International Military Officials Investigate Afghan Deaths

KABUL, Afghanistan — International military officials are investigating two episodes in which as many as 11 Afghan civilians may have been killed in what appeared to be American-led military actions.

In the more lethal episode, Afghan officials said 10 civilians were killed overnight in Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan in a village where two known Taliban commanders were visiting family members.

“Ten civilians were killed last night in a joint Afghan and American operation that took place in Chogam Valley in Shigal District,” said Fazullah Wahidi, the provincial governor. He said four women, one man and five children between the ages of 8 and 13 were killed; four teenagers were wounded, three of whom were girls.

Increasingly over the last two years, foreign insurgents, sometimes with links to Al Qaeda and other non-Afghan groups, have taken refuge in Kunar and neighboring Nuristan Province. Both provinces have a long border with Pakistan, and insurgents can hide easily in the rugged and forested mountain terrain Mr. Wahidi said the target of Kunar operation was a Taliban leader named Shahpour, “a known and really dangerous Afghan Taliban commander with links to Al Qaeda operatives in Kunar” and another Taliban commander, known as “Rocketi,” a Pakistani citizen from the Northwest Frontier Province. Both men were killed in the attack.

Mr. Wahidi said that the operation was not coordinated with Afghan security forces, but that locally hired Afghan paramilitaries were involved in the raid, which included an airstrike and a ground operation. Sometimes other United States government agencies rather than the military use special commandos.

Maj. Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said they had no information on the operation but “were aware of the reports” of civilian deaths and were looking into it.

Local officials in Kunar said that Shahpour was believed to have links to Al Qaeda and narrowly escaped being killed last year when the Americans attacked another Al Qaeda-linked Taliban commander known as Abu Hafez Al-Najde, who also went by the name Commander Ghani. Shahpour was the Taliban leader in charge of nearby Dangam district but was visiting relatives at the time of the raid.

People from Chogam, who brought injured from the remote village where the attack took place to the main hospital in the provincial capital of Asadabad, described a precise but damaging hit on two adjacent houses.

“Two homes were totally destroyed; air power was used during the operation,” said a man who brought a boy with cuts to the hospital for treatment, but refused to give his name. “There are still dead bodies under the rubble and human flesh scattered in the area.”

The other episode in which an Afghan civilian was killed by foreign troops occurred on Tuesday during daylight hours.

It took place as NATO-led forces were checking a stretch of heavily traveled highway between Kandahar and Spin Boldak for explosives during a road clearance mission and shot at an oncoming car that did not stop when signaled to do so, Major Wojack said.

An Afghan policeman, Taj Mohammed, the local Border Police commander, corroborated much of the ISAF account, but did not see the shooting himself. He said the car was carrying people from a wedding party.

Major Wojack said that the forces had followed standard procedure of signaling to the car to stop. After the driver stopped, he then started to accelerate toward the convoy, at which point the soldier ISAF shot at the car, Mr. Wojack said.

Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah in Kandahar and by an employee of The New York Times in Kunar Province.

Read More..

Tech Companies and Immigrant Advocates Press for Broad Changes in Law

SAN FRANCISCO — What do computer programmers and illegal immigrants have to do with each other?

When it comes to the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that Congress is considering this year, the answer is everything.

Silicon Valley executives, who have long pressed the government to provide more visas for foreign-born math and science brains, are joining forces with an array of immigration groups seeking comprehensive changes in the law. And as momentum builds in Washington for a broad revamping, the tech industry has more hope than ever that it will finally achieve its goal: the expanded access to visas that it says is critical to its own continued growth and that of the economy as a whole.

Signs of the industry’s stepped-up engagement on the issue are visible everywhere. Prominent executives met with President Obama last week. Start-up founders who rarely abandon their computers have flown across the country to meet with lawmakers.

This Tuesday, the Technology CEO Council, an advocacy organization representing companies like Dell, Intel and Motorola, had meetings on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, Steve Case, a founder of AOL, is scheduled to testify at the first Senate hearing this year on immigration legislation, alongside the head of the deportation agents’ union and the leader of a Latino civil rights group.

