State of the Art: Microsoft’s Surface Pro Works Like a Tablet and a PC

For decades, Microsoft has subsisted on the milk of its two cash cows: Windows and Office. The company’s occasional ventures into hardware generally haven’t ended well: (*cough*) Zune, Kin Phone, Spot Watch (*cough*).

But the new Surface Pro tablet, which goes on sale Saturday, seemed to have more going for it than any Microsoft hardware since the Xbox.

Everybody knows what a tablet is, right? It’s a black touch-screen slab, like an iPad or an Android tablet. It doesn’t run real Windows or Mac software — it runs much simpler apps. It’s not a real computer.

But with the Surface Pro ($900 for the 64-gigabyte model, $1,000 for a 128-gig machine), Microsoft asks: Why not?

The Surface Pro looks like a tablet. It can work like a tablet. You can hold it in one hand and draw on it with the other. It even comes with a plastic stylus that works beautifully.

But inside, the Pro is a full-blown Windows PC, with the same Intel chip that powers many high-end laptops, and even two fans to keep it cool (they’re silent). As a result, the Pro can run any of the four million Windows programs, like iTunes, Photoshop, Quicken and, of course, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Surface Pro is beautiful. It’s clad in matte-black metal, beveled at the edges like a Stealth helicopter. Its connectors immediately suggest its post-iPad capabilities, like a memory-card slot for expanded storage. The screen is bright and beautiful, with 1080p high-definition resolution (1,080 by 1,820) — but when you connect the tablet to a TV or desktop monitor, it can send out an even bigger, sharper picture (2,550 by 1,440). There’s one USB 3.0 jack in the tablet, and a second ingeniously built into the power cord, so you can charge your phone as you work. Or you can connect anything you’d connect to a PC: external drives, flash drives, keyboard, mouse, speakers, cameras and so on.

Are you getting it? This is a PC, not an iPad.

As though to hammer home that point, Microsoft has endowed the Surface Pro with two unusual extras that complete the transformation from tablet to PC in about two seconds.

First, this tablet has a kickstand. It’s a thin metal flap that disappears completely when closed, but holds the tablet at a nice angle when you’re working or watching a movie.

Second, you can buy Microsoft’s now-famous keyboard cover. There are two models, actually. One is about as thick as a shirt cardboard. You can type on it — slowly — but you’re tapping drawings of keys, not actual keys. It’s called the Touch Cover ($100 with Surface purchase).

The other keyboard, the Type Cover ($130) is thicker — a quarter-inch — but its keys really travel, and it has a trackpad. You can really type on this thing.

Either keyboard attaches to the tablet with a powerful magnetic click. For tablet use, you can flip either keyboard around to the back; it disables itself so you don’t type gibberish by accident.

And if you really want to go whole hog with the insta-PC idea, you should also spring for the matching Touch Wedge mouse. It’s a tiny $40 cordless wedge, not much bigger than the AA battery that powers it, with supercrisp buttons and a touch surface on top for scrolling.

Now, when I wrote a first-look post on my blog last month , I was surprised by the reader reactions. Over and over, they posted the same argument:

“For that money, I could buy a very nice lightweight laptop with a dedicated keyboard and much more storage. Why should I buy Surface Pro when I can have more for less?”

Why? Because the Surface Pro does things most laptops can’t do. Like it weighs two pounds, with touch screen. Or work in portrait orientation, like a clipboard. Or remain comfortable in one hand as you make medical rounds, take inventory or sketch a portrait. Or stay in a bag as it goes through airport security (the TSA says tablets are O.K. to stay in).

You also hear: “But haven’t there been full-blown PC tablets before?”

Yes, there are a couple. But without the kickstand and keyboard cover, they can’t change instantly into a desktop computer.

So it’s true: for this much money, you could buy a very nice laptop. You could also buy a five-day cruise, a Gucci handbag or 250 gallons of milk. They just happen to be different beasts.

