’Twill be tasty
Gorgeous gorges and new trails to explore
Bite of Bend brings food and fun to downtown
SPORTS, D1
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Tensions on Skyliners Road could push cycling elsewhere
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Anders Ramberg / The Bulletin
Sparks flew this week between Skyliners Road residents and packs of cyclists training on the road for the USA Cycling Elite, U23 & Junior Road National Championships. The problems highlighted an ongoing discussion of whether to move some of the events off Skyliners Road, which could mean a loss of tourism revenue for Bend. Relations were already tense between cyclists and residents who live at the end of the narrow, crumbling road west of Bend, after a year of discussions with Deschutes County over how to make the road safer for both groups. When hundreds of cyclists flocked to the road earlier this week to train for the events, residents complained that some cyclists rode in unnecessarily wide groups across the road, making it impossible for vehicles to pass them safely, and that several cyclists stopped in the middle of the road to listen to their coach. A Deschutes County official shared the residents’ concerns with the race director, Chad Sperry, who in turn passed them along to USA Cycling officials. “They are disgusted and apologetic,” Sperry wrote of the USA Cycling officials’ responses on Wednesday, in an e-mail to Deputy County Administrator Erik Kropp. “After today I do not ever want anything ever to do with Skyliners again after (Cascade Cycling Classic). I will work harder to get out of here but unfortunately it likely means leaving Bend to find a suitable course.” Sperry said Thursday that this statement did not result from frustration with events this week. Rather, he said he was referring to discussions that began last winter about finding other locations for some of the Skyliners Road cycling races. It has proved difficult to find alternative courses, and Sperry said he might have to move events to Redmond or Sisters to find appropriate routes. See Skyliners / A5
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“Hi, thanks for coming,” the medical assistant says, greeting a mother with her 5-year-old son. “Are you here for your child or yourself?” The boy, the mother replies. He has diarrhea. The assistant asks the mother about other symptoms, including fever (“slight”) and abdominal pain (“He hasn’t been complaining”). After a few more questions, the assistant declares herself “not that concerned at this point.” She schedules an appointment with a doctor in a couple of days. The mother leads her son from the room, holding his hand. But he keeps looking back at the assistant, fascinated, as if reluctant to leave. Maybe that is because the assistant is the disembodied likeness of a woman’s face, in black and white, on a computer screen — a no-frills avatar. See Talk / A4
J
ennifer Gaertner, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, speeds past an orange safety barrier on Northwest Skyline Ranch Road in Bend while racing Thursday in the time trial portion of the 2010 USA Cycling Elite, U23 and Junior Road National Championships. The cycling action resumes today and tonight with the Downtown Bend Criterium and continues through the weekend with road race national championships — the Awbrey Butte Circuit Race — Saturday and Sunday. For more on Thursday’s time trials, see Sports, Page D1. All that is only part of a big racing weekend in Central Oregon. More than 5,000 endurance athletes are expected to take part in the 2010 Pacific Crest Weekend Sports Festival tonight through Sunday in and around Sunriver. For more on the 14th annual Pacific Crest, see our guide to the competition inside.
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FOLEY, Ala. — The charter boat captain they called Rookie made his home back where the oak and pine woods humming with cicadas meet the Bon Secour River and where the asphalt peters out into a dead-end. This is where friends came to ask how William Allen “Rookie” Kruse was doing, back in April, when the Gulf of Mexico oil spill ended his $5,000 fishing trips for marlin and red snapper and put a crimp in his wife Tracy’s seafood business. Fine, he said. They asked again after he became frustrated with the hoops BP representatives kept making him jump through to get work on the cleanup. Still fine, Kruse said. On Wednesday morning, Kruse reported as usual to the Gulf Shores marina to work for the company that had ruined his fishing. His two deck hands said that when he sent them on an errand before 7:30 a.m., he seemed fine. But shortly afterward, Kruse climbed up to the wheelhouse of the Rookie, retrieved a Glock handgun he kept for protection and apparently shot himself in the head. His family and friends say he is the 12th victim of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, which killed 11 crew members. And they worry that there will be more among the captains idled by the worst spill in U.S. history. See Grief / A6
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Los Angeles Times
Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is planning a 40,000-square-foot expansion at its Bend store to make room for a full-service grocery department and will add roughly 85 mostly full-time jobs to accommodate the expansion. The store, at 20120 Pinebrook Blvd., opened in 1994. It measures roughly 126,000 square feet. The expansion project will including updating the store’s interior and exterior and adding sustainable building features such as skylights, automatic light-dimming systems and high-efficiency LED lighting, the company said.
