Flawed data stall California's 911 upgrades

A three-year effort by California to improve 911 emergency service has been stymied by flawed data and aging computers at local fire departments and rescue agencies across the state, a Times investigation has found.

Since 2009, the state Emergency Medical Services Authority has been seeking to centralize reports on millions of emergency medical responses, a project that officials see as critical to improving life-saving practices.

State officials hoped to capture information from the moment dispatchers answer a call until the victim is transferred to a hospital. The program would for the first time give public officials, medical researchers and regulators the ability to compare response times and patient treatment across local jurisdictions.

But the project has floundered because many fire departments and ambulance operations have been unable to provide usable information.

One problem is that fire departments report basic information inconsistently, including how long it takes them to reach victims. Some begin counting the second a 911 call is answered. Others, including the Los Angeles Fire Department, start the clock when rescue crews are alerted at fire stations.

Moreover, nearly half of the state's 32 regional emergency medical agencies have failed to contribute reports to the system, officials said. And many of those who do file reports use paper records.

The shortcomings, officials and experts said, underscore how fire agencies lag behind police departments and the private sector in using technology to better manage and evaluate their performance.

"There's been a lot of benign neglect in the fire service as far as collecting data," said Robert Upson, a Connecticut fire marshal who has analyzed data for a nationwide group that sets performance standards for fire departments.

"There's so much sloppiness in recording data. It's just built into the system."

Similar troubles have fueled a months-long controversy over faulty response time data at the Los Angeles Fire Department. In March, top commanders admitted that the department had repeatedly published reports overstating how fast rescuers reached victims in need of help. The flawed reports have been blamed on the use of unqualified firefighters to analyze data and outdated computer systems.

In an effort to improve such data, California officials launched their program to collect rich, comparable details on medical emergencies statewide. Incident reports were to be gathered by regional regulatory agencies and forwarded to the state.

But three years and about $1.6 million later, the voluntary project is plagued by lack of participation, money problems and inconsistent information. The root of the problem is that some agencies rely on outmoded, "home-brewed" computer systems, said Tom McGinnis, the state official overseeing the project.

"We can't compare apples to apples. We compare apples to oranges and peaches," McGinnis said.

The state isn't forcing cash-strapped local agencies to participate because doing so would require many to replace computer systems, McGinnis said. "Really what it comes down to is money," he said.

Some experts say the state program won't be able to deliver on its promise until reporting standards are clarified and participation is mandatory.

"It should become a requirement tomorrow," said Bruce Wagner, the top administrator for the emergency medical services agency in Sacramento County.

His agency is among those that have not provided data to the state. That's because fire departments and ambulance firms under his jurisdiction are hesitant to spend time and money gathering records if they are not required to do so, Wagner said.

"It's hard for us to tell them they are going to incur additional costs if it's not mandated," he told The Times.

Los Angeles County, where a third of the state's 911 medical rescues take place, is a year behind in processing performance information because 28 of the county's 31 fire departments submit paper reports, said Cathy Chidester, the local oversight agency's top executive. Voluminous pages of information must be individually scanned into electronic files or manually typed into a county computer system.

"It's like sweeping sand off the beach," Chidester said.

Of the county's three largest fire departments — Los Angeles city, Los Angeles County and Long Beach — only the LAFD collects medical records electronically.

The county Fire Department has not filed reports on more than 300,000 incidents over the last two years because budget cuts eliminated employees working on the records, officials said. Next year, the agency is launching a test program in which paramedics will use iPads to create electronic reports, Chief Deputy Mike Metro said.

The state data project, known as CEMSIS, short for California Emergency Medical Services Information System, has also struggled for funding. It began as a $240,000-a-year demonstration project using federal grants and philanthropic donations. But no permanent funding has been secured.

Where possible, officials are attempting to use the partial records they have compiled for research. But thus far, they haven't been able to answer fundamental questions, including how different agencies' 911 response times compare, McGinnis said.

Ideally, McGinnis said, regulators could use the database to compare "the entire spectrum" of emergency medical care in California. "I want everybody to participate and see what we're doing statewide," he said.

