Euro Watch: Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone

The euro zone economy took a step closer to recovery this month as the rate of decline in the bloc’s private sector eased more than expected, a business survey showed on Thursday.

But in an indication of the hurdles left to scale, Spain’s unemployment surged to 26 percent in the fourth quarter, a record high since measurements began in the 1970s, as a prolonged recession and deep spending cuts left almost 6 million people out of work at the end of last year.

The manufacturing survey published by Markit supports European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s assertion that the 17-nation currency union is benefiting from “positive contagion” but still hints at an economic contraction in the first quarter of 2013.

Markit’s Flash Composite Eurozone Purchasing Managers’ Index, which surveys around 5,000 companies and is seen as a good growth indicator, jumped to 48.2 from December’s 47.2, beating expectations for a rise to 47.5.

While the index has now held below the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction in all but one of the last 17 months, Markit said the data suggested conditions in the bloc were improving.

“We shouldn’t get too gloomy about those numbers,” Chris Williamson, a data collator at Markit, said. “There is a turning point that took place towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year so things are picking up. Any downturn is looking likely to end in the first half.”

He added, however, that the manufacturing index was “still consistent” with gross domestic product in the 17-country bloc falling at a quarterly rate of about 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent.

The euro zone economy contracted in the second and third quarters of last year, meeting the technical definition of recession, and the downturn is expected to have deepened in the fourth quarter.

Earlier data from Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the bloc’s growth engine, showed its private sector expanded at its fastest pace in a year.

In neighboring France, data from Markit showed that business activity shrank in January at the fastest pace since the trough of the global financial crisis. The preliminary composite purchasing managers’ index, covering activity in the services and manufacturing sectors combined, came out at 42.7 for the month, slumping from 44.6 in December.

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, or 5.97 million people, the National Statistics Institute said on Thursday, up from 25 percent in the previous quarter and more than double the European Union average.

“We haven’t seen the bottom yet and employment will continue falling in the first quarter,” José Luis Martínez, a strategist with Citigroup, said.

Spain sank into its second recession since 2009 at the end of 2011 after a burst housing bubble left millions of low-skilled laborers out of work and sliding private and business sentiment gutted consumer spending and imports.

Efforts by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government to control one of the euro zone’s largest deficits through billions of euros of spending cuts and tax increases have fueled general malaise, further hampering demand.

Still, Mr. Draghi of the E.C.B. is taking an optimistic view, declaring earlier this month that the euro zone economy would recover later in 2013 and that there was now a “positive contagion” effect in play.

Europe’s top central banker cited falling bond yields, rising stock markets and historically low volatility as evidence for this, causing several forecasters to ditch expectations for an imminent cut in euro zone interest rates.

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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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Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears

Kerry Skarbakka wants to capture the feeling you get when you’re about to eat it — wrecking your bike, tripping down the stairs, falling off a ladder — and you know it. The ground comes flying up and for a split second you’re resigned to letting events take their course. To do that, he voluntarily throws himself off of things and takes a photo in midair.

He sets up these falling photos by scoping a location he likes and then figuring out what he needs to stay safe during the plunge. If he can get away without using ropes, great, but if he needs to, Skarbakka will wear a harness underneath his clothing and tie off to an anchor. He tries to keep the falls shorter than seven feet. His girlfriend usually snaps the photos, but he says he’s also occasionally resorted to asking random people on the street to push the button.

“I ask [people], ‘Can you press the shutter when I look most compromised?’ which often gets a weird reaction,” says Skarbakka, an assistant professor of digital media and photographic studies at Prescott College in Arizona.

When Skarbakka frames the shot, he likes to try and hide the rope from view. If the rope somehow makes it into the frame, he’ll Photoshop it out in post production. He then makes enormous prints of the photos — almost life size — which helps transport the viewer to the scene of the “accident.”

Predictably, there have been some mishaps during the picture-taking process. The worst injury he’s sustained is a broken rib, but he says there’s been innumerable bumps and bruises. Sometimes the location is so intense he won’t even try to fall. In the railroad bridge photo, for example, he leaned over the edge (while tied to one of the railroad tracks) just far enough to be at what looked like a point of no return. But he never actually jumped off.

