You for Sale: Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Michael Fertik, the founder and chief executive of Reputation.com, at its offices in Redwood City, Calif., where he has amassed a database of information collected on millions of consumers.

“YOU are walking around naked on the Internet and you need some clothes,” says Michael Fertik. “I am going to sell you some.”

Naked? Not exactly, but close.

Mr. Fertik, 34, is the chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps people manage their online reputations. From his perch here in Silicon Valley, he views the digital screens in our lives, the smartphones and the tablets, the desktops and the laptops, as windows of a house. People go about their lives on the inside, he says, while dozens of marketing and analytics companies watch through the windows, sizing them up like peeping Toms.

By now many Americans are learning that they are living in a surveillance economy. “Information resellers,” also known as “data brokers,” have collected hundreds to thousands of details — what we buy, our race or ethnicity, our finances and health concerns, our Web activities and social networks — on almost every American adult. Other companies that specialize in ranking consumers use computer algorithms to covertly score Internet users, identifying some as “high-value” consumers worthy of receiving pitches for premium credit cards and other offers, while dismissing others as a waste of time and marketing money. Yet another type of company, called an ad-trading platform, profiles Internet users and auctions off online access to them to marketers in a practice called “real-time bidding.”

As these practices have come to light, several members of Congress, and federal agencies, have opened investigations.

At least for now, however, these companies typically do not permit consumers to see the records or marketing scores that have been compiled about them. And that is perfectly legal.

Now, Mr. Fertik, the loquacious, lion-maned founder of Reputation.com, says he has the free-market solution. He calls it a “data vault,” or “a bank for other people’s data.”

Here at Reputation.com’s headquarters, a vast open-plan office decorated with industrial-looking metal struts and reclaimed wood — a discreet homage to the lab where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb — his company has amassed a database on millions of consumers. Mr. Fertik plans to use it to sell people on the idea of taking control of their own marketing profiles. To succeed, he will have to persuade people that they must take charge of their digital personas.

Pointing out the potential hazards posed by data brokers and the like is part of Mr. Fertik’s M.O. Covert online profiling and scoring, he says, may unfairly exclude certain Internet users from marketing offers that could affect their financial, educational or health opportunities — a practice Mr. Fertik calls “Weblining.” He plans to market Reputation.com’s data vault, scheduled to open for business early next year, as an antidote.

“A data privacy vault,” he says, “is a way to control yourself as a person.”

Reputation.com is at the forefront of a nascent industry called “personal identity management.” The company’s business model for its vault service involves collecting data about consumers’ marketing preferences and giving them the option to share the information on a limited basis with certain companies in exchange for coupons, say, or status upgrades. In turn, participating companies will get access both to potential customers who welcome their pitches and to details about the exact products and services those people are seeking. In theory, the data vault would earn money as a kind of authorization supervisor, managing the permissions that marketers would need to access information about Reputation.com’s clients.

To some, the idea seems a bit quixotic.

Reputation.com, with $67 million in venture capital, is not making a profit. Although the company’s “privacy” products, like removing clients’ personal information from list broker and marketing databases, are popular, its reputation management techniques can be controversial. For instance, it offers services meant to make negative commentary about individual or corporate clients less visible on the Web.

And there are other hurdles, like competition. A few companies, like Personal, have already introduced vault services. Also, a number of other enterprises have tried — and quickly failed — to sell consumers on data lockers.

Even so, Mr. Fertik contends Reputation.com has the answer. The company already has several hundred thousand paying customers, he says, and patents on software that can identify consumers’ information online and score their reputations. He intends to show clients their scores and advise them on how to improve them.

“You can’t just build a vault and wish that vendors cared enough about your data to pay for it,” Mr. Fertik says. “You have to build a business that gives you the lift to accumulate a data set and attract consumers, the science to create insights that are valuable to vendors, and the power to impose restrictions on the companies who consume your data.”

THE consumer data trade is large and largely unregulated.

Companies and organizations in the United States spend more than $2 billion a year on third-party data about individuals, according to a report last year on personal identity management from Forrester Research, a market research firm. They spend billions more on credit data, market research and customer data analytics, the report said.

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iPad mini fails to draw crowds for China launch

Either Apple’s (AAPL) reservation-only system works better than anyone could have expected, or consumers in China have little interest in the company’s new iPad mini. Apple’s tiny tablet launched on schedule on Friday but according to IDG News Service, the turnout for Apple’s new slate was minimal. At Apple’s new flagship store in the well-trafficked Wangfujing district in Beijing, for example, turnout was “nearly nonexistent” according to the report, with no lines forming at all on Friday.