Detailed data could improve understanding of what works best in the field. For example, researchers could examine how often rescuers are able to restore heartbeats after arriving on the scene, a key step in increasing cardiac-arrest survival rates, said Dr. Marc Eckstein, the medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

"You have to really drill down to make sure we are talking about the right things," he said.

Slipping response times at the LAFD were only documented when outside experts, the city controller and The Times dug into the department's data. A series of Times reports found breakdowns and delays in processing 911 calls, dispatching units and summoning the nearest medical rescuers from neighboring jurisdictions.

Los Angeles Fire Commissioner Alan Skobin, who is overseeing a task force charged with overhauling the LAFD's data management, said programs such as California's fledgling 911 records system could help his agency compare its performance to other departments and improve service.

"There's a benefit to looking outside," Skobin said. "That's something the LAFD has to do."

Full coverage: Life on the line, 911 breakdowns at LAFD

Map: How fast is LAFD where you live?

Download: Open-source maps of California's emergency medical agencies

ben.welsh@latimes.com

robert.lopez@latimes.com

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Digital Social Visibility: How Facebook Gifts Change Our Choices

Facebook Gifts rolled out after a two-month beta last week, seamlessly melding social with shopping. Not to be outdone, Amazon recently released its Friends and Family Gifting option with the same kind of social gifting visibility.

For Facebook, another puzzle piece of its business model falls into place. For users, gift giving becomes by default a public rather than private activity: People can now fluidly and visibly give their friends holiday presents ranging from iTunes cards to Chandon champagne.

For our culture, however, an era of subtlety and “secret” Santa gives way to the era of reality TV. In many ways social gifting shrouds purchasing in a cloak of generosity, since the social streaming context removes the gaucheness of sharing these gifts. Yet these new social features also signal a culture where broadcasting our behaviors – whether gifting or other digitally shared activities – becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out, though: It changes the choices we make, both online and offline.

Lauren Rhue is a doctoral candidate and Arun Sundararajan (@digitalarun) is a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where they conduct research about how digital technologies transform business and society. 

How so? Our research and observations here are based on analyzing visibility behaviors across a range of social platforms over the last three years. Our data includes over 10,000 users who shared more than a million purchases on Blippy across two years, as well as a recent sample of over 1,000 Pinterest users with more than 200,000 connections and close to a million re-pins.

I Anticipate, Therefore I Change

Social influence always seemed to flow from the person who makes the choice, to the people who observe it. But digital visibility reverses the direction and creates a new form of anticipatory influence: What we do is now influenced by the peers who observe us.

We anticipate how people might perceive us or react, and those anticipatory effects change our choices.

Facebook Gifts, for example, might make us think twice about and possibly revise our shopping lists. Because our gifts aren’t just between us and our loved ones anymore: They become part of our social Timelines, our online personas. They’re the future digital ghosts of our Christmas pasts.

Social psychologists have long documented how introducing passive audience observers into situations affects athletic performance, productivity, decision times, memory recall, and even the sunny-ness of our smiles. Interestingly, modifying what one does in response to an audience isn’t simply a socially learned human trait: Similar behavior has also been recognized in non-human species ranging from Budgerigars birds to peacocks to Siamese fighting fish.

So these audience effects are primal; they’re deeply ingrained in who we are. The underlying behavior we’re witnessing now isn’t new. Rather, social technologies are creating a broader and more visible digital public persona by letting us choose our audiences; expanding the audience beyond the individual or an intimate few; making the audience persistent; and transcending the constraints of space and time.

Consider maverick economist Thorsten Veblen‘s theory of conspicuous consumption, which formalized the idea that we make some of our purchases – particularly luxury goods – to advertise economic power and gain social status. Velben wrote his masterpiece “The Theory of the Leisure Class” over a century ago, when we could not transport our real-world social networks across all of our purchasing, gifting, and other consuming sites and moments.

But we no longer need physical and temporal co-location to realize the benefits of being conspicuous. We can now name-drop our Prada bag purchase or dinner at Masa instantly via a data trail or an Instagram picture … or through a Facebook gift in our stream.