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The company said the expansion of its store at Bend’s south end doesn’t change its intent to eventually build a new store on 30 acres it owns at the northwest corner of North U.S. Highway 97 and Cooley Road in north Bend, though it has no immediate plans to do so. “Our Bend customers are telling us they’d appreciate the convenience of one-stop shopping at their local Walmart, and we look forward to working with the city and community to make this a reality,” Matti Havener, regional general manager for WalMart in Oregon and Washington, said in a company news release announcing the retailer’s plans. See Walmart / A4
By Andrew Moore
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Proposed Walmart expansion in Bend
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A2 Friday, June 25, 2010 • THE BULLETIN
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Smarter heart devices warn of peril from inside
Dr. Leslie Saxon, at the University of Southern California, holds new smart, implantable defibrillators that monitor heart information and transmit it to doctors.
“It’s like having an office visit every day and a complete physical every week.”
By Gina Kolata New York Times News Service
On a recent Monday, Helen Elzo got a call from her doctor’s office. A device implanted in her heart was not functioning. She needed to go to the hospital to have it replaced. She was aghast — her heart is damaged and, at any time, can start quivering instead of beating. If the device, a defibrillator, was unable to shock her heart back to normal, her life was in danger. In the old days, Elzo, 73, who lives outside Tulsa, Okla., could have gone for months before the problem was discovered at a routine office visit. But she has a new defibrillator that communicates directly with her doctor, sending signals about its functions and setting off alarms if things go wrong. On the horizon is an even smarter heart device, one that detects deterioration in various heart functions and tells the patient how to adjust medications. They are part of a new wave of smart implantable devices that is transforming the care of people with heart disease and creating a bonanza for researchers. The hope is that the devices, now being tested in clinical trials, will save lives, reduce medical expenses and nudge heart patients toward managing their symptoms much the way people with diabetes manage theirs. Patients, who often are frail or live far from their doctors, can be spared frequent office visits. Doctors can learn immediately if devices are malfunctioning or if patients’ hearts are starting to fail. “It’s like having an office visit every day and a complete physical every week,” said Dr. Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist at the University of Southern California.
Breakthrough The big leap forward came a few years ago when device companies figured out how to make transmitters that send data over a broader range, 20 or 30 feet. That meant that, with her device, Elzo did not have to wait till her doctor could put a receiver directly on her chest. Instead, she simply went near a small box, which is attached to a phone jack near her bed. Once a week, she also measures her weight and blood pressure — key indicators of heart failure — and that information is automatically transmitted to her doctor. If there are problems, the machine alerts her doctor. “Now, every single day the device is being queried,” said her doctor, James Coman of the Heart Rhythm Institute in Tulsa. “It’s just a phenomenal tool.” There is a downside, though: “Information overload is a very serious problem” for the doctors, said Dr. Lynne Warner Stevenson, director of the Heart Failure Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School, who counts herself as a proponent of smart devices. More information, she warned, is not always beneficial. The devices transmit useful data along with data whose significance is not clear, like variations in heart rate. Large swings in heart rate can indicate risk, but it is not clear what to do about them. Even more confusing are changes in thoracic impedance, a measurement of resistance to electric current through the lung. Impedance changes can predict future heart crises, but more often have no clinical explanation. Yet when doctors get data on impedance changes, they often feel uneasy and call patients to see how they are, making patients uneasy in turn, Stevenson said. Stevenson likened such information to the game of “Jeopardy!” — doctors are given answers in search of a question. It’s a challenge even for the nation’s 1,000 heart failure specialists. But it can be even harder for primary care doctors, who have less expertise in heart failure yet care for most of the 6 million patients in the country with the condition. Dr. Richard Page, president of the Heart Rhythm Society, said doctors wonder if they can
— Dr. Leslie Saxon, cardiologist
Photos by Ann Johansson / New York Times News Service
Claudia Navarro, left, holds a wand over her implanted defibrillator while Dr. Leslie Saxon and Jackie Arias, a sales representative for a defibrillator company, look at software showing information received from the defibrillator last month at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Information from smart, implantable devices is offering new hope to heart patients. be held liable if they do not look at all the data. Still, he said, the new technology “is potentially transformative.”
