Country singer Gary Allan’s new album gets label’s early push

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) – The release of country music singer Gary Allan’s new album “Set You Free,” this week, his first since undergoing vocal surgery in 2010, was not meant to happen so soon.

But when his record label, MCA Nashville, saw his new song “Every Storm (Runs out of Rain),” race up the charts in September, the label pushed the album’s release up two months from March.

“I’ve been doing this forever and it usually goes the other way,” Allan told Reuters. “It’s super exciting for me.”

Now in its 20th week on Billboard’s country chart, “Every Storm (Runs out of Rain),” peaked last week at No. 4 and has been downloaded some 685,000 times, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Allan, 45, who has scored three country chart toppers in his 17-year career, said his latest hit was the right song at the right time for a country politically divided and seemingly down on its luck.

“It’s a song about hope,” he said. “Sometimes a song really resonates with people and the public because of the timing of its release. This is a time when our country needs hope and I think that’s why it’s doing so well.”

Allan’s voice is stronger on the album and he credits surgery he underwent in 2010 to remove a polyp from his vocal cords, which made it difficult for him to sing high notes.

“I don’t think I realized it really, but there were a few years where I couldn’t hit the falsetto notes on songs like ‘Smoke Rings in the Dark.’ After the surgery, it was like I was 18 again,” he said.

Allan, a California native who often plays down-home American rodeos and state fairs, is best known as a brooding troubadour who likes to pack an emotional punch.

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“I don’t want to hear songs about how sunshiny things are,” he said. “I don’t like songs that feel like radio candy … I like the ones that make you think, laugh or cry – they pull some kind of emotion out of you.”

Allan for the first time played a part in writing every song on “Set You Free” to achieve that sentiment. He also used a team of rivals to freshen up his sound on his ninth studio album.

“I think you need to do something new to keep reinventing yourself,” he said. “I used three different producers and we were all a little competitive with each other to see who could get the best songs,” he said.

“The result was we got better quality in the songs and the recording. It’s my favorite album I’ve ever done.”

Among his favorite songs on the album is “One More Time,” a song about the death of his father in 2008, written with Hillary Lindsey and Matt Warren – co-writers on “Every Storm.”

“We just wanted to write an introspective song,” Allan said. “We kept thinking ‘What would you say when you got to the pearly gates?’, and what I would say is ‘I want one more time, I’m not ready to be there.’”

Another song, “Pieces,” describes Allan’s life philosophy.

“No matter who you meet in life, you take something from them, positive or negative,” Allan said. “That’s what the song is about, pieces of what I’ve been through and of the people I’ve met.”

MCA Nashville is part of Universal Music Group, a subsidiary of France’s Vivendi SA.

(Reporting by Vernell Hackett, editing by Eric Kelsey, desking by G Crosse)

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Mind: Avoiding Cold Feet Down the Aisle

His charisma was big enough to make his bad habits seem small, more like quirks than flaws. The cigarettes on his breath; the extra weight around the middle; the indifference to clothing and appearances — surely these were minor things, correctable in time.

In the months leading up to the wedding, in 1988, even the fact that he’d been living with his mother at age 38 seemed somehow explainable, if not ideal.

“How about that for a red flag?” said Jincey Huck, a state court employee in St. Louis, of her first husband, who has since died. “Deep down I knew it was a mistake, but I wanted to be married, I wanted kids, all that. I had cold feet the entire time,” said Ms. Huck, now 51.

Psychologists have studied decision-making for more than a century, trying to tease apart how biases, emotion and personality affect big choices and small ones. They have studied people playing investment games. They have taken brain images during hypothetical moral decisions. They have compared the accuracy of snap judgments to long deliberation, trying to gauge the value of subconscious instincts.

But it’s a lot harder to simulate in a laboratory the sort of big life decisions that are risky and hard to reverse: Whether to move across the country. Whether to take a new job, or buy a new house, even switch from PC to Mac. And, perhaps biggest of all: whether to walk down the aisle or split up.

“Virtually every big, real-life decision requires the decision-maker to resolve 10 fundamental questions, or what I call cardinal issues,” said J. Frank Yates, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Michigan’s business school. People only feel real confidence, he said, when they begin to address them all, including trade-offs and timing.

