Don't Call It a Tablet

The Surface Pro looks like a tablet, but it’s not a mobile device. It’s a portable device.

Sure, put the Surface Pro next to the Surface RT and it’s hard to spot many differences. One’s a little thicker, but their shapes are otherwise identical. Both have the same matte-black, magnesium-based casing. They both can be used with snap-in keyboards and they’re both propped up into typing position by built-in kickstands.

It’s a full-blown computer, but one that folds up into a tablet-sized package.

While the differences are blurry on the outside, if you use them both for a little while, the dissimilarities become distinct. The Surface RT is thoroughly a tablet, and it exists to directly challenge the iPad. It closely matches Apple’s larger slate in size, weight, performance and price. The Surface Pro, however — which goes on sale Feb. 9 for a starting price of $900 — is something more ambitious than a tablet. It’s a full-blown computer, but one that folds up into a tablet-sized package.

It’s also more expensive than a tablet — and comes with many hidden costs — but is far more capable since it runs full Windows 8 Pro. And though it isn’t perfect, the Surface Pro is certainly very compelling.

Ever since Windows 8 launched in October of last year, Microsoft’s hardware partners have been experimenting with ways of incorporating the OS’s touchscreen capabilities into their computer designs. The result, so far, has been a flood of tablet/PC Frankenbeasts with keyboards that twist, slide, fold, or otherwise play peek-a-boo beneath the touchscreen. The success of these devices varies, but most are flimsy and awkward. They want to be tablets, but they don’t want to leave the laptop behind, and they end up stuck somewhere in the middle.

The Surface Pro is more well-constructed and thoughtfully designed than any of them. It’s the best of the hybrids. The quality of the hardware, the performance, and the simplicity of the design make it a success.

But let me be clear: The Surface Pro is not a tablet. Many people have confusedly asked me if the Surface Pro is even a good tablet. The answer is a clear and resounding, “No.” It’s heavy and thick. It doesn’t invite you to curl up with it on the couch. It’s tough to read with it in bed, and it works much better propped up on a desk than it does resting on a knee or in a lap.

And while it’s portable, it isn’t an amazing laptop, either. Microsoft’s Touch and Type covers don’t come bundled with Surface Pro — you have to pay an extra $120 or $130, respectively, if you want to avoid touchscreen typing (and trust me, you will want to avoid touchscreen typing). And with either keyboard attached, the thing is so top-heavy, it’s physically challenging to use on your lap.

So why bother? Because the Surface Pro is a Windows 8 PC through and through. It comes with an Intel Core i5 processor, and it can run all of your legacy desktop applications. You can surf using your favorite browser, you can type and save and share using the full versions of Office and all your other regular work applications. You can freely download software from the web without depending on the (still anemic) Windows Store.

Microsoft has also given the Surface Pro a killer screen. The 10.6-inch, 1980×1080 pixel resolution display is a visible step up from the Surface RT. With the same 16:9 aspect ratio, it’s great for watching movies. It feels a little silly to use it in portrait mode because it’s so tall, but text is much crisper on the higher-res display, so browsing the web and reading text is more pleasurable. It’s not quite on par with the iPad’s Retina display, but I could barely see a difference between the two. Ten-point touch gestures are supported, as well as the standard swipe gestures.

The touchpads found on both keyboard covers don’t support the standard swipe gestures. They’re accurate enough for pointing, but if you try to swipe in from the right for Charms, or from the left to switch applications, they won’t respond. You’ll need to reach up and use the screen, or buy an extra mouse or trackpad like Logitech’s Rechargeable Trackpad ($80, another additional cost).

The Surface Pro does come with a great pressure-sensitive pen that magnetically attaches to the power connector. The pen really shined in handwriting-driven apps like One Note, or the painting app, Fresh Paint. And the top of the pen acts as an eraser, which is neat.

Performance is generally excellent across all Windows 8 apps I tested. However, one thing that stuck out is a general problem with screen rotations. When switching between portrait and landscape modes, it takes about a second for the Surface Pro to register the rotations. I found this lag to be disconcerting. Also, some apps displayed rotation quirks. The worst offender was Chrome. The desktop version worked flawlessly, but when I used the version made for the tile-based Windows 8 interface, the app repeatedly refused to resize properly when I flipped between landscape and portrait modes. Likewise, whenever I put Chrome in Snap View mode — a Windows 8 trick that lets you run two applications side-by-side in a split-screen arrangement — the Chrome window got smaller and would not readjust back to full-screen size when I exited Snap View.

