Advocacy groups coming hat in hand to a less-strapped Sacramento

SACRAMENTO — Now that California faces a dramatically smaller deficit, advocacy groups and other interests are queuing up with wish lists totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in case the spending spigot opens even slightly.

Children's advocates want day-care centers inspected more often. Dentists want their poor patients' coverage restored. Universities want funds to prevent further tuition increases, replace old computers and perform maintenance. Cities say the state should let them keep more of the money left over from defunct redevelopment agencies.

But California still has financial problems, even after years of steep service cuts, and Gov. Jerry Brown has vowed to keep a tight rein on the budget. State finances could take a turn for the worse if the federal budget standoff sends the country into a new recession or tax revenue doesn't keep pace with spending.

Labor unions that took compensation cuts this year and then put their political muscle behind Brown's successful tax-hike campaign may also look for more money. Almost every contract involving state workers — covering about 172,000 employees from 10 unions — is set to expire this summer.

Brown has not said publicly how he would cover next year's budget gap, which the nonpartisan legislative analyst projected at $1.9 billion. The governor is expected to unveil his spending blueprint in January.

Still, many groups "feel they should be at the head of the line and get their money back next year," said Mike Herald, a lobbyist at the Western Center on Law and Poverty. "Being shy just means you'll be at the back of the line."

Herald has his own wish list, including raising monthly welfare grants and increasing aid for the disabled.

Kim Kruckel, executive director at the Child Care Law Center in San Francisco, said she's been huddling with fellow advocates to decide what to request from Brown and lawmakers. She noted that spending on subsidized child care has been cut $1 billion in four years.

"Could we start to work our way back up? Ten or 20% per year?" Kruckel said. "That sounds reasonable."

Environmental advocates hope for more resources to control hazardous waste and other dangers through the Department of Toxic Substance Control.

"It hasn't been the most effective agency," said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California. "If we want to make it work, they're going to have to substantially increase their funding."

Advocates for dental care for the poor already have a powerful supporter in their corner, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento). He frequently recalls his August visit to a temporary dental clinic in Sacramento, where hundreds camped overnight to get free care and volunteer dentists yanked 2,700 rotted teeth.

In a September conversation with The Times' editorial board, Steinberg said he regretted the cuts the government had made in dental coverage for the poor.

"I thought to myself, 'God, how could I have ever done that,'" he said.

More than 3 million adults lost their coverage in 2009. That saved the state $55 million annually and sacrificed an equal amount of federal money.

Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access, said Sacramento should restore the money, ensuring that all adults are covered when Medi-Cal expands in 2014 to an estimated 2 million more people under President Obama's healthcare law.

Reviving dental care "could bring hundreds of millions of dollars into our healthcare system, into our economy, and help people have better health," Wright said.

The California Medical Assn. also wants more funding as the state prepares to enlarge healthcare coverage. David Ford, the group's associate director of medical and regulatory policy, said administrators will need more staff to process an influx of newly covered Californians.

"We have to be ramping up," he said.

Advocates worry that the new healthcare law will be undermined in California because the state's Medi-Cal cuts could make it harder for the poor to get care. A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the state can reduce payments to doctors and others who care for Medi-Cal patients; provider groups say they will appeal.

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Auction of Greta Garbo’s dresses, caps fetches $1.6 million

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A two-day sale of clothing, jewelry and other memorabilia belonging to reclusive movie star Greta Garbo fetched $ 1.6 million, more than three times the original estimate, according to Julien’s Auctions.

Garbo’s Louis Vuitton streamer trunk, which sold for $ 37,500, was among the top sellers in the auction of 800 items which began on Friday, along with three leather driving caps she wore in a 1924 car advertisement that fetched $ 15,000.

A U.S. passport issued to her in 1964, which carried an estimate of $ 3,000-$ 5,000, also sold for $ 15,000, and a 1930s black velvet evening dress that had an estimated value of $ 1,200 went to the highest bidder for $ 13,750.

“Greta Garbo commanded Marilyn Monroe prices,” Martin Nolan, the executive director of the Beverly Hills auction house, said in a statement. “Her beauty, extraordinary screen presence and fashion trending style were proven to be timeless.”

Garbo, one of Hollywood’s greatest stars and beauties, died in New York in 1990 at the age of 84. She retired from film and public life decades earlier in 1941.