“The odds of high-skilled passing without comprehensive is close to zero, and the odds of comprehensive passing without high-skilled passing is close to zero,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington.

The push comes as a clutch of powerful Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a long-elusive agreement on some basic principles of a “comprehensive” revamping of immigration law. Separately, a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate in late January focuses directly on the visa issue.

The industry’s argument for more so-called high-skilled visas has already persuaded the president.

“Real reform means fixing the legal immigration system to cut waiting periods, reduce bureaucracy, and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy,” Mr. Obama said in Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

In a speech in Las Vegas in January in which he introduced his own blueprint for overhauling immigration law, Mr. Obama embraced the idea that granting more visas was essential to maintaining innovation and job growth. He talked about foreigners studying at American universities, figuring out how to turn their ideas into businesses.

In part, the new alliance between the tech industry and immigration groups was born out of the 2012 elections and the rising influence of Hispanic voters.

“The world has changed since the election,” said Peter J. Muller, director of government relations at Intel, pointing out that the defeat of many Republican candidates had led to a softening of the party’s position on broad changes to immigration law. “There is a focus on comprehensive. We’re thrilled by it.”

“At this point,” he added, “our best hope for immigration reform lies with comprehensive reform.”

Mr. Case, the AOL co-founder, who now runs an investment fund, echoed that sentiment after meeting with the president last Tuesday.

“I look forward to doing whatever I can to help pass comprehensive immigration reform in the months ahead,” he said, “and ensure it includes strong provisions regarding high-skilled immigration, so we are positioned to win the global battle for talent.”

That sort of sentiment delights immigrants’ rights advocates who have banged their heads against the wall for years to rally a majority of Congress around their agenda.

“The stars are aligning here,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “You’ve got the politics of immigration reform changing. You’ve got tech leaders leaning in not just for high-skilled but for broader immigration reform.”

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who is co-sponsoring the bill to increase the number of visas available for highly skilled immigrants, said the cooperation went both ways.

“All the talk about the STEM field — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — has awakened even those who aren’t all that interested in the high-tech world,” he said.

While the growing momentum has surprised many in Washington, comprehensive change is still not a sure thing, especially in the Republican-controlled House.

Mr. Hatch said he would push forward with his measure even if the broader efforts foundered. But his Democratic co-sponsor, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, said she would press for the bill to be part of the comprehensive package.

Last year, technology executives had a taste of what could happen with stand-alone legislation.

Julia Preston contributed reporting from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 13, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the current basic annual cap for H-1B visas. It is 65,000 a year, not 60,000.

Read More..

Well: Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia

At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.

A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.

Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.

---

Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.

A transcript of this interview can be found here.

---

Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.

“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.

In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.

What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.

Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”

A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.

A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.

Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.

In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.

Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.

Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.

“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.

“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”

Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.

---

Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.

Read More..

Well: Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia

At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.

A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.

Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.

---

Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.

A transcript of this interview can be found here.

---

Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.

“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.

In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.

What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.

Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”

A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.

A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.

Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.

In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.

Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.

Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.

“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.

“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”

Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.

---

Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.

Read More..

DealBook: Switzerland to Require Banks to Hold More Capital to Offset Mortgages

LONDON – Switzerland said on Wednesday that Swiss banks would be required to hold additional capital for residential mortgages amid concerns that the country’s booming property market was overheating.

The country, which already has more stringent capital rules for its banks than other European nations, said lenders would be required to hold an additional 1 percent of risk-weighted assets to make the financial system more stable in light of an “excessive rise in prices in the real estate market and exorbitant mortgage debt.” Banks have until Sept. 30 to comply.

Property values in Switzerland have been rising as investors spooked by the uncertainties of the economic crisis in the euro zone sought a more stable places for their money.

Greater demand for Swiss homes has pushed up prices at a time of low interest rates and led many buyers to take on larger mortgages. The Swiss central bank has been unable to cool the market by increasing borrowing rates because of an overvalued Swiss currency.

