BS of A with Brian Sack

So, that means all women of child-bearing age, right?

The gentleman was unaware pregnancy begins two weeks before conception...

 AllGov.com

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that will radically redefine when life begins for an unborn child.

Fortune

Facebook's wild, nascent summer of 2004 was loosely chronicled in the blockbuster The Social Network. This is what it was really like.

Editor's Note: When I was still in college and dreaming of getting paid to write, my friends started a magazine. I wanted to contribute. At the first ideas meeting I mentioned a social network that was quickly taking over all the Ivies and would soon, we all knew, arrive at our campus. The site's creators had dropped out of Harvard to work on their project full time. They were in Palo Alto, and I'd be home in California for the summer. Maybe I could make the six-hour drive to visit them? So I did. I drove up and visited and met Zuck and attempted, in a somewhat naïve but earnest way, to make sense of what Thefacebook was and what it might eventually become.

On the way up, I got a speeding ticket, so arrived later than planned. I walked in through a wide-open front door; I saw the burnt out Tiki torches and the aftermath of generally minor, college-ish debauchery; I met Zuck, who was standoffish but generous with his time and driven and careful in a way that seemed well beyond his, or my, years. And he told a funny "your mom" joke.

Below is the article I wrote about Thefacebook as it ran in The Passenger magazine in 2005. Of course it feels dated, and, to me, the writing feels young. (Also, I ripped off the conceit of the first paragraph from a Charles P. Pierce essay. At least it was in good taste.) Perhaps most embarrassing of all, for everything I saw, I didn't see the money. In some way, though, not seeing all the riches that lay ahead for Zuck and Co. allowed me some clarity. There is, it turns out, something even bigger, even cooler, than $100 billion. And it's this thing, I think, that drove Zuck then -- that drives him still.

By Ryan Bradley, senior editor

FORTUNE -- We should have seen it coming.

We should have known better and barred the doors, battened the hatches, hid the children and said a prayer. But no. We invited it into our homes. Let it stay. Gave it space, a desk or even a room. Gave it our time, our money, our phone lines. Provided for it. Ogled it and praised it. Loved it for its size, its immeasurable size. Loved it with that American love for open spaces, the same love that led our great grandparents to cross plains, deserts and mountains-new territories and the unknown.

We should have seen it coming. We kick ourselves and wince. We fed it everything, this insatiable beast: credit card numbers, social security numbers, names of first pets and mother's maiden names. Christ, some of us learned sex from it, had sex on it, watched people having sex in ways we still do not understand. But we kept one thing forever hidden from it, until everything we'd given wasn't enough-and the internet took our face.

It was a gradual taking. Sites like Hotornot.com and UglyPeople.com allowed the especially cruel and invested among us to judge strangers, wondering all the while why they had volunteered for such abuse. We found pretty faces, ugly faces, photoshopped faces. Faces not of people with exotic names and bodies, but faces from our state, our county, city, school, dorm, class; low-resolution faces full of braces and pimples. Slowly, the sites began masquerading in purpose beyond procrastination. The middle-aged could find former classmates at the yearbook picture database Classmates.com. The lonely could find a date at AmericanSingles.com or LoveCompass.com or Lavalife.com or PlentyofFish.com or Datingpearl.com or, well, just about anywhere in the limitless cyber-universe full of faces and possibility. Low-resolution faces connected with low-resolution faces and somewhere along the way our bastions of education decided they'd have a go. MIT and Columbia tried their own inter-campus, face-based networking programs, and then Harvard tried the same.

Problem was, all initial attempts at networking came from administrators, squares, rubes that had lost touch with the student body long ago. The suits scratched their heads and slumped their academic shoulders and questioned the sanity of youth while a streaker ran past their window. These face-sites didn't have what we wanted, didn't have the searching capabilities, didn't let us say what we wanted to say or find other people who were interested in cheese, Russian literature and Fela Kuti.