All of the items in the sale, including a platform bed she designed with antique Swedish carvings, photos, luggage and documents, had been kept in storage before her family decided to sell them in the auction that was announced in August.

Garbo started her Hollywood career in silent movies such as 1927′s “Flesh and the Devil” and was among the few actors to successfully transition to talkies, becoming iconic not only for her beauty, but for her brains and the streak of independence she displayed on film and in her personal life.

The Swedish actress earned four Academy Award nominations, her first for 1929′s “Anna Christie,” and was finally given an honorary award for unforgettable performances by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1954.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney and Jill Serjeant; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

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Experts Say Thimerosal Ban Would Imperil Global Health Efforts

A group of prominent doctors and public health experts warns in articles to be published Monday in the journal Pediatrics that banning thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines, would devastate public health efforts in developing countries.

Representatives from governments around the world will meet in Geneva next month in a session convened by the United Nations Environmental Program to prepare a global treaty to reduce health hazards by banning certain products and processes that release mercury into the environment.

But a proposal that the ban include thimerosal, which has been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial and fungal contamination in multidose vials of vaccines, has drawn strong criticism from pediatricians.

They say that the ethyl-mercury compound is critical for vaccine use in the developing world, where multidose vials are a mainstay.

Banning it would require switching to single-dose vials for vaccines, which would cost far more and require new networks of cold storage facilities and additional capacity for waste disposal, the authors of the articles said.

“The result would be millions of people, predominantly in low- and middle-income countries, with significantly restricted access to lifesaving vaccines for many years,” they wrote.

In the United States, thimerosal has not been used in children’s vaccines since the early 2000s after the Food and Drug Administration and public health groups came under pressure from advocacy groups that believed there was an association between the compound and autism in children.

At the time, few, if any, studies had evaluated the compound’s safety, so the American Academy of Pediatrics called for its elimination in children’s vaccines, a recommendation that the authors argued was made under the principle of “do no harm.”

Since then, however, there has been a lot of research, and the evidence is overwhelming that thimerosal is not harmful, the authors said. Louis Z. Cooper, a former president of the academy and one of the authors, said that if the members had known then what they know now, they never would have recommended against using it. “Science clearly documented that we can’t find hazards from thimerosal in vaccines,” he said. “The preservative plays a critical role in distribution of vaccine to the global community. It was a no-brainer what our position needed to be.”

Advocacy groups have lobbied to include the substance in the ban, and some global health experts worry that because the government representatives due to vote next month are for the most part ministers of environment, not health, they may not appreciate the consequences of banning thimerosal in vaccines. The Pediatrics articles are timed to raise a warning before the meeting.

“If you don’t know about this, and you’re a minister of environment who doesn’t usually deal with health, it’s confusing,” said Heidi Larson, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs the Vaccine Confidence Project.

In an open letter to the United Nations Environmental Program and the World Health Organization this year, the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs, a nonprofit group that supports the ban, disputed the assertion that scientific studies had offered proof that thimerosal is safe, and urged member states to include it in the ban.

That it is being used in developing countries, but not developed countries, is an “injustice,” the letter said.

The World Health Organization has also weighed in. In April, a group of experts on immunization wrote in a report that they were “gravely concerned that current global discussions may threaten access to thimerosal-containing vaccines without scientific justification.”

Dr. Larson said she believed that the efforts of pediatricians and global health experts, including the W.H.O., would influence the negotiations in Geneva and that the compound would most likely be left out of the final ban.

“You can’t just pull the plug on something without having a plan for an alternative,” she said.

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In Spain, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

Raul, a truck driver in Castellón, Spain, hoped last month to be paid from a government fund. Courts are jammed with requests.

VALENCIA, Spain — Over the past two years, Ana María Molina Cuevas, 36, has worked five shifts a week in a ceramics factory on the outskirts of this city, hand-rolling paint onto tiles. But at the end of the month, she often went unpaid.

Still, she kept showing up, trying to keep her frustration under control. If she quit, she reasoned, she might never get her money. And besides, where was she going to find another job? Last month, she was down to about $130 in her bank account with a mortgage payment due.

“On the days you get paid,” she said at home with her disabled husband and young daughter, “it is like the sun has risen three times. It is a day of joy.”

