Athletes cash in on California's workers' comp

SACRAMENTO — In his seven-year career with the Denver Broncos, running back Terrell Davis, a former Super Bowl Most Valuable Player, dazzled fans with his speed and elusiveness.

At the end of his rookie year in 1995, he signed a $6.8-million, five-year contract. Off the field he endorsed Campbell's soup. And when he hung up his cleats, he reported for the National Football League Network and appeared in movies and TV shows.

So it may surprise Californians to find out that in 2011, Davis got a $199,000 injury settlement from a California workers' compensation court for injuries related to football. This came despite the fact Davis was employed by a Colorado team and played just nine times in California during an 88-game career, according to the NFL.

Davis was compensated for the lifelong effects of multiple injuries to the head, arms, trunk, legs and general body, according to California workers' compensation records.

He is not alone.

Over the last three decades, California's workers' compensation system has awarded millions of dollars in benefits for job-related injuries to thousands of professional athletes. The vast majority worked for out-of-state teams; some played as little as one game in the Golden State.

All states allow professional athletes to claim workers' compensation payments for specific job-related injuries — such as a busted knee, torn tendon or ruptured spinal disc — that happened within their borders. But California is one of the few that provides additional payments for the cumulative effect of injuries that occur over years of playing.

A growing roster of athletes are using this provision in California law to claim benefits. Since the early 1980s, an estimated $747 million has been paid out to about 4,500 players, according to an August study commissioned by major professional sports leagues. California taxpayers are not on the hook for these payments. Workers' compensation is an employer-funded program.

Now a major battle is brewing in Sacramento to make out-of-state players ineligible for these benefits, which are paid by the leagues and their insurers. They have hired consultants and lobbyists and expect to unveil legislation next week that would halt the practice.

"The system is completely out of whack right now," said Jeff Gewirtz, vice president of the Brooklyn Nets — formerly the New Jersey Nets — of the National Basketball Assn.

Major retired stars who scored six-figure California workers' compensation benefits include Moses Malone, a three-time NBA most valuable player with the Houston Rockets, Philadelphia 76ers and other teams. He was awarded $155,000. Pro Football Hall of Fame wide receiver Michael Irvin, formerly with the Dallas Cowboys, received $249,000. The benefits usually are calculated as lump-sum payments but sometimes are accompanied by open-ended agreements to provide lifetime medical services.

Players, their lawyers and their unions plan to mount a political offensive to protect these payouts.

Although the monster salaries of players such as Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant and Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning make headlines, few players bring in that kind of money. Most have very short careers. And some, particularly football players, end up with costly, debilitating injuries that haunt them for a lifetime but aren't sufficiently covered by league disability benefits.

Retired pros increasingly are turning to California, not only because of its cumulative benefits but also because there's a longer window to file a claim. The statute of limitations in some states expires in as little as a year or two.

"California is a last resort for a lot of these guys because they've already been cut off in the other states," said Mel Owens, a former Los Angeles Rams linebacker-turned-workers' compensation lawyer who has represented a number of ex-players.

To understand how it works, consider the career of Ernie Conwell. A former tight end for the St. Louis Rams and New Orleans Saints, he was paid $1.6 million for his last season in 2006.

Conwell said that during his 11-year career, he underwent about 18 surgeries, including 11 knee operations. Now 40, he works for the NFL players union and lives in Nashville.

Hobbled by injuries, he filed for workers' compensation in Louisiana and got $181,000 in benefits to cover his last, career-ending knee surgery in 2006, according to the Saints. The team said it also provided $195,000 in injury-related benefits as part of a collective-bargaining agreement with the players union.

But such workers' compensation benefits paid by Louisiana cover only specific injuries. So, to deal with what he expects to be the costs of ongoing health problems that he said affect his arms, legs, muscles, bones and head, Conwell filed for compensation in California and won.

Even though he played only about 20 times in the state over his professional career, he received a $160,000 award from a California workers' compensation judge plus future medical benefits, according to his lawyer. The Saints are appealing the judgment.

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That Syncing Feeling

“Smart, or stylish?” That’s the question facing casual watch aficionados looking for a new, high-tech addition to their collection.

On one hand (er, wrist), you’ve got the Pebble and other smartwatch upstarts, which come with built-in smartphone connectivity, customizable screens, and burgeoning developer communities eager to feed their app ecosystems. They also, by and large, look like uninspired pieces of mass-produced Chinese plastic, and that’s because they are.