All right then: the Surface Pro is fast, flexible and astonishingly compact for what it does; that much is unassailable. But in practice, there are some disappointments and confusions.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Friends, investigators seek answers in killing of O.C. couple

A joint burial is being planned for an engaged Orange County couple found dead inside their car at their Irvine condo complex.

They met in college, two highly regarded basketball players who seemed to have the same winning touch on the court and off.

After blazing through high school and college with her outside shot, Monica Quan became the assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. Keith Lawrence, whose highlight shots are still there on his college website, became a campus officer at USC.

Now police in Irvine are scrambling for an explanation — and friends are looking for a way to express their shock — after Quan and Lawrence were found shot to death in their parked car on the top floor of a parking structure in an upscale, high-security condominium complex near UC Irvine.

The two had just announced their engagement and had recently moved into a condominium complex near Concordia University, where they played basketball and had gone on to earn their degrees.

Late Sunday, after a passerby noticed two people in the parked car, police said they found Lawrence slumped in the driver's side of his white Kia. Quan was next to him, also dead. The couple were shot multiple times, and authorities said they have tentatively ruled out the possibility of it being a murder-suicide or motivated by robbery. Nothing in the car, police said, seemed to be disturbed.

The couple's friends and family said they were shaken by the violent deaths of two people who seemed to have so much to offer.

Quan was a 2002 graduate of Walnut High School in the San Gabriel Valley, where she set school records for the most three-pointers in a season and a game. She played at Long Beach State and at Concordia, where she graduated in 2007. She went on to earn a master's degree before becoming the assistant coach at Fullerton.

Quan's father was the first Chinese American captain in the LAPD, and went on to become police chief at Cal Poly Pomona.

Quan was known for pulling students aside to offer encouragement, said Megan Richardson, a former player. Marcia Foster, the head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, described her assistant as a special person — "bright, passionate and empowering," she said.

Quan shared a love of basketball with her fiancee, Lawrence, whom she met at Concordia.

He too had been a standout basketball player, starting at Moorpark High, where he played point guard and shooting guard, said Tim Bednar, who coached Lawrence.

Bednar said that Lawrence, who came from a family of athletes, was talented, yet quiet and humble. After Lawrence graduated in 2003, he continued to participate in summer youth camps

When he returned for the camps, Bednar said, he was known as the "best basketball player that ever came through" the school.

"He was awesome with the kids," Bednar said. "They all wanted to be around Keith Lawrence."

Bednar heard from Lawrence when he needed a recommendation to become a police officer after graduating from the Ventura County Sheriff's Academy. In August, he was hired by USC's public safety department.

John Thomas, the executive director and chief of the department, said that Lawrence was an "honorable, compassionate and professional" member of the community.

"We are a better department and the USC campus community is a safer place as a result of his service," Thomas said in a statement.

On Monday night, Quan's friends gathered outside Walnut High School. One clutched a heart-shaped balloon, another carried a collage of her basketball playing days. Still another held a basketball.

Lawrence's friends and family put up a Facebook page. "RIP Keith Lawrence, you will be missed," it said simply. Within hours, 840 had left comments or indicated they "liked" it. Concordia put up a link to Lawrence's game-winning shot that carried the school into a post-season tournament.

Michelle Thibeault, 27, said in a Facebook message that she had known Quan for more than a decade. The two were on the same athletic teams and went to junior high and high school together. "Monica was loved by everyone," she said.

During a somber gathering at the Cal State Fullerton gymnasium Monday, Foster read a brief statement from Quan's brother Ryan.

"We just shared a moment of incredible joy on her recent engagement," he wrote, and then added: "A bright light was just put out."

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

lauren.williams@latimes.com

Times staff writer John Canalis contributed to this report.

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How Facebook Is Transforming Science and Public Health

Facebook has encompassed many things in its nine-year run. From a subtler version of a dating site to a gaming platform and a messaging hub. We’ve seen Facebook and its billion-plus users play a part in influencing politics, the form advertising takes, and how retail happens. Now we’re starting to see Facebook begin to impact science and public health, and it could be Facebook’s biggest industry-changing opportunity yet.

