Media Decoder Blog: Comcast Buys Rest of NBC in Early Sale

8:53 p.m. | Updated Comcast gave NBCUniversal a $16.7 billion vote of confidence on Tuesday, agreeing to pay that sum to acquire General Electric’s remaining 49 percent stake in the entertainment company. The deal accelerated a sales process that was expected to take several more years.

Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, said the acquisition, which will be completed by the end of March, underscored a commitment to NBCUniversal and its highly profitable cable channels, expanding theme parks and the resurgent NBC broadcast network.

“We always thought it was a strong possibility that we’d some day own 100 percent,” Mr. Roberts said in a telephone interview.

He added that the rapidly changing television business and the growing necessity of owning content as well as the delivery systems sped up the decision. “It’s been a very smooth couple of years, and the content continues to get more valuable with new revenue streams,” he said.

Comcast also said that NBCUniversal would buy the NBC studios and offices at 30 Rockefeller Center, as well as the CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Those transactions will cost about $1.4 billion.

Mr. Roberts called the 30 Rockefeller Center offices “iconic” and said it would have been “expensive to replicate” studios elsewhere for the “Today” show, “Saturday Night Live,” “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and other programs produced there. “We’re proud to be associated with it,” Mr. Roberts said of the building.

With the office space comes naming rights for the building, according to a General Electric spokeswoman. So it is possible that one of New York’s most famous landmarks, with its giant red G.E. sign, could soon be displaying a Comcast sign instead.

When asked about a possible logo swap on the building, owned by Tishman Speyer, Mr. Roberts told CNBC, that is “not something we’re focused on talking about today.” Nevertheless, the sale was visible in a prominent way Tuesday night: the G.E. letters, which have adorned the top of 30 Rock for several decades, were not illuminated for an hour after sunset. But the lights flickered back on later in the evening.

Comcast, with a conservative, low-profile culture, had clashed with the G.E. approach, according to employees and executives in television. Comcast moved NBCUniversal’s executive offices from the 52nd floor to the 51st floor — less opulent space that features smaller executive offices and a cozy communal coffee room instead of General Electric’s lavish executive dining room.

Comcast took control of NBCUniversal in early 2011 by acquiring 51 percent of the media company from General Electric. The structure of the deal gave Comcast the option of buying out G.E. in a three-and-a-half to seven-year time frame. In part because of the clash in corporate cultures, television executives said, both sides were eager to accelerate the sale.

Price was also a factor. Mr. Roberts said he believed the stake would have cost more had Comcast waited. Also, he pointed to the company’s strong fourth-quarter earnings to be released late Tuesday afternoon, which put it in a strong position to complete the sale.

Comcast reported a near record-breaking year with $20 billion in operating cash flow in the fiscal year 2012. In the three months that ended Dec. 31, Comcast’s cash flow increased 7.3 percent to $5.3 billion. Revenue at NBCUniversal grew 4.8 percent to $6 billion.

“We’ve had two years to make the transition and to make the investments that we believe will continue to take off,” Mr. Roberts said.

The transactions with General Electric will be largely financed with $11.4 billion of cash on hand, $4 billion of subsidiary senior unsecured notes to be issued to G.E. and a $2 billion in borrowings.

Even with the investment in NBCUniversal, Comcast said it would increase its dividend by 20 percent to 78 cents a share and buy back $2 billion in stock in 2013.

When it acquired the 51 percent stake two years ago, Comcast committed to paying about $6.5 billion in cash and contributed all of its cable channels, including E! and some regional sports networks, to the newly established NBCUniversal joint venture. Those channels were valued at $7.25 billion.

The transaction made Comcast, the single biggest cable provider in the United States, one of the biggest owners of cable channels, too. NBCUniversal operates the NBC broadcast network, 10 local NBC stations, USA, Bravo, Syfy, E!, MSNBC, CNBC, the NBC Sports Network, Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, and a long list of other media brands.