Mrs. Molina, who is owed about $13,000 by the factory, is hardly alone. Being paid for the work you do is no longer something that can be counted on in Spain, as this country struggles through its fourth year of an economic crisis.

With the regional and municipal governments deeply in debt, even workers like bus drivers and health care attendants, dependent on government financing for their salaries, are not always paid.

But few workers in this situation believe they have any choice but to stick it out, and none wanted to name their employers, to protect both the companies and their jobs. They try to manage their lives with occasional checks and partial payments on random dates — never sure whether they will get what they are owed in the end. Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest in the euro zone at more than 25 percent, and despite the government’s labor reforms, the rate has continued to rise month after month.

“Before the crisis, a worker might let one month go by, and then move on to another job,” said José Francisco Perez, a lawyer who represents unpaid workers in the Valencia area. “Now that just isn’t an option. People now have nowhere to go, and they are scared. They are afraid even to complain.”

No one is keeping track of workers like Mrs. Molina. But one indication of their number can be seen in the courts, which have become jammed with people trying to get back pay from a government insurance fund, aimed at giving workers something when a company does not pay them.

In Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, the unemployment rate is 28.1 percent and the courts are so overwhelmed that processing claims, which used to take three to six months, now takes three to four years.

Since the start of the crisis in 2008, the insurance fund has paid nearly a million workers nationally back pay or severance. In 2007, it paid 70,000 workers. It is on track to pay more than 250,000 this year, and experts say the figures would be much higher if not for the logjam in the courts.

Often the unpaid workers, like Mrs. Molina, whose company is now in bankruptcy proceedings, hope their labor will keep a struggling operation afloat over the long run. Unemployment benefits last only two years, they point out, and they wonder what they would do after that. But in the meantime, they cannot even claim unemployment benefits. And no amount of budgeting can cover no payment at all.

Beatriz Morales García, 31, said she could not remember the last time she went shopping for herself. A few years ago, she and her husband, Daniel Chiva, 34, thought that they had settled into a comfortable life, he as a bus driver and she as a therapist in a rehabilitation center for people with mental disabilities. His job is financed by the City of Valencia, and hers by the regional government of Valencia.

They never expected any big money. But it seemed reasonable to expect a reliable salary, to take on a mortgage and think about children. In the past year, however, both of them have had trouble being paid. She is owed 6,000 euros, nearly $8,000. They have cut back on everything they can think of. They have given up their landline and their Internet connection. They no long park their car in a garage or pay for extra health insurance coverage. Mr. Chiva even forgoes the coffee he used to drink in a cafe before his night shifts. Still, the anxiety is constant.

“There are nights when we cannot sleep,” he said. “Moments when you talk out loud to yourself in the street. It has been terrible, terrible.”

Mrs. Morales said it was particularly hard to watch other mothers in the park with their children while she must leave her own toddler to go to work, unsure she will ever get paid.

“We are working eight hours, and we’re suffering more than people who are not working,” she said.

The couple’s pay has been so irregular that they are having a hard time even keeping track of how much they are owed, because small payments show up sporadically in their account.

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

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In Connecticut, a mother coped silently with a troubled son

NEWTOWN, Conn. — On the outside, Nancy Lanza was the picture of contented motherhood: volunteering at her sons' school, gardening, keeping a picture-perfect home so well-ordered a neighbor described it as pristine.

Outside public view, say some who knew her, she had a struggle on her hands, and that was her son Adam: a brilliant but sometimes difficult boy.

Lanza battled with the school district over Adam and eventually quit her job, pulled him out of school and educated him at home, said her sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza.

"I know she had issues with the school. … In what capacity, I'm not 100% certain if it was behavior, if it was learning disabilities, I really don't know," Marsha Lanza told reporters. The investigation widened Saturday into the still-baffling shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., with police releasing the identities of the 26 students and teachers they say Adam Lanza shot before turning the gun on himself.

His mother, police said, was shot at the family home before her son set out on his deadly rampage through the school.

"Adam, he was … definitely the challenge to the family in that house," Marsha Lanza said. "Every family has one. I have one. They have one. … But he was a very bright boy, he was smart."

Jim Leff, who knew Nancy Lanza casually through a friend, said he had been put off by an impression that she was high-strung, until he came to understand what she was trying to cope with as Adam's mother.

