Dodgers near TV rights deal with Time Warner Cable

The Los Angeles Dodgers have negotiated a long-term television deal that would pay the team $7 billion to $8 billion, a move that would help cover its recent spending spree and quiet critics who scoffed at the record $2.15-billion purchase price paid by the new owner, Guggenheim Partners.

The expected 20-year agreement with Time Warner Cable could be announced this week, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked that their names not be used because the deal has not yet closed.

The arrangement is bad news for rival News Corp's Fox Sports unit, whose channel Prime Ticket holds cable TV rights to the Dodgers through the upcoming season. Fox will pay $39 million this season — a fraction of what Time Warner Cable would pay under the new contract — and found the proposed price tag too high, people inside News Corp. said.

And the pact would probably mean bigger pay TV bills — even for those who don't watch Dodgers baseball, potentially leading to a backlash against the team and Time Warner Cable.

Under the terms of the proposed contract, Guggenheim would own a Dodgers-dedicated television channel that would start carrying games in 2014, said the people with knowledge of the pact. Time Warner Cable would manage much of the channel's operations and handle distribution to other pay TV companies, including DirecTV and Cox Cable.

The Dodgers' move to control their own channel is driven in part by a desire to pocket as much money as possible while still abiding by Major League Baseball's revenue-sharing agreement — which requires that 34% of each team's locally generated revenue, most of it from TV rights and ticket sales, be contributed to a pool for other teams.

Mark Walter, the Dodgers' controlling owner, was believed to be sharing details of the tentative deal Tuesday with Major League Baseball officials. Walter has negotiated extensively with the league over how much of the television money must be shared with the other 29 Major League teams.

The Dodgers' revenue-sharing bill could range from $1 billion to $2.7 billion, based on the structure of the deal.

The new channel would also give the Dodgers the opportunity to expand team-related programming throughout the day, as the Los Angeles Lakers do on their Time Warner Cable channel.

"If you look at what the Lakers are doing, they're communicating with their client base," Dodgers owner and Guggenheim Partners President Todd Boehly told The Times last fall. "It's fantastic. It becomes self-fulfilling. If you start interacting with the team in all-new ways, you're going to love the team even more."

Boehly was not available for comment.

The addition of a new Dodgers network would bring the number of local sports channels in Los Angeles to six, the most in any major city in the United States. Besides Time Warner Cable's SportsNet and Deportes, and Fox's Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, the Pac-12 Conference also has its own channel here. Fox Sports West carries Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Angels games.

"That's too many channels," said Marc Ganis, a sports industry consultant in Chicago. "I can't imagine that is sustainable on a long-term basis."

Sports channels aren't cheap. Time Warner Cable already charges other cable and satellite operators close to $4 a month a subscriber for SportsNet. The Dodgers and Time Warner Cable are expected to seek as much as $5 for their new channel, which is double what Fox charges for Prime Ticket, according to industry consulting firm SNL Kagan.

Those price hikes are generally passed on to consumers, who may resent the increase.

"Why do I have to pay for the Dodgers when I am not a Dodgers fan?" said Laura Burnes, a mother of two who lives in Orange County. "I don't want to see my cable costs go up any more."

The cost for sports has skyrocketed over the last decade. That's partly because the content is seen as "DVR proof." It is watched live by viewers, which makes it more valuable to advertisers and networks than sitcoms and dramas, which are often recorded and viewed later by people who skip ads.

But non-sports fans and pay TV companies are increasingly frustrated at having to pick up the tab for big sports deals. There have been calls to sell sports channels "a la carte," or separately from other programming.

The Dodger agreement with Time Warner Cable may be a tipping point.

"That is the solution everyone should be looking at seriously," said Derek Chang, a former senior executive at satellite broadcaster DirecTV. Such a move, he added, may be the only way to lower the cost of TV sports. "Ultimately the market for fees would then reset."

The Dodger deal marks the second time in less than two years that Time Warner Cable has outbid Fox Sports for a Los Angeles franchise. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $3.6 billion for a 20-year accord with the Lakers, which had been on Fox Sports West.

Time Warner Cable used the Lakers to create SportsNet and Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel.