Mr. Roberts and Michael J. Angelakis, vice chairman and chief financial officer for the Comcast Corporation, led the negotiations that began last year with Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, and Keith Sharon, the company’s chief financial officer. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Centerview Partners and CBRE provided financial and strategic advice.

The sale ends a long relationship between General Electric and NBC that goes back before the founding days of television. In 1926, the Radio Corporation of America created the NBC network. General Electric owned R.C.A. until 1930. It regained control of R.C.A., including NBC, in 1986, in a deal worth $6.4 billion at the time.

In a slide show on the company’s “GE Reports” Web site titled “It’s a Wrap: GE, NBC Part Ways, Together They’ve Changed History,” G.E. said the deal with Comcast “caps a historic, centurylong journey for the two companies that gave birth to modern home entertainment.”

Mr. Immelt has said that NBCUniversal did not mesh with G.E.’s core industrial businesses. That became even more apparent when the company became a minority stakeholder with no control over how the business was run, according to a person briefed on G.E.’s thinking who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

“By adding significant new capital to our balanced capital allocation plan, we can accelerate our share buyback plans while investing in growth in our core businesses,” Mr. Immelt said in a statement. He added: “For nearly 30 years, NBC — and later NBCUniversal — has been a great business for G.E. and our investors.”

Read More..

Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

Read More..

Well: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

Read More..

Advertising: Small Rival Music Service Takes Aim at Pandora

ONE of advertising’s great (or at least most amusing) traditions is the challenger attack ad, in which a field’s No. 2 (or No. 3) player tries to distinguish itself by taking aim at the leader. When artfully done it can have a great effect, as in Avis’s long-running “We try harder” campaign against Hertz, or Samsung’s recent ads mocking the obedience of iPhone fans.

The latest example is in digital music services, with Pandora as the Goliath and its much smaller competitor Slacker in the role of David with the 30-second sling.

In an online-only spot that will start running Wednesday, a young woman at a coffee shop vexes everyone in earshot when she opens a blue “Pandora’s box” — labeled “P,” like Pandora’s app icon — and unleashes a singularly annoying song.

“It plays that over and over again,” the woman complains to a friend, who blames Pandora’s “small music library” for the repetition. With Slacker helpfully loaded on her phone, the friend points out that Slacker has 10 times as many songs, and other features, too.

Like Pandora, Slacker offers free, ad-supported Internet radio and has two tiers of premium service. Listeners can eliminate ads for a $4 monthly subscription, and $10 a month also adds features that — like Spotify and other “on-demand” services — let users play any song they choose.

Since its founding in 2006, however, Slacker has struggled to stand out. With four million monthly users, 560,000 of them paying, its audience is a fraction of Pandora’s, which is more than 65 million a month; Clear Channel Communications has nearly 50 million online listeners through its station sites and iHeartRadio app.

To promote itself among such formidable competition — and to introduce a revamped version of its site — Slacker wants to show that it tries harder.

“We had to be very honest with where we were in the marketplace,” said Craig Rechenmacher, Slacker’s chief marketing officer. “We had to be disruptive in the marketplace, and we needed something that targets our competitors and the holes in their service.”

Slacker will spend $5.5 million on media placements this year, Mr. Rechenmacher said. In addition to the video spot, by Liquid Advertising, the campaign will include display ads by the agency Questus, and they will run on music and pop-culture sites like YouTube, Vevo, Brooklyn Vegan and College Humor.

The ads show off what Slacker says is its human touch, with playlists created by music experts and stations featuring D.J.’s and commentators. Pandora caters to listeners’ tastes through a secret algorithm that analyzes each song’s musical “genome.” (Others, like Songza, have grown quickly through expert programming, but Pandora is the field’s leader by far.)

“When we did research on our core users, what they love the most, what came back was the idea that it felt like somebody was home,” said Jack Isquith, Slacker’s senior vice president of strategic development. “There was someone who loves music at the controls.”

The campaign is also evidence of a slow change in the marketing of digital music services, many of which have avoided advertising in favor of online word-of-mouth (and, of course, lots of free music). Pandora, for example, is often featured in commercials by its partners, like car companies, but has made none of its own.