"Now that I've been filled in by friends about how difficult her troubled son … was making things for her, I understand that it wasn't that Nancy was overwrought about the trivialities of everyday life, but that she was handling a very difficult situation with uncommon grace," he wrote in a testimonial to her on his blog.

Neighbors said the Lanzas moved several years ago into the hilly neighborhood of graceful houses and pastoral views and immediately fit into the social scene, attending the picnic after the annual Labor Day parade and a rotating ladies' night at several homes.

By the accounts of some who knew her, Nancy Lanza, who grew up in rural New Hampshire, was comfortable using guns and kept several in the house.

Landscaper Dan Holmes said Lanza often talked about her gun collection, and about taking her sons target practicing. "One thing I will note is that she was a big, big gun fan," Leff wrote on his blog.

Police have said the three weapons found near Adam Lanza's body inside the school were legally purchased and registered to his mother.

Yet it appears that Adam may have tried to buy a weapon of his own before Friday's shootings. Just days before, two federal law enforcement officials say, the 20-year-old attempted to purchase a single "long gun" rifle from a Dick's Sporting Goods store in Canton, Conn., but was turned away because he did not want to wait for a required background check.

"He didn't want to wait the 14 days," said one source, declining to be identified because the case was still under review. "The sale did not take place."

Marsha Lanza, whose husband is the brother of Adam's father, Peter Lanza, said the entire family was trying to understand what happened. She said her sister-in-law never talked of being threatened by her son, or about any violence he had committed.

"And if he did, I know she wouldn't tolerate it," she said. "If he needed help, I know they would have gotten it for him.

"Because they were the type of parents — when they were married, as well as being separated — if the kids had a need, they would definitely fulfill it."

She said Nancy Lanza divorced in 2009 and was awarded the house and enough money — up to $12,450 a month in alimony, according to local news outlets that reviewed the divorce files — that she didn't have to work.

A law enforcement source said the couple were ordered to undergo parental counseling as a condition of their divorce, but another source familiar with the case said that is a standard condition of divorces in Connecticut involving a minor child.

Other Lanza family members emerged from seclusion Saturday, and, like Marsha Lanza, expressed disbelief.

"The family of Nancy Lanza shares the grief of a community and nation as we struggle to … comprehend the loss that we all share. ... On behalf of Nancy's mother and siblings, we reach out to the community… and express our heartfelt sorrow for their incomprehensible tragedy and loss of innocence that has affected so many," the family said in a statement.

It was read at a news conference by the sheriff of Rockingham County, N.H., where Nancy Lanza's brother is employed as a law enforcement officer.

Adam Lanza's father, Peter, also issued a statement.

"Our family is grieving along with all those who have been affected by this enormous tragedy. No words can truly express how heartbroken we are," it said. "We are in a state of disbelief and trying to find whatever answers we can. We too are asking why."

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

kim.murphy@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Hennessy-Fiske reported from Newtown, Murphy from Seattle and Serrano from Washington, D.C.

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Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space

To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years.

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures.

Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites.

Above: Bear Glacier, Alaska

This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.

The grey stripe down the middle of the glacier is called a medial moraine. It is formed when two glaciers flow into each other and join on their way downhill. When glaciers come together, their lateral moraines, long ridges formed along their edges as the freeze-thaw cycle of the glacier breaks off chunks of rock from the surrounding walls, meet to form a rocky ridge along the center of the joined glaciers.

Image: GeoEye/NASA, 2005.

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Greta Garbo’s dresses, caps fetch high prices at auction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An auction of film legend Greta Garbo‘s belongings got off to a roaring start on Friday, with her clothing, jewelry and other memorabilia fetching more than ten times pre-sale estimates in many cases.

Bidding was brisk and high as more than 800 items belonging to the reclusive Swedish actress, including the bed she slept in, went up for sale over two days at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills.

A 1930s black velvet evening dress with an estimated value of about $ 1,200 sold on Friday for $ 13,750. The winning bid for three leather driving caps worn by Garbo in a 1924 car advertisement was $ 15,000, compared with an estimate of $ 200.

Her U.S. passport issued in 1964, which carried an estimate of $ 3,000-$ 5,000, fetched $ 15,000.

All the items come from the estate of Greta Garbo, who died in 1990 in New York at the age of 84 after retiring from movies and public life in 1941.

Her great-nephew Derek Reisfield told Reuters when the auction was announced in August that the family had kept her belongings in storage before deciding to sell them.