Most people, of course, aren’t experts in decision science. They decide based on their own beliefs, whims and their gut.

So how instructive are gut feelings — particularly cold feet — when there are so many moving parts and the stakes are so high? A study published in the current issue of The Journal of Family Psychology provides an answer: plenty instructive, at least when it comes to marriage.

“Having doubts before marriage is not only common, it predicted a higher divorce rate for women and more dissatisfaction in marriages for men and women,” compared with newlyweds with no doubts, said Justin A. Lavner, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, with co-authors Benjamin R. Karney and Thomas N. Bradbury of U.C.L.A., is the first to examine premarital cold feet in a group of couples over time.

That gut-level doubt can portend coming trouble seems true by definition, self-evident. Yet most big decisions prompt some nervous hesitation, and research suggests that it is the nature and source of those doubts that matter, not their mere presence. Many of the psychological dynamics at play in premarital decision-making are similar to those that build around any big decision.

“The important thing to note is that most people who get divorced do not have major doubts going in” to the marriage initially, even if cold feet may increase the odds, said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook University. “At the same time there are factors — like disagreements with the other person’s parents — that may seem minor but become more important later, for instance, when you have kids.”

Several distractions can make these traps hard to appreciate. One is external pressure created by a wedding. “People get caught up in it and dismiss cold feet as, ‘Oh, that’s only the jitters,’ ” said Anne Milford, co-author with Jennifer Gauvain of “How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy” (Random House 2010), who interviewed about 200 women who had had strong doubts at the altar.

“Women most often said they knew they were making a mistake but did it anyway, often because they had no one who’d listen to them,” Ms. Milford said.

Two other elements that blur the decision are internal, less conscious, and can work against one another.

Both are types of idealization. In a series of studies, Sandra Murray of the State University at Buffalo and others have shown that new lovers have a strong tendency to idealize their partner, in the way that Ms. Huck did: Her friends are kind of sweet, when sober. He gets depressed mostly because he’s so sensitive.

Doubts don’t evaporate; they’re suppressed, only to return later.

The other is an expectation many have, of exquisite happiness. “People feel that they have to find the ideal, perfect Mr. or Ms. Right, who is their soul mate, with whom they will feel passionate love forever, and who will make them happy forever,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Myths of Happiness” (Penguin, 2013).

She added: “Of course, both research and anecdotal evidence shows that this is not what typically occurs” and this type of person can easily become disappointed.

Being mindful of both distortions — and finding someone outside the wedding frenzy to listen — is one way to check whether those cold feet are ominous.

Another, Dr. Yates said, is to sit down and write about the doubts. “If a person writes about a decision problem, as opposed to simply thinking about it, she develops greater confidence in the correctness of the decision she eventually reaches,” he said in an e-mail. And that confidence is well placed, his studies have suggested.

“I really did ignore everything; I let it all slide,” said Ms. Huck, who is now happily remarried. “The worst part was afterward, knowing I’d done something I knew at the time was a mistake.”

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Markets Mixed in Early Trading

Wall Street markets opened mixed on Thursday as Apple slid more than 10 percent following a revenue miss, and analysts said equities may be due for a pullback after a six-day rally.

Apple missed Wall Street’s revenue forecast for a third consecutive quarter after iPhone sales came in below expectations, fanning fears that its dominance of consumer electronics was slipping. The shares began falling in premarket trading, and were down 11 percent, to $456.60, in early trading.

Over all, the Standard & Poor’s 500-share index was flat, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.2 percent, while the Nasdaq was 0.6 percent lower.

However, some positive economic news looked set to put a floor under stock prices. Growth in Chinese manufacturing accelerated to a two-year high this month and a buoyant Germany took the euro zone economy a step closer to recovery, business surveys showed on Thursday.

In the United States, the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell to its lowest since the early days of the 2007-9 recession, a hopeful sign for the sluggish labor market.

With signs the economy is improving, some investors are lauding the strength of the stock market rather than calling an end to the rally.

“The market has disconnected itself with Apple,” said Jack de Gan, chief investment officer at Harbor Advisory Corp in Portsmouth, N.H. “I think it shows great strength in the overall S.&P.”

The S.&P. 500 rose for a sixth day on Wednesday following stronger-than-expected results from I.B.M. and Google. But Apple could now halt that rally, which had lifted stocks to five-year highs.