Our audience might not be online when we do this, but they’ll probably see it tomorrow, next week, or maybe even next year.

Are You There, Audience? It’s Me, Social

Of course, the audience only matters if it’s actually there. But we don’t really know how many people see what we post on Facebook, which friends are online when, or what fraction of daily incoming tweets our followers actually notice.

This audience uncertainty is due to the absence of any real surroundings, environmental factors, and tactile cues for situating our digital visibility. These are the kinds of familiar cues that, according to sociologist Erving Goffman, shape our presentation in face-to-face settings.

One way of dealing with this audience uncertainty is to picture the group toward which we aim our shares, from whom we seek to maximize approval (or minimize disapproval): our imagined audience. When you buy your favorite employee a cool Facebook gift this holiday, it’s not just the gift recipient audience you’re playing to – you’re also orienting your largesse to other colleagues and maybe your boss too.

Digital social visibility doesn’t just turn our private lives inside out: It changes the choices we make.

The trouble is, you might get the audience wrong. Your audience might instead end up being your spouse or your employee’s significant other, who could misinterpret the intent of your gift. The fissure between imagined and realized audiences can lead to conflict or the feeling that our privacy has been compromised — even though our intent was social.

This is an example of context collapse: facing multiple and unknown contexts for each of our online shares. It’s the result of having a variety of relationships (including those whittled down to just “Facebook friendships”) with competing social norms on the same platform, along with the online data trails that persist long after we leave them.

Digital social visibility is therefore a double-edged sword: As we transcend the boundaries of physical space and time, we also give up the familiar anchors and cues provided in our face-to-face interactions.

How then do people deal with context collapse? By focusing on the small fraction of our network that does provide visible acknowledgement or cues in the form of likes, re-pins, and votes.

Context collapse is the result of having a variety of relationships with competing social norms on the same platform

The problem is that this approach, however, is that it also changes the products we buy. Our research reveals that people buy more in the categories of products for which they get more feedback.

We’re just beginning to understand the phenomenon of image management as commerce and networks merge. The implications are many: for advertising (how should businesses surface choices for gifting?), for measuring influence (Klout doesn’t even begin to capture tacit persuasiveness and cues), for privacy (losing contextual integrity of our shares); and more.

But for us as individuals, the implications go beyond just buying and gifting. Luxury purchases are only one aspect of conspicuous consumption; individual taste-based goods and services are another. You’ll soon – if you’re not already – spend more time hanging out at hip restaurants or rock concerts, monster car rallies or museums, benefit dinners or book readings. Not just because you want to … but because you’ll detract from your digital visible image if you don’t.

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Ashton Kutcher files for divorce from Demi Moore

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ashton Kutcher filed court papers Friday to end his seven-year marriage to actress Demi Moore.

The actor’s divorce petition cites irreconcilable differences and does not list a date that the couple separated. Moore announced last year that she was ending her marriage to the actor 15 years her junior, but she never filed a petition.

Kutcher’s filing does not indicate that the couple has a prenuptial agreement. The filing states Kutcher signed the document Friday, hours before it was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Kutcher and Moore married in September 2005 and until recently kept their relationship very public, communicating with each other and fans on the social networking site Twitter. After their breakup, Moore changed her name on the site from (at)mrskutcher to (at)justdemi.

Kutcher currently stars on CBS’ “Two and a Half Men.”

Messages sent to Kutcher’s and Moore’s publicists were not immediately returned Friday.

Moore, 50, and Kutcher, 34, created the DNA Foundation, also known as the Demi and Ashton Foundation, in 2010 to combat the organized sexual exploitation of girls around the globe. They later lent their support to the United Nations’ efforts to fight human trafficking, a scourge the international organization estimates affects about 2.5 million people worldwide.

Moore was previously married to actor Bruce Willis for 13 years. They had three daughters together — Rumer, Scout and Tallulah Belle — before divorcing in 2000. Willis later married model-actress Emma Heming in an intimate 2009 ceremony at his home in Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands that attended by their children, as well as Moore and Kutcher.

Kutcher has been dating former “That ’70s Show” co-star Mila Kunis.