The logic is a simple one: Everyone on Facebook, all 1 billion-plus people, will have an illness at some point in their lives. And, as Facebook’s social creatures are in the habit of doing, that mass of people will share their experience battling disease, ask questions of their friends, and field advice from outsiders. Through the bullhorn of Facebook, healthcare professionals can deliver information 24-7 about flu vaccines, the path of epidemics, and essential preventive care. The social network can influence how and when people respond to disease, and how we manage death and dying. “Facebook has this massive and powerful platform [that] can be deployed for health care,” says Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.

In his book about digital health care, Topol writes about the story of a mother who posted pictures of her sick child on Facebook. People in her network started commenting on those photos. Three, including a cousin who was a pediatric cardiologist, called to tell her her son might have Kawasaki’s disease, a rare genetic disorder. She called her doctor and told her she was on her way to the hospital because she had a “sense” her kid was really sick.

“What [else] was I going to say? Three of my Facebook friends think my kid has an extremely rare childhood auto-immune disorder which I just read about on Wikipedia, and since they all contacted me after I posted a photo of him on my wall, I’m going? It seemed … wrong!” Deborah Kogan wrote on Slate. Once she got to the hospital, she writes, she told the doctor about her Facebook-prompted visit. She claims the doc said, “You know what? I was just thinking it could be Kawasaki disease. Makes total sense. Bravo, Facebook.”

This is only one story, but it does highlight the potential power of the Facebook network effect.

Last May, for example, Facebook made registering as an organ donor an official “Life Event.” Theoretically, users always had the option to tell their friends they wanted someone else to benefit from their body after they died. But publicizing that information was likely not high on the list of things people thought of sharing when they logged in. Facebook changed that, at least for a time.

About 6,000 people in 22 states registered as organ donors on the first day after the announcement was made, up from an average of about 360. That spike in registrations may have trailed off because users were not continuously reminded of this option, but the social experiment showed the influence Facebook could have on public health, say experts studying the collision between digital tools and health care.

Facebookers can already add overcoming an illness, losing weight, breaking bones or having their braces removed to their Life Events under the category “health and wellness,” but those updates provide very limited information about health.

Physicians, Topol says, don’t even know what normal, minute-by-minute blood pressure should be. That’s a problem because millions of Americans suffer from high blood pressure. But what if researchers could reach even a fraction of Facebook users who have this condition and prompt them to participate in a research study that tracked their blood pressure, along with other metrics like activity levels and heart rate through digital sensors? What if at some point in the future, there was even an option to share genetic information on your Facebook profile? With its growing cross-section of users, Facebook “could really get us an enriched data set,” Topol says.

That assumes, of course, that the data will be reliable, that Facebook will work with scientists to do research as it currently does, and that people will be willing to share personal health information given concerns about how Facebook or third parties might use their data. If you post that you have insomnia for example, would sleep medication ads suddenly pop up?

Those kinds of questions, and the cautious nature of the health care industry, have tended to keep the flow of health related data on Facebook fairly unsophisticated. Until now, Facebook has mostly served as a platform to disseminate information on the cheap. “More hospitals are on Facebook than any other social platform,” said Lee Aase, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. Organizations use it, Aase says, to raise awareness about local blood drives, mental health services, free vaccinations, STD/HIV testing, or prenatal care.

Physicians, who you might think would love to use Facebook as a natural hub to communicate with their patients, have mostly shied away from it and other social media platforms to interact with patients because of concerns over professionalism and legal liabilities due to patient confidentiality laws.

But there are signs that the healthcare crowd is warming up to Facebook, in particular research scientists are increasingly using Facebook as a tool. Currently, there have been roughly 400 academic papers published in the last four years that mention the social network, according to a search for the word ‘Facebook’ on PubMed, a public database of biomedical and life sciences research. That’s not many, but the number of such articles published each year seems to be growing. Some of these studies are trying to tease out whether Facebook could be a valid teaching tool for dentistry, histology and continuing education, which suggests the field might be getting more comfortable with the idea of using social media more widely.