He says most of the reaction to the work has been positive but occasionally misunderstood. In 2005 he worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on a performance piece where he was photographed as a special effects team dropped him off the museum’s roof dozens of times. A member of the media covering the event made a visual connection between the art and the people jumping out of the World Trade Center during 9/11 and quickly initiated a wave of backlash against Skarbakka, who says a comparison was never his intention.

“People got really mad,” he says.

At the moment Skarbakka says he’s trying to cull all the work together into a book and is actively looking for a publisher. In the future he’ll be incorporating the desert into his work — which is new to him because he recently moved to Arizona. He says he’s curious to know how we might change as a society if we were a little more resolved to the fact that a bit of chaos is inevitable.

“If we can give up that control, worry a little less about that existential anxiety, what would that do for us?” he says.

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Vegan pizza, smoked salmon Oscars on offer at post-Oscars ball

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hollywood’s elite will chow down on vegan pizza and kale salad in addition to the traditional smoked salmon Oscars at the annual Governor’s Ball after next month’s Academy Awards ceremony, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck announced on Tuesday.

Unveiling his menu for the year’s biggest movie party, Puck said chicken pot pie with shaved black truffles, mini Kobe burgers, Japanese baby peach salad, steamed red snapper with Thai spice, Tuna Nicoise and his signature gold-dusted mini-chocolate Oscars also would be served.

Some 1,500 guests are expected at the ball immediately after the February 24 Oscars ceremony, including nominees such as George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain.

Puck’s menu could be the first chance for many of the attendees to eat since breakfast, as nominees and presenters stave off food in order to squeeze in to fitted gowns and tuxedos for the televised red carpet arrivals and ceremony.

“Nobody eats lunch that day, so by nine o’clock, anybody who would be on a diet is no longer on that diet,” Puck said.

With Oscar-nominated films ranging from dramas to comedies and musicals, guests at the ball – the Academy’s official celebration – will be dining on dishes just as varied.

“We have so many great nominated movies from ‘Argo’ to ‘Les Miserables’ to ‘Silver Linings Playbook,” Puck told Reuters. “It’s a really great year for movies with lots of variety, so we are going to serve a variety of dishes.”

Puck, who this year is marking his 19th year catering the ball, and chef Matt Bencivenga will serve over 50 dishes from hors d’ oeuvres and entrees that will be served on small plates throughout the evening.

Gastronomical items will include Chinese, French, Italian dishes and others from Puck’s many Los Angeles eateries.

The master chef told Reuters there will also be a strong focus this year on vegan dishes, including pizza, kale salad with grilled artichoke, and a beet salad with spiced walnut among others.

“If they don’t find something to eat (among our dishes) then they are really finicky,” joked Puck.

About 300 of Puck’s staff will be in the kitchen and 650 on the dining room floor, which will be laid out with small tables and booths to create a party atmosphere rather than a black tie dinner, according to Puck.

Completing the setting will be a 120-foot (37-meter)chandelier hanging from the ceiling and an 18-foot (5.5-meter) golden Oscar as the centerpiece of the ballroom floor.

Puck said food preparation will start a few days before the event with the making of dishes like smoked salmon and tortellini, but “we cook everything as if we were cooking for an intimate party of 25 – everything at the last moment.”

By midnight, Puck said the festivities would be pretty much over as attendees moved to other parties. That’s when he’ll get his first opportunity of the day to relax “and hang with a few people I know, and we sit around and have some good wine.”

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Paul Simao)

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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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DealBook: Microsoft May Back Dell Buyout

The effort to take Dell private has gained a prominent, if unusual, backer: Microsoft.

The software giant is in talks to help finance a takeover bid for Dell that would exceed $20 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. Microsoft is expected to contribute up to several billion dollars.