The two media titans have also done battle on other turf.

Last year, Fox acquired an ownership stake in Yes, the New York sports channel that is home to the Yankees. In 2011, Fox outbid Time Warner Cable for rights to the San Diego Padres.

Losing the Dodgers will hurt Fox's Prime Ticket, but the company still has rights to the Los Angeles Clippers and Anaheim Ducks. A Fox executive said there are no plans to consolidate Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, which besides the Angels also has rights to the Stanley Cup champion Kings.

Distributors will press for a reduction in the fee for Prime Ticket without the Dodgers, but it's not a sure thing they'll get it, Ganis said. When New York's MSG channel lost rights to the Yankees, the subscription fee did not decrease.

joe.flint@latimes.com

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

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Why Subtraction Is the Hardest Math in Product Design

Simple doesn’t just sell, it sticks. Simple made hits of the Nest thermostat, Fitbit, and TiVo. Simple brought Apple back from the dead. It’s why you have Netflix. The Fisher Space Pen, the Swiss Army Knife, and the Rolex Oyster Perpetual are some of our most enduring products. All are marvels of simplicity.

Yet while many mechanical marvels of simplicity remain true to their original form, most electronic ones do not.

Travel back in time to use your parents’ first microwave and you’ll likely see a box with three buttons (High, Medium, Low) and a timer dial. By contrast, one of LG’s current models boasts 33 buttons. Do I hit Auto Defrost or Express Defrost? And what the hell is Less/More? None of these make my popcorn pop faster or taste better. And it’s not easier to use. Why do products become more complex as they evolve?

“Simplicity is about subtraction,” says Mike Monteiro, author of Design Is a Job. “We live in a culture of consumption, where quality is associated with more. So designers and manufacturers tend to believe that to succeed you have to provide more. What if Microsoft announced that the next version of Office had 75 percent less functionality? It would be usable! But there’s no way marketing would let them get away with that.”

Take Apple. Simplicity saved the company. Starting with the iMac, it rolled out hit after simple hit: OS X, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But as it grew into a behemoth, it allowed complexity to creep in. You can see it in iOS apps like Newsstand, which forces you to open a cheesy faux-wood bookcase before you can fire up the newspaper you actually want. A far worse example is iTunes. The new “simplified” version, iTunes 11, is fast but still has a baffling interface with a bevy of needless features. Its core function (playing music!) is lost in the shuffle. There is hope for Apple, though: The recent appointment of its minimalist-design guru Jony Ive as “human interface” chief is sure to mean re-simplified wares.

It’s no different at Google, which was also built on simple. Google won a decade of dominance with its sparse search page. Simplicity made Google a verb. But when Facebook got into its head, Google reacted by cluttering up its search page with features and buttons most people will never use. Worse, it junked up its results. A search for “pizza,” for instance, litters the page with ads, Google services like Zagat, and even news about pizza, none of which is clearly delineated from the actual search results.

As Apple and Google wrinkle into complexity, the doors are opened to newer, leaner rivals, like streaming music service Rdio or search engine upstart DuckDuckGo, both of which have clean interfaces that have won them passionate followings.

The ultimate lesson here may come from Microsoft. When it was time to roll out a new iteration of Windows, the company did something brave: It released a fundamentally different version of its flagship product. Windows 8 has a stripped-down interface, and full-screen apps run bereft of menus and ugly buttons. Simplified.

Well, half of it is. The other half is the traditional desktop. Want to run your existing Windows software? You’ll have to toggle back to that desktop. It’s confusing—jarring, even. By failing to commit, Microsoft made its OS more complicated, not less.

Simplicity is actually quite simple. It requires paring things away when market forces tell you to add. It means removing layers rather than adding them. In short, all it takes is a bit of courage.

Email: mat_honan@wired.com

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Actress Lake Bell finds her directorial voice “In A World”

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) – In a world where men rule the voice-over industry, actress Lake Bell brings a tale of women versus men and old versus new in her directorial debut comedy.

“In A World,” which premiered at the Sundance Film festival this week, follows voice-over artist Carol (Bell) attempting to follow in the daunting footsteps of her father (Fred Melamed), a famous and respected voice who is struggling to stay relevant as new talent emerges.