In September, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, in collaboration with Facebook’s Data Science group, published a study of 61 million Facebook users in the journal Nature that suggested political messaging on Facebook influenced real-word voting of millions in the 2010 congressional elections. When users were told that their friends had voted, they were slightly more likely to vote themselves. Although the effect was small, “they translate into a significant numbers of votes” if extrapolated into a real-world scenario, according to an editorial published with the report. Imagine if the same could be shown for public health campaigns on Facebook? Scripps’ Topol asks.

“The leading digital doctors are really pushing the envelope on this,” says Topol. “But it’s just getting started.”

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Well: Warning Too Late for Some Babies

Six weeks after Jack Mahoney was born prematurely on Feb. 3, 2011, the neonatal staff at WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh, N.C., noticed that his heart rate slowed slightly when he ate. They figured he was having difficulty feeding, and they added a thickener to help.

When Jack was discharged, his parents were given the thickener, SimplyThick, to mix into his formula. Two weeks later, Jack was back in the hospital, with a swollen belly and in inconsolable pain. By then, most of his small intestine had stopped working. He died soon after, at 66 days old.

A month later, the Food and Drug Administration issued a caution that SimplyThick should not be fed to premature infants because it may cause necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, a life-threatening condition that damages intestinal tissue.

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Catherine Saint Louis speaks about using SimplyThick in premature infants.

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Experts do not know how the product may be linked to the condition, but Jack is not the only child to die after receiving SimplyThick. An F.D.A. investigation of 84 cases, published in The Journal of Pediatrics in 2012, found a “distinct illness pattern” in 22 instances that suggested a possible link between SimplyThick and NEC. Seven deaths were cited; 14 infants required surgery.

Last September, after more adverse events were reported, the F.D.A. warned that the thickener should not be given to any infants. But the fact that SimplyThick was widely used at all in neonatal intensive care units has spawned a spate of lawsuits and raised questions about regulatory oversight of food additives for infants.

SimplyThick is made from xanthan gum, a widely-used food additive on the F.D.A.’s list of substances “generally recognized as safe.” SimplyThick is classified as a food and the F.D.A. did not assess it for safety.

John Holahan, president of SimplyThick, which is based in St. Louis, acknowledged that the company marketed the product to speech language pathologists who in turn recommended it to infants. The patent touted its effectiveness in breast milk.

However, Mr. Holahan said, “There was no need to conduct studies, as the use of thickeners overall was already well established. In addition, the safety of xanthan gum was already well established.”

Since 2001, SimplyThick has been widely used by adults with swallowing difficulties. A liquid thickened to about the consistency of honey allows the drinker more time to close his airway and prevent aspiration.

Doctors in newborn intensive care units often ask non-physician colleagues like speech pathologists to determine whether an infant has a swallowing problem. And those auxiliary feeding specialists often recommended SimplyThick for neonates with swallowing troubles or acid reflux.

The thickener became popular because it was easy to mix, could be used with breast milk, and maintained its consistency, unlike alternatives like rice cereal.

“It was word of mouth, then neonatologists got used to using it. It became adopted,” said Dr. Steven Abrams, a neonatologist at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. “At any given time, several babies in our nursery — and in any neonatal unit — would be on it.”

But in early 2011, Dr. Benson Silverman, the director of the F.D.A.’s infant formula section, was alerted to an online forum where doctors had reported 15 cases of NEC among infants given SimplyThick. The agency issued its first warning about its use in babies that May. “We can only do something with the information we are provided with,” he said. “If information is not provided, how would we know?”

Most infants who took SimplyThick did not fall ill, and NEC is not uncommon in premature infants. But most who develop NEC do so while still in the hospital. Some premature infants given SimplyThick developed NEC later than usual, a few after they went home, a pattern the F.D.A. found unusually worrisome.

Even now it is not known how the thickener might have contributed to the infant deaths. One possibility is that xanthan gum itself is not suitable for the fragile digestive systems of newborns. The intestines of premature babies are “much more likely to have bacterial overgrowth” than adults’, said Dr. Jeffrey Pietz, the chief of newborn medicine at Children’s Hospital Central California in Madera.