An index created by the Swiss bank UBS measuring the likelihood of a Swiss property bubble was “clearly in the risk zone,” the bank wrote in a note to investors this month.

In the final three months of 2012, house prices soared to six times the annual average Swiss household income compared with about four times in 2000, according to the bank. It called the ever-rising demand for properties not intended for personal use “remarkable.”

The government said it was following a recommendation by the Swiss National Bank to increase the capital buffers. “The sustained growth in mortgage debt and rise in real estate prices of residential properties has led to imbalances which pose a significant risk to the stability of the banking sector and to that of the economy,” the government said in a statement.

Mortgage debt has been growing faster than the economy, and mortgage volume in relation to income has reached “risky” levels, the government said, adding that residential property prices had risen more than what was justified by fundamental factors.

UBS and Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s biggest banks, both said this month that they were working on increasing their capital buffers and that the suggested increase would not change their plans.

Read More..

India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 12

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DealBook Column: Relationship Science Plans Database of Names and Connections

It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips.

Such is the promise of a new company called Relationship Science.

Never heard of it? Until recently, neither had I. But a few months ago, whispers began that this young company was assembling a vast trove of information about big names in corporate America. What really piqued my interest was that bankrolling this start-up were some Wall Street heavyweights, including Henry R. Kravis, Ronald O. Perelman, Kenneth G. Langone, Joseph R. Perella, Stanley F. Druckenmiller and Andrew Tisch.

It turns out that over the last two years, with a staff of more than 800 people, mostly in India, Relationship Science has been quietly building what it hopes will be the ultimate business Who’s Who. If it succeeds, it could radically change the way Wall Street does business.

That’s a big if, of course. There are plenty of other databases out there. And there’s always Google. Normally I wouldn’t write about a technology company, but I kept hearing chatter about it from people on Wall Street.

Then I got a glimpse of this new system. Forget six degrees of Kevin Bacon. This is six degrees of Henry Kravis.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say a banker wants to get in touch with Mr. Kravis, the private equity deal maker, but doesn’t know him personally. The banker can type Mr. Kravis’s name into a Relationship Science search bar, and the system will scan personal contacts for people the banker knows who also know Mr. Kravis, or perhaps secondary or tertiary connections.

The system shows how the searcher is connected — perhaps a friend, or a friend of a friend, is on a charitable board — and also grades the quality of those connections by identifying them as “strong,” “average” or “weak.” You will be surprised at the many ways the database finds connections.

The major innovation is that, unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter if people have signed up for the service. Many business leaders aren’t on Facebook or LinkedIn, but Relationship Science doesn’t rely on user-generated content. It just scrapes the Web.

Relationship Science is the brainchild of Neal Goldman, a co-founder of CapitalIQ, a financial database service that is used by many Wall Street firms. Mr. Goldman sold CapitalIQ, which has 4,200 clients worldwide, to McGraw-Hill in 2004 for more than $200 million. That may explain why he was able to easily round up about $60 million in funds for Relationship Science from many boldface names in finance. He raised the first $6 million in three days.

“I knew there had to be a better way,” Mr. Goldman said about the way people search out others. Most people use Google to learn about people and ask friends and colleagues if they or someone they know can provide an introduction.

Relationship Science essentially does this automatically. It will even show you every connection you have to a specific company or organization.

“We live in a service economy,” Mr. Goldman said. “Building relationships is the most important part for selling and growing.”

Kenneth Langone, a financier and co-founder in Home Depot, said that when he saw a demonstration of the system he nearly fell off his chair. He used an unprintable four-letter word.

“My life is all about networking,” said Mr. Langone, who was so enthusiastic he became an investor and recently joined the board of Relationship Science. “How many times do I say, ‘How do I get to this guy?’ It is scary how much it helps.”

Mr. Goldman’s version of networking isn’t for everyone. His company charges $3,000 a year for a person to have access to the site. (That might sound expensive, but by Wall Street standards, it’s not.)

