Jobs Had Liver Transplant – WSJ.com

By John C Abell
June 20, 2009 |
12:48 am |
Categories: People

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(UPDATE, with details and background)

Steve Jobs has had a liver transplant during his medical leave but is expected to return to work later this month as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. His medical leave was announced to a shocked Apple community in January.

The Journal cited no source in particular for its story, and got no direct comment from Apple. It quoted a “a person familiar with the thinking at Apple” that Jobs would have a diminished schedule at first when he returns to work and also reported that “At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery” as part of an agreement Jobs made with the board before he went on leave.

The Journal said the surgery took place two months ago in Tennessee, where there are three facilities that can perform such a procedure, there is no residency requirement and the wait is among the shortest in the country. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the transplant network in the United States, the five-year survival rate for liver-transplants patients is generally between about 73 percent and 76 percent.

The subject of Jobs’ health has been a front-burner item since he announced, on Aug. 1, 2004, that he had undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer. Over the course of last year, it was apparent that he was losing weight, but neither he nor the company would directly address this painfully evident fact.

On January 5, Jobs told the Apple community in an open letter that the cause of his weight loss was not a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer but a treatable hormone imbalance. In that letter, Jobs said he had already begun a “relatively simple and straightforward” treatment for the condition, that he would remain on as Apple CEO during his recovery, and that he expected to be noticeably improved in a matter of months.

Nine days later Jobs dropped the other shoe.

“… during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought,” he wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees. “In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”

Since then, COO Tim Cook has been running day-to-day operations, though the Journal has reported that Jobs was maintaining a “firm grip” on the company and involving himself in projects of his choosing, and that he had also shown up at work from time to time.

Apple shares have improved in Jobs’ absence. AAPL closed at $85.33 on Jan. 15, the first day of trading after he announced his medical leave, and closed at $139.48 on Friday, the day the new iPhone 3 GS went on sale — about a 63 percent gain. During the same period, the NASDAQ has declined by 4 percent. Without Jobs fully at the helm, the company held a successful if lackluster WWDC and launched the third-generation iPhone.

Jobs Had Liver Transplant – WSJ.com

Tesla Motors’ Musk: Let Me Run Detroit

By Eliot Van Buskirk
June 15, 2009 |
12:55 pm |

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Elon Musk has tackled electric cars, space ships and modular renewable energy stations. Now he wants a real challenge: running Detroit.

“When the mess gets sorted out, I’d like to have a conversation with whoever’s in charge at the time — the car czar or whoever — and say ‘I’d like to run your plants, if you don’t mind,’” Musk said, starting that conversation Monday at Wired’s first-ever business conference, Disruptive by Design in Manhattan.

What would he do? Hint: he doesn’t think much of namby-pamby hybrids. In the future, Musk said, only electric cars will make sense.

He characterized cars like the Toyota Prius as “splitting the baby” in the style of King Solomon — a compromise that delivers neither the perfect gas-driven or electric-driven experience, due to the duplicate equipment required to harness dual energy sources.

“[The electric car] is an inevitable thing,” Musk said in a conversation with Wired editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. “The reason I’m putting so much time and effort into helping create Tesla is because I’m hoping we can accelerate that transformation.”

The Paypal co-founder, who made nearly $200 million when eBay acquired that company in 2002, now focuses his energy on three quasar-hot topics: electric cars (at Tesla, the only company that currently sells one), space exploration (at Space-X, which won the contract to replace the Space Shuttle), and new energy technologies (at Solar City, which builds solar power systems for single-family homes and corporations).

Gossip mongers hoping for dirt in the ongoing lawsuit between Musk and Tesla founder Martin Eberhard will have to look elsewhere — with one possible exception.

Part of the problem with Detroit, he says, is the union system. “It’s not out of the question to have unions, but if there’s going to be a union, they’d better understand that they’re on the same side as the company,” he added. “I’m against having a two-class system where you’ve got the workers and then the managers, sort of like nobles and peasants…

“Most of our experienced factory workers come from unionized environments, and we asked them what benefit did they see in unions,” he added. “They said, ‘Well, if their boss was an asshole, they had recourse.’

“I said, ‘Let’s make a rule: There will be no assholes.’ I fired someone for being an asshole. And I only had to do that once, actually.”

Pictured: Chris Anderson (l) and Elon Musk (r). Photo by James Moran

Full coverage of Wired’s Disruptive by Design Conference

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original article:

PENTAGON DEFINED LEGAL PROTEST AS TERRORISM

ACLU – The Department of Defense considers protests an example of “low-level terrorism” according to an exam DOD employees were required to take this year. According to a whistleblower that came to the ACLU, a multiple choice question on the 2009 DOD Anti-terrorism Awareness training exam asked which of the following was an example of low-level terrorism:

– Attacking the Pentagon
– Improvised Explosive Devices
– Hate crimes against racial groups
– Protests

The ACLU fired off a letter to Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, demanding that the materials be corrected immediately. The DOD responded in an interview with Fox News, admitting the question was on the test that more than 1,500 department employees took.

“They should have made it clearer there’s a clear difference between illegal violent demonstrations and peaceful, constitutionally protected protests,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said on Thursday.

The DOD agreed to remove the question from the test and to send an e-mail to each employee that took it “explaining the error and the distinction between lawful protests and unlawful violent protests.”

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON YAWNING

News release – We are proud to announce the First International Conference on Yawning. These two days meetings bring together leading international speakers to review both emerging information and its convergence with current understanding. . .

Yawning is a very common and phylogenetically old behavioral event that occurs in vertebrates under different conditions. Yawning appeared very early in vertebrate history, with contagiousness evolving much later.

Yawning has many consequences, including opening of the eustachian tube, tearing, inflating the lungs, stretching and signaling drowsiness, but these may be incidental to its primal function which may something as unanticipated as sculpting the articulation of the gaping jaw during embryonic development.

Selecting a single function from the many options may be an unrealistic goal. However, reviewing the disparate facts, we may be impressed that yawning is associated with the change of behavioral state wakefulness to sleep, sleep to wakefulness, alertness to boredom, threshold of attack, sexual arousal, switching from one kind of activity to another.

The speakers list includes Wolter Seuntjens, who spent more than two decades in graduate school studying yawning. . .