Like most of his teammates, 49ers outside linebacker Dan Skuta has a laminated sheet of paper hanging near the top of his locker that reminds him of his past.

Along with a pre-NFL photo, the paper details where Skuta ranked among his peers when he was a senior at Carman-Ainsworth High in Flint, Mich. Skuta was un- ranked nationally, was not ranked among the top prospects in his state and was a zero-star recruit.

On Tuesday, a reporter glanced at Skuta's sheet and noted the scouting gurus weren't overly impressed.

"They didn't know anything about me," Skuta said. "They still don't, probably."

Skuta, 27, who was ignored by Division I colleges and not drafted by an NFL team, finally will step into the spotlight Thursday night when the 49ers visit the Rams. Skuta will start in place of All-Pro Aldon Smith, who reportedly entered a treatment facility Tuesday for a substance-abuse problem and will be away from the team indefinitely.

That leaves some big cleats for Skuta to fill after he has been known primarily for his work on special teams since he entered the league as an undrafted free agent from Division II Grand Valley State in 2009. In his first four seasons with the Bengals, he started four games at inside linebacker, the last in 2011. After signing with the 49ers in March, he was moved to outside linebacker, where he has played six defensive snaps in the season's first three games.

"I'm happy I have the opportunity to play," Skuta said, "and now I just have to make the most of it. I feel like (if) you start getting happy about something, that's when you start playing bad anyway. I'm just going to see it as an opportunity and play hard."

Replacing Smith, who had a franchise-record 19.5 sacks last season, won't be a solo job. It's likely that Skuta will play in San Francisco's base defense and rookie Corey Lemonier, a third-round pick, will take the field in its nickel package. Neither Skuta nor Lemonier (seven snaps) has played much in the regular season, but both had a strong preseason. Skuta shared team-high honors with three sacks and Lemonier had two.

"Our team, GM, the coaches, the owners, they put a good team together, put up good starters, put up good backups," cornerback Carlos Rogers said. "So that next person's got to come in and play to the level of him or better than him.

"It's hard to say that, being how good Aldon is, one of the best defensive players in the league, but we've got to pick up the slack and rally around the person who's his backup."

Smith worked well in tandem with All-Pro defensive tackle Justin Smith, and they routinely caved in offensive lines with their stunts. Skuta has been taking notes and hopes to play off Justin Smith as well.

"I've always paid attention to how they played together," Skuta said. "They did a great job in there together with communication and all their different stunts. If we get that opportunity, I'd like to do that stuff, too. I think I would fit in and do the same type of thing."

Of course, Skuta realizes few expect him to approximate Smith on Thursday night. Not that being underestimated is anything new. Skuta has beaten long odds to reach this point, and admits to carrying a sizable chip on his shoulder every step of the way.

"Absolutely," Skuta said of his background. "I'm going to be thinking about that my whole life beyond football. That's always going to be with me. Nothing's ever going to come easy, and I'm just going to play through it and do the best job I can."

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch

Summary: Like most of his teammates, 49ers outside linebacker Dan Skuta has a laminated sheet of paper hanging near the top of his locker that reminds him of his past.  Skuta, 27, who was ignored by Division I colleges and not drafted by an NFL team, finally will step into the spotlight Thursday night when the 49ers visit the Rams.  In his first four seasons with the Bengals, he started four games at inside linebacker, the last in 2011.  After signing with the 49ers in March, he was moved to outside linebacker, where he has played six defensive snaps in the season's first three games.  Neither Skuta nor Lemonier (seven snaps) has played much in the regular season, but both had a strong preseason.  Smith worked well in tandem with All-Pro defensive tackle Justin Smith, and they routinely caved in offensive lines with their stunts.


NEW YORK — Hulu says it has agreed to a non-exclusive, multiyear deal with BBC Worldwide North America that will allow it to offer BBC content to its subscribers. Terms were not disclosed.

Hulu says its Hulu Plus service has offered a variety of UK programming since its launch and the new deal makes it one of the top destinations in the United States for British content.

Effective immediately, Hulu Plus subscribers can access popular BBC shows like ‘‘Doctor Who,’’ as well as natural history and factual programming such as ‘‘Blue Planet.’’

More shows will launch in the fall, with others rolling out through the year, giving Hulu Plus subscribers access to more than 2,000 episodes of BBC Worldwide titles.

A selection of BBC programs also will rotate through the free Hulu.com service.

Summary: NEW YORK — Hulu says it has agreed to a non-exclusive, multi-year deal with BBC Worldwide North America that will allow it to offer BBC content to its subscribers. Financial terms were not disclosed. Hulu says its Hulu Plus service has offered a variety of U.K. programming since its launch and the new deal makes it one of the top destinations in the U.S. for British content. Effective immediately, Hulu Plus subscribers can access popular BBC shows like ‘‘Doctor Who,’’ as well as natural history and factual programming such as ‘‘Blue Planet.’’


Noteworthy stats from Sunday's game:

Niners TD catches, all by Vernon Davis or Anquan Boldin, before Michael Crabtree's TD grab.

Field goals without a miss Phil Dawson needs to tie Mike Vanderjagt's NFL-record streak of 42, a mark set with the Colts from 2002-04.

Yards allowed by the 49ers, their fewest in a game this season (previous low: 188 at St. Louis, Sept. 26).

Atlanta and coach Mike Smith (left) come to Candlestick next Monday for a rematch of last season's NFC Championship Game. The big story line: the Stick, the Niners' home since 1971. The final regular-season game there should be equal parts fond goodbyes and good riddances.

"You only get 16 games. They're all big and we're up for all of them."

49ers defensive tackle Justin Smith

The 49ers dominated the fourth quarter, retaining possession for all but 1:45 of the period. Tampa Bay scored on the first play of the quarter to cut its deficit to 20-14. The 49ers then went on a 17-play, 77-yard drive that took 10 minutes, 27 seconds. After S.F. turned a fumble on the ensuing kickoff into a touchdown, the Bucs ran eight more plays: five incompletions, two sacks and an interception by Eric Reid.

Summary: 18 Field goals without a miss Phil Dawson needs to tie Mike Vanderjagt's NFL-record streak of 42, a mark set with the Colts from 2002-04.  The final regular-season game there should be equal parts fond goodbyes and good riddances.  After S.F. turned a fumble on the ensuing kickoff into a touchdown, the Bucs ran eight more plays: five incompletions, two sacks and an interception by Eric Reid.


Even before he lost his sight, Sargy Mann was obsessed with ways of seeing. As a young painter he was tutored by singular realists – Frank Auerbach, Euan Uglow – who insisted that an individual artist must be exactly true to what he saw. For much of his working life Mann taught students at Camberwell School of Art all he knew about representing light and colour on canvas, with particular reference to Bonnard and Matisse, and he put all of that complex understanding into practice in his own, often gloriously sun-drenched landscapes and interiors. Like all painters, he suggests, he felt he knew instinctively what science was then in the process of discovering: that the eye was an entirely passive collector of visual stimuli, and that "seeing" was a learned activity that went on in different, discrete parts of the brain – the imaginative piecework of collating form, and colour, and light into an understandable vision of the world, one you constantly made up as you went along.

Before Sargy Mann married he lived for eight years as the house guest of his friends Kingsley Amis and his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, in their Georgian home, Lemmons, in Hertfordshire. His habit was to go out into the garden and country and paint whenever he could. In 1972 the Amises and Mann were joined by the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, dying from cancer, and his family. Daniel Day-Lewis, then a child and now a passionate collector of Mann's painting, recalls him at that time with a mixture of intrigue and delight, a welcome life force: "I remember well Sargy's vigour and sense of purpose as he set out for a day of painting. Box and boards, a long stride, eyes aglitter. And I looked forward to the fisherman's return, which was never empty-handed…"

Mann's distinctive vision, born of generously attentive looking, began to be tinged that same year by the growth of cataracts in both of his eyes. He was only 36 and for months went undiagnosed. The change in his sight he greeted with artistic curiosity: "my world had become greyer and hotter," he recalls. "I was a human spectroscope such that I could see that a sodium streetlamp was monochrome because it only had an orange halo whereas a car tail light of the same colour had a spectral halo…" He'd read about Monet's cataract operations before he had his own and what he was most interested to discover was whether he had colourless cataracts or the yellowy-brown ones that had progressively informed the changing palette of the Impressionist at Giverny. Would he, like Monet, see the world saturated in blue again after the operation? To his joy he did, and his painting for a while reflected this new cobalt dazzle.

Mann's eye problems were only just beginning, however. By the time he gave up teaching in 1988, and began working full time as a painter – by now with a wife, his former student Frances Carey and their young family to support in south London – retinal detachments and corneal ulcerations had diminished his detailed sight to almost nothing. He pieced together bits of the world with his one pretty hopeless eye by looking through a specially modified telescope, and when he went painting often took with him a white stick. On one occasion he heard his son's friend suggest that "your dad is probably the best blind painter in Peckham". The phrase became the title of a recent memoir that details a heroically good-humoured struggle against the dying of the light, one that continues day by day.

Mann is recalling some of this history for me beside a log fire in the sitting room of his low-beamed riverside house in Bungay, near the Suffolk coast, to which the family moved in 1990. He is a spirited talker, quick to digress, his attention wandering now over the jazz trio in which he used to play as a drummer with Dudley Moore on piano, (when he was an engineering apprentice in Oxford at 17 or 18), now on his use of LSD in 1965, which brought him further insight into the complexities of perception, and now on the axe which he had as a prized birthday present aged eight, and which he employed to chop up his boarding school bed at Dartington, in Devon. All this comes as background to the singularity of vision and blindness and the means by which he has continued to paint.