Price aside, the possibility that this system could lead to a deal or to a new wealth management client means it just might pay for itself.

“If you get one extra deal, the price is irrelevant,” Mr. Goldman said.

Apparently, his sales pitch is working. Already, some big financial firms have signed up for the service, which is still in a test phase. Investment bankers, wealth managers, private equity and venture capital investors have been trying to arrange meetings to see it, egged on, no doubt, by many of Mr. Goldman’s well-heeled investors. Even some development offices of charities have taken an interest.

The system I had a peek at was still a bit buggy. In some cases, it was missing information; in other cases the information was outdated. In still other instances, the program missed connections. For example, it didn’t seem to notice that Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, should obviously know a certain senior partner at Goldman.

But the promise is there, if the initial kinks are worked out. I discovered I had paths I never knew existed to certain people or companies. (Mr. Goldman should market his product to reporters, too.)

One of the most vexing and perhaps unusual choices Mr. Goldman seems to have made with Relationship Science is to omit what would be truly valuable information: phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Mr. Goldman explained the decision. “This isn’t about spamming people.” He said supplying phone numbers wouldn’t offer any value because people don’t like being cold-called, which he said was the antithesis of the purpose of his database.

Ultimately, he said, as valuable as the technology can be in discovering the path to a relationship, an artful introduction is what really counts.

“We bring the science,” he said. “You bring the art.”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this column misspelled the surname of one of the backers of Relationship Science. He is Ron O. Perelman, not Pearlman.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/12/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Database Of Names, And How They Connect.

Read More..

Well: Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia

At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.

A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.

Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.

---

Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.

A transcript of this interview can be found here.

---

Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.

“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.

In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.

What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.

Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”

A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.

A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.

Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.

In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.

Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.

Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.

“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.

“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”

Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.

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Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.

Read More..

Well: Straining to Hear and Fend Off Dementia

At a party the other night, a fund-raiser for a literary magazine, I found myself in conversation with a well-known author whose work I greatly admire. I use the term “conversation” loosely. I couldn’t hear a word he said. But worse, the effort I was making to hear was using up so much brain power that I completely forgot the titles of his books.

A senior moment? Maybe. (I’m 65.) But for me, it’s complicated by the fact that I have severe hearing loss, only somewhat eased by a hearing aid and cochlear implant.

Dr. Frank Lin, an otolaryngologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, describes this phenomenon as “cognitive load.” Cognitive overload is the way it feels. Essentially, the brain is so preoccupied with translating the sounds into words that it seems to have no processing power left to search through the storerooms of memory for a response.

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Katherine Bouton speaks about her own experience with hearing loss.

A transcript of this interview can be found here.

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Over the past few years, Dr. Lin has delivered unwelcome news to those of us with hearing loss. His work looks “at the interface of hearing loss, gerontology and public health,” as he writes on his Web site. The most significant issue is the relation between hearing loss and dementia.

In a 2011 paper in The Archives of Neurology, Dr. Lin and colleagues found a strong association between the two. The researchers looked at 639 subjects, ranging in age at the beginning of the study from 36 to 90 (with the majority between 60 and 80). The subjects were part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. None had cognitive impairment at the beginning of the study, which followed subjects for 18 years; some had hearing loss.

“Compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia over the course of the study,” Dr. Lin wrote in an e-mail summarizing the results. The worse the hearing loss, the greater the risk of developing dementia. The correlation remained true even when age, diabetes and hypertension — other conditions associated with dementia — were ruled out.

In an interview, Dr. Lin discussed some possible explanations for the association. The first is social isolation, which may come with hearing loss, a known risk factor for dementia. Another possibility is cognitive load, and a third is some pathological process that causes both hearing loss and dementia.

In a study last month, Dr. Lin and colleagues looked at 1,984 older adults beginning in 1997-8, again using a well-established database. Their findings reinforced those of the 2011 study, but also found that those with hearing loss had a “30 to 40 percent faster rate of loss of thinking and memory abilities” over a six-year period compared with people with normal hearing. Again, the worse the hearing loss, the worse the rate of cognitive decline.