“You try not to put anything in a baby’s intestine that’s not natural.” If you do, he added, “you’ve got to have a good reason.”

A second possibility is that batches of the thickener were contaminated with harmful bacteria. In late May 2011, the F.D.A. inspected the plants that make SimplyThick and found violations at one in Stone Mountain, Ga., including a failure to “thermally process” the product to destroy bacteria of a “public health significance.”

The company, Thermo Pac, voluntarily withdrew certain batches. But it appears some children may have ingested potentially contaminated batches.

The parents of Jaden Santos, a preemie who died of NEC while on SimplyThick, still have unused packets of recalled lots, according to their lawyer, Joe Taraska.

The authors of the F.D.A. report theorized that the infants’ intestinal membranes could have been damaged by bacteria breaking down the xanthan gum into too many toxic byproducts.

Dr. Qing Yang, a neonatologist at Wake Forest University, is a co-author of a case series in the Journal of Perinatology about three premature infants who took SimplyThick, developed NEC and were treated. The paper speculates that NEC was “most likely caused by the stimulation of the immature gut by xanthan gum.”

Dr. Yang said she only belatedly realized “there’s a lack of data” on xanthan gum’s use in preemies. “The lesson I learned is not to be totally dependent on the speech pathologist.”

Julie Mueller’s daughter Addison was born full-term and given SimplyThick after a swallow test showed she was at risk of choking. It was recommended by a speech pathologist at the hospital.

Less than a month later, Addison was dead with multiple holes in her small intestine. “It was a nightmare,” said Ms. Mueller, who has filed a lawsuit against SimplyThick. “I was astounded how a hospital and manufacturer was gearing this toward newborns when they never had to prove it would be safe for them. Basically we just did a research trial for the manufacturer.”

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Bucks Blog: Many Relying on Home Equity for Retirement

Even though the housing market has not recovered, nearly half of older working Americans expect to use equity in their homes to help finance their retirement, a new survey finds.

Roughly 47 percent of employed Americans ages 50 to 70 said they were relying on equity in their homes, the Retirement Check-In survey from Ameriprise Financial found. The finding is surprising, an accompanying report notes, because housing values in many parts of the country remain below the level they were before the recession. Also, 37 percent of homeowners say they’re not on track to pay off their mortgage before they retire.

More people said they were relying on home equity now compared with before the recession, the report finds. When participants were asked whether, before the downturn, they had expected to rely on home equity to help pay for their retirement, just 39 percent said yes.

While the reason for that shift isn’t entirely clear, the report says its plausible that the loss in value of other investments during the recession may have been so steep that many older workers feel they have no other alternative, even if their homes are worth less than they used to be.

“My hypothesis is that people didn’t think they were going to need to tap into equity because they thought they would have sufficient assets,” said Suzanna de Baca, vice president of wealth strategies at Ameriprise Financial. “Now, despite the fact they have reduced home equity, the shortfall between what they’ve saved and what they need is greater.”

The finding is typical of a “perplexing disparity” between Americans’ emotional outlook for retirement and the reality they face, the report said.

For instance, nearly three-quarters indicated that their dream retirement included taking “really nice vacations.” Yet, when asked if they would be able to afford the essentials in retirement, fewer than half said they felt “extremely” or “very” confident. And just 38 percent said they were confident they could afford the extras they had been anticipating in retirement, like traveling and hobbies.

The telephone survey included 1,000 employed Americans age 50 to 70, with investable assets of at least $100,000 (including employer-based retirement plans, but not real estate) and who are planning to retire at some point. Koski Research conducted the survey on behalf of Ameriprise Financial from Oct. 31 and Nov. 14, 2012. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

What role does home equity play in your retirement plans?

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Suspected child molester left L.A. archdiocese for L.A. schools

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday.

The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system.

Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

"I find it troubling," he said of the disclosures about Pina. "And I also want to understand what knowledge that we had of any background problems when hiring him, and I don't yet know that."