The day before driving up here I had met Sargy at his latest one-man exhibition at the Cadogan Contemporary gallery in Chelsea. It is a strange thing to stand in front of a canvas with a painter who can only imagine his work, a little like being granted sudden access to another man's mind's eye, but though I was leading him by his arm to his pictures before he could describe them, he seemed to "see" each painting just as vividly as I could. The paintings in this recent London show – large, sun-filled, slightly dislocating, alive with colour and selling for healthy four and five-figure sums – were rooted in a trip Mann had made to Cadaqués in northern Spain with his son, Peter, a film-maker, in April 2005. The trip, its light and atmosphere, held a special significance for Mann, because it was the last time he saw anything at all. The seaside village had been chosen for its vertiginous streetscape ("blind people above all hate flatness, they have no way of understanding it"), its startling white buildings and the sharp contrasts of light and shade that Mann could still just about decipher. He and his son walked the streets waiting for inspiration. If Sargy got interested in a particular place, a sudden sense of white or blue or orange, he would move about tapping surfaces with his stick, measuring lengths between walls and objects trying to work out some visual coordinates to be filed away. He became obsessed with some bar scenes and had Peter take a mosaic of photographs from his particular vantage that could later be described.

Mann planned to paint these scenes as soon as he got home. Father and son returned to England the day before Sargy's 68th birthday, and the family – Frances and their four children – got together to celebrate. It was, he says, a perfect day. The next morning he woke up with a strong pain in his left eye. When he asked Frances to have a look she said "Oh my god, it's bleeding." Mann was certain that it was what he had been dreading for a long time: the ulcer on his cornea had perforated causing the eye to collapse; it was the start of total blindness.

After some days in hospital Mann returned home, sightless, and wondering what he would do with the rest of his life. He had never been much interested in sculpture, though that was a possibility. He felt his way to his studio by the river, and there the subjects that had most recently been on his mind became insistent: the light and space of Cadaques that he had been planning to paint. "Well, I thought," he recalls, "I have got a ready stretched canvas and all my paint and brushes that I had imagined giving away, so why not have a go?" It was a sunny day, so he put the canvas up on the windowsill outside his studio, carried out his painting trolley to the usual place and started to feel the canvas and imagine his subject: one of the bar scenes he had painstakingly mapped out.

"After a bit I thought: 'Well here goes,' and loaded a brush with ultramarine," he recalls. "What followed was one of the strangest sensations of my life: I 'saw' the canvas turn blue as I put the paint down. Next I put my Schminke magenta, and 'saw' it turn rose. The colour sensation didn't last, it was only there while I was putting the paint down, but it went on happening with different colours…"

He didn't look back. "Once I had started painting blind, there was no stopping me. It just became the new way of doing it. It was difficult, but art had always been difficult, and having a new set of difficulties was no bad thing." It was, he thought, a bit like a deaf composer hearing orchestra parts in his head.

Mann has developed strategies to construct his intense spatial landscapes on the canvas. His horizons have become closer at hand. Putting himself inside a space accurately has became more and more crucial to his work, to getting his bearings. At his house in Bungay he reconstructed some stairs to bring "Bonnard's light" on to the landing. This space has become a kind of mind map for him. In the dark, he talks me through how he understands it, feeling deftly for edges and corners with his fingers and cane. Once established, the space can become whatever he wants it to be, flooded with the remembered sunshine of the Mediterranean, which he then recreates on canvas, guided by a movable grid of Blu-Tack blobs, and an internalised rush of colour.

Over the years in which his sight has become progressively worse, Sargy Mann has been in contact many times with Professor Semir Zeki, of University College London. Zeki is the pioneer the field of "neuroaesthetics", a name he coined, and the world's leading authority on the science of how the mind, and in particular how the artist's mind, understands the world. In 2007 Zeki was granted more than £1m by the Wellcome Trust to explore the ways in which beauty and art are functions of the physiology of the brain.

All great artists, Zeki believes, are instinctive neuroscientists; they have an innate understanding of how the brain "sees" the world, and they are fated by this knowledge to constantly try to find a correspondent visual language. Zeki pioneered, as long ago as the 1970s, the accepted understanding of the particular way in which the brain projects its concepts of colour on to the world almost from birth. For Zeki, seeing is never a passive process. When we look at a painting, as his sensitive MRI scanning proves, different bits of information are immediately separated and sent to discrete anatomical corners of our brains for processing. Our brains respond to this compartmentalised information at slightly different rates; colour is processed before form, for example, and form before motion. Having been taken apart, as it were, a painting that we love is never simply put back together again in our heads; rather it "exists" dynamically in the interplay between responses of different parts of the brain. That combination of responses can create a puzzling, powerful and lasting engagement with the image, an emotional response.

Artists, Zeki suggests, subconsciously play with these dynamics. A Monet floods the colour centres of the brain, and the areas that understand light, with all sorts of conflicting stimulation, before form ever gets a look in; Cézanne, meanwhile, found a way to make the brain perceive form in tone and texture rather than in the trick of perspective.

If an artist discovers such a "new" language of seeing, Zeki argues, then the receptors in the brains of his or her audience can't get enough of it. "The brain demands knowledge," Zeki tells me. "It is constantly on the lookout for organising concepts." Art directly feeds that demand with new ways of looking.

Zeki is of course intrigued by Sargy Mann's condition, as well as being a longstanding admirer of his work. He has for a while been planning a series of experiments in which he connects the artist's brain to a scanner and ask him to imagine colour alongside people who are seeing it more conventionally, in order to compare the response in the colour centre of the brain, known as V4. "This would bear on a more general question, in which I'm also looking at whether mathematicians use a mathematical part of the brain, or literary people have a more developed literary area," he tells me. "In Sargy's case it is possible that the increased activity may be elsewhere and not in the colour area, that the brain has found a different way of doing it."

In some senses he believes that Sargy's blindness, following from an intimate understanding of colour, is a kind of release. "I've been talking with him for many years now and one thing is that since he has become completely blind he doesn't always give a damn exactly what colour he makes an object. In the process he has come up with brilliant colours. Normally we associate different objects more or less with different colours. A lemon immediately invokes yellow, say. But with him it doesn't matter so much." As a result, he suggests, the "sighted viewer is intrigued by unaccustomed colour juxtapositions and aesthetically mesmerised by them."

Memory of colour is what we all use, all the time, to fill in the world between the lines of form; artists have always sought to liberate themselves from those conventions and look again. "I have always argued that the worst thing that can happen to the artistic brain is self censorship," Zeki says. "As soon as your brain starts telling you that you can't have a tree that is blue then you stop being able to paint trees. Picasso, of course, was always dreaming of something like the same thing, of forgetting how to look at the world. He said it was easy to paint like an adult but much more difficult to paint like a child. In some ways, certainly in terms of colour, in response to his blindness, Sargy has approached that freedom."

Though a great admirer of Zeki's science, Mann himself is a little wary of trying to reduce his vision to neural pathways. As a result the pair have been dancing around each other for a while. "Zeki has been threatening to do experiments with me for years," he says, laughing. "What he wanted me to do with my head in his MRI machine was very simple. But in order to isolate one variable you have to set up something so completely at odds with how we actually perceive things that I fear it can give you slightly puzzling results." In some ways Sargy is happy for these processes to remain a mystery. Painting is for him an emotional event as much as a scientific one. He likes to adapt a quote by Philip Larkin about poetry to describe what he does: "Painting is a visual device for preserving an experience from oblivion," he says. "For me that means making the world look more like itself. Now that is obviously nonsense, because I can no longer see. But I don't really feel that I have had to abandon any of these thoughts."

This emotional reclamation has come to rest, since he lost his sight, on what Mann can touch. Though he had rarely painted the human figure before he lost his sight, his first series of paintings after he went blind focused on Frances.

"Because I couldn't see people any more it became more important to paint them," he says. "And Frances in particular, of course. It became terribly important. I suppose you always paint the things you most want to see."

Does he ever mourn that possibility?

"I haven't really spent much time at all being miserable about my loss of sight. I haven't grieved for it. I have a moment every few days when I am painting, when I think 'Oh fuck, I wish I could see that'. And when my daughter has her baby, soon, I may have some moments of wishing I could see it, but I will hold it and smell it and that's the way my life works now, and it's a good life."

I wonder if he thinks things would have been different if his sight had gone suddenly, rather than over decades?

"I was saying to someone at the private view," he says, "how incredibly lucky I have been. I had about 25 years' apprenticeship for going blind. It was a bugger, but I kept working out how to paint over those 25 years, and my brain kept finding new ways to see the world, if you like."

Does he think that painting as he does it nowadays can be anything like a substitute for looking, a reminder of how it felt?

"Well," he says, after a long pause. "The reality of doing it is mundane. Today I went back to a painting I have been thinking about. To start to get back into it I started to measure and check where the Blu-Tack was and move it a bit, my crazy bits of 3D. And then I thought I would whack some more paint on. I got some neat orange on a brush and it felt really good. I played a bit of cricket as a boy and I've always likened picking up a brush to a cricketer picking up a cricket bat, just that act fills you with possibility of hitting it out of the middle. There is not so much of that for me now, but it's still more than enough to get me up in the mornings."