On the “stylish” end of the spectrum is … not much. Except this: Citizen’s Eco-Drive Proximity.

The Citizen learns the current time from your phone, and the watch’s hands spin around to the correct positions.

By all outward appearances, the Proximity looks like any another chronograph in a sea of handsome mechanical watches. It has all the features you’d expect, including a 24-hour dial, day and date, perpetual calendar and second time zone. But housed within its slightly oversized 46mm case is a Bluetooth 4.0 radio, so it’s capable of passing data over the new low-energy connectivity standard appearing in newer smartphones, including the iPhone 5 and 4S. And for now, the Promixity is only compatible with those Apple devices.

Initial pairing is relatively easy. After downloading Citizen’s notably low-rent iOS app, you can link the watch to your phone with a few turns and clicks on the crown.

The gee-whiz feature is the automatic time sync that takes place whenever you land in a different time zone. Once connected, the Citizen learns the current time from your phone, and the watch’s hands spin around to the correct positions — a welcome bit of easy magic, considering the initial setup is a tedious finger dance.

The watch can also notify you of incoming communications. Once you’ve configured the mail client (it only supports IMAP accounts), you’ll get notified whenever you get a new e-mail — there’s a slight vibration and the second hand sweeps over to the “mail” tab at the 10-o’clock position. If a phone call comes in, the second hand moves to the 11-o’clock marker. If the Bluetooth connection gets lost because the watch or phone is outside the 30-foot range, you get another vibration and the second hand moves to the “LL” indicator. And really, that’s the extent of the functionality around notifications.

But notable in its absence is the notification I’d like the most: text message alerts. And it’s not something Citizen will soon be rectifying because the dials and hardware aren’t upgradable.

I also experienced frequent connection losses, particularly when attending a press conference with scads of Mi-Fis and tethered smartphones around me. This caused dozens of jarring vibrations both on my wrist and in my pocket, followed by a raft of push notifications on my phone informing me of the issue. Reconnecting is easy (and generally happens automatically), but the lack of stability in certain environments matched with the limited capabilities of the notifications had me forgetting to reconnect and not even worrying about it later on.

But actually, I’m OK with that. I still like the fact that it never needs charging. Even though there aren’t any solar cells visible on the dial, the watch does have them. They’re hidden away beneath the dial, and yet they still work perfectly. And even when its flagship connectivity features aren’t behaving, it’s still a damn handsome watch. It feels solid, and it looks good at the office, out to dinner, or on the weekend — something very few other “smart” watches on the market can claim.

However, those things can be said of almost all of Citizen’s EcoDrive watches. The big distinguishing feature here is the Bluetooth syncing and notifications, and they just don’t work that well.

WIRED A smart watch you won’t be embarrassed to wear. Charges using light. Combines classic styling with cutting-edge connectivity. Subtle notifications keep you informed without dominating your attention.

TIRED Loses Bluetooth connection with disturbing frequency. Limited notification abilities. No text message alerts. Janky iPhone app.

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It’s Indie Vets Vs. Upstarts at a Varied Independent Spirit Awards

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – After finding the Oscars encroaching on their territory for a number of years, have the Film Independent Spirit Awards finally gotten a little space from their bigger, flashier weekend neighbor?

You’d think so, given that six of the Oscars’ nine Best Picture nominees have grossed more than $ 100 million, and the roster of represented companies includes Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks, Disney and Sony.

But one of those $ 100 million films, David O. Russell‘s “Silver Linings Playbook,” will be competing for five Indie Spirit Awards on Saturday, the day before it takes its eight nominations to the Oscars.

Another Oscar Best Picture nominee, Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” will also be in the running for the top Spirit Award at the ceremony, which as usual takes place in a tent on Santa Monica beach.

Oscar best-pic nominee “Amour,” meanwhile, is nominated in the foreign-film category at the Spirits, while Wes Anderson‘s best-film Spirit Awards contender “Moonrise Kingdom” is up for an Oscar for its screenplay.

The Oscars are still honoring independent film, even in a year of unexpectedly big box office and surprising participation by the major studios. And the Spirit Awards’ definition of indie is still broad enough to encompass a wide range of movies, from the small-budgeted “Keep the Lights On” to the Weinstein Company release “Silver Linings Playbook,” which skirted the $ 20 million budget limit to qualify for the Spirit Awards but was let in on a judgment call by the jury assembled by Film Independent.