Too much information? For researchers the information deluge leads to a different problem: how to analyze the data. A large clinical trial of a cardiac device used to involve 1,000, maybe 2,000 patients. Now, Boston Scientific, a maker of one of the smart heart devices, is following 400,000 patients. “No one has ever done research like this before,” said Saxon, who leads an independent team of academic scientists overseeing Boston Scientific research. The company has no editorial control over the papers the scientists write, Saxon said. Boston Scientific gets data from patients’ defibrillators. It also gets information on deaths from Medicare. The data are stripped of patient identifiers and analyzed, a task requiring the company to become more like a Google or a Microsoft, handling enormous amounts of information. There are, for example, more than four million recordings
of weights and blood pressures and over 60,000 instances when the defibrillators went off, shocking a patient’s heart. So far, Saxon’s group has reported on the first 90,000 patients. Half of them had not been enrolled for remote monitoring and served as a control group. Patients whose doctors looked at the data survived 5 percent to 15 percent longer than patients in earlier clinical trials of the devices, Saxon reported. And, in a paper under review, the group reports that their three-year survival was significantly greater than that of patients in the study whose doctors did not see the data. Other researchers will be analyzing economic data. The devices can cost as much as $30,000. Do patients with defibrillators make up for some of that expense with fewer hospitalizations or doctor visits? A study using a similar device, made by Medtronic, suggests that is the case. The Medtronic study, directed by Dr. George Crossley, president of St. Thomas Heart at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, involved 2,000 patients randomly assigned to receive a defibrillator that transmitted data or a device that
did not transmit. Those with the nontransmitting device were seen in their doctors’ offices every few months, the standard of care. Patients whose devices transmitted spent less time, on average, in the hospital when they were admitted — 3.3 days compared with 4 days — and their hospital costs were $1,600 less per admission. “The plausible reason, we think, is that we got to these people much sooner in the course of their illness,” Crossley said. “We think we did not let the people in the remote sensing group get into heart failure.”
Cues from diabetes Still, the information overload problem looms. One solution, being tested by St. Jude Medical, a medical device company in St. Paul, is to let patients deal with important data. The idea, said Dr. Neal Eigler, a senior vice president at St. Jude, is to get heart patients to adjust their medications regularly based on readings of their heart’s functioning, just as patients with diabetes adjust their insulin based on blood glucose readings. Patients hold a small device over their chest twice a day, and
if they experience symptoms like shortness of breath. It transmits readings of blood pressure in the left atrium — the upper left chamber of the heart. If pressure in that chamber gets too high, the lungs can fill with fluid. Doctors preprogram the handheld device to provide instructions to patients in response to their left atrial pressure measurements, telling them, for example, to take a different dose of a medication, restrict fluid intake, increase their activity level or call the clinic. If successful, the smart device could have a big effect. One million patients a year are hospitalized for heart failure. Ninety percent of the time it is because fluid has accumulated in their lungs. As a more positive incentive, the device can also instruct patients to decrease their medications if they are doing well. St. Jude recently completed a small study of 40 patients and is starting a large clinical trial. In the pilot study, the device reduced the frequency of high atrial pressure readings by two-thirds and the number of hospitalizations by 80 percent over five months. Meanwhile, patients whose doctors can deal with the data stream from smart devices say they are getting peace of mind. They include people like Danielle Denlein, who, to her total shock, developed a serious heart problem. On October 20, 2008, at 1:50 p.m., Denlein was driving to a drug store to buy formula for her 5-day-old baby girl. Suddenly, she felt a pain in her chest. She thought it was heartburn. Then it began radiating down her arm. “I just knew — I don’t know how I knew, but I knew — I was having a heart attack,” she said. Although she was only 35, her main coronary artery had ripped open, a rare complication associated with pregnancy. Denlein now relies on her smart defibrillator to save her from her injured heart, and to alert her doctor, Saxon, to problems if they occur. “It’s life-changing,” Denlein said. “It gives me such a feeling of comfort.”