Both studies also found, somewhat surprisingly, that hearing aids were “not significantly associated with lower risk” for cognitive impairment. But self-reporting of hearing-aid use is unreliable, and Dr. Lin’s next study will focus specifically on the way hearing aids are used: for how long, how frequently, how well they have been fitted, what kind of counseling the user received, what other technologies they used to supplement hearing-aid use.

What about the notion of a common pathological process? In a recent paper in the journal Neurology, John Gallacher and colleagues at Cardiff University suggested the possibility of a genetic or environmental factor that could be causing both hearing loss and dementia — and perhaps not in that order. In a phenomenon called reverse causation, a degenerative pathology that leads to early dementia might prove to be a cause of hearing loss.

The work of John T. Cacioppo, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, also offers a clue to a pathological link. His multidisciplinary studies on isolation have shown that perceived isolation, or loneliness, is “a more important predictor of a variety of adverse health outcomes than is objective social isolation.” Those with hearing loss, who may sit through a dinner party and not hear a word, frequently experience perceived isolation.

Other research, including the Framingham Heart Study, has found an association between hearing loss and another unexpected condition: cardiovascular disease. Again, the evidence suggests a common pathological cause. Dr. David R. Friedland, a professor of otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, hypothesized in a 2009 paper delivered at a conference that low-frequency loss could be an early indication that a patient has vascular problems: the inner ear is “so sensitive to blood flow” that any vascular abnormalities “could be noted earlier here than in other parts of the body.”

A common pathological cause might help explain why hearing aids do not seem to reduce the risk of dementia. But those of us with hearing loss hope that is not the case; common sense suggests that if you don’t have to work so hard to hear, you have greater cognitive power to listen and understand — and remember. And the sense of perceived isolation, another risk for dementia, is reduced.

A critical factor may be the way hearing aids are used. A user must practice to maximize their effectiveness and they may need reprogramming by an audiologist. Additional assistive technologies like looping and FM systems may also be required. And people with progressive hearing loss may need new aids every few years.

Increasingly, people buy hearing aids online or from big-box stores like Costco, making it hard for the user to follow up. In the first year I had hearing aids, I saw my audiologist initially every two weeks for reprocessing and then every three months.

In one study, Dr. Lin and his colleague Wade Chien found that only one in seven adults who could benefit from hearing aids used them. One deterrent is cost ($2,000 to $6,000 per ear), seldom covered by insurance. Another is the stigma of old age.

Hearing loss is a natural part of aging. But for most people with hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the condition begins long before they get old. Almost two-thirds of men with hearing loss began to lose their hearing before age 44. My hearing loss began when I was 30.

Forty-eight million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss. If it can be proved in a clinical trial that hearing aids help delay or offset dementia, the benefits would be immeasurable.

“Could we do something to reduce cognitive decline and delay the onset of dementia?” he asked. “It’s hugely important, because by 2050, 1 in 30 Americans will have dementia.

“If we could delay the onset by even one year, the prevalence of dementia drops by 15 percent down the road. You’re talking about billions of dollars in health care savings.”

Should studies establish definitively that correcting hearing loss decreases the potential for early-onset dementia, we might finally overcome the stigma of hearing loss. Get your hearing tested, get it corrected, and enjoy a longer cognitively active life. Establishing the dangers of uncorrected hearing might even convince private insurers and Medicare that covering the cost of hearing aids is a small price to pay to offset the cost of dementia.

---

Katherine Bouton is the author of the new book, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You,” from which this essay is adapted.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Medical College of Wisconsin. It is in Milwaukee, not Madison.

Read More..

DealBook: Barclays to Cut 3,700 Jobs in Overhaul

8:13 a.m. | Updated

LONDON – Barclays announced a major restructuring that will eliminate 3,700 jobs and close several business units, as the bank reported a big loss in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The overhaul of its operations comes after a series of scandals at the bank, including the manipulation of benchmark interest rates, which led to the resignation of the firm’s former chief executive, Robert E. Diamond Jr.