In Europe, shares were mostly higher. The FTSE in London was 0.6 percent higher, while the DAX in Germany gained 0.2 percent in afternoon trading.

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Dodgers near TV rights deal with Time Warner Cable

The Los Angeles Dodgers have negotiated a long-term television deal that would pay the team $7 billion to $8 billion, a move that would help cover its recent spending spree and quiet critics who scoffed at the record $2.15-billion purchase price paid by the new owner, Guggenheim Partners.

The expected 20-year agreement with Time Warner Cable could be announced this week, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked that their names not be used because the deal has not yet closed.

The arrangement is bad news for rival News Corp's Fox Sports unit, whose channel Prime Ticket holds cable TV rights to the Dodgers through the upcoming season. Fox will pay $39 million this season — a fraction of what Time Warner Cable would pay under the new contract — and found the proposed price tag too high, people inside News Corp. said.

And the pact would probably mean bigger pay TV bills — even for those who don't watch Dodgers baseball, potentially leading to a backlash against the team and Time Warner Cable.

Under the terms of the proposed contract, Guggenheim would own a Dodgers-dedicated television channel that would start carrying games in 2014, said the people with knowledge of the pact. Time Warner Cable would manage much of the channel's operations and handle distribution to other pay TV companies, including DirecTV and Cox Cable.

The Dodgers' move to control their own channel is driven in part by a desire to pocket as much money as possible while still abiding by Major League Baseball's revenue-sharing agreement — which requires that 34% of each team's locally generated revenue, most of it from TV rights and ticket sales, be contributed to a pool for other teams.

Mark Walter, the Dodgers' controlling owner, was believed to be sharing details of the tentative deal Tuesday with Major League Baseball officials. Walter has negotiated extensively with the league over how much of the television money must be shared with the other 29 Major League teams.

The Dodgers' revenue-sharing bill could range from $1 billion to $2.7 billion, based on the structure of the deal.

The new channel would also give the Dodgers the opportunity to expand team-related programming throughout the day, as the Los Angeles Lakers do on their Time Warner Cable channel.

"If you look at what the Lakers are doing, they're communicating with their client base," Dodgers owner and Guggenheim Partners President Todd Boehly told The Times last fall. "It's fantastic. It becomes self-fulfilling. If you start interacting with the team in all-new ways, you're going to love the team even more."

Boehly was not available for comment.

The addition of a new Dodgers network would bring the number of local sports channels in Los Angeles to six, the most in any major city in the United States. Besides Time Warner Cable's SportsNet and Deportes, and Fox's Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, the Pac-12 Conference also has its own channel here. Fox Sports West carries Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Angels games.

"That's too many channels," said Marc Ganis, a sports industry consultant in Chicago. "I can't imagine that is sustainable on a long-term basis."

Sports channels aren't cheap. Time Warner Cable already charges other cable and satellite operators close to $4 a month a subscriber for SportsNet. The Dodgers and Time Warner Cable are expected to seek as much as $5 for their new channel, which is double what Fox charges for Prime Ticket, according to industry consulting firm SNL Kagan.

Those price hikes are generally passed on to consumers, who may resent the increase.

"Why do I have to pay for the Dodgers when I am not a Dodgers fan?" said Laura Burnes, a mother of two who lives in Orange County. "I don't want to see my cable costs go up any more."

The cost for sports has skyrocketed over the last decade. That's partly because the content is seen as "DVR proof." It is watched live by viewers, which makes it more valuable to advertisers and networks than sitcoms and dramas, which are often recorded and viewed later by people who skip ads.

But non-sports fans and pay TV companies are increasingly frustrated at having to pick up the tab for big sports deals. There have been calls to sell sports channels "a la carte," or separately from other programming.

The Dodger agreement with Time Warner Cable may be a tipping point.

"That is the solution everyone should be looking at seriously," said Derek Chang, a former senior executive at satellite broadcaster DirecTV. Such a move, he added, may be the only way to lower the cost of TV sports. "Ultimately the market for fees would then reset."

The Dodger deal marks the second time in less than two years that Time Warner Cable has outbid Fox Sports for a Los Angeles franchise. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $3.6 billion for a 20-year accord with the Lakers, which had been on Fox Sports West.