L.A. Unified itself has come under fire in the last year for its handling of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Pina, 66, was laid off from his full-time district job last year, but returned to work episodically to organize events. One event he may have helped organize was a ribbon-cutting Saturday for a new education facility. School district officials over the weekend, however, could not confirm that. Pina did not attend the event, and the district could not confirm payment for any help he may have provided.

Pina's name emerged in documents released by the archdiocese to comply with a court order. His case was one of many in which church officials failed to take action to protect child victims and in which first consideration was given to helping the offending priests rather than their victims, according to the documentation.

A just-released, internal 1993 psychological evaluation states that Pina "remains a serious risk for acting out." The evaluation recounts how Pina was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White ... I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. "I felt like I fell in love with her. I got sexually involved with her, but never intercourse. She was about 17 when we got involved sexually, and it continued until she was about 19."

In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.

Pina's evaluation also includes a recommendation "to take appropriate measures and precautions to insure that he is not in a setting where he can victimize others." Pina continued to work as a pastor as late as March 1998.

School district officials could not verify Pina's hiring date over the weekend, but he took a job with L.A. Unified as the school system was carrying out the nation's largest school construction program. His job involved community outreach, building support for school projects, while also finding out communities' concerns and trying to address them, officials said. Such work was crucial to the program, because even though communities wanted new schools, their locations and other elements could prove controversial. Such projects frequently involved tearing down homes or businesses, environmental cleanups, and the blocking of streets and other disruptions.

"His duties were to rally community support and elicit community comments regarding schools in a neighborhood," district spokesman Tom Waldman said.

Pina's work did bring him into contact with families, frequently at public meetings organized to hear and address their concerns.

Projects that Pina worked on included a new elementary school in Porter Ranch and a high school serving the west San Fernando Valley, Waldman said. The high school, in particular, generated substantial public debate as a district team and a local charter school competed aggressively for control of the site.

The $19.5-billion building program is winding down, and, as a result, many jobs attached to it have come to an end. Pina's was among them.

The dedication he may have helped organize Saturday was for the Richard N. Slawson Southeast Occupational Center in Bell. Participants told KCET-TV, which first reported Pina's school employment, that he had assisted with community outreach on that project. The adult education and career technical education facility has 29 classrooms as well as health-career labs and child care for students. The school opened in August 2012.

Pina "was slated for some additional temporary work when the issue came to our attention last week and that work was canceled," Deasy said.

It may have been Pina who first alerted district officials that his name appeared in disclosed documents, Deasy said. Pina called a senior administrator in the facilities division. So far, no untoward issues have emerged regarding Pina's work for L.A. Unified.

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Bring on the Bailout Money!

When did “business laptop” become a euphemism for a machine that’s stripped down and overpriced? Are the corporations of the world so flush with cash that basic features and value are no longer concerns?

Dell’s Latitude 6430u, an ultrabook designed for the business market, is a case study of what’s going awry in the business computing space in 2013. But let’s start with the good.

Dell has built this ultrabook with the best of intentions. It is corporate-friendly handsome and well-designed, with thoughtful features like soft-touch paint and your choice of input devices, touchpad or pointing stick. There are three USB 2.0 ports (one an eSATA combo port), HDMI, Ethernet and VGA ports, and an SD memory card slot.

The keyboard is spill-resistant, and for environments tougher than Starbucks, Dell says the laptop has passed 14 of the 29 military-standard 810G tests. As is the case with most corporate laptops, it’s vPro-enabled for central management and security.

Sounds good so far, but let’s talk about the tradeoffs.

The most noticeable one is that this machine lacks a touchscreen. In fact, the LCD is a total disaster — a mere 1366×768 pixels and extremely dim to the point where daylight filtering through a nearby window makes it difficult to see anything. There’s no keyboard backlighting either, so if it’s dark, you can see the screen but not what you’re typing.

Though it’s an ultrabook in name, the 6430u is hardly a featherweight. At 22mm thick (including feet) it is a touch too fat for Intel’s ultrabook specifications, and at almost exactly four pounds of weight, it’s decidedly hefty, too — in fact it’s the heaviest 14-inch laptop without an internal optical drive that I’ve tested since at least March 2012.