“The Spirit Awards are a celebration of independent film, and one of the things I love is that there’s a lot of diversity in there this year,” said Josh Welsh, co-president of Film Independent with Sean McManus.

“We have first-time directors and new filmmaking talent like Benh Zeitlin, but we also have directors that we go way back with, like Wes Anderson and David O. Russell. This year is a combination of discovery and bringing back people who are a part of what we’ve been doing for years.”

Russell first came to the Spirit Awards in 1995 with “Spanking the Monkey,” for which he won the Best First Feature award; he returned two years later as a Best Director nominee for “Flirting With Disaster.” Anderson won the Spirit Award as Best Director for “Rushmore” in 2000.

Their two films, “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” lead the pack with five nominations each. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” has four – and, crucially, the Spirit Awards jury opted to nominate it and its director in the Best Feature and Best Director categories rather than putting them in the Best First Feature category, where they would almost unquestionably have won.

“Keep the Lights On” and “Middle of Nowhere” also received four nominations each, though the latter film did not crack the Best Feature category.

Despite the presence of “Bernie” and “Keep the Lights On” in the top category, this year’s awards do seem to be a shootout between “Silver Linings,” “Beasts” and “Moonrise,” perhaps with a slight edge to the first two – the first a crowd-pleasing film with real awards momentum, the second the clear indie breakout of the year.

Last year’s winner, “The Artist,” was the first film to win both the Spirit Award and the Best Picture Oscar.

Of the 21 Spirit acting nominees, the only ones to also be in the running at the Oscars are Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence from “Silver Linings,” Quvenzhane Wallis from “Beasts” and Helen Hunt from “The Sessions.” Chances are that Cooper and Lawrence have the edge, with more than 80 percent of Spirit Awards winners since 2000 coming from the ranks of Oscar nominees.

The awards are voted on by the 4,000 members of Film Independent, which is made up of professionals in the indie world but also of film fans who pay the yearly dues. Voting is done online, and Film Independent holds free member screenings in Los Angeles and New York to allow voters to see the films.

MacManus told TheWrap that Film Independent also made a deal with iTunes this year to make some of the nominated films available online, while members also received a 14-film DVD collection containing all the nominees that had chosen to participate. (Members had to sign restrictive use agreements to receive the package, added Welsh.)

This year’s show will be hosted by comic and actor Andy Samberg, whose film “Celeste and Jesse Forever” is in the running in the Best First Screenplay category.

“He brings a very new vibe and personality to the show,” MacManus said. “We wanted to look at this year’s show with fresh eyes. There’s a new look to the room, we’re doing something different with the food – everything is a new take.”

Last year’s host was Seth Rogen, who took the stage and immediately labeled the show “inconsequential.”

“Winning one will get you absolutely nothing,” he said, drawing a big laugh. “It won’t even raise your price, because it proves that you’ll work for nothing.”

If Samberg takes similar shots at the show, both MacManus and Welsh said they won’t mind.

“The awards are incredibly meaningful,” MacManus said. “We believe in independent film and we take it seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. We are okay with poking fun at ourselves.”

Added Welsh, “We’re not all puffed up or self-important. But all joking aside, these awards are significant. It’s a genuine act of honoring the independent film of the last 12 months.”

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Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman First Class Mike Eulo monitored a drone aircraft after launching it in Iraq.

The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.

“Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,” said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.

That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.

But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.

Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The Pentagon has begun taking steps to keep pace with the rapid expansion of drone operations. It recently created a new medal to honor troops involved in both drone warfare and cyberwarfare. And the Air Force has expanded access to chaplains and therapists for drone operators, said Col. William M. Tart, who commanded remotely piloted aircraft crews at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

The Air Force has also conducted research into the health issues of drone crew members. In a 2011 survey of nearly 840 drone operators, it found that 46 percent of Reaper and Predator pilots, and 48 percent of Global Hawk sensor operators, reported “high operational stress.” Those crews cited long hours and frequent shift changes as major causes.

That study found the stress among drone operators to be much higher than that reported by Air Force members in logistics or support jobs. But it did not compare the stress levels of the drone operators with those of traditional pilots.

The new study looked at the electronic health records of 709 drone pilots and 5,256 manned aircraft pilots between October 2003 and December 2011. Those records included information about clinical diagnoses by medical professionals and not just self-reported symptoms.