Time Warner Cable used the Lakers to create SportsNet and Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel.

The two media titans have also done battle on other turf.

Last year, Fox acquired an ownership stake in Yes, the New York sports channel that is home to the Yankees. In 2011, Fox outbid Time Warner Cable for rights to the San Diego Padres.

Losing the Dodgers will hurt Fox's Prime Ticket, but the company still has rights to the Los Angeles Clippers and Anaheim Ducks. A Fox executive said there are no plans to consolidate Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, which besides the Angels also has rights to the Stanley Cup champion Kings.

Distributors will press for a reduction in the fee for Prime Ticket without the Dodgers, but it's not a sure thing they'll get it, Ganis said. When New York's MSG channel lost rights to the Yankees, the subscription fee did not decrease.

joe.flint@latimes.com

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

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Why Subtraction Is the Hardest Math in Product Design

Simple doesn’t just sell, it sticks. Simple made hits of the Nest thermostat, Fitbit, and TiVo. Simple brought Apple back from the dead. It’s why you have Netflix. The Fisher Space Pen, the Swiss Army Knife, and the Rolex Oyster Perpetual are some of our most enduring products. All are marvels of simplicity.

Yet while many mechanical marvels of simplicity remain true to their original form, most electronic ones do not.

Travel back in time to use your parents’ first microwave and you’ll likely see a box with three buttons (High, Medium, Low) and a timer dial. By contrast, one of LG’s current models boasts 33 buttons. Do I hit Auto Defrost or Express Defrost? And what the hell is Less/More? None of these make my popcorn pop faster or taste better. And it’s not easier to use. Why do products become more complex as they evolve?

“Simplicity is about subtraction,” says Mike Monteiro, author of Design Is a Job. “We live in a culture of consumption, where quality is associated with more. So designers and manufacturers tend to believe that to succeed you have to provide more. What if Microsoft announced that the next version of Office had 75 percent less functionality? It would be usable! But there’s no way marketing would let them get away with that.”

Take Apple. Simplicity saved the company. Starting with the iMac, it rolled out hit after simple hit: OS X, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But as it grew into a behemoth, it allowed complexity to creep in. You can see it in iOS apps like Newsstand, which forces you to open a cheesy faux-wood bookcase before you can fire up the newspaper you actually want. A far worse example is iTunes. The new “simplified” version, iTunes 11, is fast but still has a baffling interface with a bevy of needless features. Its core function (playing music!) is lost in the shuffle. There is hope for Apple, though: The recent appointment of its minimalist-design guru Jony Ive as “human interface” chief is sure to mean re-simplified wares.

It’s no different at Google, which was also built on simple. Google won a decade of dominance with its sparse search page. Simplicity made Google a verb. But when Facebook got into its head, Google reacted by cluttering up its search page with features and buttons most people will never use. Worse, it junked up its results. A search for “pizza,” for instance, litters the page with ads, Google services like Zagat, and even news about pizza, none of which is clearly delineated from the actual search results.

As Apple and Google wrinkle into complexity, the doors are opened to newer, leaner rivals, like streaming music service Rdio or search engine upstart DuckDuckGo, both of which have clean interfaces that have won them passionate followings.

The ultimate lesson here may come from Microsoft. When it was time to roll out a new iteration of Windows, the company did something brave: It released a fundamentally different version of its flagship product. Windows 8 has a stripped-down interface, and full-screen apps run bereft of menus and ugly buttons. Simplified.

Well, half of it is. The other half is the traditional desktop. Want to run your existing Windows software? You’ll have to toggle back to that desktop. It’s confusing—jarring, even. By failing to commit, Microsoft made its OS more complicated, not less.

Simplicity is actually quite simple. It requires paring things away when market forces tell you to add. It means removing layers rather than adding them. In short, all it takes is a bit of courage.

Email: mat_honan@wired.com

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“Cyborg Foundation” wins $100K Focus Forward prize

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Spanish director Rafel Duran Torrent has won the $ 100,000 cash prize in the Focus Forward Filmmaker Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The awards, the most lucrative ever given to short documentaries, went to five different shorts, with the top one being Duran Torrent’s “Cyborg Foundation.”

The director will also be invited to a Sundance Institute ShortsLab program of his choice this year.