The collection includes vintage and designer dresses, shoes, furniture and photos from Garbo’s Hollywood heyday, as well as the platform bed she designed using antique Swedish carvings to reflect her Scandinavian heritage. The bed, due to be sold later in the auction, carries an estimate of $ 800-$ 1,200.

Among other early items sold on Friday was a single page Swedish summary bank statement from 1956 that fetched $ 1,125, a Swedish military jacket ($ 4,062), and a 1960s silk brocade evening coat ($ 12,800).

The buyers for the various items were not immediately known.

Garbo started her Hollywood career in silent movies such as 1927′s “Flesh and the Devil” and was among the few actors to successfully transition to talkies, becoming iconic not only for her beauty, but for her brains and the streak of independence she displayed on film and in her personal life.

She earned four Academy Award nominations, her first for 1929′s “Anna Christie,” and was finally given an honorary award for unforgettable performances by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1954.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

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As Gold Is Spirited Out of Afghanistan, Officials Wonder Why

Zalmai for The New York Times

A Kabul jewelry shop. Officials are concerned about gold being flown out of Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand luggage and tucked into jacket pockets, roughly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kabul with increasing regularity, confounding Afghan and American officials who fear money launderers have found a new way to spirit funds from the country.

Most of the gold is being carried on commercial flights destined for Dubai, according to airport security reports and officials. The amounts carried by single couriers are often heavy enough that passengers flying from Kabul to the Persian Gulf emirate would be well advised to heed warnings about the danger of bags falling from overhead compartments. One courier, for instance, carried nearly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an early morning flight in mid-October, according to an airport security report. The load was worth more than $1.5 million.

The gold is fully declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legitimately being sent by gold dealers seeking to have old and damaged jewelry refashioned into new pieces by skilled craftsmen in the Persian Gulf, said Afghan officials and gold dealers.

But gold dealers in Kabul and current and former Kabul airport officials say there has been a surge in shipments since early summer. The talk of a growing exodus of gold from Afghanistan has been spreading among the business community here, and in recent weeks has caught the attention of Afghan and American officials. The officials are now puzzling over the origin of the gold — very little is mined in Afghanistan, although larger mines are planned — and why so much appears to be heading for Dubai.

“We are investigating it, and if we find this is a way of laundering money, we will intervene,” said Noorullah Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank. Yet he acknowledged that there were more questions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me something about it,” he said in an interview. Or, as a European official who tracks the Afghan economy put it, “new mysteries abound” as the war appears to be drawing to a close.

Figuring out what precisely is happening in the Afghan economy remains as confounding as ever. Nearly 90 percent of the financial activity takes place outside formal banks. Written contracts are the exception, receipts are rare and statistics are often unreliable. Money laundering is commonplace, say Western and Afghan officials.

As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that situation we usually are: is there something bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of commerce?” said a senior American official who tracks illicit financial networks.

There is reason to be suspicious: the gold shipments track with the far larger problem of cash smuggling. For years, flights have left Kabul almost every day carrying thick wads of bank notes — dollars, euros, Norwegian kroner, Saudi Arabian riyals and other currencies — stuffed into suitcases, packed into boxes and shrink-wrapped onto pallets. At one point, cash was even being hidden in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Airways flights to Dubai.

Last year alone, Afghanistan’s central bank says, roughly $4.5 billion in cash was spirited out through the airport. Efforts to stanch the flow have had limited impact, and concerns about money laundering persist, according to a report released last week by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The unimpeded “bulk cash flows raise the risk of money laundering and bulk cash smuggling — tools often used to finance terrorist, narcotics and other illicit operations,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often taken to Dubai, where officials are known for asking few questions. Many wealthy Afghans park their money and families in the emirate, and gold dealers say more middle-class Afghans are sending money and gold — seen as a safeguard against economic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a postwar economic collapse grows louder.

But given Dubai’s reputation as a haven for laundered money, an Afghan official said that the “obvious suspicion” is that at least some of the apparent growth in gold shipments to Dubai is tied to the myriad illicit activities — opium smuggling, corruption, Taliban taxation schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s economy.

There are also indications that Iran could be dipping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buying up dollars and euros here to circumvent American and European sanctions, and it may be using gold for the same purpose.