After analyzing diagnosis and treatment records, the researchers initially found that the drone pilots had higher incidence rates for 12 conditions, including anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

But after the data were adjusted for age, number of deployments, time in service and history of previous mental health problems, the rates were similar, said Dr. Otto, who was scheduled to present her findings in Arizona on Saturday at a conference of the American College of Preventive Medicine.

The study also found that the incidence rates of mental heath problems among drone pilots spiked in 2009. Dr. Otto speculated that the increase might have been the result of intense pressure on pilots during the Iraq surge in the preceding years.

The study found that pilots of both manned and unmanned aircraft had lower rates of mental health problems than other Air Force personnel. But Dr. Otto conceded that her study might underestimate problems among both manned and unmanned aircraft pilots, who may feel pressure not to report mental health symptoms to doctors out of fears that they will be grounded.

She said she planned to conduct two follow-up studies: one that tries to compensate for possible underreporting of mental health problems by pilots and another that analyzes mental health issues among sensor operators, who control drone cameras while sitting next to the pilots.

“The increasing use of remotely piloted aircraft for war fighting as well as humanitarian relief should prompt increased surveillance,” she said.

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Gunfire and deadly crash rattle the Las Vegas Strip

LAS VEGAS — A spectacular predawn crash on the Strip — triggered when bullets fired from a black Range Rover peppered a Maserati — hit this resort city right between the eyes. In the end, three people were dead and a major intersection under lockdown during a three-state manhunt for the shooters, leaving even casino veterans used to the extraordinary scratching their heads.

The mayhem was sparked, witnesses told police, by a quarrel early Thursday at a hotel valet stand.

The two vehicles left the Aria resort hotel and were heading north on Las Vegas Boulevard at 4:20 a.m., an hour when the casino marquees shine brightly but the gambling thoroughfare is largely empty. At Harmon Avenue, occupants inside the Range Rover opened fire on the Maserati, police said.

The silver-gray sports car, which was struck several times, sped into the intersection at Flamingo Road, ramming a Yellow cab. The taxi exploded, killing the driver and a passenger. Four other vehicles in the intersection were also involved in the crash and explosion, but officers offered no details.

"Omg Omg Omg that car just blew up!" one witness tweeted shortly after the crash, posting a photo of the wreckage. "God Bless their Souls! Omg!"

The driver of the Maserati died later at a hospital, police said. A passenger in the vehicle received minor injuries and was being interviewed by investigators. At least three others were also injured.

Police in Nevada, California, Arizona and Utah were on alert for the distinctive black Range Rover SUV, described as having dark-tinted windows, black rims and out-of-state paper dealer plates.

"We are going to pursue these individuals and prosecute them," Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said at an afternoon news conference. "This act was totally unacceptable. It's not just tragic but unnecessary — the level of violence we see here in Las Vegas and across America."

Authorities had not publicly identified the dead. But a Las Vegas television station late Thursday identified the taxi driver as Michael Boldon, 62, who the station said had recently moved here from Michigan to care for his 93-year-old mother.

The victim's son, who drives a limousine, told Fox News 5 that he last talked with his father after 3 a.m., and later called his cellphone shortly after the crash to warn him to avoid the Strip. But there was no answer.

The station also identified the driver of the Maserati as Ken Cherry, a rap artist from Oakland who also is known as "Kenny Clutch." The station quoted family members identifying Cherry as the driver. An Internet video of a Cherry song called "Stay Schemin" shows two men in a vehicle on the Strip.

Police had more questions than answers.

"It began with a dispute at a nearby hotel and spilled onto the streets," said Capt. Chris Jones of the Las Vegas Police Robbery and Homicide Division.

The morning's events threw the Strip into disarray all day. The gambling boulevard's busiest and best-known intersection was cordoned off by yellow police tape until nightfall, keeping traffic and curious pedestrians away from the carnage. Even skywalks were blocked off.

While slot machines beeped and card games continued inside casinos around the accident scene — including the Bellagio, Caesars Palace and Paris Las Vegas — hotel bell captains were fielding questions from tourists who had awakened to news of the crash and the Strip shutdown. The alleys and side streets between nearby hotels were clogged with pedestrians who inched along on narrow sidewalks, past delivery doors, many making their own paths between the landscaped bushes and palm trees.

Even casino industry workers were thrown into turmoil. Hotel maids and dealers who finished their midnight shifts after dawn were left without bus service home. "I'm stranded," said Tiruselam Kefyalew, 25, a maid. "What a day to leave my cellphone at home."