An investment by Microsoft — if it comes to pass — could be enough to push a leveraged buyout of the struggling computer maker over the goal line. Silver Lake, the private equity firm spearheading the takeover talks, has been seeking a deep-pocketed investor to join the effort. And Microsoft, which has not yet made a commitment, has more than $66 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft and Silver Lake, a prominent investor in technology companies, are no strangers. The private equity firm was part of a consortium that sold Skype, the online video-chatting pioneer, to Microsoft for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago. And the two companies had discussed teaming up to make an investment in Yahoo in late 2011, before Yahoo decided against selling a minority stake in itself.

A vibrant Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans to make Windows more relevant for the tablet era, when more and more devices come with touch screens. Dell has been one of the most visible supporters of Windows 8 in its products.

That has been crucial at a time when Microsoft’s relationships with many PC makers have grown strained because of the company’s move into making computer hardware with its Surface family of tablets.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

If completed, a buyout of Dell would be the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis, reaching levels unseen since the takeovers of Hilton Hotels and the Texas energy giant TXU. Such a deal is taking advantage of Dell’s still-low stock price and the abundance of investors willing to buy up the debt issued as part of a transaction to take the company private. And Silver Lake has been working with Dell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, who is expected to contribute his nearly 16 percent stake in the company to a takeover bid.

Yet while many aspects of the potential deal have fallen into place, including a potential price of up to around $14 a share, talks between Dell and its potential buyers may still fall apart.

Shares of Dell closed up 2.2 percent on Tuesday, at $13.12. They began rising after CNBC reported Microsoft’s potential involvement in a leveraged buyout. Microsoft shares slipped 0.4 percent, to $27.15.

Microsoft’s lending a hand to Dell could make sense at a time when the PC industry is facing some of the biggest challenges in its history. Dell is one of Microsoft’s most significant, longest-lasting partners in the PC business and among the most committed to creating machines that run Windows, the operating system that is the foundation of much of Microsoft’s profits.

But PC sales were in a slump for most of last year, as consumers diverted their spending to other types of devices like tablets and smartphones. Dell, the third-biggest maker of PCs in the world, recorded a 21 percent decline in shipments of PCs during the fourth quarter of last year from the same period in 2011, according to IDC.

In a joint interview in November, Mr. Dell and Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, exchanged friendly banter, as one would expect of two men who have been in business together for decades.

Mr. Dell said Mr. Ballmer had gone out of his way to reassure him that Microsoft’s Surface computers would not hurt Dell sales.

“We’ve never sold all the PCs in the world,” said Mr. Dell, sitting in a New York hotel room brimming with new Windows 8 computers made by his company. “As I’ve understood Steve’s plans here, if Surface helps Windows 8 succeed, that’s going to be good for Windows, good for Dell and good for our customers. We’re just fine with all that.”

Microsoft has been willing to open its purse strings in the past to help close partners. Last April, Microsoft committed to invest more than $600 million in Barnes & Noble’s electronic books subsidiary, in a deal that ensures a source of electronic books for Windows devices. Microsoft also agreed in 2011 to provide the Finnish cellphone maker Nokia billions of dollars’ worth of various forms of support, including marketing and research and development assistance, in exchange for Nokia’s adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.

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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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Fitness Trackers Are Long on Hype, Short on Credibility

We are awash in personal data trackers. There are wristbands, headbands, watches, smart scales, helmets and even forks to help us track our weight, heart rate, blood pressure and glucose level while logging how far we walk and how many calories we burn. All this information is supposed to give us behavior-morphing insights into our personal health habits.

Trouble is, no one can say for sure that any of it makes us healthier. Oh sure, these gadgets might get us psyched up to exercise, and they might encourage us to take the stairs instead of the elevator, but there has not yet been any scientific exploration of whether fitness gadgets, like the Fitbit Flex or Withings Smart Activity Monitor, actually work like they should.

“The durability of the effect is still in question,” said Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. “We don’t have randomized [clinical] trials showing improved outcomes or durability in influencing behavior.”

You wouldn’t know that walking through the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES, where more than 220 companies showed off their digital health gadgets. They all used pictures of youthful, happy, svelte people lacing up running shoes, eating salads and playing outdoors. Their booths were filled with attractive, fit gals and guys.

The message is clear: These devices will help improve your health and physique.