We’ve seen Apple rack up big numbers despite small launch-day turnouts in the past, but Apple’s reservation system does not appear to be responsible for the seemingly slow launch — according to IDG, many consumers who did turn up at Apple stores looking to purchase an iPad mini were unable to do so because they weren’t even aware that the reservation-only system existed.

Apple’s iPhone 5, which will presumably draw more of a crowd, launches in China next Friday.

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Cairo Protesters Take to Streets as Political Crisis Deepens

CAIRO — Supporters and opponents of the government of President Mohamed Morsi staged competing demonstrations on Friday after noon prayers, throwing Egypt deeper into political crisis.

Thousands of pro-government Islamists attended the funeral of two men killed in clashes on Wednesday outside the presidential palace, the site of continuing demonstrations by the opposition. “With blood and soul, we redeem Islam,” they chanted, while calling opposition leaders “murderers,” The Associated Press reported.

Simultaneously, thousands of opposition protesters streamed in separate marches toward the presidential palace, gathering there to shout “Leave!, Leave,” even though Mr. Morsi does not make his residence in the building. Speakers accused the Muslim Brotherhood, which Mr. Morsi once helped lead, of sparking the violence by sending “hired thugs” to destroy a tent camp set up by the president’s opponents, the news agency reported.

Rival protests were reported throughout the country, including in Alexandria in the Nile delta, the tourist center of Luxor and Assiut, in the south, where marchers chanted “No Brotherhood, no Salafis, Egypt is a civic state,” the A.P. said.

News reports quoted several leaders of the opposition coalition as saying they would not join the dialogue proposed by Mr. Morsi in a speech on Thursday in which he blamed the outbreak of violence on a “fifth column.” He also vowed to proceed with a referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his supporters and their opponents.

Mr. Morsi spoke a day after the growing antagonism between his supporters and the secular opposition triggered the worst outbreak of violence between political factions here since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup six decades ago. By the time the fighting ended, six people were dead and hundreds were wounded.

The violence also led to resignations that rocked the government, as advisers, party members and the head of the commission overseeing the planned vote on a new constitution stepped down, citing the bloodshed.

“The National Salvation Front is not taking part in the dialogue, that is the official stance,” Ahmed Said, a member of the coalition and head of the liberal Free Egyptians Party, told Reuters.

Several other prominent opposition figures, including Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said they would not participate.

In a message on Twitter, Mr. ElBaradei said the president’s offer “lacks the basics of real dialogue.”

“We are for dialogue that is not based on arm-twisting and imposing a fait accompli,” he said.

The sight of protesters on Cairo’s streets has been common since the beginnings of Egypt’s transition toward democracy that began with the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak last year.

In the latest protests, the target of the demonstrations has been the presidential palace in the wealthy suburb of Heliopolis, where protesters converged on Friday.

Since clashes there earlier this week, the elite presidential guard has ringed the palace with barbed wire, tanks and armored vehicles. After Mr. Morsi’s speech on Thursday, his opponents mocked his words and called for new demonstrations on Friday.

Some observers said the president speech echoed his predecessor, Mr. Mubarak, who always saw “hidden hands” behind public unrest. Mr. Morsi said that corrupt beneficiaries of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy had been “hiring thugs and giving out firearms, and the time has come for them to be punished and penalized by the law.” He added, “It is my duty to defend the homeland.”

Mr. Morsi received a phone call on Thursday from President Obama, who expressed his “deep concern” about the deaths and injuries, the White House said in a statement.

“The president emphasized that all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the statement said, chastising Mr. Morsi and the opposition leaders as failing to urge their supporters to pull back during the fight.

Prospects for a political solution also seemed a casualty, as both sides effectively refused to back down on core demands.

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London. Two employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Cairo.

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MLB average salary up 3.8 percent to $3.2 million

NEW YORK (AP) — Baseball's average salary increased 3.8 percent this year to a record $3.2 million.

According to final figures released Friday by the Major League Baseball Players Association, the rise was the steepest since 2007. The boost was helped by an increase in the minimum salary from $414,000 to $480,000.

The New York Yankees had the highest average for the 14th consecutive season at $6.88 million, rising after consecutive declines from a peak of $7.66 million when they won the World Series in 2009.