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THE BULLETIN • Friday, June 25, 2010 A3
FURNITURE OUTLET
T S Supreme Court limits corruption law Secrecy on ballot petitions rejected By Adam Liptak New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday significantly narrowed the scope of a law often used by federal prosecutors in corruption cases and called into question the fraud convictions of Jeffrey Skilling, a former chief executive of Enron, and Conrad Black, a newspaper
executive convicted of defrauding his media company. The justices were unanimous in calling a broad interpretation of the law, which makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services,” unconstitutionally vague. The decision will have implications for many other cases, including those of former Gov.
Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, who is on trial in Chicago on charges of violating the law, and Joseph Bruno, a prominent former New York politician who was recently convicted of violating the law. Many lower court judges and scholars have called the law hopelessly vague, saying it could apply to conduct as routine as calling in sick to go to a baseball game. Also Thursday, the court ruled in an 8-1 decision that people
who sign petitions to put referendums on state ballots do not have a general right under the First Amendment to keep their names secret, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in an 8-to-1 decision. The near-unanimity of the decision masked a deep division on a more focused question that the justices left for another day: Are there good reasons to protect the identities of people who signed petitions concerning a measure
opposing gay rights and say they fear harassment and retaliation should their names be posted on the Internet? The case came from Washington state, which allows voters to reject legislation through a referendum process. Last year, opponents of a state domestic partnership law known as the “everything but marriage” act gathered more than 130,000 signatures, enough to place a referendum on the November ballot.
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Belgian police raid Catholic offices New York Times News Service BRUSSELS — Belgian authorities on Thursday heightened pressure on the Roman Catholic Church in a sexual abuse scandal, raiding the Belgian church headquarters, the home of a cardinal and the offices of a commission estab-
lished by the church to handle abuse complaints. The police questioned all of those present, from bishops to staffers like cooks and drivers. The authorities are investigating accusations that Belgian clerics sexually abused children, according to officials.
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President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ride together Thursday to lunch in Arlington, Va. With recent accords on national security behind them, the two engaged in a bit of economic summitry Thursday, with Obama pushing for more exports to Russia and Medvedev seeking more U.S. business investment, especially in technology. The actual achievements on the economic front were modest. The United States promised to redouble its efforts to help Russia join the World
Trade Organization, agreeing to try to complete years of negotiations by September. Russia said it would lift barriers to the multibillion-dollar importation of American chicken. Mostly, the leaders emphasized common ground, with Obama saying that he and Medvedev had had “excellent discussions, discussions that would have been unlikely just 17 months ago,” when the countries’ relationship “had drifted perhaps to its lowest point since the Cold War.” — New York Times News Service
No more changes for now on Afghan team, Obama says By Karen DeYoung The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Thursday that there will be no additional changes for now in his leadership team on Afghanistan, but that he will be “insisting on unity of purpose” and “paying very close attention” to its performance. “I’m confident that we’ve got a team in place that can execute,” Obama said. His comments came as senior Republicans called on Obama to replace the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the State Department diplomat working most closely on the issue. Both were disparaged by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his aides in published remarks that led Obama to relieve McChrystal of the Afghanistan war command this week.