Otherwise, I was happy with Windows 8 Pro on the Surface. All the apps I used during my tests were super-responsive. Scrolling was smooth, and there were no input latency problems to speak of.

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Court to probe singer Chris Brown’s community service records

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Prosecutors on Tuesday asked a court to find R&B singer Chris Brown in violation of his probation because they say community service records stemming from his 2009 assault on girlfriend Rihanna contain “significant discrepancies.”

Brown is scheduled to appear at a hearing on Wednesday in Los Angeles, at which time a judge could decide to revoke the “Don’t Wake Me Up” singer’s probation.

But Brown’s attorney, Mark Geragos, told Reuters the allegations are “scurrilous, libelous and defamatory.”

“The prosecution has lost their collective minds,” Geragos said. “I’m going to seek sanctions against the (district attorney’s) office for bringing a frivolous motion.”

Brown pleaded guilty in 2009 to beating and punching R&B singer Rihanna and was sentenced to five years probation, 180 days of community service and domestic violence counseling.

The community service involved tasks like cutting grass, picking up trash and removing graffiti. He was allowed to complete it in his home state of Virginia.

“After a thorough review of all documents and evidence submitted to the court it appears there are significant discrepancies indicating at best sloppy documentation and, at worst fraudulent reporting,” Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Mary Murray said in a court filing on Tuesday.

Murray cited three occasions when she said Brown was not at the recorded location of his community service and instead performing or traveling, once on a private jet bound for Cancun, Mexico.

Brown, in another instance, never stripped or waxed the floors at a Virginia community center as a report said he did, according to the 19-page court document.

Murray also accused Virginia authorities of poor and incorrect management of the singer’s service and records, and said his community service case should be transferred to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia Schnegg in November praised Brown for “actually working diligently to complete all the things the court has required of you.”

R&B singer Rihanna and Brown have recently rekindled their romance and are dating again, Rihanna told Rolling Stone magazine last week.

Brown was in a brawl last month with fellow singer Frank Ocean outside a West Hollywood recording studio. A police report indicates he punched Ocean in the face but Ocean said over the weekend he did not want Brown prosecuted.

(Editing by Xavier Briand and Eric Walsh)

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Well: Getting Into Your Exercise Groove

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

This isn’t meant as an insult, but you are physiologically lazy. So am I. So are we all. Using treadmill testing, scientists have definitively established that, like other animals, humans naturally aim to use as little energy as possible during most movement. So when we walk or run, our bodies tend to choose a particular cadence, a combination of step length and step frequency, that allows us to move at any given speed with as little physiological effort as possible.

How we pick that cadence, though, and whether we can or would even want to change it has been unclear. But a series of recent studies involving runners, walkers, metronomes and virtual reality curtains suggests that while the tug of physiological laziness is strong, it can be controlled, or at least tweaked, with some conscious effort — and perhaps your iPhone playlist.

In the first and most revelatory of the studies, physiologists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia asked adult volunteers to walk on a treadmill at an easy pace. Using motion capture technology, the scientists determined how many steps each person was taking per minute at this speed. A person’s pace depends, of course, on both step length and step frequency. But because the two are inextricably entwined — lengthen your stride and you’ll take fewer steps over a given distance — studying one provides sufficient information about the other, and frequency is easier to enumerate.

After establishing each volunteer’s preferred step frequency, the scientists then sped up or slowed the treadmill, and the researchers measured how quickly people’s legs responded.

The body, remember, wants things to be easy. When you increase or decrease the speed of your walking or running, various physiological changes occur; the amount of oxygen in your blood rises or falls, for instance, because your muscles start requiring more or less of the stuff. Other biochemical changes also occur within muscle cells. Sensing those changes, the body realizes that, at this new speed, your cadence isn’t ideal; you’re taking too few or too many steps to use the least possible amount of energy. Your body adjusts.