The Los Angeles Dodgers rose from 13th to second at $5.55 million and Texas from 15th to fifth at $4.89 million.

At nearly $685,000 Houston had the lowest average since the 2006 Florida Marlins.

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The New Old Age Blog: A Son Lost, a Mother Found

My friend Yvonne was already at the front door when I woke, so at first I didn’t realize that my mother was missing.

It was less than a week after my son Spencer died. Since that day, a constant stream of friends had been coming and going, bringing casseroles and soup, love, support and chatter. Mom hated it.

My 94-year-old mother, who has vascular dementia, has been living in my home in upstate New York for the past few years. Like many with dementia, mom is courteous but, underneath, irascible. Pride defines her, especially pride in her Phi Beta Kappa intellect. She hates to be confronted with how she has become, as she calls it, “stupid.”

The parade of strangers confused her. She had to be polite, field solicitous questions, endure mundane comments. She could not remember what was going on or why people were there. It must have been stressful and annoying.

That night, like every night since the state troopers brought the news, I woke hourly, tumbling in panic. As if it were not too late to save my son. Mom knew something was wrong, but she could not remember what. As I overslept that morning, she must have decided enough was enough. She was going home.

In a cold sky, the sun blazed over tall pines. As I opened the door, the dogs raced out to greet Yvonne and her two housecleaners. Yvonne often brags about her cleaning duo. They were her gift to me. They were going to clean my house before the funeral reception, which was scheduled for later that week. This was a very big gift because, like my mother before me, I am a very bad housekeeper.

Mom’s door was shut. I cautioned the housecleaners to avoid her room as I showed them around. Yvonne went to the kitchen to listen to the 37 unheard messages on my answering machine; the housecleaners went out to their van to get their instruments of dirt removal.

I ducked into Mom’s room to warn her about the upcoming noise. The bed was unmade; the floor was littered with crumpled tissues; the room was empty.

Normally, I would have freaked out right then. I knew Mom was not in the house, because I had just shown the whole house to the cleaners. Although Mom doesn’t wander like some dementia patients, she does on occasion run away. But I could not muster a shred of anxiety.

“Yvonne,” I called, “did you see my mother outside?”

Yvonne popped her head into the living room, eyebrows raised.“Outside? No!” She was alarmed. “Is she missing?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily, “I’ll look.” I stepped out onto the front porch, tightening the belt of my bathrobe and turning up the collar. Maybe she had walked off into the woods. The dogs danced around my legs, wanting breakfast.

I had no space left in my body to care. Either we would find her, or we would not. Either she was alive, or she was not. My child was gone. How could I care about anything ever again?

Then I saw my car was missing. My mouth fell open and my eyeballs rolled up to the right, gazing blindly at the abandoned bird’s nest on top of the porch light: What had I done with the keys?

Mom likes to run away in the car when she is angry. She used to do it a lot when my father was still alive — every time they fought. Since Mom took off in my car almost a year ago, after we had had a fight, I’d kept the keys hidden. Except for this week; this week, I had forgotten.

I was reverting to old habits. I had left the doors unlocked and the keys in the cupholder next to the driver’s seat. Exactly like Mom used to do.

“Uh-oh,” I said aloud. Mom was still capable of driving, even though she did not know where she was going. I just really, really hoped that she didn’t hurt anybody on the road. I pulled out my cellphone, about to call the police.

“Celia!” Yvonne shouted from the kitchen. She hurried up behind me, excited. “They found your mother. There are two messages on your machine.”

At that very moment, Mom was holed up at the College Diner in New Paltz, a 20-minute drive over the mountain, through the fields, left over the Wallkill River and away down Main Street.

Yvonne called the diner. They promised to keep the car keys until someone arrived. By that time, Yvonne had to go to work. She drove my friend Elizabeth to the diner, and Elizabeth drove Mom home in my car.

Half an hour later, they walked in the front door. Mom’s cheeks were rouged by the chill air and her eyes sparkled, her white hair riffing with static electricity. “Hello, hello,” she sang out. “Here we are.” She was wearing the flannel nightgown and robe I had dressed her in the night before. It was covered by her oversized purple parka, and her bare feet were shoved into sneakers.

I started laughing as soon as I saw her. I couldn’t help it. Elizabeth and Mom started laughing too. “You had a big adventure,” I said, hugging them both. “How are you?”