Runners-up were Jared P. Scott and Kelly Nyks for “The Artificial Leaf,” Paul Lazarus for “Slingshot,” Kim Munsamy for “Bones Don’t Lie and Don’t Forget” and Callum Cooper for “Mine Kafon.”

The program was launched at last year’s Sundance by Morgan Spurlock and Karol Martesko-Fenster. Focus Forward was run by Spurlock’s and Martesko-Fenster’s company, cinelan, and sponsored by GE.

The top films were chosen by a jury consisting of Sundance senior programmer Caroline Libresco, actress Daryl Hannah and directors Barbara Kopple, Jose Padilha, Joe Berlinger, Floyd Webb and Peter Wintonick.

The winning films and the 15 other finalists can be viewed on the Focus Forward website.

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The New Old Age Blog: Study Links Cognitive Deficits, Hearing Loss

There’s another reason to be concerned about hearing loss — one of the most common health conditions in older adults and one of the most widely undertreated. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggests that elderly people with compromised hearing are at risk of developing cognitive deficits — problems with memory and thinking — sooner than those whose hearing is intact.

The study in JAMA Internal Medicine was led by Dr. Frank Lin, a hearing specialist and epidemiologist who over the past several years has documented the extent of hearing problems in older people and their association with falls and the onset of dementia.

The physician’s work is bringing fresh, and some would say much-needed, attention to the link between hearing difficulties and seniors’ health.

In his new report, Dr. Lin looked at 1,984 older adults who participated over many years in the Health ABC Study, a long-term study of older adults conducted in Pittsburgh and Memphis. Participants’ mean age was 77; none had evidence of cognitive impairment when the period covered by this research began. In 2001 and 2002, they received hearing tests and cognitive tests; cognitive tests alone were repeated three, five and six years later.

The tests included the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which is administered through an interview and yields an overall picture of cognitive status, and the Digit Symbol Substitution Test, a paper-only exercise that asks people to match symbols and numbers, which can reveal deficits in someone’s working memory and executive functioning.

Dr. Lin found that annual rates of cognitive decline were 41 percent greater in older adults with hearing problems than in those without, based on results from the Modified Mini-Mental State Exam. A five-point decline on that test is considered a “clinically significant” indicator of a change in cognition.

Using this information, Dr. Lin found that elderly people with hearing problems experienced a five-point decline on the exam in 7.7 years, compared with 10.9 years for those with normal hearing.

Results from the Digit Symbol Substitution Test showed the same downward trend, though not quite as steep: older people with hearing loss recorded a yearly rate of cognitive decline 32 percent greater on it than those with intact hearing. In both cases, the results showed an association only, with no proof of causality.

Still, given the fact that nearly two-thirds of adults age 70 and older have hearing problems, it is an important finding.

For caregivers and older adults, the bottom line is “pay attention to hearing loss,” said Kathleen Pichora-Fuller, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study.

Most people seek medical attention for hearing difficulties 10 to 20 years after they first notice a problem, she said, because “there’s a stigma about hearing loss and people really don’t want to wear a hearing aid.” That means years of struggling with the consequences of impairment, without interventions that can make a difference.

One consequence that may help explain Dr. Lin’s findings is social isolation. When people have a hard time distinguishing what someone is saying to them, as is common in older age, they often stop accepting invitations to dinners or parties, attending concerts or classes, or going to family events. Over time, this social withdrawal can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to the loss of meaningful relationships and activities that keep older people feeling engaged with others.

A substantial body of research by cognitive scientists has established that seniors’ cognitive health depends on exercising both body and brain and remaining socially engaged, and “now we have this intersection of hearing research and cognitive research lining up and showing us that hearing health is part of cognitive health,” said Dr. Pichora-Fuller, who originally trained as an audiologist.

Family physicians and internists, too, often dismiss older patients’ complaints about hearing, and should pay close attention to Dr. Lin’s research, she said.

“I hope this study will be a wake-up call to clinicians that auditory tests need to be part of the battery of tests they employ to look at an older person’s health,” agreed Patricia Tun, an adjunct associate professor of psychology at Brandeis University.

Although the tests are effective and cause no known harm, a panel of experts recently failed to recommend them for older adults because of a lack of supporting evidence, as I wrote last August.