Written and directed by Bell, 33, who is best known for supporting roles in movies such as “No Strings Attached” and “What Happens in Vegas,” “In A World” is a quirky comedy with an unlikely heroine.

Bell talked to Reuters about the struggles of being in the voice-over world, her disdain for women with “sexy baby” voices, and what her superhero power would be.

Q: What drew you to the voice-over world for your film?

A: “I always envisioned that I was going to be one of the great voice-over artists. I thought I was going to kill it when I got to Hollywood. Since I was a kid, I loved accents, I collected them … I would manipulate my voice to make people laugh all the time. I liked this idea of being a blind voice – you could be any ethnicity, you could be from any country, you could be any race. I thought it was so cool that you wouldn’t be judged by who you are.”

Q: Your character, Carol, has to struggle with being a woman trying to break into the male-dominated world. Is that echoing the real-life industry?

A: “I started getting into the idea of the omniscient voice, the people who announce and tell you what to buy or how you should think about things, they help form your opinions. These random people from the sky, they always were male, and I thought it was an interesting subject to attack because why aren’t there any ladies? What are we, not omniscient? Are we not God?”

Q: How much of your own career struggles are reflected in Carol’s story?

A: “What’s interesting about Carol’s message is that she is a woman trying to find her voice, literally and also figuratively. As a filmmaker, I’m definitely embarking on this really beautiful journey of finding what my comedic voice is or what my filmic voice is.

“I’m lucky enough to have friends who took a chance on me and be in this film with me and respect me enough to let me direct them to do something different than maybe they’ve ever done before. There’s definitely parallels in feeling like I’m finding my own voice.”

Q: Was this an autobiographical film for you?

A: “It’s not anymore. Draft one is autobiographical, but by draft 25, it’s something else after so many rewrites, it takes on its own life. That’s what’s so cool about writing, you never know where it’s going to lead. I often like to write when I’m acting in something else because then I can show up and be part of the machine and be around creative people, and then come home and go off into different worlds in my head.”

Q: What do you want people to take away from watching this?

A: “I would hope in a fantasy world that the message is, people would somehow become aware of their own voice and respect it, because it’s a privilege. Women are plagued by the “sexy baby” vocal virus that is taken on, that is rampant in this nation. I just think that people should take themselves more seriously and give themselves a little more credit.”

Q: Do you have a dream role you’d like to play?

A: “The dream role is that I’m a superhero. I want to be a superhero … I want to have a superhero outfit because I like dressing up a lot. That would be fun.”

Q: What would your superhero power be?

A: “Right now, it’d be quelling the ‘sexy baby’ (voices) of the world and extinguishing them.”

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Christopher Wilson)

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Well: Have a Health Question? Ask Well

The Well section of The New York Times is starting a new online featured called Ask Well. If you have a question about fitness, nutrition, illness or family health, the staff of The New York Times Health section is ready to help you find the answer.

How do you solve the problem of back pain caused by sitting in an office chair all day? Do you still need the flu shot even if you’ve had the flu? What’s the best way to heal tennis elbow? Those are some of the questions we’ve already answered in Ask Well.

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Tara Parker-Pope speaks about Ask Well.

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All questions submitted to Ask Well will be reviewed by the health staff. We’ll post selected questions and let readers vote on those they would most like to see answered. You can ask a question, vote for your favorites and read answered questions on the Ask Well Questions Page.

While Ask Well is not a source for personal medical advice (only your doctor can give you that), we can offer readers health information from the experts and guide you to various resources to help you make informed decisions. So let’s get started. Tell us what’s on your mind, and Ask Well will provide the answers.

Ask Well

Your health questions answered by Times journalists and experts.

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Union Membership Drops Despite Job Growth

The percentage of American workers in labor unions took an unusually large fall in 2012, dropping to 11.3 percent last year from 11.8 percent in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Wednesday.

 The total number of union members also took an unusually big drop, by 400,000, to 14.366 million, even though overall employment in the United States rose by 2.4 million nationwide last year, the B.L.S. said.