“I’m just marvelous,” said my mother. Mom always feels great after doing something rakish. We settled her on the sofa with her feet on the ottoman. By the time I got her blanket tucked in around her shoulders, she had fallen asleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t stop laughing as she described the scene. “Your mother was holding court in this big booth. She was sitting there in her nightgown and her parka, talking to everybody, with this plate of toast and coffee and, like, three of the staff hovering around her.”

The waitress said Mom seemed “a little disoriented” when she got there. Mom said she was meeting a friend for breakfast, but since she was wearing a nightgown and didn’t know whom she was meeting or where she lived, the staff thought there might be a problem. They convinced Mom to let them look in the glove compartment of the car, where they found my name and number.

It was then that I realized I was laughing – something I’d thought I would never be able to do again. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, I’m laughing,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Elizabeth, holding her belly.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, rolling on the floor.

And she who gave me life, who had suffered the death of my child and the extinction of her own intellect, snoozed on: oblivious, jubilant, still herself, still mine.

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Wealth Matters: Protect Yourself from Investment Fraud This Madoff Day

From left, Marc S. Drier, Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford. Their fraudulent schemes collapsed in late 2008 and early 2009.

THIS is the time of year when most people think of gifts and holiday gatherings. I couldn’t help thinking of frauds past.

Four years ago this week, Marc S. Dreier, a high-flying lawyer, was arrested and later charged with defrauding his clients of $700 million. A few days later, Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud was uncovered. Totaling an estimated $65 billion, Mr. Madoff’s fraud was in a class by itself. And then, a short time afterward, some of the brokers who had been selling fraudulent certificates of deposit for R. Allen Stanford began to turn on him; he was arrested in February 2009 and later convicted of a $7 billion fraud.

These schemes collapsed with the economy in 2008. But on their anniversaries, it may be a good time to ask whether you have done all you can to lower your risk of being caught up in a similar fraud. Call it Madoff Day (celebrated on Dec. 11, the day of his arrest).

Protecting yourself against fraud, or simply bad advice, is easier said than done. The most common advice is to make sure your money is held by an independent custodian or firm whose job is to keep your money safe. That wasn’t the case with either the Madoff or Stanford fraud. But that is only one small step.

So what else can investors do to protect themselves, not only from unscrupulous advisers but also from rushing into an investment that is clearly too good to be true?

Marc H. Simon, a lawyer who lost two years of bonuses, his job and months of unreimbursed expenses when Mr. Dreier’s law firm collapsed, said he has thought a lot about what he could have done differently.

Mr. Simon said that six or seven years before the fraud was uncovered, he knew of inconsistencies in the firm’s 401(k) plans. But the big red flag should have been that Mr. Dreier had sole control over every major decision at the law firm. Still, that had been Mr. Dreier’s pitch: work for him and don’t worry about the irksome details partners typically face.

“People like Drier and Madoff were highly intelligent individuals, they were very charismatic and they were giving people what they wanted,” Mr. Simon said. “It is harder to bring into question those who are providing you something you want.”

Randall A. Pulman, a lawyer in San Antonio who represents many victims of Mr. Stanford’s fraud, agreed that the will to believe was what ensnared people.

“For you and me, it’s too good to be true,” he said. “For the guy who has been working in the oil fields, how is he supposed to know?”

Of course, fraud and just plain bad advice are not limited to the poor or unsophisticated. Robert P. Rittereiser, the former chief financial officer of Merrill Lynch and former chief executive of E. F. Hutton, is working as the receiver for two funds suing J. Ezra Merkin, a former money manager who steered money to Mr. Madoff. Mr. Rittereiser did not think investors in Mr. Merkin’s funds knew that their money was simply being passed on to Mr. Madoff. But even if they did, they may not have seen anything to be concerned about.

“They were investing money and getting appropriate returns for the kind of fund it was,” Mr. Rittereiser said. “Most of them had a relationship of some kind and confidence with Merkin and the people he was dealing with.”

So how do you protect yourself? The first step would seem to be picking an honest adviser. The good news is that only about 7 percent of advisers have disciplinary records, said Nicholas W. Stuller, president and chief executive of AdviceIQ, a company that evaluates advisers. The bad news is that those violations appear only after someone has filed a complaint.

Mr. Stuller’s company, which has now approved some 2,400 advisers, rejects anyone with any type of infraction — from a securities fine to a misdemeanor for getting into a fight. He said this policy might keep some good advisers off the site, but his goal is to search the records of federal and state regulators to find advisers he knows are clean.