“It costs a lot of money to build a brand if you didn’t hit it luckily through viral channels, like Pandora did,” said David Hyman, the former chief executive of the music service Mog, which was sold last year to Beats Electronics.

The biggest force in promoting digital music over the years, music executives say, was Apple’s iTunes and iPod commercials. Rhapsody, too, has run dozens of television ads, including a memorable one with Jay-Z in 2009.

For the most part the recent wave of streaming services has not been heavily advertised, but that is changing as the field grows more competitive. Last year, Rdio, a subscription service, did a multimillion-dollar campaign that included billboards in Times Square. Spotify, which has grown quickly but has not fully penetrated the mainstream market, recently hired its first agency of record, Droga5 — the former agency of Rhapsody.

For its campaign, Slacker wanted to focus on how digital services serve consumers. In the coffee shop video, the patrons align with the demographics of the service — 18 to 44 years old, and slightly more females than males, said Will Akerlof, the chief executive of Liquid Advertising — and visibly express their reactions to the music playing.

To find a sufficiently irritating soundtrack, the agency looked at a 2007 Rolling Stone magazine feature, “The 20 Most Annoying Songs,” Mr. Akerlof said, and recorded a techno-pop version of the folk song “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” in the style of Rednex’s version from the mid-1990s (No. 13 on the list).

That lighthearted approach, with a focus on the consumer, has been missing from many digital-music ads, Mr. Isquith said.

“The approaches of many of the people in the space has been, ‘Hey, we’re standing next to big stars,’ or, ‘Hey, we’ve got the slickest, most cutting-edge tech product,’ but that’s not why people use it,” he said.

“Our ads,” Mr. Isquith added, “are meant to say that this is a great listener experience that will delight you.”

Read More..

Thai Soldiers Repel Attack in Major Blow to Insurgents

BANGKOK — Thai soldiers repelled an attack on a military outpost early Wednesday, killing at least 16 gunmen in what appeared to be a significant setback for ethnic insurgent groups leading a bloody uprising now in its ninth year.

Col. Pramote Promin, the spokesman of the army’s southern command, said the army had been expecting the attack after being tipped off by villagers and “former insurgents fed up with the violence.”

“This helped us to be fully prepared,” Colonel Pramote said.

Thai authorities said that one of the men killed in the attack, Maroso Jantarawadee, was an important leader of the insurgency.

Srisompob Jitpiromsri, the associate dean at Prince of Songkla University in the southern city of Pattani and one of the foremost experts on the insurgency, described Wednesday’s failed insurgent attack as a “tactical defeat” for them.

“This operation failed but that doesn’t mean they will fail in the long term,” Mr. Srisompob said. “They will try again and again.”

About 50 insurgents, who wore ballistic vests and military-style uniforms and had military assault weapons, attacked the outpost soon after midnight Wednesday, Colonel Pramote said. The attack lasted 20 minutes and those not killed fled into the jungles, some leaving trails of blood. Thai authorities declared a curfew in the area and said they were checking hospitals and clinics for the injured attackers.

Colonel Promote said no Thai soldiers were wounded or killed in the attack. “All the soldiers are safe,” he said.

Thailand’s southern insurgency, one of Asia’s most deadly and intractable ethnic conflicts, has left more than 5,000 people dead since the upswing of violence in 2004.

The precise motives of the insurgents remained unclear but centered on longstanding resentment by Malay Muslims toward the majority Thai Buddhists in the country.

Insurgents often target symbols of the Thai state, including the police, soldiers, government officials and teachers.

More than 150 teachers have been killed since 2004 and many schools have been burned. A school near the site of Wednesday’s attack was set afire just before dawn.

Thai authorities said Mr. Maroso, the insurgent leader killed in the attack, was a suspect in the killing of a teacher on Jan. 23.

Mr. Srisompob of Prince of Songkla University said there were two competing trends in the three violence-wracked provinces.

The insurgents are picking higher profile targets, including conducting an attack on a shopping mall last year in the city of Hat Yai that killed 5 people and injured 354, including many Malaysian tourists.