The divorce filing was first reported Friday by People magazine.

___

Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP.

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About New York: One Boy’s Death Moves State to Action to Prevent Others

Prompted by the death of a 12-year-old Queens boy in April, New York health officials are poised to make their state the first in the nation to require that hospitals aggressively look for sepsis in patients so treatment can begin sooner. Under the regulations, which are now being drafted, the hospitals will also have to publicly report the results of their efforts.

The action by New York has elated sepsis researchers and experts, including members of a national panel who this month formally recommended that the federal government adopt standards similar to what the state is planning.

Though little known, sepsis, an abnormal and self-destructive immune response to infection or illness, is a leading cause of death in hospitals. It often progresses to severely low blood pressure, shock and organ failure.

Over the last decade, a global consortium of doctors, researchers, hospitals and advocates has developed guidelines on early identification and treatment of sepsis that it says have led to significant drops in mortality rates. But first hints of the problem, like a high pulse rate and fever, often are hard for clinicians to tell apart from routine miseries that go along with the flu or cold.

“First and foremost, they need to suspect sepsis,” Dr. Mitchell M. Levy, a professor at Brown University School of Medicine and a lead author of a paper on the latest sepsis treatment guidelines to be published simultaneously next month in the United States in a journal, Critical Care Medicine, and in Europe in Intensive Care Medicine.

“It’s the most common killer in intensive care units,” Dr. Levy said. “It kills more people than breast cancer, lung cancer and stroke combined.”

If started early enough, the treatment, which includes antibiotics and fluids, can help people escape from the drastic vortex of sepsis, according to findings by researchers working with the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, the global consortium. The tactics led to a reduction of “relative risk mortality by 40 percent,” Dr. Levy said.

Although studies of 30,000 patients show that the guidelines save lives, “the problem is that many hospitals are not adhering to them,” said Dr. Clifford S. Deutschman, director of the sepsis research program at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

About 300 hospitals participate in the study, and the consortium has a goal of having 10,000. “The case is irrefutable: if you take these sepsis measures, and you build a program to help clinicians and hospitals suspect sepsis and identify it early, that will mean more people will survive,” Dr. Levy said.

At a symposium in October, the New York health commissioner, Dr. Nirav R. Shah, said that he would require state hospitals to adopt best practices for early identification and treatment of sepsis. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo intends to make it a major initiative in 2013, said Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for the governor. “The state is taking unprecedented measures to prevent and effectively treat sepsis in health care facilities across the state and is looking at a wide range of additional measures to better protect patients,” Mr. Vlasto said.

In April, Rory Staunton, a sixth grader from Queens, died of severe septic shock after he became infected, apparently through a cut he suffered while playing basketball. The severity of his illness was not recognized when he was treated in the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center. He was sent home with a diagnosis of an ordinary bellyache. Hours later, alarming laboratory results became available that suggested he was critically ill, but neither he nor his family was contacted. For an About New York column in The New York Times, Rory’s parents, Ciaran and Orlaith Staunton, publicly discussed their son’s final days. Their revelations prompted doctors and hospitals across the country to seek new approaches to heading off medical errors.

In addition, Commissioner Shah in New York convened a symposium on sepsis, which included presentations from medical experts and Rory’s parents.

At the end of the meeting, Dr. Shah said that he had listened to all the statistics on the prevalence of the illness, and that one had stuck in his memory: “Twenty-five percent,” he said — the portion of the Staunton family lost to sepsis.

He said he would issue new regulations requiring hospitals to use best practices in identifying and treating sepsis, actions that, he said, he was taking “in honor of Rory Staunton.”

The governor’s spokesman, Mr. Vlasto, said that “the Staunton family’s advocacy has been essential to creating a strong public will for action.”

Dr. Levy said New York’s actions were “bold, pioneering and grounded in good scientific evidence,” adding, “The commissioner has taken the first step even before the federal government.”

Dr. Deutschman said that initiatives like those in New York were needed to overcome resistance among doctors. “You’re talking about a profession that has always prided itself on its autonomy,” he said. “They don’t like to be told that they’re wrong about something.”