“There are advisers who have significant negative disciplinary history with one regulator but appear to be pristine with another regulator,” Mr. Stuller said. “There was a guy in Minnesota who was stealing insurance premiums. In his enforcement record, it says, ‘We’re going to alert Finra,’ but his Finra record is clean,” he said, referring to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. “That’s where the regulators don’t talk to each other.”

AdviceIQ’s main competitor, BrightScope, takes a different approach. It notes disciplinary actions taken against advisers but leaves it up to the consumer to go to regulators to determine what the violations were.

“We want the consumer to go to the source data, because there is a lot of liability in publishing that,” said Mike Alfred, co-founder and chief executive of BrightScope. “Many of these folks are good advisers, and they’ll take care of you. But what if they had one crazy client who put all his money in Internet stocks in 2000 and then sued?”

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3 Walmart Suppliers Made Goods in Bangladesh Factory

Khurshed Rinku/Associated Press

Burials on Nov. 27 for some of the 112 victims of the garment factory fire in Bangladesh.

Documents found at the Tazreen apparel factory in Bangladesh, where 112 workers died in a fire nearly two weeks ago, indicate that three American garment companies were using the factory during the past year to supply goods to Walmart and its Sam’s Club subsidiary.

The documents — photographed by a Bangladeshi labor organizer after the fire and made available to The New York Times — include an internal production report from mid-September showing that 5 of the factory’s 14 production lines were devoted to making apparel for Walmart.

In a related matter, two officials who attended a meeting held in Bangladesh in 2011 to discuss factory safety in the garment industry said on Wednesday that the Walmart official there played the lead role in blocking an effort to have global retailers pay more for apparel to help Bangladesh factories improve their electrical and fire safety.

Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop group based in Amsterdam, said Walmart was the company that “most strongly advocated this position.”

The meeting was held in April 2011 in Dhaka, the country’s capital, and brought together global retailers, Bangladeshi factory owners, government officials and nongovernment organizations after several apparel factory fires in Bangladesh had killed dozens of workers the previous winter.

According to the minutes of the meeting, which were made available to The Times, Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Walmart director of ethical sourcing, along with an official from another major apparel retailer, noted that the proposed improvements in electrical and fire safety would involve as many as 4,500 factories and would be “in most cases” a “very extensive and costly modification.”

“It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments,” the minutes said.

Kevin Gardner, a Walmart spokesman, said the company official’s remarks in Bangladesh were “out of context.”

“Walmart has been advocating for improved fire safety with the Bangladeshi government, with industry groups and with suppliers,” he said, adding that the company has helped develop and establish programs to increase fire prevention.

Ms. Zeldenrust said, “Everyone recognized that fire safety was a serious problem and it was a high time to act on it, and Walmart’s position had a very negative impact.” She added, “It gives manufacturers the excuse they’re looking for to say, ‘We’re not to blame.’ ”

Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring group based in Washington, was also at the meeting. He said that upgrading the factories’ safety would cost a small fraction of what Walmart and other retailers pay for the clothing they import from Bangladesh each year.

Bloomberg News first reported details of the Dhaka meeting on Wednesday.

Walmart has indirectly acknowledged that the factory, Tazreen Fashions, outside Dhaka, was producing some of its apparel, saying in a statement that a supplier had “subcontracted work to this factory without authorization and in direct violation of our policies.” In that statement, issued two days after the Nov. 24 fire, Walmart said, “We have terminated the relationship with that supplier.” Walmart has declined to name the supplier.

After Walmart was shown some of the documents from the factory on Wednesday, Mr. Gardner replied in an e-mail. “As we’ve said, the Tazreen factory was de-authorized months ago,” he wrote. “We don’t comment on specific supplier relationships.”

The photographed documents from the factory indicate that three suppliers — the International Direct Group, Success Apparel and Topson Downs — used the factory to make shirts, shorts and pajamas for Walmart. One document, written in July, provides product descriptions from Success Apparel for Walmart’s Faded Glory house-brand shorts. A photo taken inside the factory after the fire showed a pair of Faded Glory shorts.

The documents indicate that Success Apparel often worked through Simco, a Bangladeshi garment maker.

Mr. Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium said the documents raised questions about Walmart’s statements after the fire.

“It was not a single rogue supplier as Walmart has claimed — there were several different U.S. suppliers working for Walmart in that factory,” Mr. Nova said. “It stretches credulity to think that Walmart, famous for its tight control over its global supply chain, didn’t know about this.”