At the State Department, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she has “full confidence” in Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and in Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Eikenberry, in Kabul, acknowledged “vigorous debates” between the embassy and the military but said that their effort was unified. As the dust began to settle around Obama’s appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s replacement, the administration worked to convince allies, adversaries and the public that the change in leadership did not mean a change in strategy. Obama, speaking to reporters with visiting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said that “we will not miss a beat.”
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N B Expanded spending again falls in Senate Senate Democrats on Thursday abandoned efforts to provide fresh aid to cash-strapped state governments and extend emergency unemployment benefits for millions of jobless workers, leaving in limbo President Barack Obama’s push for more spending to bolster the economy. The decision came after the Senate failed again to muster 60 votes to advance a package of tax cuts and emergency economic provisions. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., joined a united Republican caucus in voting to block the measure, citing concern that even the latest slimmed-down version would expand bloated budget deficits. The package fell short, 57-41. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., blamed Republican intransigence for killing the
measure and dismissed talk of continuing negotiations, saying the only path forward would require Republican compromise.
No charges following sex allegation vs. Gore PORTLAND — Portland police say they investigated allegations that former Vice President Al Gore had “unwanted sexual contact” with a massage therapist during an October 2006 visit, but they found insufficient evidence to support the woman’s claims. Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk said Wednesday an attorney representing the woman contacted police in late 2006. Schrunk said the woman refused to be interviewed by detectives and didn’t want the investigation to continue. — From wire reports
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A4 Friday, June 25, 2010 • THE BULLETIN
C OV ER S T OR I ES
Walmart Continued from A1 The company has not yet submitted a land use application to the city for its proposed expansion but is holding a public meeting on July 8 in Bend to inform store neighbors of the company’s plans. The city requires a public meeting be held before an application is submitted. Amelia Neufeld, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company doesn’t have a concrete timetable for the planned expansion. She said the store will remain open during the expansion and remodeling work. Local grocers had mixed reactions to Wal-Mart’s announcement. “We don’t comment on competition,” said Lilia Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for Albertson’s Inc., which operates a store across the street from Walmart. “We just stay focused on what we have to do, and that is giving our customers the best service we can.” Doug Schmidt, managing partner of the Erickson’s Thriftway store chain, which has a store in Bend on Greenwood Avenue, said the Walmart grocery addition “will have an impact on everybody, but we’re not too concerned; we’ll just have to wait and see. We’re not exactly close to them, so it probably won’t impact us as much — not as much as the stores that are closer in proximity.” However, Schmidt said part of the reason Erickson’s closed its Redmond store in 2007 was that the store’s sales declined after the Walmart Supercenter opened in Redmond earlier that year. The supercenter includes a roughly 40,000-square-foot gro-
Talk Continued from A1 Her words of sympathy are jerky, flat and mechanical. But she has the right stuff — the ability to understand speech, recognize pediatric conditions and reason according to simple rules — to make an initial diagnosis of a childhood ailment and its seriousness. And to win the trust of a little boy. For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence — the use of computers to simulate human thinking. But in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn, in their way. The prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines. The artificial intelligence technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cell phones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google’s and Microsoft’s search services now respond to voice commands. More drivers are asking their cars to do things like find directions or play music. The number of U.S. doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes all kinds of medical terminology letter perfect, doctors say. It has more trouble with other words and grammar, requiring wording changes in about one of every four sentences, doctors say. So the outlook is uncertain for many of the estimated 4 million workers in U.S. call centers or the nation’s 100,000 medical transcriptionists, whose jobs were already threatened by outsourcing abroad.