And then there’s the price. At $1,279, it’s also the most expensive ultrabook I’ve tested in the Windows 8 era, despite lacking some key features.

For your investment you do get some additional, if modest, upgrades. The 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU is a tick faster than the usual 1.7GHz i5 installed on most Windows 8 laptops, and Dell upgrades the RAM to a full 8GB. I’m not sure what the typical business professional would need with that much RAM, but it does power the laptop to excellent benchmark scores on productivity apps. Graphics of course are a no-show here, though the video benchmarks could have been a lot worse. A 128GB SSD is included as well.

The somewhat odd-looking keyboard grew on me after spending some time with the machine. While it’s technically an island-style design, the keys have the tapered edges of a traditional keyboard, so there’s less room in between the islands (the straits?). If the key travel wasn’t so short, it’d be a really nice touch-typing experience. The touchpad and pointing stick both seem perfectly workable.

Strangely, while performance was ultimately exceptional, it took some doing to get it there. My testing experience with the 6430u was marred by more than its fair share of hangs and crashes and other strange behavior. My first run of the PC Mark 7 benchmark (my standard first stop for performance testing) ended with results 30 percent below its eventual high point. Infrequent issues with apps lagging during launch and the laptop’s relatively slow boot don’t build confidence that its high marks will always be attainable.

WIRED Exceptional performance (when it’s firing on all cylinders). Looks good, at least in the boardroom. Five hours of battery life is solid for the category. External DVD burner just a $74 add-on.

TIRED No touchscreen on a Windows 8 ultrabook? What’s the point? Erratic performance issues. Dismal screen quality and brightness. Obese. Wildly overpriced. Loud fan.

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Fall Out Boy ends three-year break with new album, tour

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Fall Out Boy unveiled plans for a new album and world tour on Monday, three years after the pop punk band‘s four members announced a hiatus to pursue solo projects.

“This isn’t a reunion,” the band said on its website, “because we never broke up.”

The new album, “Save Rock and Roll,” will be available worldwide on May 6-7. A tour kicks off Monday night in Chicago.

A new song, “My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark (Light Em Up),” is available on iTunes.

“When we were kids the only thing that got us through most days was music,” the band’s website statement said. “We needed to plug back in and make some music that matters to us. The future of Fall Out Boy starts now.”

Fall Out Boy soared to fame in 2005 with the album “From Under the Cork Tree.” Hit songs like “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” and “Dance, Dance” mixed energetic guitars and angst-ridden lyrics. The group released two more albums in 2007 and 2008 but went on an indefinite hiatus in 2009.

The band’s members include bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz, vocalist and guitarist Patrick Stump, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley.

(Reporting By Nichola Groom; Editing by Bill Trott)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: A Doctor's Struggle With Numbers

My youngest child has been struggling with numbers.

This all started around the time of his 4th birthday, in mid-November. He knew he was getting older and asked a lot of questions about babies, who were “too little to have a number,” being less than 1 year old. Then, on the day of his birthday, he wanted to know when he was turning 4.

I told him that today was his birthday, that he turned 4 today.

“But when do I turn 4?” He had recently learned to emphasize certain words in an effort to assist his dim parents in getting his questions answered.

I told him at 8 in the morning, the time he was born.

“No, no, when do I turn 4?”

I looked at him helplessly, wondering whether he was expecting some pivotal moment when he would suddenly gain five inches in height. He decided that the anointed time occurred later that day, after he received his presents.

A week later, his mother and I went for a car ride with her parents, both in their mid-70s. In a rare quiet moment amid the usual barrage of instructions on how to navigate the rural western Pennsylvania roads, our son spoke up.

“When is Pappy going to die?”

The adults fell over themselves responding, trying to both reassure him and ourselves, as if the faster and louder we answered his question, the more we would negate it: A lot of years. Not for a long, long time. We hope he never does.