Mr. Nova works closely with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity and made the factory documents available.

Investigators also found apparel made for Sears and Disney inside the factory after the fire. Both companies said suppliers had given orders to the factory without their knowledge and authorization.

Mr. Gardner said accredited outside auditors had periodically inspected the factory on Walmart’s behalf. A May 2011 audit gave the factory an “orange” rating, meaning that there were “higher-risk violations” and that it would be re-audited within six months. If a factory gets three orange ratings over two years, it loses Walmart’s approval.

A follow-up audit in August 2011 for Walmart gave Tazreen an improved “yellow” rating, meaning “medium-risk violations.”

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Roethlisberger to start against Chargers

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will start on Sunday against the San Diego Chargers.

Roethlisberger missed the last three weeks with a sprained right shoulder and dislocated rib but practiced for the second straight day on Thursday without incident. Roethlisberger said he felt "good" but declined to go into details. Offensive coordinator Todd Haley said he believes Roethlisberger can make all the necessary throws.

The Steelers (7-5) went 1-2 in Roethlisberger's absence, including a 23-20 victory over Baltimore last week behind backup Charlie Batch. Tight end Heath Miller said he hasn't noticed any drop off in velocity from Roethlisberger, who took "90 percent" of the snaps with the first team on Thursday.

Pittsburgh is tied with Cincinnati for the AFC's final wild card spot.

___

Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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Well: Running in Reverse

This column appears in the Dec. 9 issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Backward running, also known as reverse or retro running, is not as celebrated as barefoot running and will never be mistaken for the natural way to run. But a small body of science suggests that backward running enables people to avoid or recover from common injuries, burn extra calories, sharpen balance and, not least, mix up their daily routine.

The technique is simple enough. Most of us have done it, at least in a modified, abbreviated form, and probably recently, perhaps hopping back from a curb as a bus went by or pushing away from the oven with a roasting pan in both hands. But training with backward running is different. Biomechanically, it is forward motion’s doppelgänger. In a study published last year, biomechanics researchers at the University of Milan in Italy had a group of runners stride forward and backward at a steady pace along a track equipped with force sensors and cameras.

They found that, as expected, the runners struck the ground near the back of their feet when going forward and rolled onto the front of their feet for takeoff. When they went backward though, they landed near the front of their feet and took off from the heels. They tended to lean slightly forward even when running backward. As a result, their muscles fired differently. In forward running, the muscles and tendons were pulled taut during landing and responded by coiling, a process that creates elastic energy (think rubber bands) that is then released during toe-off. When running backward, muscles and tendons were coiled during landing and stretched at takeoff. The backward runners’ legs didn’t benefit from stored elastic energy. In fact, the researchers found, running backward required nearly 30 percent more energy than running forward at the same speed. But backward running also produced far less hard pounding.

What all of this means, says Giovanni Cavagna, a professor at the University of Milan who led the study, is that reverse running can potentially “improve forward running by allowing greater and safer training.”

It is a particularly attractive option for runners with bad knees. A 2012 study found that backward running causes far less impact to the front of the knees. It also burns more calories at a given pace. In a recent study, active female college students who replaced their exercise with jogging backward for 15 to 45 minutes three times a week for six weeks lost almost 2.5 percent of their body fat.

And it aids in balance training — backward slow walking is sometimes used as a therapy for people with Parkinson’s and is potentially useful for older people, whose balance has grown shaky.

But it has drawbacks, Cavagna says — chiefly that you can’t see where you’re going. “It should be done on a track,” he says, “or by a couple of runners, side by side,” one facing forward.

It should be implemented slowly too, because its unfamiliar motion can cause muscle fatigue. Intersperse a few minutes periodically during your regular routine, Cavagna says. Increase the time you spend backward as it feels comfortable.

The good news for serious runners is that backward does not necessarily mean slow. The best recorded backward five-kilometer race time is 19:31, faster than most of us can hit the finish line with our best foot forward.

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Obama’s Tax Plan Would Spare Many Affluent Families

President Obama’s insistence that marginal tax rates rise for families making more than $250,000 has convinced millions of affluent Americans that they are likely to be writing larger checks to the government next year.

But many of those families have no reason to fret.

A close look at the president’s plan shows that a large majority of families making up to $300,000 – as well as hundreds of thousands of families with even larger incomes – would not pay taxes at a higher marginal rate.