The number of overall attacks increased last year, according to data compiled by Mr. Srisompob. At the same time Mr. Srisompob said he saw impatience escalating with the insurgency among Malay Muslims.

“An increasing number of Malay Muslims are fed up with the violence,” he said. “The voices of the community are getting stronger.”

The number of militants involved in the insurgency was not clear. The military had a list of about 9,000 people it considered likely insurgents.

Thailand has flooded the area with soldiers in recent years. There are about 150,000 security personnel in the three provinces, including military, police and village protection volunteer forces.

Poypiti Amatatham contributed reporting.

Read More..

On the Road: Squeezing Frequent Fliers Is a Likely Merger Outcome

Given the likelihood of a merger of American Airlines and US Airways, the question that frequent fliers always ask is timely again, in light of previous mergers in recent years between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, United and Continental Airlines, and Southwest Airlines and AirTran Airways.

First, some good news from Brian Kelly, the proprietor of ThePointsGuy.com, a Web site popular with frequent fliers concerned about mileage award benefits. After a merger, “all of your US Air lifetime miles and all of your American Airlines lifetime miles will combine,” he said. “So that’s a benefit. If you’ve got a small amount of US Air miles and a decent amount of American miles, all of a sudden you’re going to have this one new combined balance.”

Indications are that the far larger and more popular American Airlines AAdvantage mileage program will prevail in a combined airline. So elite-status qualifying miles on US Airways will also shift into AAdvantage, which is another potential advantage, he said. Since US Air has four ranks of elite status and American has only three, it’s also likely that US Air members will find an easier path to bonuses and standard upgrades when their elite-status mileage moves to AAdvantage.

“AAdvantage was the first frequent-flier program, and they have a great team running it,” Mr. Kelly said. “I really hope they won’t dismantle that and try to go with the US Air Dividend Miles program, because that program is not nearly as good.”

Of course, airline mergers are aimed at reducing costs and improving efficiency — not customer convenience. One result of the mergers has been a reduction in airline service, especially in midsize and smaller markets. That means fewer seats available for mileage award tickets and more elite-status customers competing for fewer upgrades.

Today, American and the much smaller US Airways have a combined 6,500 daily flights. But experience from past mergers, as well as the current trends in reducing airline capacity, suggest that a combined airline will have fewer daily flights.

On the other hand, there are not a large number of markets in which American and US Air directly compete for originating passengers (rather than connecting ones). And let’s not overlook international routes, which is where the major airlines have been concentrating in recent years.

While airlines are now significantly cutting capacity on trans-Atlantic routes, demand for flights to Asia is growing, along with demand for Latin America. It is generally assumed that a combined airline, still flying under the American name, would maintain American’s current membership in the Oneworld global alliance. Members of the US Airways frequent-flier program would then have new access to award tickets and elite benefits on the vast route network of American and its 11 Oneworld partners, including British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas.

But US Airways belongs to the bigger Star Alliance, whose 27 member airlines include United Airlines, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Air China and Air Canada. So a merger would make it challenging for frequent fliers to sort out widely varying mileage award rules, including various fees, for alliances and partnerships.

It takes a while for a merger to become operational. “It would take at least a year, probably closer to 18 months, for full integration,” Mr. Kelly said. So there is plenty of time to use existing miles or, conversely, add to existing accounts in anticipation of the combination. Consider, for example, a US Airways MasterCard promotion that has a sign-up bonus of 40,000 miles, and offers additional double miles on US Airways purchases, Mr. Kelly noted. Those award miles would ultimately transfer to the new airline.

A merger entails “a lot of technical issues,” Mr. Kelly said, adding that while the Delta-Northwest merger went fairly smoothly for frequent-flier members, the more recent United-Continental merger still hasn’t fully smoothed out wrinkles in combining two frequent-flier programs.

Along with Mr. Kelly’s Web site, incidentally, there’s good information and a lively discussion of various airline frequent-flier mileage programs on the mileage forums at FlyerTalk.com. As mileage programs merge, rules for award tickets and fees and various elite-status upgrades and bonuses are in flux, and keeping track of the details, while a real chore, can be useful.

