Bucks Blog: The Question You Should Be Asking About the Stock Market

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published last year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

With the stock market up more than 100 percent from those scary days in early 2009 and up 16 percent in 2012 alone, we’re now hearing plenty about how small investors are getting back into the market. Andrew Wilkinson, the chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak Associates, referred to it as a “a real sea change in investor outlook.”

It seems we’re in danger of repeating the same old cycle of swearing off stocks forever during scary markets, missing a huge rally and then deciding it’s time to buy when stocks are high again. On the flip side, I’ve had a number of conversations with Main Street investors who are asking if now is the time to sell because the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering near 14,000 and the S&P 500 stock index is around 1,500 again.

So which one is it? Should everyday investors be buying or selling?

Do you see the problem here?

If we’re investing based on what the market has done, it’s a recipe for disaster. Recent market performance tells us almost nothing useful about what the market will do in the near future. Logically it seems like it should, but a quick review of the market’s performance during the last six years should be evidence enough to convince us that it doesn’t.

Remember how you felt in March, 2009? I bet you didn’t feel like investing, and you weren’t alone. Almost no one did. It was a scary time. But it turns out that it would have been a brilliant time to invest. Again, not because of what the market had done, but what it was about to do.

But there was no way to know that in March 2009.

Did anyone expect (or feel) like 2012 was going to turn into a 16 percent year? In fact, almost all the unfortunate souls that make their living predicting the markets got 2012 wrong.

Here’s the thing we need to remember: we have no idea if now is the time to be buying or selling. But the good news is that it’s not even the question we should be asking. Instead we should be asking, “How can we avoid making the big behavioral mistake of selling low and buying high (again!) in the future?”

Instead of worrying about getting in or out of the market at the right time, take that time to focus on crafting a portfolio based on your goals. Start by taking out a piece of paper and writing a personal investment policy statement that addresses the following:

1. Why are you investing this money in the first place? What are your goals?
2. How much do you need in cash, bonds and stocks to give you the best chance of meeting those goals while taking the least amount of risk?
3. What actual investments will you buy to populate that plan and why? Make sure you address issues like diversification and expenses.
4. How often will you revisit this plan to make sure you’re doing what you said you would do and to make changes to your investments to get them back in line with what you said in number 2?

A personal investment policy statement can be one of the most important guardrails against the emotional investment decisions that we all regret in hindsight. So, when you get worried about the markets and are tempted to sell everything you own that has anything to do with stocks, go back to that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

And when you get excited about that initial public offering that your brother-in-law says he can “get you in on,” pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

When your neighbors are all wrapped up in how the latest apocalypse du jour is going to ruin everyone’s retirement, pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

I know this might not work all the time. In fact, it might not work at all when we’re scared and dead set on getting out. But my hope is that having something we wrote when we weren’t scared will give us a little time to pause and ask a few questions before we do something that might end up being a mistake.

As a result, maybe, just maybe, we can shift the focus away from whether now is the right time to buy or sell and place it squarely on whether that decision fits into our own, personal investment plans.

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Study Discovers Internal Trigger for the Previously Fearless

In the past few years, scientists have learned a lot about fear from a woman who could not experience it. A rare illness had damaged a part of her brain known as the amygdala and left her eerily unafraid.

Both in experiments and in life, the woman, known as SM, showed no fear of scary movies, snakes, spiders, or very real domestic assaults, death threats and robberies at knife and gunpoint.

Although she lived in an area “replete with crime, drugs, and danger,” according to an earlier study, without a functioning amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain long known to process fear, nothing scared her.

But recently SM had a panic attack. And the simple fact that she was able to know fear without a working amygdala, experts say, illuminates some of the brain’s most fundamental processes and may have practical value in the study of panic attacks.

SM’s moments of fear occurred during an experiment that involved inhaling carbon dioxide through a mask in amounts that are not harmful but create a momentary feeling of suffocation. Not only SM, but two other women, identified as AM and BG, identical twins with amygdala damage similar to SM’s, showed all the physical symptoms of panic, and reported that, to their surprise, they felt intense fear.

The researchers, who report on the experiment in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, had hypothesized that SM would not panic. John A. Wemmie, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa and the senior author of the paper, said, “We saw the exact opposite.”

Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, who had worked with SM and some of the researchers involved in this study on previous papers, but did not participate in this research, said he was delighted with the results, because it confirmed his own thinking that while the amygdala was central to fear generated by external threats, there was a different brain path that produced the feeling of fear generated by internal bodily experiences like a heart attack. This idea was put forth in a 2011 paper about SM on which he was a co-author.

“I think it’s a very interesting and important result,” he said

Dr. Joseph E. LeDoux, of New York University, who has extensively studied the amygdala but was not involved in the research, said in an e-mail, “This is a novel and important paper” in an area where there is much left to learn. He said scientists still did not understand “how the brain creates a conscious experience of fear” whether the amygdala or other systems are involved.