But Zuck! Zuck could do it. Zuck was our guy. Zuck was one of us and knew what we wanted. And Zuck could do it faster, better, sooner than the squares. And Mark Zuckerberg did. He created Thefacebook.

"Harvard [administrators] were working on their own inter-campus networking program, but Zuck approached them and he said he'd do it in a week and he'd do it better--and he did," says Zuckerberg's friend and Thefacebook compatriot Dustin Moskovitz.

The audacity! Saying you'll do something better and faster and then doing it. Zuck had a knack for knowing what students would want, and he knew how to program the necessary features. He knew that college students want options--the option of self-expression, the option of listing our sexual leanings, the option of finding classmates, the option of making ourselves look more attractive and interesting than we actually are. Zuck and company gave us all of these things, and more--because Zuck knew that what we abhor above all is stagnation, and as long as Thefacebook kept growing and changing, we would be drawn to it.

And Thefacebook grew and grew, taking over the Harvard campus, the Ivy League, the private schools, the state schools, the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, the South, the country.

And now the beast dwells in a small bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac in Palo Alto, cared for by five kids not from the West but westerners nonetheless. Five kids busily staring into glowing screens, eyes red, wrangling bandwidth. I walked in the front door on an unseasonably warm September evening. The door was open and ignored. Half-finished chip bags, pizza boxes, bottles of Corona and Pacifica and empty bags of In-N-Out covered every bit of counter space around Zuck's Sony laptop. There was an electronic hum, barely audible, and the faint sound of crickets from the backyard. All five sat at tables, five different tables, each surface covered with its own unique assortment of excessive litter surrounding a computer. Zuckerburg, the founder, creator, and leader of the outfit, looked up for a moment, then returned to his laptop and the programming jargon that flashed across the screen. Dustin Moskovitz, also supposed to be a junior at Harvard, also stopping out for a year, also 20, acknowledged me with a quick smile. Moskovitz had told me on the phone, a few hours earlier, to "keep an open mind" when I came to visit.

Moskovitz and I had been corresponding over email for months. They were a dodgy lot, these five kids slumped over keyboards and staring into glowing screens. I was happy to finally pin them down.

Wed Jun 23: Hi Ryan, I guess just give us a call when you're around. We're not planning to take any vacations during the summer, so you'll be able to meet with us for an hour or so. We are pretty busy though, so just make sure to contact us the day before.

Wed Jul7: Yeah, sure. Well, maybe Friday wouldn't be best for us as we're planning on throwing a party. I guess you could go if you wanted, but we tend to run around getting stuff when we do that. Are you planning on staying around a few days?

Sun Aug 8: Hi Ryan, We're actually extremely busy this late in August. We've sort of entered crunch time. However, I think our normal press guy should be returning state-side relatively soon. You may have better luck trying to get in contact with him again (press@thefacebook.com) and arranging an interview that way. I apologize for the inconvenience,
Dustin

Wed Aug 11: Hi Ryan, I talked it over with Mark. I guess if you came the last week of August or early September (we stopped out, so not going back to Harvard...), you could chill for a while.

Fri Sep 3: Man, you're killing me Ryan. Can you make it to a party on Saturday? (during the day). Maybe Wed. or Thur. but next week will probably be the most intense week of thefacebook' s existence (i know a reporters dream) so it may not be possible. I'll have to let you know sooner to the date.

It was the most intense week of Thefacebook's existence. The crew was busy releasing Thefacebook on college campuses, crunching in hours to make sure the release date corresponded to the beginning of the school year in early September. In the past week Thefacebook had opened on 41 new campuses, and had been wildly popular (in varying degrees of wild popularity) on each. Drawn on a whiteboard was a tournament-style bracket system that pitted the schools against each other in terms of Thefacebook popularity--Uconn vs. Rutgers, Irvine vs. Brandeis, UT vs. Vassar. At the time of my visit, Thefacebook had opened on more than 120 college campuses. Three months later, that number had grown to more than 200. At each of the 203 campuses--from American to Yale--the popularity is phenomenal, always over 60 percent. At Harvard, student-members make up well over 90 percent of the student body.