Limousine drivers who normally prowl the city's gambling core improvised detours. Some said the police blockade would cost them $500 or more in lost business and tips.

"Most people understand, but you have your complainers," said Jim DeSanto, a limo driver who waited for fares outside Bally's casino. "Those people will complain, even when everything is perfect."

Well after noon, guests peered out nearby hotel windows and others leaned into the street to glimpse the crime scene.

"Hey, honey, it must have happened right here," one man told his wife as they left Caesars around noon. The tourist, who would only say that he had arrived from Tampa, Fla., the previous evening, had looked out his hotel window at 4:30 to see a vehicle in flames.

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Good Lookin' Out

The other strap-it-on-and-get-rad cameras out there — the GoPros and the Contours and the Ions — are all pretty sick in their own right. But for ease of use, no camera is sicker than Drift Action’s HD Ghost cam.

It has enough capability and pure oomph to keep up with the competition — it captures 1080p at 30fps and 720p at 60fps, and it can talk to your other devices via Wi-Fi — but it also comes stock with features other cams make you pay extra for: an integrated 2-inch color LCD screen; big, meaty navigation buttons on top of the camera; and a wrist-mounted remote control that lets you start and stop recording from up to 30 feet away. The whole thing’s waterproof up to 9 feet, too, so mountain biking through a rainstorm or snowboarding during a whiteout doesn’t require a separate waterproof case.

Now, 1080p at 30fps isn’t the best in class. The best camera for slow-mo footage is the GoPro Hero3 (also $400), which offers double the frame rate at 1080p. And all those additional features — the remote, the LCD screen, the waterproof case — are available in some form or another with other cams, albeit usually at an extra cost. What makes the HD Ghost stand out is how easy to use it is. Thanks to the clearly labeled buttons and the intuitive menu on the LCD screen, I was able to ditch the user guide and still access the majority of the Ghost’s functions.

The wrist-mounted remote is great, too. The controls can be operated with heavy gloves on, and the buttons make changing settings, swapping functions, and checking out the footage you just captured remarkably easy. Colored LED lights on the watch-sized unit let you know what mode the Ghost is in, as well as the camera’s status.

My favorite feature on the Ghost is the on-the-fly video-tagging capability. When it’s in what Drift calls “Flashback mode,” the camera records video on a continuous loop ranging in length from 10 seconds to five minutes. If something sweet happens on your bike ride, you can press a button and save the last minute of footage (or however long), then immediately start a new loop. Not only does this save precious space on your memory card, but it also saves you from having to wade through hours of boring footage to find the good clips.

During my test trip to Squaw Valley in Northern California’s Lake Tahoe area, I never lost footage due to user error (leaving the camera off and thinking it was recording when it wasn’t, which I usually do all the time), and the rotating lens let me mount it just about anywhere without tweaking my angles. I was satisfied with the footage. It was clear and sharp, and I was able to snag the occasional still photo while I was recording video.

Here’s a highlight reel. This string of clips is made up of raw video straight from the camera.

The GoPro Hero and the new Sony Action Cam are still the wearables to beat for image quality and (especially with the GoPro) capturing slo-mo shots. But I can heartily recommend the HD Ghost, especially for those who’d rather get outside and start recording than spend hours digesting a manual to figure out how it works.

WIRED Simple out-of-box use. Battery lasts about three hours. Waterproof to 9 feet without a case. Intuitive smartphone app interface. Awesome remote you can strap to your wrist, or anywhere. Rotating lens lets you position it pretty much anywhere on your body or board and still find acceptable angles. Can capture 11-megapixel stills while shooting video.

TIRED Heavy. Multicolored LED lights aren’t great for us red/green colorblind folks. Pricey — Sony’s camera is less expensive.

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The New Old Age Blog: For Traumatized Caregivers, Therapy Helps

I recently wrote about caregivers who experienced symptoms of traumatic-like stress, and readers responded with heart-rending stories. Many described being haunted by distress long after a relative died.

Especially painful, readers said, was witnessing a loved one’s suffering and feeling helpless to do anything about it.

The therapists I spoke with said they often encountered symptoms among caregivers similar to those shown by people with post-traumatic stress — intrusive thoughts, disabling anxiety, hyper-vigilance, avoidance behaviors and more — even though research documenting this reaction is scarce. Improvement with treatment is possible, they say, although a sense of loss may never disappear completely.