In a bid to reduce its exposure to risky trading activity, Barclays plans to close a number of operations in Europe and Asia, including a tax-planning unit that has been criticized for tarnishing the firm’s reputation.

“There will be no going back to the old way of doing things,” the chief executive, Antony P. Jenkins, told reporters at a news conference in London on Tuesday. “We will never be in a position again of rewarding people for activities inconsistent with our values.”

Despite the revamp of its operations and a new emphasis on values, the bank plans to retain the majority of its investment banking unit, particularly its operations in Britain and the United States. The division generated roughly 60 percent of the bank’s adjusted pretax profit in 2012.

Barclays will close four business divisions, while another 17 units will either be closed, sold or pared back in response to subdued market activity, Mr. Jenkins said. In total, the expected layoffs across the bank’s operations represent around 3 percent of the firm’s global work force.

The investment banking division is to be among the hardest hit, where about 1,800 employees are expected to be laid off. The job cuts will primarily fall on the bank’s Asian and European equities divisions, as well as its agricultural commodities trading operations. Almost 90 percent of the reductions already have been made, according to Christopher G. Lucas, the bank’s departing chief financial officer.

Mr. Jenkins refused to comment specifically on the position of Rich Ricci, the head of Barclays investment banking, whose name has surfaced in the inquiry into the bank’s role in the rate-rigging scandal.

“No one can predict the future, but I am confident in the team around me,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Who knows what could happen in a year’s time.”

The restructuring plan includes an additional 1,900 job cuts in the bank’s European retail and business banking unit, where Barclays plans to close roughly 30 percent of its Continental branch network.

The reductions have been focused in areas where Barclays does not compete globally with other international banks or where the firm could experience reputational damage like the recent rate-rigging scandal and the inappropriate sales of loan insurance to customers.

“Not much of this is surprising,” said Ian Gordon, a banking analyst at Investec in London. “They are not removing any of the material activities from the investment bank.”

The recent scandals that have engulfed the bank weighed down the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings.

Barclays posted a net loss of £835 million ($1.3 billion) in the last three months of 2012, compared with a profit of £356 million in the period a year earlier.
The results were hampered by the need to set aside additional capital to compensate costumers who were inappropriately sold loan insurance and for small businesses that were improperly sold complex interest-rate hedging products. Barclays also took a charge against the value of its own debt.

Excluding the adjustments, the bank’s pretax profit for the fourth quarter would have been £1.1 billion, almost double the amount in the period a year earlier.
For 2012, the bank reported an annual net loss of £1 billion, compared with a £3 billion profit for 2011. The annual loss resulted from provisions to cover legal costs related to the rate-rigging scandal and other improper activities.

The bank added that it would reduce annual costs by around 10 percent, to £16.8 billion, by 2015. Its share price rose almost 6 percent in afternoon trading in London on Tuesday.

Barclays said it had reduced bonuses across its operations by 16 percent for 2012, compared with the previous year. In its investment banking division, total bonuses fell 20 percent, with the average bonus in the unit standing at £54,100, a 17 percent reduction, according to a company statement.

The bank added that it had cut compensation awards because of risks facing several business units, including the rate-rigging scandal.

In a settlement with American and British authorities in June, Barclays agreed to pay fines totaling $450 million after some of its traders manipulated the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, for financial gain. Some of the firm’s managers also altered the rate to portray the bank in a healthier financial position than it actually was.

The investment banking division reported a pretax profit of £858 million in the fourth quarter, compared with a pretax profit of £267 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. Pretax profit at the bank’s retail and business banking unit rose 17 percent, to £732 million, while pretax profit in its corporate banking division almost tripled, to £107 million.

Mr. Jenkins acknowledged that some of the firm’s past actions had fallen short. He added that the investment banking division would remain at the heart of the firm’s future operations, though wrongdoing would not be tolerated.

“The old ways weren’t the right way to behave nor did they deliver the right results,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Individuals must take responsibility for their own behavior.”

Read More..