SM scores in the normal range on IQ and other tests, and voluntarily participated in this and earlier studies, all of which showed her lacking in any sort of fear response until now. In one, for example, she walked through a Halloween haunted house and never gasped, recoiled or screamed, as others did, when a person in a costume leaped out of the dark. She also did not seem to learn fear from life experiences.

So what was so unusual about carbon dioxide?

The answer seems to lie in the way the brain monitors disturbances in the world outside the body -- snakes and robbers -- compared with the way it monitors trouble inside the body -- hunger, heart attacks, the feeling of not being able to breathe. External threats clearly are processed by the amygdala. But she had never been tested for internal signals of trouble.

In the experiment SM and others participated in, they took one deep breath with plenty of oxygen but much more carbon dioxide than air usually contains. Humans are actually not sensitive to how much oxygen they are breathing, but to how much carbon dioxide is accumulating in the body, since it builds up quickly when one can’t breathe. The sensation is familiar to anyone who has tried to hold their breath.

The researchers suggest that excess carbon dioxide produces signals that may be picked up in the brainstem and elsewhere, activating a fear-generating system in the brain that a venomous snake or a mugger with a gun would not trigger.

One puzzling aspect of the results is that SM and the two other women all reacted so strongly. Among people with normal brains, only those with panic disorder are reliably terrified in carbon dioxide experiments. Most people are not so susceptible, suggesting, said Colin Buzza, a co-author of the study and a medical student at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, that perhaps the amygdala is not functioning properly in eople with panic disorder.

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Innovative Ways the Autism Community Uses iPads

The iPad has proven to be an especially useful communication tool for young people with autism. It provides a way to express themselves through words and images; it can be used to teach them about everyday scenarios and give them more independence. It’s also far less bulky than some communication devices of the past.

Autism Spectrum Disorders are developmental disabilities that affect about one in every 88 children, and one in 54 boys.

[More from Mashable: 10 Essential Tools for the Lean Web Developer]

Jonathan Izak‘s 12-year-old autistic brother inspired him to develop the AutisMate app for iPad. His brother, Oriel, is mostly nonverbal and used to struggle to communicate, sometimes throwing tantrums when he was unable to get his point across, Izak tells Mashable.

At 7 years old, Oriel had to wear a heavy communication device around his neck, which further set him apart from other children at school. Now, Oriel carries an iPad and uses the app his brother developed to communicate and learn new behaviors like how to act in specific social situations.

[More from Mashable: Tablet Shipments Hit Record Levels While Apple’s Market Share Declines]

With AutisMate, parents or caretakers take and upload photos of their child’s bedroom, the kitchen, his or her school to the app. When the app launches, the iPad’s GPS will know where the user is and allows them to tap pictures of their surrounding environment. The child can tap the refrigerator, for instance, to express that he or she is hungry.

Izak says these visual tools for communication don’t become a permanent crutch but rather promote speech and communication.

It’s not uncommon for children with autism to be nonverbal and need the iPad to communicate. AutismSpeaks.org says it’s estimated that 25% of people with autism are completely nonverbal.

Izak explains that, for someone with autism, the unknowns in life can be scary, so to prepare that person for the world, apps like AutisMate show scenes of how to do everyday things like go to a restaurant or the doctor’s office.

Parents, caretakers and doctors know early intervention with autism is a key factor to increasing their child’s likelihood of communicating, which is probably why most autism apps focus on children. iPad apps to help children with autism develop their communication skills are part of a rapidly growing market and have proved to be effective tools. Check out some of the apps we found and others recommended to us. Let us know if you know of any other useful apps for people with autism.

Click here to view the gallery: Autism Apps

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, UrsaHoogle

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Stevie Wonder headlines pre-Super Bowl concert

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Applause and approval greeted Stevie Wonder as thousands stood for hours to hear his pre-Super Bowl concert that also featured guitarist Gary Clark Jr.

Escorted on stage late Saturday by his daughter and backup singer Aisha Morris, Wonder performed several of his hits, including his opening song, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)."

That was followed by "Master Blaster," Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," and Wonder's own "Higher Ground."

The 62-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member headlined the event outdoor event held near the Wyndham Riverfront Hotel on the eve of Sunday's game between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers.

Thousands packed a tent set up on a parking lot across the street from the hotel to hear Wonder, Clark, R&B artist Janelle Monae and DJ Martin Solveig.

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Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction

Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

Matt Eich for The New York Times

MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”

It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.

Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.

Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.

Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”

Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.

“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”

“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”

Dr. Waldo M. Ellison

Richard Fee initial evaluation

Feb. 5, 2010

Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.

Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.

“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 3, 2013

An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.