The availability of proven therapies should move treatment of sepsis into a new era, experts say, comparing it to how heart attacks were handled not long ago. People arriving in emergency rooms with chest pains were basically put to bed because not much could be done for them, said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, the president of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System. Dr. Tracey, a neurosurgeon, has made major discoveries about the relationship between the nervous system and the runaway immune responses of sepsis.

If physicians and nurses were trained to watch for sepsis, as they now routinely do for heart attacks, many of its most dire problems could be headed off before they got out of control, he said. The Stauntons have awakened doctors and nurses to the possibility of danger camouflaged as a stomach bug.

“We are with sepsis where we were with heart attack in the early 1980s,” Dr. Tracey said.

“If you don’t think of it as a possibility, this story can happen again and again. This case could change the world.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

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As Shoppers Hop From Tablet to PC to Phone, Retailers Try to Adapt

Ryan O’Neil, a Connecticut government employee, was in the market to buy a digital weather station this month. His wife researched options on their iPad, but even though she found the lowest-price option there, Mr. O’Neil made the purchase on his laptop.

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

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Boehner rejects Democrats' push for immediate vote on gun bill

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker John A. Boehner rejected calls from Democrats to schedule a vote on new gun restrictions before the end of the year, saying he wants to wait for recommendations from a newly formed White House task force before committing to a legislative response to the mass shooting at a Connecticut school.

“When the vice president's recommendations come forward, we'll certainly take them into consideration,’’ Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday in his first public comments on calls for new gun legislation since the slaying of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “But at this point I think our hearts and souls ought to be to think about those victims in this horrible tragedy.”

President Obama on Wednesday said he had asked Vice President Joe Biden to lead a task force to come up with initiatives to stem gun violence by the end of next month. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and fellow Democrats have pressed for an immediate vote on a long-stalled bill that would ban ammunition magazines containing more than 10 rounds.

Obama has outlined a slightly slower pace for action, urging Congress to hold a vote “in a timely manner” in the new year.

Both Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill say they are trying to seize on what appears to be a burst of momentum behind gun legislation in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., tragedy. Similar efforts initiated after other high-profile shootings faltered after national attention veered elsewhere.

Biden held the first meeting of the task force Thursday, gathering several cabinet members and White House officials with a group of local law enforcement leaders. In remarks before the meeting, the vice president noted his work on the 1994 crime bill, which banned the sale of some assault weapons, and said he would again be working closely with police groups to craft proposals.

“What I think the public has learned about you is you have a much more holistic view of how to deal with violence on our streets and in our country that you’re ever given credit for,” Biden told the law enforcement officials. “I want to hear your views because, for anything to get done, we’re going to need your advocacy.”

richard.simon@latimes.com

Twitter: @richardsimon11

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Twitter: @khennessey

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Net Neutrality, Data-Cap Legislation Lands in Senate

A proposal forbidding internet service providers from turning the data-cap meter off to grant a so-called internet fast lane to preferential online services was introduced Thursday in the Senate.

The bill by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) comes a week after a report found that the institutionalization of data caps by ISPs is geared toward profiteering rather than the stated goal of managing traffic congestion.

“A covered internet service provider may not, for purposes of measuring data usage or otherwise, provide preferential treatment of data that is based on the source or the content of the data,” (.pdf) Wyden’s bill reads.

Ars Technica noted that Comcast had not counted its Xbox video-streaming app against its data caps. Comcast, however, no longer enforces its data caps.

“Data caps create challenges for consumers and run the risk of undermining innovation in the digital economy if they are imposed bluntly and not designed to truly manage network congestion,” Wyden said in a statement.

Among other things, the proposal demands a standardized method for measuring data and also questions data caps altogether. That’s because it grants the Federal Communications Commission with regulatory power over data-cap pricing.

“The commission shall evaluate a data cap proposed by an internet service provider to determine whether the data cap functions to reasonably limit network congestion in a manner that does not unnecessarily discourage use of the internet,” according to the proposal.

That means internet companies might have to explain why the caps are imposed at low-traffic times, such as in the middle of the night.