Summary: British painter Sargy Mann was diagnosed with cataracts at 36, and went on to lose his sight completely. But in his mind's eye his vision did not fade. Mann found new ways to keep working and today his paintings, collected by Daniel Day-Lewis among others, are more acclaimed than ever


It has been called one of the great art heists of the 20th century. For more than 50 years, the identity of the master art thief who stole Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London has been a mystery.

But a confidential director of public prosecutions (DPP) file released at the National Archives last week finally identifies the "thief" as the 20-year-old son of a retired Newcastle bus driver, who had told the police he had done it to "draw attention to my father's campaign" against pensioners having to pay the BBC licence fee.

The theft of the Goya portrait in 1961, which had been valued at £140,000 (more than £2m at today's prices), was the first time a painting had been stolen from the National Gallery. Its director offered his resignation and it led to an official inquiry into security at Britain's national galleries and museums.

But the Scotland Yard reports and his statements to the police in the newly released DPP file suggest that the culprit was far from being a sophisticated balaclava-clad master thief.

Just before dawn on Monday 21 August 1961, John Bunton – a temporary van driver living not far away in digs off Tottenham Court Road – stood on a parking meter to get over the gallery's back wall. He then used a six-metre ladder left by builders to climb through the unlocked window of a men's toilet to get into the main building of the gallery.

The painting was standing on an easel in a roped-off enclosure at the top of the main stairs. "I went up to it, took hold of it, and carried it back to the gents toilet," he told the police. He climbed back out of the window, down the ladder, and retraced his steps to the back wall by St Martin's Street. "I climbed over the wall, still holding the picture in one hand ... I put the picture on the back seat of the car and drove back to [his furnished room in] Grafton Street. I then put the picture under my bed."

Bunton said that he hadn't carried a jemmy and if the toilet window had been shut he would have had to give up. He had to push-start the small black Wolseley that he used as a getaway car.

Not only has Bunton never been prosecuted for the theft of the Goya, his identity would never have been known had he not panicked when he was arrested and fingerprinted in Leeds in July 1969 for a minor offence.

He was worried that he had left his prints at the National Gallery or on the stolen painting and told officers that he wanted to tell them about something that had been bothering him for some time. As it happened, his fingerprints were not identical to the marks that the police had on file in the Goya case.

But Detective Inspector George Chandler, who had led the investigation into the art theft, was inclined to believe John Bunton's confession. Four years earlier, in 1965, John's father, Kempton, a then 61-year-old unemployed Newcastle bus driver living on £8 a week national assistance, had stood trial for the theft of the painting after walking into West End Central police station.

Six weeks before his confession, a left luggage label had been sent to the Daily Mirror and the painting recovered from the left luggage office at Birmingham New Street station.

Although he was cleared of stealing the Goya, Kempton Bunton was imprisoned for three months for the offence of larceny of the picture frame.

The theft had sparked a national sensation because, before confessing, Bunton Sr had sent a series of anonymous notes to the press. "The act is an attempt to pick the pockets of those who love art more than charity, the picture is not and will not be for sale – it is for ransom - £140,000 – to be given for charity," said one note. The case became so famous that a copy of the picture appeared in a 1962 Bond film, with Sean Connery remarking: "So there it is," when he sees it in Dr No's Jamaican lair. It was actually in a cupboard in Kempton Bunton's council flat in Newcastle.

Although he told the police he had stolen the artwork, they had always found it hard to believe. As Chandler put it in his 1969 report to the DPP: "At the time of the offence, Kempton was 57 years old. He is a tall heavily built man, who now weighs somewhere in the region of 18 stones, and it is extremely unlikely that he would have had the agility to scale the outer wall and make his way unaided to the toilet window. He would also in my view been incapable of returning to the wall and climbing over it, without causing some damage to the painting, whereas his son, John, who at that time was only 20 years of age, is still of good physique and would have been quite capable of taking the painting in the manner in which he describes."

John Bunton said it had not entered his head to destroy or sell the picture instead of giving it to his father. "He intended to use it as a tool in his campaign and that it should ultimately be returned to the National Gallery." When the police asked why he or his brother, Kenneth, who knew the secret, hadn't come forward when his father faced an Old Bailey trial, he replied: "He told us not to. Ordered us. It was his wish."

Sir Norman Skelhorn, the DPP, told the police that John Bunton's admission alone wasn't sufficient to prosecute him. As for his father, the DPP ruled it would be difficult to prosecute him for perjuring himself at the Old Bailey as they would have to rely on the evidence of the son, who was clearly an unreliable witness. So no further action was taken.

It appears that John Bunton may have got away with one of the 20th-century's great art thefts .

Summary: It was the son wot done it. Released archive evidence points to father claiming Goya for fight against BBC licence fee payments


Fans of the reality TV show Shark Tank love to watch investors Mark Cuban and Daymond John make entrepreneurs sweat after they’ve delivered their pitches for money.

Less famous are the sharks who will circle Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston Monday for an event called Pilot Shark Tank. They’re doctors and nurses like Calum MacRae and Karen Conley, and they’ll be offering something that may be more valuable than money: a chance for health care entrepreneurs to pilot-test new technologies or services in their departments.

Over the last two years, Boston has seen a surge of hackathons, accelerator programs, innovation showcases, and other events designed to bring t-shirt clad entrepreneurs closer to physicians in lab coats. And that has produced a bumper crop of small startups with ideas for applying technologies such as smartphones, sophisticated data analytics, and Google Glass in the health care sector.

But entrepreneurial eagerness will only get these companies so far: Health care professionals are insanely busy, and not many have time to meet with a dozen startups proposing similar solutions to a problem. Entrepreneurs also must navigate hospital bureaucracies, including review boards that must approve research and clinical trials for anything new. Software products face particularly intense scrutiny because of security and privacy issues.

“The biggest gap in the innovation ecosystem isn’t funding,” says Lesley Solomon, director of strategy and innovation at Brigham & Women’s Biomedical Research Institute. “It’s the ability to pilot and get feedback and get thoughtful input from clinicians. It’s never going to be an easy process, but with the Pilot Shark Tank, we wanted to create an easier way to pilot within the Brigham.”

In addition to organizing Monday’s event, Solomon helped put together the hospital’s first weekend-long hackathon event last September, which brought together 150 entrepreneurs, students, and hospital employees to work on 17 different projects related to topics such as managing chronic disease outside the hospital. A handful of the projects, proposed and built over a few days, developed into startups.

Hospitals have always played a big part in Boston’s innovation economy. But traditionally, they licensed their scientific discoveries and patents to startups or larger companies. Often, those companies would recruit department heads and other medical experts to serve on advisory boards. Occasionally, docs would launch companies of their own.

The new approach is less formal, a lot more like inviting a bunch of friends over to help prepare a dinner party. At last year’s Hacking Pediatrics event at Boston Children’s Hospital, for instance, a pediatric gastroenterologist, a nutritionist, and a handful of techies and business people came together to create a project that would help families find recipes that address food allergies or health issues like celiac disease.

That project, originally called RightByte, won the $3,000 top prize at the event, and is evolving into a company called Kindrdfood (pronounced “kindred food”).

Some hope all of this entrepreneurial energy can be focused like a proton beam on some of the biggest problems in health care, like knowing more about what patients do between office visits, or reducing costs.

“The medical-academic-industrial complex is failing health care today,” says Zen Chu, an entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT and founder of the H@cking Medicine program there. “When you look at metrics in the US today, in terms of cost and quality, it’s just failing. But great things can happen when you bring in fresh eyes from outside of health care, combined with people on the front lines.”

At Brigham & Women’s, Solomon says that as health care reforms increase pressures on hospitals to control costs, they are searching for new efficiencies. But with so many startups pitching mobile apps and cloud-based software, evaluating which ones are worth experimenting with can induce cephalgia (aka headaches.) “Often there are 10 companies with the same idea, and we have to figure out which one we should be testing,” she says.

Making it through that filter presents a real challenge for startups, which must collect data that proves their products can make a medical or financial impact. Jacob Sattelmair, chief executive of Boston-based Wellframe, says that having both an administration and clinical “champion” inside organizations like McLean Hospital and South Shore Hospital has helped him get collaborations going.

Wellframe sells an online system to help doctors deliver guidance to patients with on-going conditions like mental illness.

There’s also the issue of money to fund research studies, recruit patients to participate, and analyze data that could eventually be published in a medical journal. “Big companies have budgets for all of that,” says Yechiel Engelhard, chief executive of Cambridge-based GeckoCap. “But even $50,000 or $100,000 is real money for a startup to spend on a clinical trial.”

GeckoCap, which makes a small wireless device to monitor a child’s use of an asthma inhaler, began at a hackathon event at MIT two years ago; Engelhard says that children will finally begin getting devices to test “in the next few months.”

Nick Dougherty will pitch his startup, VerbalCare, on Monday at the Pilot Shark Tank. It aims to improve communications between patients and caregivers. The Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston is already testing the system.

But Dougherty acknowledges that the mortality rate for startups in health care will be higher than other industries.

“A company like Snapchat can throw something into the App Store and get a ton of downloads,” Dougherty says. “That isn’t possible for us. If we start a dialogue with doctors today, we’ll be lucky to have a contract in hand in a couple of quarters.”

Summary: Boston has seen a surge of hackathons, accelerator programs, innovation showcases, and other events for health care startups. But entrepreneurial eagerness will only get them so far.