I always maintain that the best value in your frequent-flier miles is award tickets for international travel. With an American-US Air merger and the machinations over alliance partner policies, that will require even more attention to detail.

“American in the last year has really scaled back on the amount of advance award availability on their own flights,” Mr. Kelly said, but with greater availability on international flights like those operated by its partner British Airways (which might include a fee of up to $350 one way). US Airways also has “a lot of partner award availability, but not as much on their own flights,” he said.

“After they sit down and work out all of their synergies, the bottom line will be that international capacity and award availability will be cut,” Mr. Kelly said. “I don’t see award availability improving.”

Read More..

Bloomberg Lauds Companies for Cutting Salt Content

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in the midst of a long-running campaign to change the eating habits of New Yorkers and consumers across the country, declared a victory against salt on Monday, as 21 companies, from Kraft and Goya to FreshDirect, said they had met the first stage in reductions in salt content in foods.

After focusing on reducing trans fats and smoking, Mr. Bloomberg turned his attention to salt in 2010, announcing that about 30 companies had signed up to reduce salt in foods by 25 percent within five years, as a way of lowering consumers’ blood pressure and saving lives lost to heart attack and stroke.

“These companies have a huge presence on our shelves and in our diets,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall as he announced the results, surrounded by a half-dozen executives of food companies.

The first stage focused on the low-hanging fruit — salsa, dips, bacon, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cold cuts, processed cheese, salad dressing, canned beans and pizza — foods whose salt content is so high that reducing it up to a point probably would not be noticed by many consumers.

Mr. Bloomberg called them “some of America’s most beloved and iconic foods,” suggesting that the cuts might have a disproportionately salutary effect. But Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said he did not know how much salt the results so far had removed from the average person’s diet.

One side effect of the salt reduction drive is that food companies are looking for salt substitutes to make food taste better.

The main way to do that is to add potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, said Russ Moroz, vice president for research at Kraft Foods. But because potassium tends to have a bitter, mineral taste, other ingredients have to be added. He said these were proprietary secrets, and he declined to name them.

Potassium is good, Dr. Farley said, because it lowers blood pressure and most people do not get enough of it. It is removed from fruits and vegetable during processing, he said. Mr. Bloomberg said he thought fears of additives were overdone.

But a salt industry scientist said Monday that too much potassium could be bad for the kidneys, and that the “cocktail of chemical constituents” added to balance the bitterness and enhance the salty taste could present unknown risks, as those ingredients were undisclosed.

“They do it with one eye on the lab and the other eye on the label,” said Morton Satin, vice president for science and research at the Salt Institute, a trade association. “They make sure it’s below the level that the F.D.A. requires for it to be on the label.”

Mr. Satin said that the link between high blood pressure and salt was just “a theory,” and that reducing salt too much could have harmful effects, like iodine deficiency in children, a cause of mental retardation, and diabetes.

Some companies said reducing salt proved to be a popular marketing tool. Goya reported that it had reduced salt in its regular canned beans by 5 or 6 percent, without any drop in sales. “We tasted them, and you really wouldn’t notice the difference,” Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods, said Monday.

Mr. Bloomberg said it might surprise many people to know that bread and rolls were the “biggest contributor” to salt in the diet. Eating a muffin, he said, could be worse than eating a small bag of Lays potato chips.

Bread makers are hard to spot on the list of companies that have pledged to reduce salt, perhaps, Mr. Satin said, because it is more difficult to make bread without salt. However, some companies, like Au Bon Pain, have reduced salt in some baked goods.

On an irreverent note, Mr. Bloomberg said that he loved Subway sandwiches and would eat his favorite, the Italian B.M.T. — it includes salami, pepperoni and ham — regardless of the salt content, but that he was glad that it now contained 27 percent less.

Read More..