 The declines came during a period when the nation’s labor unions have been on the defensive. Wisconsin enacted a law in 2011 that curbed the collective bargaining rights of most of the state’s government employees, while Indiana and Michigan passed “right to work” laws last year that are likely to encourage more private-sector workers to drop their union membership so they do not have to pay any union dues or fees.

 The Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership for private-sector workers dropped to 6.6 last year, from 6.9 percent in 2011 – a drop that has caused some labor leaders to voice fears that unions are steadily fading into irrelevance for many large employers.

The bureau said union membership among public-sector employees fell to 35.9 percent in 2012, from 37.0 percent the previous year, and there were more union members in the public sector — 7.3 million employees – than in the private sector, 7 million.

The number of union members is down from 17.7 million in 1983, when 20.1 percent of the nation’s workers belonged to labor unions.

In recent months, however, there has been an uptick in union activity, as evidenced by labor protests at Walmart stores across the nation in November and one-day strike by fast food workers in New York City last month. In both those job actions, the workers were protesting what they said were low wages and meager benefits. But union officials acknowledge that it is often hard, in the face of intense employer resistance and employee fears of layoffs, to persuade a majority of workers at a big-box store or other workplaces to vote to unionize.

  Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main union federation, responded to the labor report in a statement, saying, “Working women and men urgently need a voice on the job today, but the sad truth is that it has become more difficult for them to have one, as today’s figures on union membership demonstrate.”

Among individual states, North Carolina had the lowest unionization rate, 2.9 percent, the B.L.S. report said, followed by Arkansas at 3.2 percent and South Carolina at 3.3 percent. New York had the highest unionization rate, 23.2 percent, followed by Alaska at 22.4 percent and Hawaii at  21.6 percent.

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County official calls car leasing contract procedure 'embarrassing'

Auditors reviewing a $1.75-million car leasing contract given to a company with a politically connected lobbying firm found that Los Angeles County officials had failed to create a "truly competitive" process, but that there was no evidence of improper influence.

Investigators with the county auditor-controller's office reviewed the Enterprise Rent-a-Car contract at the request of Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. A report by KCET-TV had raised questions about the way the business was awarded.

Enterprise was given a sole-source, five-year deal in March to provide 60 leased  vehicles to the county's Community Development Commission and to maintain the agency's existing fleet. Commission staff projected that outsourcing the fleet services would save about $300,000 a year.

The Nov. 28 report on KCET's "SoCal Connected" focused on the lobbying firm Englander Knabe & Allen and questioned whether its clients — including Enterprise — got an unfair advantage because partner Matt Knabe is the son of county Supervisor Don Knabe, who voted along with all the other supervisors to award the contract.

Both Knabes have said that their relationship has never posed a conflict, and a spokesman for the Englander firm has said Matt Knabe never lobbies his father directly.

The auditor-controller found no evidence of attempts to influence the rental car award. Matt Knabe told investigators that no one from his firm had lobbied on the contract, and the commission's executive director said he was "100% confident" the supervisor's son did not influence the process.

"The report shows that Matt acted professionally and used no undue influence in his dealings with the county," said Englander partner Eric Rose.

But the review did find that county staff did an "inadequate" job of trying to find other potential bidders.

Asked by KCET what vendors had been contacted and given a chance to compete for the business, a county analyst created a list to make it appear the department had reached out to 50 companies. In fact, only 16 firms had been contacted, auditors found. Enterprise was the only company that responded to the email request, and staff made no follow-up attempt to contact the other firms.

According to the auditor's report, the count of 50 vendors was originally used as a "place holder" in a template document and never corrected. By the time the contract was awarded, the contract analyst "felt he could not correct the number without embarrassment."

Investigators also found that the agency violated its own policy by not advertising the contract on the commission's or the county's websites, and that the contract should have gone through a full bidding process.

In addition, several vendors that contract officials emailed to invite interest had no "realistic potential" to provide a leased fleet to the county in the first place, the review concluded.

Investigators wrote that they couldn't determine whether the commission could have gotten a better deal but said "the potential for greater savings from a more competitive process appears to be plausible."

County auditor-controller Wendy Watanabe called the situation "embarrassing" but chalked up the issues to incompetence rather than intentional steering.