The entire state of California is facing a “severe” drought or worse for the first time since tracking began in 2000, according to the federal U.S. Drought Monitor.

The level of drought in the state, where wildfires in the south have burned down at least 30 homes, is “unprecedented” over the last decade and a half, climatologist Mark Svoboda, from the National Drought Mitigation Center, which runs the monitor based out of Nebraska, told USA Today.

Nearly a quarter of the state is facing an “exceptional” drought, the worst possible categorization, including the entire Bay Area. Another half of the state, including Los Angeles and San Diego, is in the midst of an “extreme” drought, while the remainder of the state is in the midst of a “severe” drought, the third most dire category.

Summary: It's the first time the entire state has faced such an intense drought since the federal monitor began monitoring drought levels in 2000


By Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance and Corporate Governance Alliance

FORTUNE – U.S. TV detective shows end when the criminal is caught. In Japan, though, “the program continues 10 more minutes,” writes psychologist and scholar Hiroshi Azuma in Japanese frames of mind: cultural perspectives on human development. The criminal talks about his life, his feelings, his conscience, and “he apologizes.” The detective shakes his hand “and encourages him to start a new life when he finishes his prison term.”

Through the lens of Olympus’ alleged fraud, we are watching an alternative ending to a story of corporate malfeasance. Olympus has been able to preserve its listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — and its example is one that U.S. companies seeking to build trust would be wise to consider. What might we emulate?

After claims of no problems as late as October, Olympus’ alleged fraud has been followed in recent months with independent reviews that have been made public, condemning the company’s actions. To be clear, it’s not that Olympus didn’t know how to commission a whitewash report. Its board of auditors (an oversight structure in Japan that does not exist in the U.S.) commissioned such a report in May 2009 and found no wrongdoing.

But in contrast, the December 2011 independent third party report by five attorneys (including former judges) and one accountant hits hard. The publicly available English version of the report doesn’t say Olympus’ management is rotten to the core, as had been earlier reported. What it does say is damning enough: “the core of management was corrupted, and the periphery was also contaminated,” and “There were many yes men among the directors, and it must be considered the Board of Directors had become a mere formality.”

Curtis Milhaupt, professor of Japanese corporate law at Columbia, says the frankness of the report is a “good sign for Japanese corporate governance” and, as professor Mark Roe at Harvard Law says, it shows an Olympus committee much “more willing to be negative” than we are used to seeing in similar reports in the U.S. The oft-praised report commissioned by the Enron board and even reports commissioned by the government and bankruptcy courts, such as the recent Financial Crisis Inquiry Report or the Valukas report on Lehman, describe lapses of oversight but do not contain clear, pointed characterizations or condemnations of the sort the Olympus report provides.

Making the full, uncensored text of such a candid company commissioned report publicly available is unusual enough by U.S. standards. But rather than hide the details of the many twists and turns in this remarkable saga as many U.S. companies might do, the top third of the home page of the Olympus website directs you to the timeline and relevant documents. In large letters, the web page reads: “Taking this opportunity, we once again extent (sic.) our deepest apologies to Olympus shareholders, customers, business partners, and all stakeholders, for the significant trouble we have caused them.”

This is not the kind of language we are used to seeing on U.S. company websites when the jig is up. Even if the Japanese meaning may be slightly different, the idea of such a bold admission and apology is worth considering.

Although we in the West often view ourselves as open and outspoken, as Tim Phillips points out in his delightfully amusing Talk Normal, we in fact live in a culture with a pervasive reluctance to call something what it is. “Problems” become “issues,” Phillips says, and the gobbledygook language we use creates a “workplace [that behaves] as a cult.” Workers may have a sense of belonging but are also encouraged to fall in line and to “take on the values of the workplace,” whether they agree or not, as a prerequisite to hold their jobs and be considered to be “performing at work,” he says.

What Phillips describes, is precisely what allows these scandals to occur and perpetuate in the first place.

Admit, don’t deny – and apologize

Following the December 6 independent report, current Olympus President Shuichi Takayama issued a statement the next day saying, “it has become clear that the company postponed over many years recognition of losses … [due to] defects in the corporate governance of the Company. I, on behalf of the Company, deeply apologize for the trouble to all related persons that this has caused…. It has become clear that [those responsible including board members] will not be able to escape from liabilities.”

A news announcement on December 21 included this closing line: “The Company would like to again take this opportunity to offer sincerely its deepest apologies….”

Find out who is responsible and sue them yourself

Boards in the U.S. are relationship-oriented. And in that, they share much in common with Japanese culture: “To condemn someone … prematurely without sufficient justification is inappropriate everywhere but especially so in a relationship-oriented culture where interpersonal ties assume priority and being sympathetic to others is a moral imperative. One way to do this is to withhold judgment until a detailed story is available,” Azuma writes.

In the December 7 letter, Takayama explains that shareholders asked the company to pursue a damages suit against the directors. Such requests by shareholders aren’t unusual in the U.S., says University of Akron Law School professor Elizabeth Shaver, but generally U.S. companies leave it to shareholders to pursue the matter.

Olympus set up commissions that moved swiftly to determine who was at fault. And the company, represented by the board of auditors, has brought lawsuits against named directors, including Takayama, who is being sued for $500 million yen. While it’s true the U.S. doesn’t have a board of auditors structure, wouldn’t it be refreshing if boards pursued justice for their stakeholders themselves rather than forcing shareholders to do so on behalf of the company? It would certainly send a powerful signal to the capital markets, executives, and directors themselves if boards were to pursue wrongdoers directly.

According to the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer survey, 11% of respondents don’t trust Japanese businesses to tell the truth while over three times that percentage (38%) don’t trust U.S. companies to be honest. Over the last few months, Olympus has been willing to bend its pride and do what was required to survive this scandal. A cynical response would be to say, “What choice did they have?”

Olympus is not to be applauded for its alleged fraud or cover-up, but if U.S. companies take note of the good Olympus has done in the last few months, they’d help to build trust in U.S. companies, improving our ability to attract capital and turn our economy around.

Eleanor Bloxham is CEO of The Value Alliance and Corporate Governance Alliance (http://thevaluealliance.com), a board advisory firm.

Summary: Olympus is not to be applauded for its alleged fraud or cover-up, but U.S. companies should pay close attention to its response.


WASHINGTON — Bank of America’s record $16.65 billion settlement for its role in selling shoddy mortgage bonds — $7 billion of it geared for consumer relief — offers a glint of hope for desperate homeowners.

The settlement requires the second-largest US bank to reduce some homeowners’ loan balances, provide new loans to low-income buyers, and address areas of neighborhood blight.

But consumer advocates say relatively few people will be helped relative to the devastation triggered by the mortgage bonds, which fueled the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and threw millions of homes into foreclosure.

Only a fraction of homeowners would be eligible for refinancing under the settlement. And the process by which people would qualify and receive aid could drag on for years, with payouts set to be completed as late as 2018.

Those who have already lost homes to a foreclosure or a short sale — when a lender accepts less money from a sale than what the borrower owes — wouldn’t likely benefit at all.

‘‘It is certainly better than nothing,’’ said Bruce Marks, chief executive of the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. ‘‘But for the millions who lost their homes, it reinforces the appearance that the government has not been on their side.’’

Monnette Holland had been anxiously waiting the settlement, wondering if it might save her four-bedroom home in Franklin, Va. ‘‘It has been a nightmare,’’ she said.

Holland had refinanced her house in 2006 with Countrywide, a firm that was later bought by Bank of America and that made up the bulk of toxic mortgage securities involved in the settlement.

Holland, a 65-year-old former legal secretary, used the proceeds from the refinancing to pay off auto loans and install a new roof and windows. But then her husband was forced into an early retirement at a paper mill. And Holland had to go on disability because of arthritis and other health problems.

The couple tried and failed several times to modify their mortgage, only to learn that its owner kept changing: after Countrywide, it was Bank of America, later Specialized Loan Servicing, and most recently Bank of New York Mellon.

As an alternative to foreclosure, Holland listed her house — worth $270,000 at its peak — for less than $90,000 in a short sale. A buyer made an offer just days before the Justice Department settlement was announced Thursday.

The Bank of America settlement will include the appointment of an independent monitor to review the consumer relief. This could take weeks and mean that ‘‘thousands of people who right now are in default or foreclosure’’ will miss the chance to reduce their mortgage balances, said Shanna Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Smith’s organization has investigated the fallout from the foreclosures. It has filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs that banks failed to maintain properties after borrowers defaulted. The alliance said it found Bank of America enabled foreclosed homes in minority communities in Orlando, Denver, Memphis, Atlanta, and elsewhere to slide into disrepair.

As part of the consumer relief, Bank of America has essentially pledged to help remedy the neighborhood blight its neglect helped cause when it auctioned off foreclosed homes at steep discounts, Smith said.

Bank of America had initially resisted a settlement, because almost all the bad mortgage securities that led to the settlement came from Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, the two troubled firms the bank acquired in 2008 as the financial meltdown erupted.

But a federal judge in Manhattan ruled in a separate case that Bank of America was liable for those premerger mortgages and issued a penalty of nearly $1.3 billion. That helped spur the bank to forge a deal

Summary: WASHINGTON (AP) — Bank of America’s record $16.65 billion settlement for its role in selling shoddy mortgage bonds — $7 billion of it geared for consumer relief — offers a glint of hope for desperate homeowners. The settlement requires the second-largest U.S. bank to reduce some homeowners’ loan balances, provide new loans to low-income buyers and address areas of neighborhood blight. But consumer advocates say relatively few people will be helped relative to the devastation triggered by the mortgage bonds, which fueled the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and threw millions of homes into foreclosure.