Another potential explanation for Dr. Lin’s new finding lies in a concept known as “cognitive load” that Dr. Tun has explored through her research. Basically, this assumes that “we only have a certain amount of cognitive resources, and if we spend a lot of those resources of processing sensory input coming in — in this case, sound — it’s going to be processed more slowly and understand and remembered less well,” she explained.

In other words, when your brain has to work hard to hear and identify meaningful speech from a jumble of sounds, “you’ll have less mental energy for higher cognitive processing,” Dr. Tun said.

Even seniors who hear sounds relatively well often report that words sound garbled or mumbled, she noted, indicating a deterioration in hearing mechanisms that process complex speech.

Also, as yet unidentified biological or neurological pathways may affect both speech and cognition. Or hearing loss may exacerbate frailty and other medical conditions that older people oftentimes have in ways that are as yet poorly understood, Dr. Lin’s paper notes.

A limitation to his study is its reliance, in part, on the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which asks older adults to respond to questions posed by an interviewer, according to Barbara Weinstein, a professor and head of the audiology program at CUNY’s Graduate Center.

Her research has shown that hearing-compromised seniors may not understand questions and answer incorrectly, confounding results. Another limitation arises from the failure to test participants’ hearing over time, as happened with cognitive tests, making associations more difficult to tease out.

Dr. Lin hopes to address this through another research project that would follow older adults over time and test whether interventions such as hearing aides help prevent the onset or slow the progression of cognitive decline. In the meantime, older people and caregivers should arrange for hearing tests if they have concerns, and consider getting a hearing aid if problems are confirmed.

Getting sound to the brain is the “first and most important step” in preventing sensory deprivation that can contribute to cognitive dysfunction, said Kelly Tremblay, a professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Washington.

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Bits Blog: Keeping the Internet Safe From Governments

Even before the World Conference on International Telecommunications took place last month in Dubai, Internet activists anticipated trouble. So did Congress, which issued a resolution calling it “essential” that the Internet remain “stable, secure and free from governmental control.”

The worries proved prescient. The conference, which supposedly was going to modernize some ancient regulations, instead offered a treaty that in the eyes of some critics would have given repressive states permission to crack down on dissent. The United States delegate refused to sign it. Fifty-four other countries, including Canada, Peru, Japan and most of Western Europe, voted no as well.

The OpenNet Initiative estimates that about a third of Internet users live in countries that engage in “substantive” or “pervasive” blocking of Internet content. They tended to be among the 89 countries that signed the treaty, including Russia, Cambodia, Iran, China, Cuba, Egypt and Angola.

Those in favor of a free and open Internet have long had a problem with the International Telecommunication Union, the affiliate of the United Nations that ran the conference. They see the I.T.U., which dates back to 1865, as longing for the pre-Internet era, when its influence and fortunes were greater. As a result, activists think, the I.T.U. has become aligned with, and a tool of, countries that desire more governmental control over public speech.

In the wake of the Dubai meeting, there are renewed calls to scale back United States financing of the I.T.U. drastically. The logic is, why are taxpayers supporting an organization whose motives they oppose?

“Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corrected,” says the De-Fund the I.T.U. Web site, which has posted a petition on the White House Web site.

The De-Fund site notes that the petition is not asking the United States government to take an unprecedented first step. “Many of our free-market democratic allies, led by Germany, France, Spain and Finland, have already de-funded the I.T.U. Likewise, right-thinking American companies like I.B.M., Cingular, Microsoft, Fox, Agilent, Sprint, Harris, Loral and Xerox, and others, have already withdrawn their private-sector contributions from the I.T.U.”

The petition was the brainchild of Bill Woodcock, the Berkeley-based research director of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit institute. “This is really about whether people should be allowed to say what they think,” Mr. Woodcock said. “The Internet enables free speech, and that makes it very dangerous to countries that try to control public discourse.”

The United States government contributes about 8 percent of the I.T.U.’s budget. The 55 countries that voted against the treaty contribute about three-quarters of it. If the White House receives 25,000 signatures by Feb. 10, it will review and quite possibly act on the petition. As of Tuesday, it had about 600 signatures with minimal publicity.