I asked these professionals for stories about patients to illustrate the therapeutic process. Read them below and you’ll notice common themes. Recovery depends on unearthing the source of psychological distress and facing it directly rather than pushing it away. Learning new ways of thinking can change the tenor of caregiving, in real time or in retrospect, and help someone recover a sense of emotional balance.

Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Survival Guide for Caregivers” (Guilford Press, 2006), was careful to distinguish normal grief associated with caregiving from a traumatic-style response.

“Nightmares, lingering bereavement or the mild re-experiencing of events that doesn’t send a person into a panic every time is normal” and often resolves with time, he said.

Contrast that with one of his patients, a Greek-American woman who assisted her elderly parents daily until her father, a retired firefighter, went to the hospital for what doctors thought would be a minor procedure and died there of a heart attack in the middle of the night.

Every night afterward, at exactly 3 a.m., this patient awoke in a panic from a dream in which a phone was ringing. Unable to go back to sleep for hours, she agonized about her father dying alone at that hour.

The guilt was so overwhelming, the woman couldn’t bear to see her mother, talk with her sisters or concentrate at work or at home. Sleep deprived and troubled by anxiety, she went to see her doctor, who works in the same clinic as Dr. Jacobs and referred her to therapy.

The first thing Dr. Jacobs did was to “identify what happened to this patient as traumatic, and tell her acute anxiety was an understandable response.” Then he asked her to “grieve her father’s death” by reaching out to her siblings and her mother and openly expressing her sadness.

Dr. Jacobs also suggested that this patient set aside a time every day to think about her father — not just the end of his life, but also all the things she had loved about him and the good times they’d had together as a family.

Don’t expect your night time awakenings to go away immediately, the psychologist told his patient. Instead, plan for how you’re going to respond when these occur.

Seven months later, the patient reported her panic at a “3 or 4” level instead of a “10” (the highest possible number), Dr. Jacobs said.

“She’ll say, ‘oh, there’s the nightmare again,’ and she can now go back to sleep fairly quickly,” he continued. “Research about anxiety tells us that the more we face what we fear, the quicker we are to extinguish our fear response and the better able we are to tolerate it.”

Sara Qualls, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, said it’s natural for caregivers to be disgusted by some of what they have to do — toileting a loved one, for instance — and to be profoundly conflicted when they try to reconcile this feeling with a feeling of devotion. In some circumstances, traumatic-like responses can result.

Her work entails naming the emotion the caregiver is experiencing, letting the person know it’s normal, and trying to identify the trigger.

For instance, an older man may come in saying he’s failed his wife with dementia by not doing enough for her. Addressing this man’s guilt, Dr. Qualls may find that he can’t stand being exposed to urine or feces but has to help his wife go to the bathroom. Instead of facing his true feelings, he’s beating up on himself psychologically — a diversion.

Once a conflict of this kind is identified, Dr. Qualls said she can help a person deal with the trigger by using relaxation exercises and problem-solving techniques, or by arranging for someone else to do a task that he or she simply can’t tolerate.

Asked for an example, Dr. Qualls described a woman who traveled to another state to see her mother, only to find her in a profound disheveled, chaotic state. Her mother said that she didn’t want help, and her brother responded with disbelief. Soon, the woman’s blood pressure rose, and she began having nightmares.

In therapy, Dr. Qualls reassured the patient that her fear for her mother’s safety was reasonable and guided her toward practical solutions. Gradually, she was able to enlist her brother’s help and change her mother’s living situation, and her sense of isolation and helplessness dissipated.

“I think that a piece of the trauma reaction that is so devastating is the intense privacy of it,” Dr. Qualls said. “Our work helps people moderate their emotional reactivity through human contact, sharing and learning strategies to manage their responsiveness.”

Dolores Gallagher-Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, noted that stress can accumulate during caregiving and reach a tipping point where someone’s ability to cope is overwhelmed.

She tells of a vibrant, active woman in her 60s caring for an older husband who declined rapidly from dementia. “She’d get used to one set of losses, and then a new loss would occur,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

The tipping point came when the husband began running away from home and was picked up by the police several times. The woman dropped everything else and became vigilant, feeling as if she had to watch her husband day and night. Still, he would sneak away and became more and more difficult.