Summer and winter are safe, but when David Hockney turned up to begin work on spring, he found a scene which the artist described as "a massacre"; the sky empty, and the ground littered with the limbs of fallen giants.

Nothing remains except stacks of sawn trunks and branches of the little copse of mighty sycamores and beeches near his home in East Yorkshire which he had intended to paint in all seasons.

Hockney found the trees as he found all his subjects, by driving for hours around narrow side roads. The small copse, at a T junction south of the village of Warter was one of two narrow strips planted over a century ago at right angles, on private land as a shelter belt for farm buildings and wide open fields. They appear to have been felled to sell the valuable timber.

"I knew I was coming back to do more, but I didn't think there was any rush about it," he said yesterday.

The two paintings of the copse, reproduced for the first time in the Guardian, will be included in an exhibition next month at the Würth museum in Künzelsau, Germany. They are now the only record Hockney will make of the wood in its glory. "I admit this may matter only to me. Perhaps nobody else would feel like this - and it was on such a remote little road hardly anyone else even saw them, perhaps two cars an hour might pass that way. But to me there was something shocking about the scene. The landscape I remembered was gone completely, and what remained looked like a scene from the first world war.

"To me even the approach to that little wood had a kind of grandeur, like the approach to some marvellous great temple, and the trees themselves were very large, very architectural, very majestic. I was really quite taken with them. It was like coming into some little village or town and finding that overnight the people had obliterated a great church that had stood there for 900 years.

"I admit they had a perfect right to do this - but it seems sad. If they had pulled down a great church people would have seen and asked questions, but nobody asked about these trees. Nobody asks enough questions any more."

In his late 60s and early 70s the artist once known best for sun-dappled bodies in blue Californian swimming pools, who has flirted with photography and giant collage faxes as art forms, has returned to English landscape on a grand scale.

His main home became his house at Bridlington in Yorkshire, and he scoured the surrounding region for subjects. One epic painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter - of another, nearby woodland - took up an entire wall of the biggest room of the Royal Academy's summer show two years ago. The picture is 12m x 5m (40ft x 16ft), made up of 50 smaller canvases, and Hockney said it engulfs the viewer. He later presented it as a gift to the Tate collection, the most valuable ever from a living artist.

Hockney came upon the strip of towering trees, framed by two narrow roads and a scrap of triangular green, about two years ago. He returned, taking hundreds of photographs and making scores of sketches. House guests came to know the trees well too: he insisted on some friends getting up before dawn, to accompany him to see the light hit the trunks at a particularly cherishable angle at about 6am. "They were very struck at the effect," he said firmly.

He has completed two paintings, 3m by 4m each, showing bare winter branches, and summer's towering greenery.

He last visited the wood two months ago, and returned on Wednesday to start sketching and photographing for spring, hoping the first leaves might just be starting to break on the trees. Instead he found a scene of desolation.

"I thought first they had gone for housing, but now I believe that can't be right in such a remote spot. I think they were just harvested, as if they were any other crop - and though they had a perfect right to do it, it still seems very sad."He went back again yesterday with his camera - and though he still mourns the lost trees was impressed by the patterns of the massive stacked trunks.

"I think now this is my next painting of the wood. It will be very different - but the piles of wood are quite beautiful in their own right, simply because wood can't help being beautiful."

• This article was amended on Thursday 2 April 2009. The museum where David Hockney's paintings of a copse in East Yorkshire will be exhibited this month is the Würth, not Wurtz, in Künzelsau, not Kunzelsau. This has been corrected.

Summary: Artist's inspiration from secluded trees is felled along with them and chance to capture their beauty gone


Here’s one way to recognize a stolen car: It’s probably pretty old. Thanks to a surge of advanced anti-theft technology, stealing newer cars is remarkably tough. That’s led to a dramatic decline in auto theft, in Massachusetts and throughout the United States.

“We’ve made major strides, and technology, I think is probably the key player in this,” said Roger Morris, a spokesman for the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), an insurance industry trade group.

According to the bureau’s “Hot Wheels” list of the top 10 most stolen cars, in 2013 the nation’s most victimized vehicle was the Honda Accord. But the great majority of the 53,000 stolen Accords were built in the 1990s.

You’ll see similar numbers for the other cars on the list. Cars eight years or older dominated the rankings; very few recent vehicles made the cut.

Meanwhile, the overall rate of auto theft has plummeted.

“The volume of thefts is nothing like it used to be,” said David Procopio, a spokesman for the Massachusetts State Police, which shut down its dedicated auto theft task force about two years ago. In 1975, the Commonwealth had the highest car theft rate in the nation, but since then it has fallen by about 90 percent. Nationwide, car theft peaked in 1991 and has dropped 65 percent since.

Much of the credit goes to aggressive policing, but even more important wasthe development of cars that are far harder to steal. A horde of antitheft devices have become almost universal over the past decade. Most important was the immobilizer, a system that prevents a car from starting unless the driver uses a key that’s recognized by the computer network built into virtually all modern vehicles.

“That’s probably the biggest thing that’s happened to theft rates,” said Bill Biondo, a technical fellow in global vehicle security at General Motors Corp.

Born in the late 1980s, immobilizers first appeared in luxury cars, but by the early 21st century they were standard on nearly all vehicles.

“Gone are the old days of two and three decades ago when a car thief could jimmy into the vehicle, use a screwdriver to defeat the steering column, connect the ignition wires, and take the car,” Procopio said.

Immobilizer technology has largely eliminated casual car theft. But the professionals are as busy as ever.

“Today, what you’re dealing with is the organized criminal,” said crime bureau spokesman Roger Morris. “They’re not out there stealing for joyrides.”

These serious thieves get around modern technology by using old-fashioned fraud. For instance, a criminal may test-drive a new car, but hand in a dummy key when he returns the vehicle. At night, he returns with the real key and drives the car off the lot.

Other crooks use stolen identities to “purchase” cars on credit. Of course, they never make any payments, but the vehicle won’t be reported as stolen until the “owner” misses a payment or two, and that could take months. Meanwhile, the car has been stripped for parts or loaded into a shipping container for resale overseas.

While there are fewer car thefts, it’s gotten harder to catch those who have stayed in the game.

The crime bureau estimates that fewer than half of stolen cars are ever recovered, compared to a 60 percent recovery rate back in the 1980s. So the search is on for better technology and tactics to keep criminals at bay.

The latest Chevy Tahoe SUV from General Motors Corp., for instance, features sensors that set off an alarm if someone tries to jack up the car or if a window is smashed. Even if someone can bypass these sensors, there’s an internal motion detector that will ring the alarm if you climb behind the wheel.

And of course there’s OnStar, the service that connects the car with GM’s nationwide wireless network. If an OnStar-equipped vehicle is stolen, GM can limit the speed at which it can be driven, remotely lock the ignition so that it can’t be started, and track the car’s location.

Many car companies offer stolen-car location tracking these days, but the concept was pioneered byLoJack Corp., of Canton. In 1986, LoJack introduced a system that hides a small radio transmitter inside a car. If the vehicle is reported stolen, the local police department sends an activation code to the car’s transmitter, which begins broadcasting a homing signal.

LoJack has partnerships with about 1,800 law enforcement agencies in 30 US states and the District of Columbia. The agencies use LoJack receivers installed in police cars to pick up the signals from stolen vehicles and track them down.

The company says it recovers 90 percent of LoJack-equipped stolen cars.

LoJack cars are unmarked; thieves never know they’ve stolen one until the cops show up.

“Let’s get the police to recover the vehicle and hopefully arrest the thief,” said Patrick Clancy, LoJack’s vice president for law enforcement. “That’s the covert nature of it.”

The mere existence of LoJack has scared off many criminals. A 1998 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that car theft rates fell 50 percent in Boston, 35 percent in Newark, and nearly 20 percent in Los Angeles after the introduction of LoJack. Even though relatively few drivers installed LoJack, every car in town became less attractive to thieves, who couldn’t be sure which vehicles had been LoJacked.

These days, LoJack is marketing its service directly to automobile dealers and rental agencies, to help them recover cars stolen by professional fraudsters.

“That’s a huge problem going on right now,” said Clancy — and a reminder that car theft will probably never go away.

“As long as there are thieves out there, they’re looking for an easy path,” said NICB’s Morris. “Criminals are criminals.” But thanks to antitheft tech, the good guys are winning.

Summary: Here’s one way to recognize a stolen car: It’s probably pretty old. Thanks to a surge of advanced anti-theft technology, stealing newer cars is remarkably tough. That’s led to a dramatic drop in auto theft, in Massachusetts and throughout the US.


It is hard to believe in the cold light of day, but on Saturday night 350 well-heeled Wiltshire folk, army people and London arty types formed a procession behind a moving house and a Georgian choir.

We were walking, by lantern-light, towards the church of St Giles in Imber, the decrepit but achingly beautiful heart of a village in Salisbury Plain which, in 1943, was emptied of its inhabitants and requisitioned by the army for military use - and never given back.

The village no longer exists in any real sense: the public cannot normally come here, and the old buildings have been blown to bits during successive army exercises. They have been reconstructed in breeze block and brick, with blind openings for windows and doors: these are banal, simplified stand-ins for houses, like a child's drawings. They lack the gothic atmosphere of ancient abandoned buildings, but have a squat, dour menace all of their own.