Because the complexity of the tax code makes it difficult to draw clean lines, they are the beneficiaries of choices the administration has made to ensure that families earning less than $250,000 do not pay higher rates.

Some of those affluent households still would pay higher taxes next year under other parts of the president’s tax plan and increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act, but not under the centerpiece, the part most frequently promote by the president and most bitterly opposed by Congressional Republicans.

John Boudreau, the president of a Connecticut construction firm who expects to make about $300,000 this year, said that was a welcome surprise. He voted for Mr. Obama and said he was ready to pay taxes at a higher rate. But he’d rather not.

“I’m willing to, but if it works that I’m not, so be it,” he said. “I will not be a person that’s going to stick an extra check in my tax bill as my donation to my country.”

Unless the White House and Congress are able to reach an agreement, federal taxes are scheduled to rise sharply next year for a large majority of Americans. Tax cuts first passed in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush are scheduled to expire. So are cuts passed during Mr. Obama’s first term.

The president’s plan would prevent most of the scheduled increase for those below an income threshold Mr. Obama generally describes as $250,000. The Senate has passed similar legislation. But Democrats remain at loggerheads with House Republicans, who want to prevent scheduled increases for the most affluent households, too. And the parties disagree about how to prune federal spending.

The number that now divides the parties was introduced by Mr. Obama in 2007, in the early days of the presidential campaign, when he promised to extend the Bush tax cuts for families that made less than that amount.

“I can make a firm pledge,” Mr. Obama said in September 2008. " Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

When policy makers talk about income, however, they don’t mean the amount of money a family earns; they mean the portion subject to taxes. The government does not tax contributions to retirement plans, interest payments on mortgages or charitable donations, among other things. As a result, two families with the same incomes will most likely have different taxable incomes.

To guarantee that tax rates do not increase for any family making less than $250,000, the Obama administration proposed in 2009 to raise marginal rates on taxable income above roughly $230,000 – because the minimum amount of income a family is entitled to shelter from taxation is roughly $20,000.

But the average amount families in that income range are entitled to shelter from taxation is much larger, closer to $60,000. In other words, families with taxable income of $230,000 on average earned about $290,000 in 2009.

“They wanted to be able to say that ‘Absolutely nobody making less than $250,000 could possibly pay higher taxes under our plan,'” said Bob McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal advocacy group “So they had to assume the most ridiculous assumptions, that even if you’re a childless couple with no itemized deductions making $250,001, your taxes still won’t go up. They figured that if this couple existed and their taxes went up, somebody would find them and jump on ‘em.”

Furthermore, to remain consistent with the president’s original promise, the administration has adjusted the original numbers for inflation. When Mr. Obama says $250,000, the White House says he means “in 2009 dollars.” It is now proposing to raise marginal rates on families with taxable incomes above $246,000 – meaning, on average, families earning more than about $305,000.

While the president has said that he wants to raise tax rates for the top 2 percent, only about 1 percent of taxpayers will face higher marginal rates, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a widely respected research group.

The restoration of the other provisions temporarily suspended by the Bush tax cuts, including limits on deductions and higher taxes on investment income, still would raise taxes for only about 32 percent of families with income between $250,000 and $300,000, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice. About 77 percent of families with income between $300,000 and $350,000 would face an increase.

Neera Tanden, domestic policy director for Mr. Obama’s 2008 general election campaign, said the president might not have succeeded in rallying popular support for any tax increase if he had not made the $250,000 promise.

But Ms. Tanden, now president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said the administration should reconsider that commitment.

She co-authored a deficit-reduction plan released earlier this week recommending modest tax increases on households making as little as $100,000.

“We think it’s reasonable to ask a couple more dollars from people who make $150,000,” she said.

Some of the beneficiaries see good reasons why their taxes should not rise.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’m disappointed,” said Ryan Ruby, 36, of Bothell, Wash., after learning that the president’s tax plan probably wouldn’t affect him even though he and his wife make between $250,000 and $300,000 a year. “I do think our tax rates should go up eventually, but right now I think the need for people to have disposable income to get the economy moving is probably more important than broadening the base.”

Most affluent households still will pay higher taxes next year for other reasons.

A two-year-old payroll tax break is scheduled to lapse at the end of this year. That would increase Social Security taxes by 2 percentage points on wage income below $113,700.

And the Affordable Care Act levies new taxes specifically targeting married couples earning more than $250,000 and singles earning more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income.

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