"I think they got lazy, they took a shortcut, and they didn't think it was that big of a deal," she said.

Watanabe said the investigation had focused on the Enterprise contract, so she could not say whether there was a broader issue with the agency's contracting process.

Commission representatives could not be reached Monday. The commission was slated to respond to the report's findings within 30 days.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

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Strut Your Digital Design Skills in Wired's 3-D Print-Off

No need to buy a gift box when you can 3-D print one. Design: Alia Hasan

3-D printing puts manufacturing on designers’ desks, at least for those who have access to a desktop printer. For the rest of us, Wired is inviting you to show off your 3-D design skills in our 3-D print-off. Send us your original, printable designs; we’ll post the submissions on our site, then select the ten coolest to print through Shapeways.com in one of many of their printable materials and feature in a photo gallery. Show the world your masterpiece, from your name in three-dimensional block letters, to a highly-detailed space demon sculpture, to a clever wall hanger for your iPad. There are no restrictions.

How Do I Design a 3-D Object? +We’ll show you how with tip-filled articles over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, for those who don’t have previous experience with modeling or CAD software, these free online and app-based tools can get you designing in minutes:

• Tinkercad — A web-based design application that allows you to access a variety of tools to draw shapes, then push or pull them to introduce depth. Simple to use. See our tips here.


• Shapeways Creator — Wide variety of tools for easy design creation. Includes 2D to 3D, an application that lets you take any black and white image (including text) and give it depth to create a digital object. Also, tools for making vases, figurines, and jewelry.


• Autodesk 123D Design — Entry-level iOS, Mac, PC, and browser-based tool for design, from one of the biggest companies. Includes a built-in library of pre-made shapes and objects that you can combine and modify. Our review.


• Sketchup — A slightly more advanced CAD software that is still accessible for beginners. Has a slightly longer learning curve than the other apps. See our tips here.

Submit Your Design

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Sundance 2013: Relativity Acquires Joseph Gordon-Levitt-Directed ‘Don Jon’s Addiction’

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Relativity Media has acquired Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut “Don Jon’s Addiction” for $ 4 million, an individual with knowledge of the deal told TheWrap.

The film premiered at Sundance on Friday to great fanfare, and several distributors have been bidding for it.

Relativity won out with a substantial financial commitment and plans for a wide theatrical release this year. It will support the movie with prints and advertising, with the commitment at $ 25 million, an individual told TheWrap.

That would make it the biggest deal from the festival so far.

The film follows Gordon-Levitt – who also wrote and stars in the film – as a lady’s man with a porn addiction. Dissatisfied with his life, he sets out on a Don Juan-esque quest to find love and a more satisfying sex life.

Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Rob Brown, Tony Danza and Glenne Headly also star in the film.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well Pets: Holly the Cat's Incredible Journey

Nobody knows how it happened: an indoor housecat who got lost on a family excursion managing, after two months and about 200 miles, to return to her hometown.

Even scientists are baffled by how Holly, a 4-year-old tortoiseshell who in early November became separated from Jacob and Bonnie Richter at an R.V. rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., appeared on New Year’s Eve — staggering, weak and emaciated — in a backyard about a mile from the Richters’ house in West Palm Beach.

“Are you sure it’s the same cat?” wondered John Bradshaw, director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute. In other cases, he has suspected, “the cats are just strays, and the people have got kind of a mental justification for expecting it to be the same cat.”

But Holly not only had distinctive black-and-brown harlequin patterns on her fur, but also an implanted microchip to identify her.

“I really believe these stories, but they’re just hard to explain,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado. “Maybe being street-smart, maybe reading animal cues, maybe being able to read cars, maybe being a good hunter. I have no data for this.”

There is, in fact, little scientific dogma on cat navigation. Migratory animals like birds, turtles and insects have been studied more closely, and use magnetic fields, olfactory cues, or orientation by the sun.

Scientists say it is more common, although still rare, to hear of dogs returning home, perhaps suggesting, Dr. Bradshaw said, that they have inherited wolves’ ability to navigate using magnetic clues. But it’s also possible that dogs get taken on more family trips, and that lost dogs are more easily noticed or helped by people along the way.