Yet at the weekend, lights illuminated their interiors and kitsch music poured out of them from unseen sources: it was as if the houses themselves were making the sounds, playing happy-sad ditties to mark their own deaths and resurrections.

This was all part of an event masterminded by London-based commissioning body Artangel. What lay at the end of the procession, however, was a disappointment: a performance in St Giles Church by the Rustavi Choir and the Matrix Ensemble of a new work by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. After the atmosphere and poignancy of preceding events, it was a somewhat trite affair.

The evening had started, more auspiciously, as the sun set behind us, with the audience being bussed over the chalky plain towards Imber. At first sight the landscape seemed untouched and wild - until you noticed the vehicle tracks incised in the grass and rusting tanks dotting the lonely landscape, while stern signs at the edge of the road warned of "Unexploded Military Debris".

Deposited in the village, the audience wandered around the unearthly place, watching a driverless Morris Minor repeatedly circle a roundabout - a reference to the car that was used in the 1960s by protesters fruitlessly campaigning for Imber to be returned to its villagers.

After a while, the audience paused, and food and wine were served. We were becoming a community, in a peculiar way - there was something of the village fete about it, albeit a forlorn festival for a place without permanent inhabitants. Meanwhile, inside a barn, poignant footage of the villagers' uprooting from their homes was shown.

Incongruity was heaped on incongruity as the Rustavi Choir struck up their mournful, rousing strains and the audience (or congregation, perhaps) followed towards the church. There we were, following the full-size house (in fact a structure like a big tent, with printed material laid over a framework), but despite the surreal comedy of it, this was a funeral procession, and we were laying Imber to rest.

Aside from the misfiring finale, the evening was a wonderful piece of theatre, with a whole village becoming both set and players, and we the audience transformed into temporary citizens of Imber. Not only incongruous in its form, it was deliciously incongruous in its genesis: the Church of England, Artangel and the British army are unlikely bedfellows.

And in an artistic landscape where genre-bending "events" are all the rage (pace the increasingly feeble Tate and Egg Live "collaborations"), it is encouraging to see a work that - albeit flawed - is done with some heart and conviction.

· Yesterday, outgoing Royal Opera House chairman Colin Southgate - shy, sensitive soul that he is - finally took a deep breath and blushingly told the world how he had heroically saved the House from ruin. In fact, until one had read his valedictory interview in the Telegraph, one would have had no idea that he had done so many wonderful things, without, it seems, much help from his underlings.

Yes, he singlehandedly stripped away the "clubbishness" of the ROH; saved the orchestra; prevented a merger with English National Opera; introduced financial control; persuaded the government to hand over £25m; appointed Michael Kaiser as chief exec (who was a success, really!); and persuaded Antonio Pappano to work there.

And by the way, it wasn't his fault that Ross Stretton, the former Royal Ballet chief who was such a disaster, was appointed. Thank heaven the modest Sir Colin has put the record straight at last. Personally, I will be crying myself to sleep as I mourn his departure.

· If you want to contact Charlotte Higgins, please email arts.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk marking the email to her attention.

Summary: Watching a car go round in circles, chasing a house through a deserted village - why isn't art always like this?


GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Based on evidence and expert testimony, the Cardinals seem equipped to treat their fans and NFL peers to an aerial uprising.

But one thing they're not quite ready to pass is the go-to-guy torch . . . at least not officially. And that's especially true if you ask one of the guys responsible for inspiring these corresponding expectations.

"There's not no No. 1, there's not no No. 2 in our group," said Michael Floyd, now entering his third pro season, at the team's training camp at University of Phoenix Stadium.

That's a diplomatic way of reminding us how much respect the former first-round pick has for teammate and mentor Larry Fitzgerald as Fitz begins his slow descent down the sky-high peak of a Hall-of-Fame career.

Fitzgerald, it should be noted, certainly didn't slouch into 82 catches -- 10 of those for touchdowns -- last season. He's still rockin' . . . just not in a chair.

With solid quarterbacking again and Fitz on the other side, we're only acknowledging that Arizona again has gone stereo for big, bad wideouts. And the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Floyd, who, like his celebrated teammate, grew up in Minnesota, simply served notice of his installation by snagging 65 passes for 5 TDs and a team-leading 1,040 yards -- 87 yards more than Fitzgerald.

So the presumption of a friendly takeover in go-to responsibility hasn't been beyond comprehension around the league. Floyd, however, prefers to be one Cardinal who attempts his rise toward stardom while remaining emotionally grounded.

"There are some plays that are recommended for a certain individual," he said, "and without that second guy, that guy won't be open. So we all work for the same common goal, and that's to win ballgames."

For the record, that's simply reminding us how Fitzgerald still provokes sufficient fear in the opposition to qualify as a creepy decoy when he's not making plays. Perhaps the time has come for Floyd to serve in a similar role.

Anyway, when the topic is Floyd's emergence, you'll get no quarrel from within the organization.

"Mike is stepping into his own," Fitzgerald said. "Carson (Palmer) has a lot of confidence in him, the coaching staff has a lot of confidence in him. When he plays, he's going to get his opportunities, and the ones he got last year he took advantage of.

"He works his tail off and studies in the classroom. He understands what's expected of him and holds himself to a higher standard. I'm really happy for Mike."

For his part, Palmer is definitely buying the Floyd stock. For some supportive, statistical parallels that explain why, let's go back to the 2013 season, during which the first-year Arizona QB opened with at least one interception in the team's first nine games.

But he was clean -- in terms of picks -- in games 10 and 11, posting quarterback ratings of 119 and 114, respectively, in victories at Jacksonville and at home vs. Indianapolis.

OK, so it may be sort of coincidental, but this brutal efficiency also occurred when Floyd just happened to make 13 catches for 297 yards over those two games, including a 91-yard scoring salvo against the Jaguars. The Cardinals did lose at Philadelphia the next week, but Floyd had 10 catches for 99 yards and a touchdown in that one.

"I can't say there is a ceiling," the quarterback said when asked if Floyd is approaching the limit of his powers. "Mike's a young guy. It doesn't seem like it because of his maturity, but this is his third year.

"He can do just about everything because he's quick enough. He's a big, physical guy, but he plays quick, he plays small."

This praise hardly qualifies as anathema to the chatter trotting alongside Floyd's career.

Let's hark back to Minnesota, where Floyd was a really big deal at Cretin-Durham Hall High School. His many accolades included that of Minnesota's "Mr. Football" and consecutive state Player-of-the-Year distinctions bestowed upon him by representatives of a popular sports drink.

*By clicking "SUBSCRIBE", you have read and agreed to the Fox Sports Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Scout.com designated him a five-star recruit in, ranking Floyd as the 16th best high school player in America for the graduating class of 2008.

Obviously, big things were expected when he enrolled at Notre Dame . . . and Floyd delivered. That's especially true of the last two seasons in his four with the Fighting Irish.

Floyd gave ND 21 of his 37 touchdowns during that time, piling up 1,000 or more yards in each campaign.

The Cardinals were impressed enough with his production and physical profile to take Floyd with the 13th overall selection in the 2012 draft. Then they watched him struggle as a rookie. Well, the quarterbacking made it nearly impossible for any Arizona receiver to flourish (Fitzgerald had 71 grabs for a mere 798 yards in 16 games) that season, but it might not have mattered for Floyd had Kurt Warner been around.

Arizona coach Bruce Arians wasn't around either, but he understands the process.

"I think sometimes as a rookie you don't know how to be a pro," Arians said, "and you learn from a guy like Larry to be a pro. Then your ability takes over and that's pretty much where he's at. He's just going to climb."

While Floyd continues to deftly receive these accolades with admirable restraint, he admits last season's success provided a terrific launching point for his third pro season.

"It builds it tremendously," he said when the word confidence was mentioned. "I'm glad that my quarterback has a lot of confidence in me, knowing that I can make plays on the ball and make plays for him, even though he might be in a jam at times.

"I feel good, we all feel good, and we're ready to get this thing rolling."

Follow Randy Hill on Twitter

Summary: Arizona's third-year receiver seems primed for big season as go-to complement for Larry Fitzgerald.


Franz Ackermann: Home, Home Again White Cube, London N1, until 20 May

Franz Ackermann is living proof of the art industry's extraordinary remoteness from the world. Among such circles the German painter can do no wrong. Barely a biennial, scarcely an art fair and nary a major dealer or gallery would pass up the chance of an Ackermann - and they now change hands for record amounts - yet nobody could claim his art had any real public reach.

I don't know a single person who has ever seen an Ackermann they liked. A fellow critic says he takes care to avoid them. Saatchi showed some of Ackermann's vast collages of semi-abstract fragments in his German edition of the Triumph of Painting show last year and they were thought frantic, noisy and aimless. Big as billboards and deeply involved in what you might call semiotics - signage, tourism, motels, flight patterns and so forth - and in scrambling the visual signals, they are a breeding ground for jargon and theory. Which may be another reason why a certain generation of curators adore them.

But Ackermann thrives, and at 42 shows very energetically at two of the most powerful commercial galleries in the world - Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and of course Jay Jopling's White Cube in London. Which is where he is currently exhibiting a whole environment of paintings, photographs, scaffoldings and a floor piece you can shuffle all over, following a line the artist himself took for a walk.

