neural prostheses to restore sensory feedback to people with brain injuries.

In the new study, the researchers implanted small electrode arrays in two regions of the rats’ brains, one involved in planning movements, and one involved in the sense of touch.

Then they trained several rats to poke their noses and whiskers through a small opening in the wall of their enclosure to determine its width. The scientists randomly changed the width of the opening to be either narrow or wide for each trial, and the rats had to learn to touch one of two spots depending on its width. They touched a spot to the right of the opening when it was wide and the spot on the left when it was narrow. When they got it correct, they received a drink. Eventually they got it right 95 percent of the time.

Next, the team wanted to see if signals from the brain of a rat trained to do this task could help another rat in a different cage choose the correct spot to poke with its nose — even if it had no other information to go on.

They tested this idea with another group of rats that hadn’t learned the task. In this experiment, one of these new rats sat in an enclosure with two potential spots to receive a reward but without an opening in the wall. On their own, they could only guess which of the two spots would produce a rewarding drink. As expected, they got it right 50 percent of the time.

Then the researchers recorded signals from one of the trained rats as it did the nose-poke task and used those signals to stimulate the second, untrained rat’s brain in a similar pattern. When it received this stimulation, the second rat’s performance climbed to 60 or 70 percent. That’s not nearly as good as the rats who could actually use their sense of touch to solve the problem, but it’s impressive given that the only information they had about which spot to chose came from another animal’s brain, Nicolelis says.

Both rats had to make the correct choice, otherwise neither one got a reward. When that happened, the first rat tended to make its decision more quickly on the next trial, and its brain activity seemed to send a clearer signal to the second rat, the team reports today in Scientific Reports. That suggests to Nicolelis that the rats were learning to cooperate.

The brain-to-brain communication link enables the rats to collaborate in a novel way, he says. ”The animals compute by mutual experience,” he said. ”It’s a computer that evolves, that’s not set by instructions or an algorithm.”

From an engineering perspective, the work is a remarkable demonstration that animals can use brain-to-brain communication to solve a problem, said Mitra Hartmann, a biomedical engineer who studies rats’ sense of touch at Northwestern University. “This is a first, to my knowledge, although the enabling technology has been around for a while.”

“From a scientific point of view, the study is noteworthy for the large number of important questions it raises, for example, what allows neurons to be so ‘plastic’ that the animal can learn to interpret the meaning of a particular stimulation pattern,” Hartmann said.

“It’s a pretty cool idea that they’re in tune with each other and working together,” said neuroscientist Bijan Pesaran of New York University. But Pesaran says he could use some more convincing that this is what’s actually going on. For example, he’d like to see the researchers extend the experiment to see if the rats on the receiving end of the brain-to-brain communication link could improve their performance even more. ”If you could see them learning to do it better and faster, then I’d really be impressed.”

Pesaran says he’s open to the idea that brain-to-brain communication could one day be used to rehabilitate brain injury patients, but he thinks it might be possible to accomplish the same thing by stimulating the injured brain with computer-generated patterns of activity. ”I don’t get why you’d need another brain to do that,” he said.

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