The proposal was immediately applauded by the digital rights group Public Knowledge.

“Data caps create an artificial scarcity in the broadband market that limits consumer choice and hinders the creation of new competitive content online,” Christopher Lewis, the group’s vice president, said in a statement.

For the moment, the proposal is going nowhere as lawmakers are expected to adjourn for the year in the coming days.

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World Music Awards postponed due to visa issues, Newtown tragedy

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The World Music Awards was postponed on Thursday due to “logistical and multiple visa issue,” organizers said, two days before the event was scheduled to be held in Miami.

Event producers John Martinotti and Marcol International said in a statement that the December 22 awards ceremony also was being delayed in the wake of the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, last week.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience but this decision had to be made due to logistical and multiple visa issues and in view of this week’s national mourning. Fans have been a great support to the artists and have voted online in huge numbers,” the producers said in a statement.

The winners in categories ranging from world’s best song, world’s best artists and entertainer of the year, are picked by fans who vote online. The statement said that votes will continue to be collected until a new date is set for the show.

This year’s nominees include Usher, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Chris Brown. Past winners include Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson.

The awards ceremony, founded in 1989 and hosted by Monaco’s Prince Albert II, has primarily taken place in Monte Carlo and proceeds from the show go to charity. This year, show producers decided to move it to Marlins Park Stadium in Miami.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Eric Kelsey)

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Obama makes gun control top priority

WASHINGTON — President Obama committed himself to placing gun control at the top of his second-term agenda, redoubling his intention to tackle the problem of gun violence in spite of daunting political obstacles that have frustrated similar efforts for years.

Appearing before reporters in the White House briefing room Wednesday, Obama sought to erase any doubts that he is prepared to stake his prestige on combating what he called an "epidemic of gun violence." Although he spoke in the aftermath of the massacre last Friday at a Connecticut elementary school, he placed the issue in a broader context, specifically mentioning people killed since then in the "lesser-known tragedies that visit small towns and big cities all across America every day."

As a first step, Obama gave Vice President Joe Biden the task of coming up with specific proposals before the end of next month. Working with Cabinet members and outside organizations, Biden is to come up with ideas that probably will include actions Obama can take administratively to bypass potential clashes with Congress.

The working group is expected to examine not only proposals for gun control measures, but also steps to improve services for the mentally ill and to push back against violence in popular culture.

Obama promised that he would detail "very specific" initiatives early next year, including in his State of the Union address, and sought to rebut the idea that Biden's group would be another ineffective Washington commission.

Biden has long experience with the politics of gun control from his service as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 1980s and 1990s. But neither his familiarity with the issue nor Obama's determination to press forward changes the extremely difficult nature of the fight that lies ahead for them.

In many respects, the climate for congressional action is less favorable than it was in 1994, when President Clinton's exhaustive personal lobbying campaign for a ban on assault-style weapons managed to prevail in a House of Representatives that Democrats controlled by two votes.

Despite an uptick in the aftermath of the latest tragedy, public support for stricter gun control laws remains significantly lower today than in the 1990s, according to polls.

"The politics are absolutely gruesome," said Paul Begala, a former Clinton advisor who worked to reelect Obama in 2012. "In many areas, the country is moving left, certainly in terms of gay rights, and on issues like marijuana. But from the time I was working with President Clinton, we've moved significantly to the right on gun control."

Patrick J. Griffin, a Clinton White House aide who was at the center of the fight over the 1994 crime bill, called it "probably tougher than healthcare" to get through Congress.

A handful of pro-gun-rights Democrats have stepped forward this week to suggest the need for tougher gun laws or at least a need for what Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia called "a conversation on everything."

Republicans, however, have largely remained silent, making the Republican-controlled House of Representatives a particular stumbling block.

Asked whether GOP lawmakers would soon speak out in favor of tighter laws, Republican strategist Whit Ayres said no, "because they don't believe that more gun laws are likely to stop gun violence committed by mentally ill people."