But so far there aren’t many studies or trials testing the effectiveness of activity trackers or health monitors at getting us to move more and eat better foods or whether digital sensors are any better than old-school approaches like Weight Watchers.

Many of these devices have been developed by startups or Kickstarter campaigns and simply don’t have the deep pockets necessary to finance expensive clinical trials, says Topol.

Some researchers, Topol included, are following the wave of health technology with studies testing how activity monitors and other digital health sensors influence outcomes for chronic illnesses like cardiac disease and diabetes.

Other scientists at the University of California, San Francisco; Mayo Clinic; Massachusetts General Hospital; and Aurora Health Care are conducting trials to determine how digital data trackers affect activity levels, obesity and dietary intake in various populations. Some of these trials are just now recruiting patients or recently finished collecting data.

Dr. Anne Thorndike, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, is wrapping up a study of Fitbit’s effect on activity levels among medical residents. She couldn’t share all her findings because she’s still submitting her study for publication, but said there was some fatigue over the course of her 12-week study, suggesting the motivating effect of information, badges and notifications might be short-lived. That’s to be expected. As with any new toy or gadget, the novelty wears off.

A 2007 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that using pedometers, activity monitors and step counters was associated with being more physically active and having a lower body mass index and blood pressure. But the authors note that “whether these changes are durable over the long term is undetermined.”

The key to prolonging people’s engagement with their trackers might be to harness the social networking features built into the devices. Some research has shown social networks can impact health outcomes for patients with migraine, obesity and ALS, but whether that will translate to sensor-based social networks remains to be seen.

At this point, the connection between sensor-collected data and a patient’s official (electronic) health record also is not well defined. There’s no simple interface to upload data collected by biometric sensors into medical health records short of printing out your data, scanning it and converting it into a PDF you can send to your doctor.

That might become more of an issue as personal data trackers mature from pedometers pimped out with great user interfaces into hardware that’s being added to mobile devices to gather data typically collected by physicians, like electrocardiograms, galvanic skin response and blood oxygenation and glucose levels, says Topol. And that democratization of health care is what he sees as the biggest benefit of these devices. He predicts 2013 will see more “medical wearables,” which will make studying conditions like sleep apnea more comfortable and less expensive for patients.

The next step is the commercialization of sensors floating around in our bloodstreams or implanted in our skin, teeth or brains.

As these medical sensors become more pervasive, companies also will have to be conscious of how they market their products. For example, the Masimo iSpO2 pulse oximeter is approved for consumers to measure their own blood oxygen levels and pulse rates using the similar technology used in hospitals. But because it’s not approved for medical use, doctors can’t use it or have their patients use products like this until they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. AliveCor, which makes a portable electrocardiogram built into an iPhone case, faced similar issues until it was approved by the FDA in December.

“It’s like the wild, wild West,” said Dr. Atul Butte of the Stanford School of Medicine, who just started using a Fitbit and an Aria Scale. “For a drug company, there’s such a burden to show how [their product] works better. A gadget maker is … not required to show that data and that’s kind of unfair.”

“Probably, like most gadgets, these devices help those folks on the borderline, [those] ready to make behavioral changes and looking for something to tip them into healthy behaviors,” he added.

After a few days of using his own trackers, Butte admits he’s “already making changes like switching from lattes to more espressos.”

Will those changes last more than a few weeks? Only time will tell.

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Beyonce, Hudson do star turns at inauguration

WASHINGTON (AP) — Beyonce drew a loud cheer at the inauguration Monday even before her impressive rendition of the national anthem. But in the role she played four years ago singing for the president and first lady at the inaugural ball was her “Dreamgirls” co-star Jennifer Hudson.

If President Barack Obama’s first inaugural theme seemed to be summed up by Beyonce’s “At Last,” this time it was Hudson’s version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”

Hudson was among the entertainment at Monday night’s inaugural balls, joined by Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys, who modified her hit “Girl on Fire” to sing “He’s the president and he’s on fire … Obama’s on fire. Obama’s on fire.”

The crowd at the official Inaugural Ball joined in with the Grammy-nominated fun. anthem “We Are Young.”

And Wonder got small knots of dancers going with crowd-pleasers such as “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.”