But that process takes a little while, at least five seconds or so for the oxygen levels to change and your body to recognize the alteration, says Max Donelan, a professor at Simon Fraser University who was a co-author of the study with his graduate student Mark Snaterse and others.

However, the walkers in the study were adjusting their step frequency within less than two seconds after the treadmill speed changed, Dr. Donelan points out. They then fine-tuned their pacing after that. But the first adjustment came almost instantly.

The same process occurred when the researchers repeated the experiment with runners. If the treadmill speed changed, the runners’ step frequency shifted almost immediately, too fast for internal physiology to have played much of a role.

These insty adjustments suggest that our brains very likely contain huge libraries of preset paces, Dr. Donelan and his colleagues have concluded, of idealized, “physiologically efficient” step cadences for any given speed and condition. It seems probable, in fact, that over our lifetimes, Dr. Donelan says, our brains develop and store countless templates for most pacing situations. We learn and remember what cadence allows us to use the least energy at that speed, and when we reach that speed, we immediately default to our body’s most efficient pace.

Just how the brain recognizes that we are moving at any particular speed is not completely understood, Dr. Donelan says, but almost surely involves messages from the eyes, feet, ears, nervous system, skin and other bodily systems.

Interestingly, it seems to be quite difficult to fool your brain. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues draped shower-curtain-like enclosures around the front of a treadmill, projected a virtual reality scene of a hallway onto it and then manipulated people’s sense of the speed with which they were moving through the hallway, they found that people’s step frequency would quickly change to match this supposed new speed. But then they would settle back into their former cadence, even as the virtual hallway continued to move past them at unnatural speed.

Visual cues simply were not strong enough to affect pacing for long.

But the scientists have found one signal that does seem effectively to override the body’s strong pull toward its preferred ways of moving: a strongly rhythmic beat. When Dr. Donelan and his colleagues fitted runners or walkers with headphones tuned to a metronome, they found that they could increase or decrease volunteers’ step frequency, even if that frequency was faster or slower than a person’s preferred step pattern. They would also maintain that pace for as long as the metronomic rhythm continued unaltered. The volunteers aligned their movement to the beat.

In practical terms, this finding suggests that music may be one of the best ways to affect the pace of your running or walking, especially if you are trying to maintain a pace with which you are not familiar or which feels awkward. Want to start jogging faster than you have in the past? Load your iPod with uptempo music, Dr. Donelan suggests (although obviously ease into any changes in training slowly, to lessen the risk of injuries).

Dr. Donelan and his colleagues even have recently launched an iPhone app called Cruise Control that allows people to coordinate their pacing with their playlists. Input your preferred running or walking speed and the app skims your music library (nonjudgmentally; if you like Nickelback, that’s your business) and strings together songs with the requisite beat, even subtly altering the tempo of songs, if needed.

But of course, if you’re comfortable with your pace as it is, stick with it. For me, the most stirring message of these recent experiments is that, left to its own devices, your body will almost always obligingly try to choose the least demanding pace for you, a goal with which I’m happy to fall into step.

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Economic Scene: Immigration Reform Issue: The Effect on the Budget

The stars could hardly have shone brighter on the prospects for immigration reform than in the early months of 2007.

The coalition pushing for change included the oddest of bedfellows — roping together business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce with the Service Employees International Union, the fastest-growing union in the country. It had an impeccable bipartisan pedigree, including President George W. Bush and Senator Jon Kyl, a staunchly conservative Republican, as well as the Democrats’ liberal lion, Senator Ted Kennedy.

The economy was growing. The unemployment rate was at its lowest level since the dot-com bubble burst six years before. And the flaws of our immigration laws — impotent to stop a river of unauthorized immigrants drawn across the border by job opportunities — were obvious to all.

Immigration reform, however, was not to be.

Immigrants’ rights groups balked at the hurdles put in immigrants’ path toward legalization. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. hated a provision creating temporary work visas, arguing that it was a license for businesses to bring in cheap foreign labor. Then, a Senate Democrat, Byron Dorgan, offered the coup de grâce with an amendment to phase out the worker visa program after five years. Though proposed at the behest of organized labor, the amendment got the support of some of the most anti-union Republicans in the Senate. And it killed the entire enterprise, stripping away corporate America’s main reason to support a deal.