This satisfied him for the moment, but much like his father, he broods about these types of important topics. A couple of hours later, back at the house, he asked as if in mid-thought: “But, what is the last number?”

I repeated his question, stalling.

“Yes, what is the last number? What’s my last number?” he asked. His mother and I glanced at each other, in a quick game of chicken to see who would answer first.

“We don’t know, honey,” I finally said. He looked up at my wife, who nodded in agreement.

My son’s words came back to me the following Monday when I saw my first patient, a man in his 70s whose leukemia didn’t get worse on chemotherapy, but unfortunately also didn’t get better. We had run out of options, aside from supportive care.

“How long does he have?”

My patient’s son asked the question that was on everyone’s mind, and when he did, the wave of emotion that washed across the room was almost palpable. My patient’s daughter crossed her legs, and his wife started to cry. So did my patient, though he tried to hide it, glancing up at the fluorescent ceiling lights of the clinic room. Guys in his generation, I’ve found, don’t like to appear weak in front of their family.

I turned to my patient and asked him if he wanted me to talk about this, about his prognosis. My first responsibility in this type of situation is always to my patient and what he wants to hear. Some people want to know specifics, down to the half-month of predicted survival; others want no information at all, as if hearing a number will seal their fate.

“Sure, I guess so,” he answered. He did want to know, but he didn’t want to know.

Oncologists are notoriously bad at predicting survival, and none of us wants to be known as “the doctor who told me I would be dead by now,” the doctor who made a prediction of imminent demise, sending a family into a terrifying tailspin of goodbyes, only to be proven wrong and subsequently mocked for years to come. One of my patients, upon being told by another doctor that she had two months to live, held Christmas in April so she could spend one last holiday with her grandchildren. She survived to see two more Christmases.

At the same time, we need to be truthful and give guidance to people who want time to prepare, time to write wills and pay off debts, to say goodbyes and to leave instructions, to tie up the loose ends of a life now heavy with meaning.

We try to provide hope, but not false hope.

So we give ranges, starting with the best estimate of survival, because my patients have told me they shut down after they hear the worst estimate. We talk about setting goals, about maximizing quality of life, because we don’t have much leverage with quantity of life. We emphasize spending as much time as possible with family and friends, and as little time as possible with people wearing white coats. We tell them we’re not going to give up if they don’t give up.

But the truth is, we don’t know.

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Dr. Mikkael Sekeres is director of the leukemia program at the Cleveland Clinic.

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DealBook: U.S. and States Prepare to Sue S.&P. Over Mortgage Ratings

The Justice Department, along with state prosecutors, plans to file civil charges against Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service, accusing the firm of fraudulently rating mortgage bonds that led to the financial crisis, people briefed on the plan said Monday.

Up until last last week, the Justice Department had been in settlement talks with S.&P., these people said. But the negotiations broke down after the Justice Department said it would seek a settlement in excess of “10 figures,” or at least $1 billion, these people said, which would wipe out the profits of S.&P.’s parent, the McGraw-Hill Company, for an entire year.

McGraw-Hill earned $911 million last year.

A suit against S.&P. would be the first the government has brought against the credit ratings agencies related to the financial crisis, despite continued questions about the agencies’ conflicts of interest and role in creating a housing bubble.

By bringing a civil suit, as opposed to a criminal case, the Justice Department’s burden of proof will be less, perhaps lowering the bar for a successful prosecution.

In a statement on Monday, S.&P. said it had received notice from the Justice Department over a pending lawsuit.

The ratings agency argued any such legal action would be baseless, since it downgraded plenty of mortgage-backed investments, including in the two years leading up to the financial crisis. It also contended that other observers of the debt markets, including government officials, believed at the time that any problems within the housing sector could be contained.

“A D.O.J. lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit,” the agency said in its statement. “With 20/20 hindsight, these strong actions proved insufficient – but they demonstrate that the D.O.J. would be wrong in contending that S.&P. ratings were motivated by commercial considerations and not issued in good faith.”

Shares in McGraw-Hill were down 3.8 percent in midafternoon trading on Monday, at $56.07.

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