The digital assistant “Hi, are you looking for Eric?” asks the receptionist outside the office of Eric Horvitz at Microsoft. This assistant is an avatar, a time manager for office workers. Behind the female face on the screen is an arsenal of computing technology including speech understanding, image recognition and machine learning. The digital assistant taps databases that include the boss’s calendar of meetings and appointments going back years, and his work patterns. Its software monitors his phone calls by length, person spoken to, time of day and day of the week. It also tracks his location and computer use by applications used — email, writing documents, brows-
If you go What: Public meeting to discuss Wal-Mart’s expansion plans Where: AmeriTel Inn, 425 S.W. Bluff Drive, Bend When: 6 to 8 p.m., July 8 Contact: 888-867-4592 or walmartor@integra.net
Ryan Brennecke / The Bulletin
A customer walks through the grocery section of the Walmart Supercenter in north Redmond Thursday afternoon. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to add a similar grocery section its south Bend store. cery department. Travis Lovejoy, part of the ownership group that opened the 14,000-square-foot C.E. Lovejoy’s community market in the Brookswood Meadow Plaza in southwest Bend last week, wasn’t surprised by Wal-Mart’s announcement. “It’s a rumor that’s been floating around, so we knew there was a possibility of that, but it’s
not something that concerns us,” Lovejoy said. “We don’t feel we are a market that competes with Walmart.” Attempts to reach a spokeswoman for Fred Meyer, which has a grocery store just north of Walmart, were unsuccessful. The nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart also is the nation’s largest grocery chain. In its fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, the
company had revenues of $405 billion, according to regulatory filings, of which roughly $131.8 billion was from grocery sales. Its closest competitor, Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., the parent company of Fred Meyer, had revenues of $76.7 billion in its most recent fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2010. Wal-Mart has increasingly emphasized grocery sales and
last year converted 86 of its discount stores into so-called supercenters that include fullservice grocery departments. In its 2009-10 fiscal year, it opened 49 supercenters in the U.S. and no discount stores, according to regulatory filings. On the same day in 1994 that Wal-Mart opened its Bend store, it also opened a 102,100-squarefoot store in Redmond, on the
ing the Web — for how long and time of day. When a colleague asks when Horvitz’s meeting or phone call may be over, the avatar reviews that data looking for patterns. The avatar has a database of all the boss’s colleagues at work and relationships, from research team members to senior management, and it can schedule meetings. Horvitz has given the avatar rules for the kinds of meetings that are more and less interruptible. As part of the project, the researchers plan to program the avatar to engage in “work-related chitchat” with colleagues who are waiting. Computers with artificial intelligence can be thought of as the machine equivalent of idiot savants. They can be extremely good at skills that challenge the smartest humans, playing chess like a grandmaster or answering “Jeopardy!” questions like a champion. Yet those skills are in narrow domains of knowledge. What are far harder for a computer are common-sense skills like understanding the context of language and social situations when talking — taking turns in conversation, for example. The Microsoft projects are only research initiatives, but they suggest where things are headed. And as speech recognition and other artificial intelligence technologies take on more tasks, there are concerns about the social impact of the technology and too little attention paid to its limitations.
of speech commands its vehicles recognize from 100 words to 10,000 words and phrases. Systems like Ford’s Sync are becoming popular options in new cars. They are also seen by some safety specialists as a defense, if imperfect, against the distracting array of small screens for GPS devices, smart phones and the like. Later this summer, a new model of the Ford Edge will recognize complete addresses, including city and state spoken in a single phrase, and respond by offering turn-by-turn directions.