Today, the economy is not growing much. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Yet President Obama thinks the stellar alignment may be  better than six years ago. He is proposing a wholesale change to the same flawed immigration laws. He trusts that Republicans, who lost the Hispanic vote by an enormous margin in November, cannot afford to further alienate Hispanics by voting against their top priority.

Despite the strong case for an overhaul, however, changing our immigration laws may be tougher than the president appears to believe. While we may have overcome some of the obstacles of 2007, reform will probably face deep-seated opposition from many Americans — including most conservative Republicans — to what they will view as a potentially large expansion of welfare.

President Obama’s proposal is based on principles similar to those of the 2007 attempt: a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in the country, a legal channel for future immigrant workers and their families, and a plan to better enforce the nation’s borders and immigration laws.

Yet immigration reform today means something quite different than it did in 2007. Notably, the elements needed to stop the flow of illegal immigrants north are much less important to the enterprise. The Obama administration has already spent huge amounts of money on border enforcement. Today, border policing costs about $18 billion a year — nearly 50 percent more than it did in 2006. And deportations have soared. What’s more, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle, as Mexico has grown more robustly than the United States. The illegal immigrant population has even been shrinking in the last few years. And it may continue to do so as the Mexican population of prime migration-age people stops growing.

Also, many employers have already gotten some of what they wanted: the number of workers entering the United States on temporary visas for low-end jobs in agriculture and other industries has increased sharply.

“The discussion is in a different environment,” said Gordon H. Hanson, an expert on the economics of immigration at the University of California, San Diego. “The flow of new immigrants is not the story anymore.”

This might help the cause of reform in some ways. It could allow the discussion about work visas to focus on the highly educated workers coveted by technology companies and pre-empt the kind of argument between business and labor over visas for cheap immigrant workers that sank reform in 2007. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for instance, has heartily embraced President Obama’s plan.

But what supporters of an overhaul of immigration law seem to be overlooking is that these very changes could also make it more difficult to build a coalition across the political divide. If reform is mainly about granting citizenship to 11 million mostly poor illegal immigrants with relatively little education, it is going to land squarely in the cross hairs of our epic battle about taxes, entitlements and the role of government in society.

It’s hard to say with precision what impact offering citizenship would have on the budget, but the chances are good that it would cost the government money. Half to three-quarters of illegal immigrants pay taxes, according to studies reviewed in a 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office. And they are relatively inexpensive, compared with Americans of similar incomes. Their children can attend public schools at government expense — putting a burden on state and local budgets. But they are barred from receiving federal benefits like the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. Only their American-born children can get those.

Government revenue might not change much with legalization. Most illegal immigrants who don’t pay taxes probably work in the cash economy — as nannies or gardeners — where tax compliance among citizens is low. Costs, of course, would increase. Once they became citizens, immigrants would be entitled to the same array of government benefits as other Americans. For Social Security and Medicare alone, offering citizenship to illegal immigrants would mean losing a subsidy worth several billion dollars a year in payroll taxes from immigrants who can’t collect benefits in old age.

The White House and other backers of reform have made much of a 2007 Congressional Budget Office analysis concluding that the failed immigration overhaul would have increased government revenue by $48 billion over a decade while adding only $23 billion to direct spending on entitlements and other programs. But the report also said that including the costs of carrying out the new law would actually increase the budget deficit by $18 billion over the decade and several billion a year after that. What’s more, it noted that most of the expected new tax revenue came from new immigrant workers, not from the newly legalized population.

Our history suggests we could have much to gain by turning illegal immigrants into citizens and putting an end to unauthorized immigration. The last time we permitted illegal immigrants to legalize, in 1986, incomes jumped for those who took advantage of the opportunity. Their children became more proficient in English and completed more years of school — becoming more productive and paying more taxes over their lifetimes.

But the same history underscores how immigration sets off fears about further sharing of government resources. Ten years after the immigration reform of 1986, reeling from some public anger, Congress passed a law barring legal immigrants from means-tested government services. The same issue is likely again to be a major flash point. Professor Hanson pointed to “the older white man who sees his entitlements at risk because of the demands placed by legalization on our fiscal resources.”