Bloomberg Lauds Companies for Cutting Salt Content

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in the midst of a long-running campaign to change the eating habits of New Yorkers and consumers across the country, declared a victory against salt on Monday, as 21 companies, from Kraft and Goya to FreshDirect, said they had met the first stage in reductions in salt content in foods.

After focusing on reducing trans fats and smoking, Mr. Bloomberg turned his attention to salt in 2010, announcing that about 30 companies had signed up to reduce salt in foods by 25 percent within five years, as a way of lowering consumers’ blood pressure and saving lives lost to heart attack and stroke.

“These companies have a huge presence on our shelves and in our diets,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall as he announced the results, surrounded by a half-dozen executives of food companies.

The first stage focused on the low-hanging fruit — salsa, dips, bacon, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cold cuts, processed cheese, salad dressing, canned beans and pizza — foods whose salt content is so high that reducing it up to a point probably would not be noticed by many consumers.

Mr. Bloomberg called them “some of America’s most beloved and iconic foods,” suggesting that the cuts might have a disproportionately salutary effect. But Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said he did not know how much salt the results so far had removed from the average person’s diet.

One side effect of the salt reduction drive is that food companies are looking for salt substitutes to make food taste better.

The main way to do that is to add potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride, said Russ Moroz, vice president for research at Kraft Foods. But because potassium tends to have a bitter, mineral taste, other ingredients have to be added. He said these were proprietary secrets, and he declined to name them.

Potassium is good, Dr. Farley said, because it lowers blood pressure and most people do not get enough of it. It is removed from fruits and vegetable during processing, he said. Mr. Bloomberg said he thought fears of additives were overdone.

But a salt industry scientist said Monday that too much potassium could be bad for the kidneys, and that the “cocktail of chemical constituents” added to balance the bitterness and enhance the salty taste could present unknown risks, as those ingredients were undisclosed.

“They do it with one eye on the lab and the other eye on the label,” said Morton Satin, vice president for science and research at the Salt Institute, a trade association. “They make sure it’s below the level that the F.D.A. requires for it to be on the label.”

Mr. Satin said that the link between high blood pressure and salt was just “a theory,” and that reducing salt too much could have harmful effects, like iodine deficiency in children, a cause of mental retardation, and diabetes.

Some companies said reducing salt proved to be a popular marketing tool. Goya reported that it had reduced salt in its regular canned beans by 5 or 6 percent, without any drop in sales. “We tasted them, and you really wouldn’t notice the difference,” Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods, said Monday.

Mr. Bloomberg said it might surprise many people to know that bread and rolls were the “biggest contributor” to salt in the diet. Eating a muffin, he said, could be worse than eating a small bag of Lays potato chips.

Bread makers are hard to spot on the list of companies that have pledged to reduce salt, perhaps, Mr. Satin said, because it is more difficult to make bread without salt. However, some companies, like Au Bon Pain, have reduced salt in some baked goods.

On an irreverent note, Mr. Bloomberg said that he loved Subway sandwiches and would eat his favorite, the Italian B.M.T. — it includes salami, pepperoni and ham — regardless of the salt content, but that he was glad that it now contained 27 percent less.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Speakers With a Big Sound for Big Desks

The British loudspeaker maker KEF, a name well known to audiophiles, has broken out both the high-tech and marketing razzle-dazzle for its desktop X300A speakers.

For starters, it talks about the “Uni-Q driver array,” which joins two speakers in one – a fancy version of a good old coaxial speaker, which puts a woofer for low tones and a tweeter for high tones in the same chassis.

Then it boasts that each speaker has a class AB amplifier, a kind of dual circuit that is used in some higher quality amplifiers and car amps as well. It pumps up to 50 watts to the low frequency speaker and 20 watts to the high.

Neither of these is quite the breakthrough it is made to appear, but you don’t often find either in a speaker built for computers.

The end result is a very solid set of speakers – 16.5  pounds of solid each.

They aren’t for people concerned about desk space. The size of typical bookshelf speakers, they are nearly a foot high, with a roughly 7-by-10-inch footprint.

Nor are they for people concerned about running skeins of cables. Each speaker takes an industrial strength power cord, a USB cable to the computer or player and another cord between the speakers themselves.