lines, the listener is a computer. One that can recognize not only words but also emotions — and listen for trends in customer complaints. In the telephone industry, for example, companies use speech recognition software to provide an early warning about changes in a competitor’s calling plans. By detecting the frequent use of names like AT&T and other carriers, the software can alert the company to a rival that lowered prices, for example, far faster than would hundreds of customer ser-
vice agents. The companies then have their customer agents make counteroffers to callers thinking of canceling service. Similar software, used by Aetna, began to notice the phrase “cash for clunkers” in hundreds of calls to its call center one week-
Smarter devices “I’m looking for a reservation for two people tomorrow night at 8 at a romantic restaurant within walking distance.” That spoken request seems simple enough, but for a computer to respond intelligently requires a ballet of more than a dozen technologies. A host of companies — AT&T, Microsoft, Google and startups — are investing in services that hint at the concept of machines that can act on spoken commands. They go well beyond voice-enabled Internet search. Perhaps the furthest along is Siri, a Silicon Valley company offering a “virtual personal assistant,” a collection of software programs that can listen to a request, find information and take action. In this case, Siri, presented as an iPhone application, sends the spoken request for a romantic restaurant as an audio file to computers operated by Nuance Communications, the largest speechrecognition company, which convert it to text. The text is then returned to Siri’s computers, which make educated guesses about the meaning. Apple is so impressed that it bought Siri in April in a private transaction estimated at more than $200 million. In cars, too, speech recognition systems have vastly improved. In just three years, the Ford Motor Company, using Nuance software, has increased the number
To the customer’s rescue “Please select one of the following products from our menu,” electronics giant Panasonic used to tell callers seeking help with products from power tools to plasma televisions. It was not working. Callers took an average of 2 1/2 minutes merely to wade through the menu, and 40 percent hung up in frustration. “We were drowning in calls,” recalled Donald Szczepaniak, vice president of customer service. Panasonic reached out to AT&T Labs in 2005 for help. The AT&T researchers worked with thousands of hours of recorded calls to the Panasonic center, in Chesapeake, Va., to build statistical models of words and phrases that callers used to describe products and problems, and to create a database that is constantly updated. The goal of the system is to identify key words — among a person’s spoken phrases and sentences — so an automated assistant can intelligently reply. Simple problems — like product registration or where to take a product for repairs — can be resolved in the automated system alone. That technology has improved, but callers have also become more comfortable speaking to the system. A surprising number sign off by saying, “Thank you.” Some callers, especially younger ones, also make things easier for the computer by uttering a key phrase like “plasma help,” Szczepaniak said. “I call it the Googleization of the customer,” he said. The speech technology’s automated problem sorting has enabled Panasonic to globalize its customer service, with inquiries about older and simpler products routed to its call centers in the Philippines and Jamaica. The Virginia center now focuses on high-end Panasonic products like plasma TVs and home theater equipment. And while the center’s head count at 200 is the same as five years ago, the workers are more skilled these days. Those who have stayed have often been retrained.
The efficient listener “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” But at a growing number of consumer call centers, technical support desks and company hot
city’s south end, according to The Bulletin’s archives. In September 2007, Wal-Mart closed its original Redmond store and opened a nearly 218,000square-foot Walmart Supercenter on the city’s north end. “We keep hearing from people that they love the store in Redmond and, ‘When are you going to put one in Bend?’ So we are moving forward with Bend,” said Jennifer Spall, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pulled its application for the Highway 97 and Cooley Road site in August 2006 after the state upheld a decision by the city to deny Wal-Mart’s application, primarily due to concerns about how much traffic the proposed store would add to the already overloaded intersection. In 2007, the Oregon Department of Transportation said it would appeal any land use decision that impacted the intersection until it could come up with a plan to alleviate traffic at the intersection. The department is conducting an environmental impact study on two proposed fixes for the intersection and Wal-Mart has been involved in many of the those discussions, said ODOT spokesman Peter Murphy. Andrew Moore can be reached at 541-617-7820 or at amoore@bendbulletin.com.
end last year. It turned out that tens of thousands of car shoppers responding to the government incentive were calling for insurance quotes. Aetna created insurance offers for those particular callers and added workers to handle the volume.
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C OV ER S T ORY
THE BULLETIN • Friday, June 25, 2010 A5
Skyliners
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Continued from A1 In a couple of years, when Skyliners Road is scheduled to be repaved, directors of sporting events likely will have to find other locations anyway. Sperry will work with USA Cycling in 2011 and 2012, when the USA Cycling Masters Road National Championships are coming to Central Oregon. He hopes to locate courses for those events by this fall. Chuck Arnold, the executive director of the Downtown Bend Business Association, said cycling events provide a big economic boost to local businesses, and he doesn’t like the idea of races being moved outside the city. “Especially when we are desperately trying to diversify the economy, desperately trying to attract people here for tourism, you have to embrace these things,” he said.