Conservative Republicans set on cutting government spending share those concerns. And for all their reasons to reach out to Hispanics, they might not find making illegal immigrants legal politically advantageous. On Tuesday, Republicans in the House argued against granting citizenship to illegal immigrants at all.

Hispanics are more liberal than the general population on economic matters, polls suggest, and more supportive of Big Government initiatives. Granting them citizenship would give them the vote.

As Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, said, “They will see legalization as a voter-registration drive for Democrats.”

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version misspelled the first name of one of the two United States senators from Arizona.  His name is Jon Kyl, not John.

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Tour bus had poor safety record before fatal crash

Federal inspectors over the last year found faulty axles and brakes and other safety violations on the tour bus that careened out of control on a winding mountain road near Yucaipa on Sunday evening, killing seven passengers, records show.

Maintenance citations of the tour buses owned by Scapadas Magicas of National City were numerous and serious enough that the company was placed on a federal watch list that flagged its buses for increased roadside inspections.

Bald tires, defective or missing axle parts, and insufficient brake linings were among 59 maintenance violations inspectors found on the firm's buses in the last two years, U.S. Department of Transportation safety records show.

PHOTOS: Tour bus crash

The tour bus was operating under a contract with InterBus Tours and Charters, based in Tijuana, which closed its office Monday, shortly after sending a busload of day tourists to Knott's Berry Farm. The Scapadas Magicas office in National City, in San Diego County, was not open Monday.

Maria McDade, who said she was Scapadas Magicas' administrator for more than 20 years before retiring last year, said none of the company's buses had ever been in an accident and, aside from a fine of $2,500, the company had complied with all U.S. Department of Transportation regulations.

"I feel really, really sad, but accidents happen," she said by walkie-talkie phone from her home in Tijuana. "I feel so sad for all these people." Current company officials could not be contacted for comment.

A message posted on InterBus' Facebook page expressed regret for the accident and told clients that its contractor was insured.

Sales Manager Jordi Garcia said the agency's insurance would be handling burial expenses for the deceased. He said the agency had been open for one year and offered daily trips to Disneyland, Six Flags Magic Mountain and Universal Studios. The trips attracted people from all walks of life, including students, families and young professionals.

"Big Bear is also very popular this time of year. They want to experience nature," he said. The daylong excursion cost $40, he said.

He said the business contracts with independently owned bus operators and that they are responsible for complying with all U.S. and Mexican regulations.

"We're only interested in their availability and the condition of their buses," he said, adding that the agency has never had a problem with any of the several operators with whom they contract.

The Scapadas bus left Tijuana early Sunday with 38 passengers, including children, and was descending California 38 from the ski resort town of Big Bear Lake when the driver apparently lost control about four miles from Yucaipa.

The bus clipped a small Saturn sedan before it veered into oncoming traffic and began to roll, tossing out passengers who were not wearing seat belts. It crushed an oncoming Ford pickup before coming to rest upright atop a boulder and10-foot elderberry bush on a stretch of highway along Mill Creek. Backpacks, clothing and body parts were strewn across the crash site and, on Monday morning, a body remain draped out one of the bus windows.

"It is a gruesome and horrible scene. It's one of the most horrific scenes I've ever seen in 10 years with the department," said Officer Leon Lopez, spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

CHP officials were joined Monday by investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board at the scene of the accident, which occurred about 6:30 p.m. Sunday just north of the U.S. Forest Service ranger station in the San Bernardino National Forest. The highway was closed most of Monday.

The bus driver, as well as passengers, reported that the vehicle was experiencing mechanical problems before the accident occurred, authorities said. Investigators believe a problem with the brakes may have led the bus to speed out of control down the highway's sweeping curves.

On Monday, those officials questioned the driver, identified as Norberto B. Perez, 52, of San Ysidro, but did not disclose his account of the crash.

"Everything happened so fast. When the bus spun everything flew, even the people," passenger Gerardo Barrientos, who was sitting on the bus next to his girlfriend, told the Associated Press. "I saw many people dead. There are very, very horrendous images in my head, things I don't want to think about."