With gun-metal-colored cabinets and no grill to obscure (or protect) the speakers, the X300As have a utilitarian look, but alas, not a utilitarian price: They list for $800 a pair.

The price could be excused if the sound were exceptional. Because the speakers can be customized to achieve different sounds, it’s hard to make a blanket assessment. But I’ll try.

After fiddling with the bias and balance controls, the EQ setting and a set of foam stoppers to rein in the bass, I can say the speakers sound very, very good in some cases – “Honky Tonk Woman” was lively, and the cowbell (more cowbell!) was just perfect.

In other cases, they were not as impressive – in the overture for “The Mikado,” the oboes sounded like they had tin cans over them.

But overall, they are a very good pair of speakers if money and desk space are no object.

Read More..

North Korea Is Suspected of Conducting 3rd Nuclear Test

Lee Jin-Man/Associated Press

A South Korean watched news reporting about a possible nuclear test conducted by North Korea on a TV screen in Seoul on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON — North Korea appeared to conduct its third, and probably largest, nuclear test on Tuesday, according to American and Asian officials, posing a new challenge for the Obama administration in its effort to keep the country from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.

While North Korea’s official news outlets were silent about the test, many nations detected seismic activity centered near the same location where the North conducted tests in 2006 and 2009. The United States Geological Survey said it was only a kilometer underground, an indication consistent with a nuclear blast. And in Vienna, the organization that monitors the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty said that tremor had “clear explosionlike characteristics.”

Preliminary estimates suggested a test far larger than the previous two conducted by the North, though probably less powerful than the first bomb the United States dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, in 1945.

If confirmed, the test would be the first under the country’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, and an open act of defiance to the Chinese, who urged the young leader not to risk open confrontation by setting off the weapon. In the past few days a Chinese newspaper that is often reflective of the government’s thinking said the North must “pay a heavy price” if it proceeded with the test. But it was unclear how China would act at the United Nations Security Council, which was heading into emergency session as news of the suspected blast played out.

The Obama administration has already threatened to take additional action to penalize the North if it conducts a test, through the United Nations. But the fact is that there are few sanctions left to apply against the most unpredictable country in Asia. The only penalty that would truly hurt the North would be a cutoff of oil and other aid from China. And until now, despite issuing warnings, the Chinese have feared instability and chaos in the North more than its growing nuclear and missile capability, and the Chinese leadership has refused to participate in sanctions.

Mr. Kim, believed to be about 29, appears to be betting that even a third test would not change the Chinese calculus.

The apparent test set off a scramble among Washington’s Asian allies to assess what the North Koreans had done.

The United States sent aloft aircraft equipped with delicate sensors that may, depending on the winds, be able to determine whether it was a plutonium or uranium weapon. The Japanese defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, said Japan had ordered the dispatch of an Air Self-Defense Force jet to monitor for radioactivity in Japanese airspace.

Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told Parliament that “based on precedents, Japan believes that this quake was triggered by a North Korean nuclear test,” and said the country was considering “its own actions, including sanctions, to resolve this and other issues.”

But the threat may be largely empty, because trade is limited and the United States and its allies have refrained from a naval blockade of North Korea or other steps that could revive open conflict, which has been avoided on the Korean Peninsula since an armistice was declared 60 years ago.

It may take days or weeks to determine if the test, if that is what it proves to be, was successful. American officials will also be looking for signs of whether the North, for the first time, conducted a test of a uranium weapon, based on a uranium enrichment capability it has been pursuing for a decade. The past two tests used plutonium, reprocessed from one of the country’s now-defunct nuclear reactors. While the country has only enough plutonium for a half-dozen or so bombs, it can produce enriched uranium well into the future.

No country is more interested in the results of the North’s nuclear program, or the Western reaction, than Iran, which is pursuing its own uranium enrichment program. The two countries have long cooperated on missile technology, and many intelligence officials believe they share nuclear knowledge as well, though so far there is no hard evidence.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, South Korea.

Read More..