Earlier changes In response to residents’ concerns, the County Commission voted earlier this year to limit sporting events on Skyliners Road to two days and to require that any proposals for new events get the commission’s approval. Two weeks ago, the commission voted to lower the speed limit on most of the road from 55 mph to 45 mph. “It’s the cyclists that are creating the problem,” said Sean Loftus, a Skyliners Road resident. “The residents who are most directly impacted by these races began asking for help from the county about four years ago.… These are the exact same races that are causing the motoristcyclist interaction.” Kropp said public testimony painted recreational cyclists’ bad behavior as the main problem, but when county officials asked residents for solutions, he said, “The answer was, ‘ban all events.’ I think a lot of the problem is the days before the events. It’s the practice routes.” A resident and a couple of cycling event organizers both said Deschutes County sheriff’s deputies should be ticketing cyclists who break the law. When Sperry showed an email containing one resident’s complaint to USA Cycling officials, they agreed to send a message to race participants warning them they would be fined if they were caught violating Oregon traffic laws, according to an e-mail from Sperry to Kropp. The USA Cycling officials also suggested encouraging the Sheriff’s Office to start ticketing violators, Sperry wrote. “I’ll bet you if they started writing a couple tickets, the word of the tickets would spread
5 from U.S. convicted on terror charges SARGODHA, Pakistan — Five Virginia men were convicted on terror charges and sentenced to 10 years in prison Thursday by a Pakistani court, in a case that focused U.S. concern about its citizens linking up with foreign extremist groups. A defense attorney for the men questioned the legitimacy of the verdict and accused prosecutors and the judge in the closed-door trial of ignoring key evidence. He promised an immediate appeal.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
Bend police and USA Cycling volunteers help coordinate vehicle and cyclist traffic for a Thursday time trial at the intersection of Skyliners Road and Northwest Skyline Ranch Road.
“Especially when we are desperately trying to diversify the economy, desperately trying to attract people here for tourism, you have to embrace these things.” — Chuck Arnold, executive director of the Downtown Bend Business Association, on the possibility of moving some cycling races from Bend through people here so fast the amount of incidents would drastically be reduced,” said Chuck Kenlan, executive director of Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation, which organizes the Cascade Cycling Classic. “Any kind of blatant disregard for following the rules on the part of a cyclist is just as bad as blatant disregard for rules by motorists.” Loftus also pointed out that the county had not issued any citations to cyclists.
‘Trying to keep the peace’ Capt. Tim Edwards of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office said he assigned deputies to patrol the area throughout the week because he knew it had been a problem spot in the past. On Tuesday, the first day of the stepped-up patrols, deputies handed out 30 warnings to cyclists who were riding two abreast or in the middle of the road and to drivers who were speeding or not safely passing bikes. Edwards said his office is trying to educate cyclists and drivers about the rules. Deputies have opted for warnings, rather than citations, because most of the people they’ve spoken to have been polite and agreed to
Kenlan said. “A course like Skyliners, there’s advantages to both riders, so it’s an attractive time trial for those reasons,” Kenlan said. Hillary Borrud can be reached at 541-617-7829 or at hborrud@ bendbulletin.com. Erin Golden can be reached at 541-617-7837 or at egolden@bendbulletin.com.
comply with the rules. “We’re not going to be the bad guys in this thing,” he said. “Everybody else is trying to make us the bad guys. We’re just trying to keep the peace, and that’s what we’re going to do.” Kenlan said Thursday that he did not know whether the event’s time trials would be able to continue on Skyliners Road after this year. The Cascade Cycling Classic will remain in Central Oregon as long as Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation continues to organize it, Kenlan said. The event is a fundraiser for the organization. But, if necessary, the time trial portion of the event could move to another area, farther from Bend. “Finding another road close to Bend that the (U.S.) Forest Service would allow us to close, or Deschutes County would allow us to close, with adequate parking, is impossible,” Kenlan said. “If we want to continue to have the Cascade Cycling Classic, we have to find a suitable time trial course. It’s an important stage in that race. Maybe it means going to Sisters, or somewhere else.” But Skyliners Road would be hard to replace because it appeals both to cyclists who specialize in climbing hills and those who excel on flat routes,
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