Ramon Ramirez, who is listed in documents as the owner of Scapadas Magicas, lives in Tijuana and rents an apartment in Chula Vista. No one answered the door at the Chula Vista residence.

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Navy's Next-Gen Binoculars Will Recognize Your Face

Take a close look, because the next generation of military binoculars could be doing more than just letting sailors and soldiers see from far away. The Navy now wants binoculars that can scan and recognize your face from 650 feet away.

That’s according to a Jan. 16 contract announcement from the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which is seeking a “Wireless 3D Binocular Face Recognition System.” During a testing period of 15 months, the plan is to improve “stand-off identification of uncooperative subjects” during daylight, using binoculars equipped with scanners that can read your mug from “100 to 200 meters” away, or about 328 to 650 feet. After scanning your mug, the binoculars then transmit the data to a database over a wireless network, where the data is then analyzed to determine a person’s identity. The no-bid contract, for an unspecified amount of money, went to California biometrics firm StereoVision Imaging.

“High level, it’s a surveillance and identification system,” Greg Steinthal, StereoVision’s president, tells Danger Room. “It’s using the ubiquitous binocular for real-time identification. The data point here is that this is to be used to add objectivity to an operation that’s highly subjective. So this is not intended for kinetic action to go arrest or detain someone. It’s more a tool to put other eyes on him or her.”

It helps that the technology — at least in a more limited form — already exists. StereoVision has developed a face-recognizing binocular system called 3DMobileID, with a maximum distance of around 328 feet, or 100 meters. “You have an unfair advantage,” the company touts in one promotional video, showing images of a human face being scanned at a distance, before the background is stripped out for a blue screen and then matched up to a database.

Depending on how well the binoculars work — and there’s reason to be cautious — it could give the Navy the ability to take advanced facial recognition into a much more portable and long-distance version than many current systems. Facebook uses the technology to match faces when users upload new photos. Google has its own version as well for its its Picasa photo service, and Apple has been researching face recognition as a way to unlock smartphones. (There are apps for iOS that do this, too.)

But the ranges on most systems also tend to max out at a few feet. For the military, that can be dangerous. Close-range biometric scanners (iris scanners are currently used by soldiers in Afghanistan) can pose a danger to the operator, as a person walking up to have their features scanned from a few inches away could be preparing to detonate an explosive vest. And what if a person happens to be on the move, or is bobbing and weaving through a crowd? That can render the scanners ineffective. Once upon a time, many face scanners also depended on the relatively crude practice of scanning 2-D images of the human face, which are an imprecise method when there are varying lighting conditions.

But the key to solving many of these problems could be a simple upgrade: StereoVision’s system scans in 3-D. When the system first scans you, it creates a 3-D model of your face instead of a 2-D image. That allows the system to isolate your face from a crowd, sharpen the image — which boosts the range — and then compares the image to a database. A filter also adjusts for varying degrees of light by smoothing out light across the face into a uniform pattern.

Now for the flaws in the system. The binoculars are not intended to work at night, and have difficulty scanning faces in twilight. When the binoculars can’t draw an image, it gives off a an audible beep to the operator, which is helpful. Otherwise, the process takes “about five to 10 seconds,” says Steinthal.

It’s also less effective when a subject is on the move. “[It] depends on how fast the target is walking,” Steinthal says. “We’re at walking, one-and-half meters per second. Somebody running? We’re not going to be able to do that right now.”

The concept of binoculars that scan and identify is also — perhaps unnervingly — not limited to the military. For one, StereoVision’s binoculars were developed in part with a $409,226 contract from the National Institute of Justice, and face scanners are a popular research topic for the FBI more broadly.

The FBI is spending $1 billion on a program called Next Generation Identification based around developing face scanners and combining the technology with other biometrics like the iris, voice, and fingerprints. A static face recognition system has also been installed at Toucumen International Airport in Panama City that can scan travelers’ faces and match them to criminal databases maintained by the FBI and Interpol. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the San Diego Police Department have also tested out the binoculars, according to Steinthal, and are intended there for gang enforcement units and even to track “celebrity stalkers” in the L.A. area. Maybe if the FBI wants its special agents to also have some pretty far-out binoculars too, it should take a peek.