Maybe he is getting more poised with age, certainly less hectic and brash, but this is the best I've seen of his work. Ackermann has had a long time to work out precisely what he wants to achieve with his jumble of vignettes and fragments, his flattened spaces and violent colours - and, oddly enough, for something so blatant, it seems to be an art of hints.

Trees disappear headfirst into the void, ghostly yachts flit in and out, there are partial views of towerblocks, balconies and malls. You look down a long hotel corridor, ominously empty, and from there to what might be a Japanese teahouse. It's all about tourist-class travel.

Paintings vacillate between long-shot and close-up, above and below, inside public buildings and back out on the streets. They are pieced together, patched together, from a welter of images downloaded from the net, photographs and Ackermann's own perpetual globetrotting. A yellow wheel that might be a stadium spins across one vast canvas. Another features a daringly large area of Day-Glo pink that seems, bizarrely, to conflate hints of spaceflight as well as fairgrounds and aquariums.

Day-Glo doesn't give off heat so much as ersatz flavour, of an Opal Fruit sort, though it is good for nuclear sunsets and of course imparts instant modernity. Artifice is what it says and unrelievedly artificial is what these paintings want to look. Even where a quite lush little landscape ends in blue remembered hills there'll be a shard of eye-popping colour to kill any sense of nature or nostalgia.

Day-Glo pink, green and lime, streamers of acid yellow and burning orange are pinned together with black grids, held in check by slate grey and deep purple. It feels quite hard to get in among it all and look steadily without being pained, but Ackermann manages to keep a whisker away from absolute overload.

But to what purpose? German painting today is so full of abstract-figurative hybrids, of broken architecture, artificial colours and depthless flatness. It has been that way since the far better days of Thomas Scheibitz and his terrifically dynamic and chromatic quasi-cityscapes in the Nineties. More than one of Ackermann's compatriots have made a subject out of urban architecture, generally disassembled, and others have also noticed the great metropolitan flux that makes all cities now look much the same.

It is hard to read the tone of paintings that make such a point of being too busy to stop. But perhaps there is a kind of joviality at work; certainly in the play on Paul Klee's idea of taking a line for a walk and of visitors literally stumbling round Ackermann's chaotic floor map. Nor could you really say he was setting up a dirge about contemporary life, or even worrying too overtly about terrorism and travel, although there are hints of both.

The work seems pretty light, if very accomplished in its sense of abstract design. But the artist's admirers think otherwise. 'The daily practice of painting, in Ackermann's case,' gushes one, 'amounts to nothing less than an attempt to redefine the discipline itself.' If that means anything at all I suspect it refers to his way of painting up to the eleventh hour before a show's opening, of trying to keep an image in flux as long as he can. Unless, of course, it relates to something more specific about his work - the fact that he doesn't seem to want one picture to stand out more than another.

Ackermann's kind of high-wire act could go in two directions: towards complete breakdown and shambles, or towards knife-edge balance. Which is very much his achievement this time. But in noticing this over and again through the show you become aware that the paintings are ultimately indistinguishable from each other.

Summary: Art: The tourist-class spaces and acid colours of Franz Ackermann's paintings have made him the art world's darling. So why does no one like his work, asks Laura Cumming?


While tech startups and a few other firms may offer some alcoholic beverages on premise to their employees, no one does it better than the alcoholic beverage industry. Corporate bars found at liquor companies and brewers are the perfect place to relax after a long day at the office. Spirits companies have told Fortune they use their bar spaces for a variety of functions: sneak peaks to showcase new flavors or brands, an area to recruit new talent, mixology demonstrations, and even World Cup viewing parties.

It isn’t all fun and games at these offices. Alcoholic beverage regulation and taxation are notoriously complex. For example, 12 U.S. states still won’t allow sales of spirits on Sundays. And things get even trickier on the local level. The industry’s players are also responsible for developing and marketing new flavors to stay fresh on consumers minds when they order a beer or a cocktail. And those trends are being challenged by a Millennial generation that have different preferences than older consumers.

Still, it has to be nice to finish the workday and know a nice watering hole is only steps away. Here is a look at some of the fanciest bars across the U.S. that many adults won’t ever get a chance to visit.

Summary: A free cup of coffee and a small snack bar qualify as perks for most U.S. companies, but a fully-stocked onsite Happy Hour bar is sure to inspire envy for many office workers.


There are several surprises in the survey results issued Monday by UBS’ Steve Milunovich. Of an initial 4,000 smartphone owners drawn evenly from four countries (U.S., U.K., China, Italy):

The Samsung Gear is currently the bestselling smartwatch on the market. The Apple Watch is not due out until early next year, and according to a UBS footnote the respondents in their survey weren’t told anything about the device’s features.

Below: Brand preference among likely smartphone buyers.

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

Summary: Extrapolating from a survey of 1,864 smartphone owners, UBS sees Apple selling 24 million Apple Watches in 2015.


Missi Pyle as Ellen Abbott in Gone Girl (left) and Nancy Grace

12/12/2014 AT 01:55 PM EST

not seen the zoomed-in, slow-motion animated GIFs circulating all over the Web.

In a table-turning interview printed in

, the legal pundit was interviewed by her

imitator, Missi Pyle. The two chatted about the film, the various media portrayals of Grace in action, and, of course,

, which made a surprise appearance in the film.

Grace, 55, "loved the film. Number one, I'm a huge Ben Affleck fan. Number two, the stars – what a lineup," she said. The Affleck mention prompted Pyle, 42, to later ask: "I'm wondering if you caught his 'man part' in the movie?"

"I heard it made a turn in the movie," Grace replied. "I'm assuming that was the shower scene. I'm sorry, I was too focused on the blood to notice Ben Affleck's penis, so I apologize to the penis because I did not notice it."

Added Grace, "Has everyone in this country seen his penis but me? Am I the only one?"

Not the only one, but she's possibly just part of a small minority at this point.

As for her many other imitators (such as

and Jill Brennan's Gracie Jane on

, among others), the news anchor is "very flattered â¦ Even though I get poked fun at, I don't mind â¦ To me, the truth is extremely polarizing, and it doesn't always taste good going down.

"This is not a popularity contest," she added. "I do not expect to go home and be crowned Miss Congeniality. That's not going to happen."

Summary: Grace is deeply sorry for missing the most talked-about moment in Gone Girl


At yesterday’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama referred to the dramatic improvements in economic productivity and employment that had occurred on his watch, but did not seal the point by displaying graphs or charts documenting and dramatizing his assertions.

He tried to stir the nation to address the gaping inequality of wealth in our society. But, again, he did not use any of the digital tools that school children now routinely employ, when presenting assigned reports to their classes, to render his arguments vivid and convincing.

Likewise, Obama spoke of a pressing need to address climate change, but failed to display any of the evidence that he might have enlisted to establish the existence of such a need: charts or graphs of rising average temperature readings over the past century; video of melting glaciers or meteorologic events believed to be attributable to such change; animations displaying our retreating shorelines in recent years. By contrast, think of the nearly magical techniques Al Gore–outside the political context–used to make these points nearly a decade ago in the movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

Would presidential addresses lose dignity if such techniques were employed? Someone must think so. Maybe it goes back to H. Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy in 1992. In those pre-Powerpoint years, the businessman awkwardly held up his own charts—the kind that might have been placed on an easel in his boardroom—and tried to show the nation why it should have been alarmed by the skyrocketing federal debt, the plummeting purchasing power of the dollar, stagnating wages, and, in fact, the growing inequality of income.

Maybe it was Perot’s big ears, short stature, and funny voice. Maybe it was the incongruity of a CEO crudely wading into politics, or the fact that genuinely eccentric features of Perot’s personality eventually cast a pall over his campaign. But people do still talk very dismissively about “Perot and his charts.”

On the other hand, Perot got 19% of the vote in 1992—the best third-party showing since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. At one point—till his eccentricities came to the fore—he was drawing 39% in polls.

A quarter century ago, when TV monitors, laser-disk technologies, animations, and other digital advancements first began creeping into courtrooms, some lawyers—mainly on the defense side—declined to stoop to using such populist bells and whistles. I wrote about the phenomenon then—in May 1990!—in a comically dated piece for The American Lawyer entitled, “Now Showing In A Courtroom Near You.” At a trial before U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin in Washington, D.C., the plaintiffs lawyer had martialed these electronic technologies to dazzling effect. When the defense lawyer stood up for his summation, he told Sporkin, with John Houseman-like pride, that he was going to present his case “the old-fashioned way, with paper and voice.”

Sporkin cut him off. “Don’t knock the new way,” he said. “I am telling you it is sensational. I must tell you I think that’s going to be the way of the future.”

Twenty-five years later, federal courtrooms have more HD-TV monitors than water pitchers—one on the judge’s bench, several for the clerks, several for each counsel table, and, near the bar, an enormous one facing the gallery.

Presidents, on the other hand—and obviously it’s not just Obama—still shun audiovisual aids. The day will come, though, when one of them breaks the boycott. Then the corner will have been forever turned, and no one will ever look back.

Remember when–in 1997–the New York Times belatedly first put a color photo on the front page? At first, only déclassé publications like USA Today stooped to stunts like that. Then one day the Times finally gave it a try. It assured readers that its practice would be thoughtful and sparing, and that it would continue using black-and-white.

Then it printed a few fabulous color photos. The argument was over.

Disdain can be a mask concealing other emotions. Like laziness. (“I don’t have time to learn these new-fangled technologies.”) Or ignorance. (“How do you actually do it?”) Or fear. (“Will I make a fool of myself? Will people think I lack dignity?”)