Cats navigate well around familiar landscapes, memorizing locations by sight and smell, and easily figuring out shortcuts, Dr. Bradshaw said.

Strange, faraway locations would seem problematic, although he and Patrick Bateson, a behavioral biologist at Cambridge University, say that cats can sense smells across long distances. “Let’s say they associate the smell of pine with wind coming from the north, so they move in a southerly direction,” Dr. Bateson said.

Peter Borchelt, a New York animal behaviorist, wondered if Holly followed the Florida coast by sight or sound, tracking Interstate 95 and deciding to “keep that to the right and keep the ocean to the left.”

But, he said, “nobody’s going to do an experiment and take a bunch of cats in different directions and see which ones get home.”

The closest, said Roger Tabor, a British cat biologist, may have been a 1954 study in Germany in which cats placed in a covered circular maze with exits every 15 degrees most often exited in the direction of their homes, but more reliably if their homes were less than five kilometers away.

New research by the National Geographic and University of Georgia’s Kitty Cams Project, using video footage from 55 pet cats wearing video cameras on their collars, suggests cat behavior is exceedingly complex.

For example, the Kitty Cams study found that four of the cats were two-timing their owners, visiting other homes for food and affection. Not every cat, it seems, shares Holly’s loyalty.

KittyCams also showed most of the cats engaging in risky behavior, including crossing roads and “eating and drinking substances away from home,” risks Holly undoubtedly experienced and seems lucky to have survived.

But there have been other cats who made unexpected comebacks.

“It’s actually happened to me,” said Jackson Galaxy, a cat behaviorist who hosts “My Cat From Hell” on Animal Planet. While living in Boulder, Colo., he moved across town, whereupon his indoor cat, Rabbi, fled and appeared 10 days later at the previous house, “walking five miles through an area he had never been before,” Mr. Galaxy said.

Professor Tabor cited longer-distance reports he considered credible: Murka, a tortoiseshell in Russia, traveling about 325 miles home to Moscow from her owner’s mother’s house in Voronezh in 1989; Ninja, who returned to Farmington, Utah, in 1997, a year after her family moved from there to Mill Creek, Wash.; and Howie, an indoor Persian cat in Australia who in 1978 ran away from relatives his vacationing family left him with and eventually traveled 1,000 miles to his family’s home.

Professor Tabor also said a Siamese in the English village of Black Notley repeatedly hopped a train, disembarked at White Notley, and walked several miles back to Black Notley.

Still, explaining such journeys is not black and white.

In the Florida case, one glimpse through the factual fog comes on the little cat’s feet. While Dr. Bradshaw speculated Holly might have gotten a lift, perhaps sneaking under the hood of a truck heading down I-95, her paws suggest she was not driven all the way, nor did Holly go lightly.

“Her pads on her feet were bleeding,” Ms. Richter said. “Her claws are worn weird. The front ones are really sharp, the back ones worn down to nothing.”

Scientists say that is consistent with a long walk, since back feet provide propulsion, while front claws engage in activities like tearing. The Richters also said Holly had gone from 13.5 to 7 pounds.

Holly hardly seemed an adventurous wanderer, though her background might have given her a genetic advantage. Her mother was a feral cat roaming the Richters’ mobile home park, and Holly was born inside somebody’s air-conditioner, Ms. Richter said. When, at about six weeks old, Holly padded into their carport and jumped into the lap of Mr. Richter’s mother, there were “scars on her belly from when the air conditioner was turned on,” Ms. Richter said.

Scientists say that such early experience was too brief to explain how Holly might have been comfortable in the wild — after all, she spent most of her life as an indoor cat, except for occasionally running outside to chase lizards. But it might imply innate personality traits like nimbleness or toughness.

“You’ve got these real variations in temperament,” Dr. Bekoff said. “Fish can be shy or bold; there seem to be shy and bold spiders. This cat, it could be she has the personality of a survivor.”

He said being an indoor cat would not extinguish survivalist behaviors, like hunting mice or being aware of the sun’s orientation.

The Richters — Bonnie, 63, a retired nurse, and Jacob, 70, a retired airline mechanics’ supervisor and accomplished bowler — began traveling with Holly only last year, and she easily tolerated a hotel, a cabin or the R.V.