Earlier in the day, the applause for Beyonce started when she took her place with Jay-Z at the Capitol to watch President Barack Obama take the oath for his second term in office. The two stopped to chat with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

James Taylor kicked off the musical performances, strumming his guitar and singing “America the Beautiful.” Kelly Clarkson followed with a different arrangement of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Then Beyonce was introduced and the crowd again roared its approval.

Beyonce had a definite fan in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who applauded eagerly after she finished singing the national anthem. She offered R&B-esque vocal riffs as she sang on and the crowd seemed to love it, cheering loudly as she finished. Clarkson, too, hit high notes.

Beyonce may have been the star musical attraction, but she had plenty of company from Hollywood at the Capitol on Monday. Katy Perry and John Mayer sat side-by-side, with Perry in an orange-striped coat and wide hat, and Mayer in dark sunglasses. Singer-songwriter Ke$ ha was there, too.

People flocked to the colorful pop star, snapping photos. And Perry did the same, taking shots of “Girls” actress and daughter of news anchor Brian Williams, Allison Williams.

Actress Eva Longoria was seated on the platform outside the Capitol after making an appearance at a Kennedy Center performance Sunday night. Perry sang at the children’s concert the night before.

Former Boston Celtics great Bill Russell was in the crowd, too, along with actor Marlon Wayans.

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AP writers Donna Cassata, Darlene Superville, Josh Lederman and Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report.

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Follow Mesfin Fekadu on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MusicMesfin

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The New Old Age Blog: The Brutal Truth of 'Amour'

It has been a few days since I left the movie theater in a bit of a daze, and I’m still thinking about “Amour.”

So much of this already much-honored film rings utterly true: the way a long-married Parisian couple’s daily routines, their elegant life of books and music and art, can be upended in a moment. The tender care that Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) provides for Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) as multiple strokes claim her body and her mind, and the inexorable way that care wears them both down. Their withdrawal into a proud dyad that seeks and accepts little help from outsiders, even family. “We’ve always coped, your mother and I,” Georges tells their daughter.

The writer and director Michael Haneke’s previous movies, which I haven’t seen, tend to be described as shocking, violent, even punitive. “Amour,” which Times critic Manohla Dargis called a masterpiece, includes one brief spasm of violence, but the movie remains restrained, not graphic. It’s brutal only because life, and death, can be brutal.

Is popular culture paying more attention to aging and caregiving? In the last couple of years, I have written about these subjects surfacing in a YouTube series (“Ruth & Erica”), in movies like “The Iron Lady,” in novels like Walter Mosley’s “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.”

A couple of weeks back, watching a play called “The Other Place,” starring the remarkable Laurie Metcalfe, I suddenly realized that the dynamic physician and businesswoman onstage had some sort of early-onset dementia. Dementia seems a particularly popular subject, in fact. Intrinsically dramatic, it suffuses the Mosley novel and Alice LaPlante’s “Turn of Mind,” and some of my favorite movies about aging, “Away From Her,” “Iris” and “The Savages.”

“Kings Point,” Sari Gilman’s compelling documentary about a retirement community in Florida where nobody seemed to expect to grow old, just won an Oscar nomination for best short-subject documentary and will be shown on HBO in March. And “Amour,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is up for five Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and a best actress nomination for the 85-year-old Ms. Riva. (Academy voters: Just give it to her.)

A number of these artists, Mr. Haneke included, have spoken about their own experiences with aged relatives. Perhaps, as the population ages and more people confront the consequences, the stories our culture tells itself have evolved to include more old people, more caregivers. Or maybe I just want that to be true.

“Do not go see this,” my movie-going buddy had been warned, probably because her mother has dementia and friends who had seen the film wanted to spare her. I know some people found “Amour” too slow-paced or claustrophobic — like many elderly couples’ lives, it basically takes place in four rooms — or too grim. (If you’ve seen it, tell us what you thought.)

If you’re a full-time caregiver or you’re coping with a relative with dementia, perhaps you would prefer to spend your 2 hours 7 minutes of precious time off watching something funny. Escapism has its virtues.

But I found “Amour” unflinching and provocative and beautiful.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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