A spokesman for the I.T.U., which is based in Switzerland, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

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County official calls car leasing contract procedure 'embarrassing'

Auditors reviewing a $1.75-million car leasing contract given to a company with a politically connected lobbying firm found that Los Angeles County officials had failed to create a "truly competitive" process, but that there was no evidence of improper influence.

Investigators with the county auditor-controller's office reviewed the Enterprise Rent-a-Car contract at the request of Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. A report by KCET-TV had raised questions about the way the business was awarded.

Enterprise was given a sole-source, five-year deal in March to provide 60 leased  vehicles to the county's Community Development Commission and to maintain the agency's existing fleet. Commission staff projected that outsourcing the fleet services would save about $300,000 a year.

The Nov. 28 report on KCET's "SoCal Connected" focused on the lobbying firm Englander Knabe & Allen and questioned whether its clients — including Enterprise — got an unfair advantage because partner Matt Knabe is the son of county Supervisor Don Knabe, who voted along with all the other supervisors to award the contract.

Both Knabes have said that their relationship has never posed a conflict, and a spokesman for the Englander firm has said Matt Knabe never lobbies his father directly.

The auditor-controller found no evidence of attempts to influence the rental car award. Matt Knabe told investigators that no one from his firm had lobbied on the contract, and the commission's executive director said he was "100% confident" the supervisor's son did not influence the process.

"The report shows that Matt acted professionally and used no undue influence in his dealings with the county," said Englander partner Eric Rose.

But the review did find that county staff did an "inadequate" job of trying to find other potential bidders.

Asked by KCET what vendors had been contacted and given a chance to compete for the business, a county analyst created a list to make it appear the department had reached out to 50 companies. In fact, only 16 firms had been contacted, auditors found. Enterprise was the only company that responded to the email request, and staff made no follow-up attempt to contact the other firms.

According to the auditor's report, the count of 50 vendors was originally used as a "place holder" in a template document and never corrected. By the time the contract was awarded, the contract analyst "felt he could not correct the number without embarrassment."

Investigators also found that the agency violated its own policy by not advertising the contract on the commission's or the county's websites, and that the contract should have gone through a full bidding process.

In addition, several vendors that contract officials emailed to invite interest had no "realistic potential" to provide a leased fleet to the county in the first place, the review concluded.

Investigators wrote that they couldn't determine whether the commission could have gotten a better deal but said "the potential for greater savings from a more competitive process appears to be plausible."

County auditor-controller Wendy Watanabe called the situation "embarrassing" but chalked up the issues to incompetence rather than intentional steering.

"I think they got lazy, they took a shortcut, and they didn't think it was that big of a deal," she said.

Watanabe said the investigation had focused on the Enterprise contract, so she could not say whether there was a broader issue with the agency's contracting process.

Commission representatives could not be reached Monday. The commission was slated to respond to the report's findings within 30 days.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

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Strut Your Digital Design Skills in Wired's 3-D Print-Off

No need to buy a gift box when you can 3-D print one. Design: Alia Hasan

3-D printing puts manufacturing on designers’ desks, at least for those who have access to a desktop printer. For the rest of us, Wired is inviting you to show off your 3-D design skills in our 3-D print-off. Send us your original, printable designs; we’ll post the submissions on our site, then select the ten coolest to print through Shapeways.com in one of many of their printable materials and feature in a photo gallery. Show the world your masterpiece, from your name in three-dimensional block letters, to a highly-detailed space demon sculpture, to a clever wall hanger for your iPad. There are no restrictions.

How Do I Design a 3-D Object? +We’ll show you how with tip-filled articles over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, for those who don’t have previous experience with modeling or CAD software, these free online and app-based tools can get you designing in minutes:

• Tinkercad — A web-based design application that allows you to access a variety of tools to draw shapes, then push or pull them to introduce depth. Simple to use. See our tips here.


• Shapeways Creator — Wide variety of tools for easy design creation. Includes 2D to 3D, an application that lets you take any black and white image (including text) and give it depth to create a digital object. Also, tools for making vases, figurines, and jewelry.


• Autodesk 123D Design — Entry-level iOS, Mac, PC, and browser-based tool for design, from one of the biggest companies. Includes a built-in library of pre-made shapes and objects that you can combine and modify. Our review.


• Sketchup — A slightly more advanced CAD software that is still accessible for beginners. Has a slightly longer learning curve than the other apps. See our tips here.

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