Obama alluded to the daunting legislative math he faces by noting that many House Republicans represent districts that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney won last month. Indeed, a majority of the new House — 219 representatives out of 435 — will be Republicans from districts that Obama failed to carry, noted David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

In his remarks, Obama pledged to push ahead regardless of that political arithmetic. "The fact that this problem is complex can no longer be an excuse for doing nothing," he said.

He called on the new Congress to vote "in a timely manner" on banning the sale of assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips and on a requirement for background checks before all gun purchases. Those proposals, which Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and others plan to introduce as early as next month, have repeatedly been blocked in Congress by the gun lobby and its allies.

The president also said the Senate should confirm a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a position that has been filled on an interim basis over the last six years because of opposition from gun rights forces.

Obama did not preview how he might try to prod reluctant lawmakers, but employing the memory of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims will probably be one technique.

Progress could be made "if those of us who were sent here to serve the public trust can summon even one tiny iota of the courage those teachers, that principal, in Newtown summoned on Friday," he said.

At one point, a reporter suggested that the president had essentially been absent from the gun control fight over the last four years, through repeated episodes of mass gun violence.

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Thingiverse Removes (Most) Printable Gun Parts

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Thingiverse is cracking down on 3-D printable gun parts.

When the team at Wiki Weapon set the internet on fire by announcing a 3-D printable gun, what they’d actually accomplished was creating a barely working part for an AR-15 assault rifle, the same gun platform that Adam Lanza used in Sandy Hook Elementary. The plans for that part were available through yesterday on Thingiverse MakerBot’s repository for 3-D printable plans. Today, the files have been taken down.

The AR-15 part had been uploaded by gunsmith Michael Guslick, who goes by HaveBlue on the site. The part has been available since before Thingiverse changed its terms of service to forbid weapons and weapon parts.

Thingiverse’s latest Terms of Service say, “You agree not to use the Site or Services to collect, upload, transmit, display, or distribute any User Content … (ii) that … promotes illegal activities or contributes to the creation of weapons.”

In a statement obtained by CNET, MakerBot’s attorney said that “Thingiverse has always been, and is currently, evolving … as is the company as it pursues innovation and growth. We have always had the discretion to take action for policy violations. Recent events served as the impetus here to take immediate action (and there were several) and reiterate or emphasize the site’s focus on creative empowerment for products that have a positive impact.”

Policing those terms of service is a challenging task, and a quick search reveals several borderline cases that remain online.

There is a custom grip for the Ruger LCP pistol uploaded by user Pawl. One user who has printed the part indicates that it has a tendency for the clip attaching it to the gun to break off, while another asks for a version then can be re-sized for a Glock.

User jballard‘s projects include blueprints for an M-16 Receiver and a Colt M1911A1 Pistol, along with a Picatinny Rail iPhone Mount. “With this Iphone mount you will no longer miss a text or a call while you are hunting, ‘plinking,’ or just having a good ol time!” reads the description, “I have shown it mounted to the top of an AR-15 Reciever, it can also be mounted on the botom of pistol rails and any other type of picatinny accesory rails you can find!”

Jballard seems aware of the line they are toeing, because they also offer a Weaponized Fork. “This is a fork. You can eat with it. You can stab things with it. You can launch it with a device made to launch such objects. This thing has changed the world, can you?”

Meanwhile, there are a lot of prop weapons like this revolver from user Renosis, and a galaxy of plans for Nerf weapons and attachments (including a Nerf claymore).

The link between DIYers and gun enthusiasm runs deep. As Christopher Mims reports, the AR-15 that Lanza used isn’t so much a gun as a highly customizable weapon platform and a consumer toy with a whole industry of aftermarket parts and DIY upgrades.

For a glimpse into that world, you can visit AR15.com, which features a thread with close to 4,000 posts of members swapping photos of their beloved weapon with the most recent additions having been made today.

A tour through that thread reveals a culture of guns fandom that is as wide as America. There are guns with Star Wars insignia, guns with jokes about the zombie apocalypse, pink guns, minimalist machined guns, and baroque monsters covered in bells and whistles and laser sights. Each one was lovingly built and detailed with the same care given to modding a hot rod, custom-building a PC, or creating a 3-D printed Yoda head.

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