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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DealBook: Dell Nears a Buyout Deal of More Than $23 Billion

Dell Inc. neared an agreement on Monday to sell itself to a group led by its founder and the investment firm Silver Lake for more than $23 billion, people briefed on the matter said, in what would be the biggest buyout since the financial crisis.

If completed, a takeover would be the most ambitious attempt yet by Michael S. Dell to revive the company that bears his name. Such is the size of the potential deal that Mr. Dell has called upon Microsoft, one of his most important business partners, to shore up the proposal with additional financial muscle. The question will now turn to whether taking the personal computer maker private will accomplish what years of previous turnaround efforts have not.

The final details were being negotiated on Monday evening, and a deal could be announced as soon as Tuesday. Still, last-minute obstacles could cause the talks to collapse, the people briefed on the matter cautioned.

The consortium is expected to pay $13.50 to $13.75 a share, these people said. Mr. Dell is expected to contribute his nearly 16 percent stake to the deal, worth about $3.8 billion under the current set of terms. He is also expected to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital from his own fortune.

Silver Lake, known as one of the biggest investors in technology companies, would most likely contribute roughly $1 billion, these people added. Microsoft is expected to put in about $2 billion, though that would probably come in the form of preferred shares or debt.

Dell is also expected to bring home some of the cash that it holds in offshore accounts to help with the financing.

A spokesman for Dell declined to comment.

For decades, Dell benefited from its status as a pioneer in the market for personal computers. Founded in 1984 in a dormitory room at the University of Texas, the company grew into one of the biggest computer makers in the world, built on the simple premise that customers would flock to customize their machines.

By the late 1990s, its fast-rising stock created a company worth $100 billion and minted a class of “Dellionaires” whose holdings made for big fortunes, at least on paper. Mr. Dell amassed an estimated $16 billion and formed a quietly powerful investment firm to manage those riches.

But growing competition has sapped Dell’s strength. Rivals like Lenovo and Samsung have made the PC-making business less profitable. Last month, the market research firm Gartner reported that Dell sold 37.6 million PCs worldwide in 2012, a 12.3 percent drop from the previous year’s shipments. Perhaps more significant is the emergence of the smartphone and the tablet, two classes of devices that have eaten away at sales of traditional computers.

Mr. Dell has sought to move the company into the more lucrative and stable business of providing corporations with software services, spending billions of dollars on acquisitions to lead that transformation. The aim is to refashion Dell into something more like I.B.M. or Oracle. Even so, manufacturing PCs still makes up half of the company’s business.

The company’s stock had fallen 59 percent in the 10 years ended Jan. 11, the last business day before word of the buyout talks emerged. That has actually made Dell more tempting as a takeover target for its founder and Silver Lake, which see it as undervalued.

A Dell deal would be a watershed moment for the leveraged buyout industry: It would be the largest takeover since the Blackstone Group paid $26 billion for Hilton Hotels in the summer of 2007. No leveraged buyout since the financial crisis has surpassed the $7.2 billion that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and others paid for the Samson Investment Company, an oil and gas driller, in the fall of 2011.

Private equity executives have hungered for the chance to strike a deal worth more than $10 billion, an accomplishment believed difficult because of the sheer size of financing required. Dell would take on more than $15 billion in debt, an enormous amount arranged by no fewer than four banks.

But the debt markets have been soaring over the last two years, as the cost of junk bonds has stayed low. Persistent low interest rates have prompted debt buyers to seek investments that carry higher yields

Dell was unusually well-placed to make a deal with private equity. The company carries $4.9 billion in long-term debt, which some analysts have regarded as a manageable amount. And its management has signaled a willingness to bring back at least some of the company’s cash hoard held overseas, despite potentially ringing up a hefty tax bill.

It is unclear whether the company’s biggest investors will accept a deal at the levels that the buyer consortium is advocating. Shares of Dell fell 2.6 percent, to $13.27, on Monday after reports of the proposed price range emerged.