Yahya, a dealer in Kabul, said other gold traders were helping Iran buy the precious metal here. Payment was being made in oil or with Iranian rials, which readily circulate in western Afghanistan. The Afghan dealers are then taking it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dollars. The money is then moved to China, where it was used to buy needed goods or simply funneled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a single name.

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Meet the World?s Cheapest Venture Capitalist

Maciej Cegłowski’s new startup fund was the toast of Silicon Valley on Friday, lighting up Twitter, winning top billing on the elite Hacker News forum, and drawing dozens of applications from would-be portfolio companies. The fund’s draw: Extreme stinginess.

The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud, as the fund is called, offers chosen startups all of $37 in venture capital. Not $37 million, like you might get from the uber-investors on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road, or $37,000, like what YCombinator and other incubators offer. Thirty-seven crisp George Washingtons.

“The thing that has really changed in the past couple of years that hasn’t been internalized by everyone is that startup costs are really very, very low,” says Cegłowski. “Even compared to 2008 it costs very little money to do stuff. You have these technologies that are pretty good at scaling up … but it’s still free, open source software. So as long as the labor is free, you’re fine.”

‘I want to promote ideas that aren’t game changers.’

— Maciej Cegłowski

The Co-Prosperity Cloud is more than a statement on the rapidly falling cost of scaling software. It’s also about a crucial shift in the role played by startup investors. The importance of the actual capital distributed by venture capitalists continues to fall along with the costs of deploying, distributing, and scaling up apps, websites, other software, and even hardware. Less tangible aspects of an investment, like the endorsement, expertise, and social graph of the investor have become correspondingly more important.

If Cegłowski can prove there is an extreme version of this trend — that there are compelling startups for which investment dollars are borderline meaningless, and for which social capital is paramount – he could help remake the tech investment pipeline from a glorified money hose into a system for primarily distributing social capital like prestige, attention, taste, and advice.

The Co-Prosperity Cloud is an experiment in distributing just that sort of social capital. It offers not just the $37, but also Cegłowski’s vote of confidence – he’s only picking six winners – and “as much publicity as I can provide,” as the fund webpage says. That publicity will presumably come via the devoted online following Cegłowski has built over the years for his articles on bootstrapping his bookmark service Pinboard.in, as well as for his wide-ranging personal essays, including an indispensable meat-lover’s guide to visiting Argentina.

“I want to see if I can give people the social boost to get a chance to explain their idea and attract that initial group of customers,” Cegłowski says. “Because once you have a handful of people who use your product you can kind of claw your way up from that. It’s just that the first part is really tough.”

The former Yahoo engineer is hardly the first to capitalize on the changing nature of startup funding. YCombinator pioneered the pairing of tiny, low-five-figure funding rounds with intensive mentoring and an unconventional selection process. Its success stories include Dropbox, SocialCam, and Airbnb. The venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, meanwhile, bolsters its monetary investments with exceptional expertise in areas like human resources and public relations. Its investments have included Facebook, Twitter, and Skype.

Where the Co-Prosperity Cloud is different is in its lower ambitions. It aims to fund what Cegłowski calls “barely successful … modest” companies like his own Pinboard, a one-man operation that he says couldn’t pay a second employee but that covers his costs, salary, plus a contribution to his savings. Where YCombinator encourages two-founder teams and follow-on venture capital rounds that push startups toward a big-money exit, the Co-Prosperity Cloud actively encourages solo founders and slow-building, sustainable companies.

“I’m interested in this world of niche businesses no one will really fund,” Cegłowski says. “[I] want to promote ideas that aren’t game changers and aren’t going to grow into a giant business but are a perfectly great business.”

The fund is off to a promising start. As of this morning, it was a brand-new idea that had popped into Cegłowski’s head during an a.m. jog around San Francisco. By the end of the evening, he had upward of 40 applications, as well as offers to supplement each of his investments, to the tune of $50 apiece, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (of the aforementioned Andreessen Horowitz) and tech entrepreneur Thomas Ptacek.

The Co-Prosperity Cloud’s application deadline is Jan. 1, and Cegłowski anticipates announcing winners shortly thereafter. He jokes about how poorly things could go, but in the end resolved that this would be OK: “I decided I could spend $200 for this experiment.” That small outlay could result in big savings for future entrepreneurs. Or, at the very least, another blockbuster entry on Cegłowski’s blog.

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