Presidents should be trying to persuade people—trying to move them to action. If opponents are taking the position that climate change is still unproven, Obama needs to use all the technological means available to take his case directly to the people. If a President wants to the nation to act in the face of a humanitarian crisis, he needs to show them video of the crisis. If he wants support for military action against terrorists, he should show video of their crimes.

Some people criticize Obama for being too professorial. But actually, he’s the only professor in the country who still won’t use digital technologies to get his points across.

Watch more of Obama’s State of the Union from Fortune’s video team:

Summary: Why do presidents still foreswear audiovisual aids that could spur the country to action?


Bali Nine ringleaders Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan.

Indonesian officials are making secret preparations for the executions of Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, even as the federal government urges them daily to reconsider.

Lawyers for the men had hoped a challenge of their clemency denial would at least put a pause on the executions.

But Indonesia's Attorney-General HM Prasetyo on Tuesday confirmed plans to execute the men are going ahead.

"It will proceed," he told reporters.

"We haven't determined the time yet."

Denpasar District Chief Prosecutor Imanuel Zebua says officials in Bali, where the two are jailed, are pressing ahead with plans.

Australian death-row prisoners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. (AAP)

They had requested instructions from the attorney-general on the transfer of the pair from Kerobokan to Nusakambangan, a prison island off central Java, where five drug offenders were executed last month.

Mr Imanuel said the move would be secret, kept even from their families.

"It could be on the day before the execution and we don't have to tell the family first," he told reporters.

"We also don't want to tell you (media) either. You could be waiting for us at the airport."

Chan, 31, and Sukumaran, 33, would be allowed to make a last request, the prosecutor said, and that could be done at Bali's Kerobokan jail rather than on Nusakambangan.

President Joko Widodo denied the men clemency despite their rehabilitation, which is supported by a flurry of testimonies in recent days from present and former inmates.

Lawyers for the Sydney men will challenge the presidential decree that denied them clemency without looking at their circumstances in an administrative court.

They had hoped the executions would be put on hold, pending the court action.

The Bali Nine ringleaders' families travelled to Jakarta on Monday, where Sukumaran's mother Raji made a heartfelt plea.

She said her son and Chan were unlike other prisoners, having dedicated themselves to rehabilitating other inmates with classes in art, cooking and computers.

The families returned to their twice-daily jail visits on Tuesday.

Chan's father Ken, who recently underwent surgery after a fall, saw his son for first time in three years.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says the government, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott, is making daily representations in a bid to save Chan and Sukumaran.

"We're making representations, privately and publicly, to stay the execution," she told the Nine Network on Tuesday.

"And we will not give up, we continue to do that on a daily basis."

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: Australia's foreign minister says she is taking the right approach by making representations on behalf of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran from home.


MF Global makes its failure official.

MF Global MF , the broker-dealer run by former Goldman Sachs GS chief executive Jon Corzine, today filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The firm had spent the past weekend seeking a buyer, and apparently struck a deal to sell at least some of its assets to Interactive Brokers via the bankruptcy process. Its shares were suspended from trading earlier this morning, while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it would no longer do business with MF Global until the firm was “fully capable of discharging the responsibilities set out in the New York Fed’s policy.”

In its bankruptcy petition, MF Global lists assets of between $100 million and $500 million. It also claims liabilities of between $10 million and $50 million, with between 25,000 and 50,000 creditors. The leading unsecured creditor is JPMorgan at $1.2 billion, while others include Deutsche Bank, CNBC and Oracle Corp.

Corzine reportedly will receive around $12 million in severance, although he may forego that if he still cares at all about his own reputation.

Below is a copy of the Chapter 11 petition:

Sign up for my daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com

Summary: MF Global makes its failure official. MF Global , the broker-dealer run by former Goldman Sachs chief executive Jon Corzine, today filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The firm had spent the past weekend seeking a buyer, and apparently struck a deal to sell at least some of its assets to Interactive Brokers via the bankruptcy…


Editor’s note: In his new book, Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization,Gunek Bains discusses the soft skills required to engage leaders in a connected world. Below is an edited excerpt:

This week, the European Union faces yet another round of discussions as its leaders demand a better economic plan from Greece before releasing the funds the debt-troubled nation needs to prevent, in a matter of days, its default on debts. These last minute frantic scrambles to save the eurozone project are now all too regular and the pattern is likely to continue as other countries in the project lurch into payment crises, experience difficulties in the bond markets or elect governments that reject previously agreed to plans. However, to understand where all this is going, it is helpful to step back and analyze some of the fundamental reasons behind the crisis.

Essentially, what happened was that everyone got taken in by the heady catch-up growth of the southern European and Irish economies without discerning whether the momentum was sustainable or the euro project viable. People overlooked the relevance of deep-seated cultural factors to the issue of economic sustainability. The exact same thing is happening with respect to gauging the economic prospects of India, China and other emerging market economies today. It is easy to get caught up with the high, catch-up growth figures in all these regions and not to see the cultural problems bubbling underneath the surface that will, over time, influence whether this performance is sustainable. Global CEOs need to become cultural experts, psychologists, and historians if they are to make the right long-term calls for their companies.

The importance of this is illustrated by looking more deeply into the eurozone crisis. The drive to create a single economic entity with a common currency, free movement of people, and consistent rules is predicated on the unstated, but nevertheless strong, assumption that there is a high level of cultural similarity across the nations involved. In one sense this is true; but in another sense the cultural and psychological instincts of Greeks are not the same as those of Germans.

This is not to pass judgment on either, but rather to say that beyond obvious and superficial differences — like Greeks being more persistent and ingenious in circumventing EU rules around smoking in public places — there lurked deeper differences in attitudes towards financial and economic matters that the creators of the common currency failed to recognize or were blithely optimistic about. It is now apparent that many of the problems arose from the very different attitudes to economic management, payment of taxes, attitudes to borrowing, and orientation to work that exist in the eurozone and which threaten the whole project or at the least to stymie growth in the region for some time.

Going a bit deeper, many of these attitudinal and behavioral differences arise from profound differences in some underlying values. In particular, as will be discussed later, southern European countries have at their core a more religious, relational, and in-the-moment set of values — versus the northern countries where more secular, individualistic, and long-term psychological instincts are more evident.

Individualistic cultures require mechanisms other than religious authority or the sanction of one’s community to regulate people’s behavior, and hence place much greater emphasis on the rules set down by the state or other institutions. In the more relational cultures of southern Europe and Ireland, it is easier to trump rules imposed by more distant institutions; it is the obligations to one’s immediate circle that count. Furthermore, if you live in a culture with a more short-term orientation, you are likely to take the plunge when economic opportunities created by, for example, money being available at low interest rates present themselves without thinking too hard about the long-term consequences. This is the case whether you are a government doling out pensions and benefits or an individual making a property investment.

But where do these differences in underlying values themselves come from? We can go deeper still. Surprising as it may sound, from a cultural DNA point of view, the different psychological instincts in the southern European countries and Ireland versus northern Europe make sense when one looks at how modern humans settled Europe some 45,000 years ago. As will be demonstrated later, the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe came through two clearly differentiated routes — something that’s had a powerful impact on the continent’s psychological and cultural DNA. One path was through the Middle East, into Anatolia, then into the Balkans and southern Europe. The other involved a more northerly route through the Caucuses and Western Russia into Eastern Europe, Poland and Germany.

Although subsequent severe Ice Age events scrambled the picture later on, many of the peoples in northern Europe are descended from the population that followed the second path, and those in southern Europe, to a greater extent, the first path. Furthermore, when expansion occurred from the ice age refuges, those who moved north coped for tens of thousands of years with a radically different ecological environment compared to that which they left behind in the south.

Long-term planning and a sustained work ethic were critical to surviving the bitter winters of the north. Interestingly, there is also considerable evidence that a movement of people from Spain went along an Atlantic coastal route to repopulate Ireland and the west of Scotland. Today, there is still a clear genetic dividing line running through the UK that reflects this movement.

What is interesting is that many cultural traits, including Catholicism, map this pattern of entry and diffusion in Europe. The eurozone crisis also follows this exact pattern, including Ireland’s involvement. A sound argument can be made for the view that the pattern of migration and the different environmental challenges that humans faced in the south and along the Atlantic Coast lead to their psychological and cultural instincts evolving in a different way from those who had the challenge after the ice age of surviving in the ecological conditions of the north.

Understanding the deeper reasons for these difficulties is not just an exercise in intellectual exploration — it also has implications for the future. The Germans will not easily relax on their drive to impose explicit rules and guidelines that drive long-term success – because in the past their survival depended on this attitude. For Greeks, the temptation to take a more short-term, humanistic approach is irresistible. Solving the crisis in a genuinely long-term manner will require surfacing and working on these cultural differences. This will require the northern countries questioning their instincts and adapting as much as the countries who are experiencing the problems. All round it will require empathy for ways of looking at the world that just seem alien from one’s own perspective. This will be difficult for all parties but in the absence of this occurring the eurozone project is doomed.

Gurnek Bains is the author of “Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization” (Wiley March 23, 2015) and chairman of YSC, a global corporate psychological consultancy. Follow him @GurnekBains1

Watch more business news from Fortune:

Summary: Solving the crisis long-term will require several efforts, including having Greece and Germany work on fundamental cultural differences that currently divide the two nations.