"It's always kind of a surprise which schools Thefacebook really takes off on," Moskovitz says.

He takes me through several new features, some recently released, some still being tested. He tells me how important it is, for them, to keep Thefacebook "built by college students, for college students." How it's a networking tool, a study tool; how, with a new calendar feature, Thefacebook makes our lives more organized and easier.

He pauses, again flashing a smile, "But most guys still just use it to look for chicks."

And will It ever stop? We search ourselves, our photos, others' photos--searching for reinvention, an opportunity to appear better, more interesting, more social, more than we really are. We question our friendships, our social networks. Hidden in our rooms, we secretly scan pages looking for more attractive, more interesting, more exotic faces. And can we help it?

Read the rest of the story here...

By Harriet McLeod

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) - A new mother of twins in Greenville, South Carolina, is the latest victim of a rare and potentially fatal flesh-eating bacterial infection, health officials said on Thursday.

Lana Kuykendall was in critical but stable condition at Greenville Memorial Hospital, hospital spokeswoman Sandy Dees said.

Kuykendall, who gave birth to twins earlier this month at a Georgia hospital, came home to South Carolina and had severe pain in her leg, her husband, Darren Kuykendall, told a local television station. Within 15 minutes of noticing that the painful spot on her leg was spreading, she went to the hospital, he said.

Lana Kuykendall has had several surgeries and has been on a ventilator, Dr. Jerry Gibson, an epidemiologist with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, told Reuters on Thursday.

"She has the worst kind of bacterial infection," Gibson said. "It destroys tissues and invades the long membranes. We see four or five cases a year in South Carolina. There's no prevention."

Two other cases of flesh-eating infections have been reported recently in South Carolina and Georgia but Gibson said, "These cases don't cluster together except randomly."

Kuykendall was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating infection that can destroy muscles, skin and tissue.

Different bacteria can cause the condition. Gibson said he had not seen Kuykendall's medical chart and did not know what type of bacteria was to blame.

Necrotizing fasciitis can be caused by group-A streptococci or by staphylococci, common bacteria that live on people's skin and in their noses, he said.

"Normally, they do nothing," Gibson said. "Sometimes the group-A strep causes strep throat. Sometimes the staph causes a skin infection. Rarely, people can become infected in a place that's usually sterile - heart, lung, tissue under the skin - and have group-A strep where it shouldn't be.

"This is a condition that scares people," he said. "Patients are usually very normal and then they deteriorate fast. It usually starts at the site of a break in the skin. People may wash it out and it suddenly starts progressing."

Gibson said he does not know if Kuykendall's infection could have started in the hospital where she gave birth.

"It started growing on her leg," he said.

Necrotizing fasciitis has a high mortality rate. "It moves so fast and often requires very invasive surgery to correct it," he said.

In another recent case, Georgia college student Aimee Copeland, 24, is being treated for necrotizing fasciitis at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, Georgia. She has had most of one leg amputated and was expected to suffer the loss of her fingers as well.

Copeland contracted the infection after a zip-line accident in which she fell and cut her leg along the Little Tallapoosa River near Carrollton, Georgia. Doctors blamed her infection on the Aeromonas hydrophila bacteria, which are found in fresh or brackish water.

A former South Carolina fire chief, Glenn Pace, told a local television station he had been battling the disease since early April, spent 20 days in the hospital and had three surgeries on his foot but did not have to have his leg amputated.

The infection is caused by "something subtle, sometimes in a person who has poor nutrition or alcohol use but also in people who have no immune deficiencies," Gibson said.

The "flesh-eating" infection is not communicable, he said.