Both husband and wife had come from Jewish families caught up in the Holocaust during World War II, and the feeling of “complete and utter helplessness and hopelessness” that descended on this older woman was intolerable, Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

Therapy was targeted toward helping the patient articulate thoughts and feelings that weren’t immediately at the surface of her consciousness, like, for example, her terror at the prospect of abandonment. “I’d ask her ‘what are you afraid of? If you visualize your husband in a nursing home or assisted living, what do you see?’” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

Then the conversation would turn to the choices the older woman had. Go and look at some long-term care places and see what you think, her psychologist suggested. You can decide how often you want to visit. “This isn’t an either-or — either you’re miserable 24/7 or you don’t love him,” she advised.

The older man went to assisted living, where he died not long afterward of pneumonia that wasn’t diagnosed right away. The wife fell into a depression, preoccupied with the thought that it was all her fault.

Another six months of therapy convinced her that she had done what she could for her husband. Today she works closely with her local Alzheimer’s Association chapter, “helping other caregivers learn how to deal with these kinds of issues in support groups,” Dr. Gallagher-Thompson said.

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Wall Street Edges Ahead

Stocks rose on Wall Street Friday, bolstered by better-than-expected earnings from Hewlett-Packard.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index climbed 0.4 percent, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.3 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index added 0.4 percent.

The S.&P. 500 has dropped 1.9 percent over the last two sessions, its worst two-day drop since early November, putting the benchmark index on pace for its first weekly decline of the year. The retreat was triggered by minutes from the Federal Reserve’s January meeting, released earlier in the week, that suggested stimulus measures may end earlier than thought.

Still, the index was up more than 5 percent for the year and has held above the 1,500-point level.

“When you get a move like that, you are bound to see a pause, and the Fed minutes is a good enough reason to at least reassess,” said Michael Marrale, head of research, sales and trading at ITG in New York.

But, he added, “ultimately, we are going to see rates go higher and, ultimately, that will take money out of bonds and into equities.”

Hewlett-Packard, the maker of personal computers and printers, climbed 5.1 percent after the company’s quarterly revenue and forecasts beat analysts’ expectations as it continued to cut costs.

Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing retailer, dipped 1 percent after it reported a drop in fourth-quarter comparable sales, even as the latest quarterly earnings topped estimates.

The insurer American International Group posted fourth-quarter results that beat analysts’ expectations. Shares advanced 4.4 percent.

Marvell Technology Group, a chip maker, rose 5.8 percent after the company gained market share in the hard-disk drive and flash-storage businesses.

The European Commission forecast on Friday that growth in the 27-nation European Union would rise only 0.3 percent this year, while growth in the 17 members that use the euro would fall 0.1 percent for a second year of recession. Stock markets in Europe were mostly ahead in afternoon trading after a sharp pullback on Thursday.

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Bulgari shows off Liz Taylor's gems

It isn't easy sometimes to be an ordinary person in Los Angeles, so near to and yet so far from the city's glamorous events.

You hear about the grand Oscar parties, but you will never be invited. The award ceremony may be taking place minutes from where you live, but you watch it at home, on TV, in your sweat pants — and you might as well be in Dubuque.

Rodeo Drive too can make you feel like a scrap on the cutting room floor. As you stroll the wide and immaculate sidewalks of Beverly Hills' iconic shopping street, you pass by boutiques you'd feel self-conscious walking into. In the windows are baubles and trinkets you could never in three lifetimes afford.

Which is why it is rather nice to be invited to make a private appointment at the house of Bulgari, the fine Italian jeweler that opened its doors in 1884.

Elizabeth Taylor loved Bulgari jewels. Richard Burton, whose torrid affair with her began during the filming of "Cleopatra" in Rome, accompanied her often to the flagship shop on the Via Condotti. He liked to joke that the name Bulgari was all the Italian she knew.

So it is fitting that starting Oscar week, the jeweler is celebrating the Oscar-winning star with an exhibit of eight of her most treasured Bulgari pieces.

They are heavy on diamonds and emeralds — of rare size, gleam and value.

And Bulgari knows their value well.

After Taylor's death, it reacquired some of the gems at a Christie's auction. One piece, an emerald-and-diamond brooch that also can be worn as a pendant, sold for $6,578,500 — breaking records both for sales price of an emerald and for emerald price per carat ($280,000).

That brooch, whose centerpiece is an octagonal step-cut emerald weighing 23.44 carats, was Burton's engagement present to Taylor. He followed it upon their marriage (his second, her fifth) with a matching necklace whose 16 Colombian emeralds weigh in at 60.5 carats. Bulgari bought the necklace back too, for $6,130,500.