But during the Good Sam R.V. Rally in Daytona, when they were camping near the speedway with 3,000 other motor homes, Holly bolted when Ms. Richter’s mother opened the door one night. Fireworks the next day may have further spooked her, and, after searching for days, alerting animal agencies and posting fliers, the Richters returned home catless.

Two weeks later, an animal rescue worker called the Richters to say a cat resembling Holly had been spotted eating behind the Daytona franchise of Hooters, where employees put out food for feral cats.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, Barb Mazzola, a 52-year-old university executive assistant, noticed a cat “barely standing” in her backyard in West Palm Beach, struggling even to meow. Over six days, Ms. Mazzola and her children cared for the cat, putting out food, including special milk for cats, and eventually the cat came inside.

They named her Cosette after the orphan in Les Misérables, and took her to a veterinarian, Dr. Sara Beg at Paws2Help. Dr. Beg said the cat was underweight and dehydrated, had “back claws and nail beds worn down, probably from all that walking on pavement,” but was “bright and alert” and had no parasites, heartworm or viruses. “She was hesitant and scared around people she didn’t know, so I don’t think she went up to people and got a lift,” Dr. Beg said. “I think she made the journey on her own.”

At Paws2Help, Ms. Mazzola said, “I almost didn’t want to ask, because I wanted to keep her, but I said, ‘Just check and make sure she doesn’t have a microchip.’” When told the cat did, “I just cried.”

The Richters cried, too upon seeing Holly, who instantly relaxed when placed on Mr. Richter’s shoulder. Re-entry is proceeding well, but the mystery persists.

“We haven’t the slightest idea how they do this,” Mr. Galaxy said. “Anybody who says they do is lying, and, if you find it, please God, tell me what it is.”

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Bits Blog: TSMC Anticipates Big Orders. Is Apple One of Them?

Analysts expect Apple to drop Samsung Electronics as a chip supplier, but when?

In business, it’s not usually wise to be funding your competition. Unfortunately for Apple, processor chips for iPhones and iPads are made by Samsung, the South Korean company that is its top competitor in smartphones.

Most analysts expect Apple will eventually change suppliers. One potential suitor that keeps popping up in the rumor mill is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip maker, and for good reason.

TSMC is one of the few companies that have the capacity and the technology to meet Apple’s demand. The company had $17.5 billion in revenue in 2012 and its net income rose 32 percent in the fourth quarter. The chairman and chief executive, Morris Chang, is planning a record $9 billion in capital expenditures to expand production in 2013. TSMC makes some of the smallest and most powerful chips, and these chips go into both computers and smartphones.

The added incentive is, TSMC solely makes chips by contract, and probably will never compete with Apple in finished consumer electronics as Samsung has.

“This is the reason that companies such as Nvidia and AMD, which actually compete against each other in PCs, both go to TSMC (to make their chips),” Patrick Liao, an analyst at Nomura Securities, said. “They never worry about technology theft.”

For the last year and a half, industry watchers have tried to predict when TSMC will receive its first big order from Apple.

TSMC’s latest 28-nanometer chip was oversubscribed by existing customers to the point of shortage in 2012, and many believe the company does not have enough capacity for a large Apple order in 2013.

However, the 20-nanometer chip, which TSMC expects to go into full production in 2014, looks promising, analysts say. (Connections within a chip are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.)

At an earnings conference on Thursday, Mr. Chang declined to comment on Apple, but he bullishly predicted the 20-nanometer would outsell the 28-nanometer in its first two years.

“Enough discussions have taken place, with enough customers who have large requirements (on 20nm), to lead us to believe that the volume will be very large,” Mr. Chang said.

That bullishness leads analysts to believe that Apple could be a customer involved in these discussions.

“That language makes you feel like the direction is headed where we all expect,” said Steven Pelayo, regional head of technology research at HSBC.

If Samsung cuts capital spending this year, Mr. Pelayo says, that will add another piece to the puzzle of when Apple plans to exit.

“2013 is really a status quo year. Samsung ramps down, TSMC ramps up. We’ll see what happens in 2014.”

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