Biggest Private Equity-Backed Leveraged Buyouts

DEAL, IN BILLIONS	TARGET	BUYER	ANNOUNCED
Source: Thomson Reuters *At time of deal, including assumption of debt, not adjusted for inflation.
$44.3	TXU	Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs	February 2007
37.7	Equity Office Properties Trust	Blackstone Group	November 2006
32.1	HCA	Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Merrill Lynch Global Private	July 2006
30.2	RJR Nabisco	Kohlberg Kravis Roberts	October 1988
30.1	BAA	Grupo Ferrovial SA, Caisse de Depot et Placement and GIC Special Invest	March 2006
27.6	Harrah’s Entertainment	Texas Pacific Group and Apollo Management	October 2006
27.4	Kinder Morgan	GS Capital Partners, The Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings	May 2006
27.2	Alltel	TPG Capital and GS Capital Partners	May 2007
27.0	First Data	Kohlberg Kravis Roberts	April 2007
26.7	Hilton Hotels	Blackstone Group	July 2007

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'American Sniper' Chris Kyle shot dead in a post-combat world

Military sniper Chris Kyle had survived the dust-worn places where he had to worry about enemy fire — or even friendly fire — until this weekend.

Kyle, 38, an author and former Navy SEAL, was shot dead Saturday by an unemployed, 25-year-old Marine veteran, Texas officials said Sunday. Kyle's friend Chad Littlefield, 35, was also killed. No one witnessed the shootings, authorities said.

The suspect, Eddie Ray Routh, used a semiautomatic handgun to shoot Kyle and Littlefield multiple times at a secluded gun range at the Rough Creek Lodge southwest of Fort Worth, investigators said at a televised news conference. Routh is in custody and is expected to face two capital murder charges.

Routh had enlisted in the Marines in 2006, deploying to Iraq in 2007 and to Haiti in 2010 for hurricane relief. He remains in the Marine Reserve.

After Kyle left the Navy in 2009, he wrote "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History." During his four deployments to Iraq, he wrote, he'd recorded the most confirmed kills of any American sniper — more than 150.

Back in the States, Kyle was known to take troubled veterans to gun ranges as part of giving back — shooting and hanging out as a kind of therapy.

"The shooter is possibly one of those people," Erath County Sheriff Tommy Bryant said at the news conference, hinting that Routh's mother, a schoolteacher, may have reached out to Kyle to get help for her son. Officials couldn't confirm whether Routh had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Routh appeared to be one of the nation's numerous unemployed veterans, and Kyle was one of those who left the anonymity of military service and entered the public sphere.

Kyle's autobiography was unapologetically politically incorrect: During one visit home between deployments, he got a tattoo of a crusader cross on his arm.

"I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian," Kyle wrote. "I had it put in in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I'd been fighting. I always will. They've taken so much from me."

Kyle won adulation and a spotlight and appeared on the NBC reality show "Stars Earn Stripes," in which "celebrities are challenged to execute complicated missions inspired by real military exercises."

In an interview last year with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, Kyle claimed to have punched former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura in 2006 for "bad-mouthing the war, bad-mouthing Bush and bad-mouthing America."

Kyle was president of Craft International, a military and law enforcement training company. In a statement lamenting the slayings, the company identified Littlefield as Kyle's trusted friend and said they died trying to help "a troubled veteran."

News of Kyle's demise spread quickly through the Navy SEAL community, according to Rorke Denver, a reserve SEAL team lieutenant commander based in San Diego, who served with Kyle on SEAL Team 3 in Iraq.

"We're such a small brotherhood that when something happens to anybody here or overseas, word travels fast," Denver said Sunday.

Denver said the news was "really hard to believe," and he called Kyle "one of our real champions and battle stars."

"I knew Chris had been working with other veterans, folks with PTSD, trying to help them get better," Denver said. "It's hard to stomach that someone he was trying to help would turn on him."

Denver said he had been fielding questions from civilians who couldn't understand why Kyle would have taken someone with PTSD to a shooting range — but as a veteran, he understands.

"That type of shooting can actually be cathartic, calming," Denver said, "letting your heart settle," particularly for veterans who have just returned home after being accustomed to carrying weapons.

Officials said they didn't have a motive for Routh's attack. The three men apparently traveled to the gun range together in the same truck.

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Wheatley Crater on Venus

Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.

Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution]

Caption: NASA

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