They are in the exhibit, along with Burton's engagement ring to Taylor and a delicate brooch — given to her by husband No. 4, Eddie Fisher — whose emerald and diamond flowers were set en tremblant so that they gently fluttered as Taylor moved.

The jewels are not for sale.

On Tuesday night, actress Julianne Moore wore the Burton necklace, with pendant attached, at a gala for Bulgari's top clients. At the dinner hour, guests were escorted along a lavender-colored carpet to a nearby rooftop that had been transformed into a Roman terrace.

Those honored guests, of course, got private viewings of Taylor's jewels.

But so did Amanda Perry, a healer from West Hollywood who arrived the next morning for one of the first appointments available to the public.

Someone had emailed news of the collection to the 35-year-old Taylor fan. She walked in off the street Tuesday, when the exhibit was open only to press — and Sabina Pelli, Bulgari's glamorous executive vice president, fresh from Rome, was taking sips of San Pellegrino brought to her on a silver tray between back-to-back interviews that started at 5 a.m.

The camera crews were long gone when Perry came back Wednesday. She had the exhibit, and handsome sales associate Timothy Morzenti of Milan, entirely to herself.

In a black suit, still wearing on his left hand the black glove he dons to handle fine jewels, Morzenti whisked Perry off via a private elevator to the exhibit on the second floor. The jewels stood in vitrines mounted high off the ground. Behind them were photos and a slide show of Taylor, bejeweled.

"Which piece would you like to see first?" Morzenti asked her as a security guard stood by. "I personally love the emerald ring."

Then he proceeded at leisure to explain Bulgari-signature sugar-loaf cuts and trombino ring settings, while tossing in occasional Taylor stories.

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Pinterest Gets a Billion-Dollar Bump, Pins More Cash to Its Boards

Everyone’s favorite online discovery site Pinterest has raised yet another round of funding, $200 million from San Francisco firm Valiant Capital Partners, the company confirmed Wednesday. Existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also participated. The massive round – twice as much as Pinterest’s last VC infusion of $100 million – values the company at $2.5 billion, according to Pinterest. All for a company that has either yet to figure how to make any money from its 50 million monthly visitors, or just as likely is keeping its mouth shut about its plans.
In the last year Pinterest has exploded. What started out as an invite-only social bookmarking network, where anyone could save a photo and link they found online, has become one of the top 50 websites, according to comScore. In May 2012, the site attracted $100 million at a $1 billion (or $1.5 billion, depending on who you talked to) valuation from Japanese firm Rakuten, leading venture capitalists and the media to hint at the possibility of another bubble set to burst.

It’s spent some of that money on buying recipe aggregator PunchFork in January 2012, and on a new office near San Francisco’s design district. Another chunk of that cash went toward growing the 20-person team to more than 100 employees.

With this new cash, Pinterest is going abroad and buying more companies, says early Pinterest investor Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark Capital. “Pinterest will continue to build out and improve its products; you’ll see more international expansion and there will be additional acquisitions to fit Ben’s (Silbermann) greater vision for the company,” he says. The site is already popular in Europe and Asia, but Pinterest has plans to add more languages and create a more custom experience in other countries.

While $200 million seems over the top for a company that’s not pulling in any revenue, it’s just right, according to Heitzmann. “You always want more than enough capital to execute the vision,” he says. “Pinterest’s vision is to become one of the largest companies in the world for both online and offline discovery, and we want to make sure the company has enough to do that.”

Apparently a lack of revenue isn’t a problem yet. Heitzmann isn’t worried, saying when the time comes Pinterest will find a way to make use of all the content we’re pinning to our board to turn a profit. There’s already been hints of how that might happen. Pinterest started pulling in pricing information when someone pinned a product from an online shop. Pinterest is also immensely valuable to e-commerce retailers because of how much traffic a pin of a dress or coffee mug can send to their sites, and there’s been talk that businesses would be willing to pay for those referrals.

Still, potential avenues for revenue do not equal actual revenue. And while investors championed enterprise startups in the market last year for their clear-cut business models, it seems VCs are still taking their chances on a consumer company with lots of pretty pictures, lots of users and no profits. Either Pinterest’s viral growth is just that impressive, or there’s something else going on behind the scenes that have investors signing those fat checks. We’re betting on the latter.

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