(Editing by David Adams and Bill Trott)

The Christian Science Monitor / By Howard LaFranchi

Dissatisfied with President Obama’s assurances that the United States will not tolerate Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, the House of Representatives has come up with its own red line: It says Iran must be stopped before achieving a nuclear weapons capability.

That may sound like a fine line between the two, but critics of the House resolution say it has the potential to move the US closer to war with Iran.

The problem with this new formula, some nuclear experts say, is that no one knows exactly what “nuclear weapons capable” means. What the ambiguity of this new red line for Iran does do, others add, is lower the threshold at which military action would be undertaken to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

The House resolution, with 314 sponsors, calls on Mr. Obama “to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability.” The resolution goes on to demand reaffirmation of US “opposition to any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

The House approved the resolution Thursday, six days before the US and other world powers are to sit down with Iran in Baghdad for talks on the Iranian nuclear program. The vote was 401 to 11.

An initial session of talks in Istanbul last month led to suggestions from both sides that an interim diplomatic breakthrough – one that slows Iran’s nuclear progress by removing to another country much of the enriched uranium Iran has stockpiled – might at least be possible.

The House resolution could disrupt the diplomatic channel, some regional experts say, by signaling to the Iranians that the US is unlikely to stick by any compromise that would allow Iran to retain a uranium enrichment program.

But some House members, including several Democrats, said the Baghdad meeting next week made this the right time for a resolution putting Iran on notice. “What better time for this body to send an unambiguous message that Iran must never be allowed to achieve a nuclear weapons capability?” said Rep. Howard Berman (D) of California, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The message must be that Iran’s “nuclear weapons program must end once and for all,” he added.

Conservative Refocus notes:

U.S. Economy Turning The Corner ...but which way are we going?

Bloomberg

Hewlett-Packard Co. is considering cutting as many as 25,000 jobs, or 8 percent of its workforce, to reduce costs and help the company contend with ebbing demand for computers and services, people briefed on the plans said.

The number to be cut includes 10,000 to 15,000 from Hewlett-Packard's enterprise services group, which sells a range of information-technology services and has been beset by declining profitability, said these people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't final and may change.

Meg Whitman, chief executive officer since September, is seeking to reverse the growth slump that led to the ouster of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. The company's PC sales are dropping as consumers favor tablets, such as Apple Inc.'s iPad, and it has been slow to adapt to the shift toward cloud computing, away from the IT services Hewlett-Packard provides.

"Hewlett-Packard could make the difficult decision of announcing" a workforce reduction, Brian Marshall, an analyst at ISI Group, wrote in a research note earlier this month. This "would enable investments in strategic, higher growth areas."

Eliminating 18,000 jobs could result in savings of about $1.2 billion and add 50 cents to annual per-share earnings, he estimated.

Michael Thacker, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California- based Hewlett-Packard, declined to comment.

Some of the cuts to Hewlett-Packard's workforce of 324,600 may come through early-retirement packages, the people said. Hewlett-Packard may offer early retirement to about several thousand people, the people said.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest maker of personal computers and printers, is working with management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Whitman, former CEO of EBay Inc., said in March that she'll combine the PC and printing divisions, ending deliberations to spin off the PC unit. She has also said she'll step up investment in research and development and take steps to shore up Hewlett-Packard's balance sheet.

Besides tussling with Apple, Hewlett-Packard is also vying with companies including International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. in the market for hardware, software and services for large corporations.

Hewlett-Packard in February forecast sales for the quarter through April that fell short of analysts' predictions. Sales in the current year may decline 4 percent to $122.4 billion, according to average analyst predictions compiled by Bloomberg.

The enterprise services group includes the 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion made by former CEO Mark Hurd.

Hurd, who was CEO from 2005 to 2010, reduced costs through actions including a 5 percent pay cut for most employees in 2009, lower research spending and plans to eliminate at least 48,000 jobs.

Hewlett-Packard is scheduled to report fiscal second- quarter earnings on May 23.

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