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Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”

Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”

With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.

Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.

Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.

“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.

Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”

Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”

Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.

Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”

Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”

And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.

The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.

To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.

Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.

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In Behind-Scene Blows and Triumphs, Sense of Clinton Future

Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton behind President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan during a meeting in Germany in 2011.

WASHINGTON — Last summer, as the fighting in Syria raged and questions about the United States’ inaction grew, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred privately with David H. Petraeus, the director of the C.I.A. The two officials were joining forces on a plan to arm the Syrian resistance.

The idea was to vet the rebel groups and train fighters, who would be supplied with weapons. The plan had risks, but it also offered the potential reward of creating Syrian allies with whom the United States could work, both during the conflict and President Bashar al-Assad’s eventual removal.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus presented the proposal to the White House, according to administration officials. But with President Obama in the midst of a re-election bid, they were rebuffed.

A year earlier, she had better luck with the White House. Overcoming the president’s skeptical aides, she persuaded Mr. Obama to open relations with the military rulers in Myanmar, a reclusive dictatorship eager to emerge from decades of isolation.

As she leaves the State Department, the simplest yardstick for measuring Mrs. Clinton’s legacy has been her tireless travels: 112 countries, nearly a million miles, 401 days on the road. Historians will point to how she expanded the State Department’s agenda to embrace issues like gender violence and the use of social media in diplomacy.

“We do need a new architecture for this new world: more Frank Gehry than formal Greek,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech last week that served as both a valedictory and a reminder of why she remained the nation’s most potent political figure aside from Mr. Obama.

And yet, interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials also paint a more complex picture: of a dogged diplomat and a sometimes frustrated figure who prized her role as team player, but whose instincts were often more activist than those of a White House that has kept a tight grip on foreign policy.

The disclosures about Mrs. Clinton’s behind-the-scenes role in Syria and Myanmar — one a setback, the other a success — offer a window into her time as a member of Mr. Obama’s cabinet. They may also be a guide to her thinking as she ponders a future run for the presidency with favorability ratings that are the highest of her career, even after her last months at the State Department were marred by the deadly attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“Secretary Clinton has dramatically changed the face of U.S. foreign policy globally for the good,” said Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration. “But I wish she had been unleashed more by the White House.”

In an administration often faulted for its timidity abroad, “Clinton wanted to lead from the front, not from behind,” said Vali R. Nasr, a former State Department adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Mrs. Clinton made her first official trip to Asia, a choice that spoke to her diplomatic ambitions as well as her recognition from the start that many big-ticket foreign-policy issues in the Obama administration — Iraq, Iran, and peacemaking in the Middle East — would be controlled by the White House or the Pentagon.

In Afghanistan, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton hungered for a success on the order of the Dayton Accords, which ended the Bosnian War. But when her special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, who had negotiated that agreement, fell out of favor with the White House and later died, those dreams died with him.

Then came the Arab awakening, a strategic surprise that eclipsed America’s pivot to focusing on Asia and plunged Mrs. Clinton into a maelstrom. It tested her loyalty to longtime allies like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and reinforced her conviction that anger at decades of stagnation, fueled by social media, would sweep aside the old order in the Arab world.

After Britain and France argued for intervening to defend Libya’s rebels against Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mrs. Clinton played an important role in mobilizing a broad international coalition and persuading the White House to join the NATO-led operation.

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Apple TV Is Running Late

So, Apple‘s big plan to talk cable companies into making the iPod of the television industry thus far involves getting Time Warner to let it put HBO Go on its box (if you buy a cable subscription!), something other similar boxes already do. How very unexciting. It’s surprising that Apple TV doesn’t already offer HBO Go, since its biggest competitors Roku and Xbox 360 have had it for over a year. And it’s not like Apple has spent that time coming up with some innovative arrangement that would that would excite the cord-cutter (and cord-never) set. No, per Bloomberg’s   Edmund Lee and Adam Satariano, by mid-2013, Apple TV owners who also subscribe to cable or satellite TV can watch the premium channel through their TVs via Apple’s box. Yes, if you have an Apple TV, you can watch HBO either on it or through your cable box. The choice is yours!

RELATED: Apple Won’t Be Revolutionizing TV Anytime Soon if Cable Has Their Say

HBO Go is a modest improvement over the HBO On Demand offerings because it offers HBO’s entire library of shows, not just a select few. HBO also puts brand new episodes up right after they air, which is nice for people who forget to set or have a too-full DVR. But, cable subscribers already have access to HBO Go—on their computers. The improvement here is that existing subscribers now have another way to get those shows onto their TV screens.

RELATED: HBO Is Finally OK with Cord Cutting (In Scandinavia)

This too-late move to get Time Warner on its box surfaces a larger problem: Apple TV has very few apps so far, as AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka points out. HBO Go will bring its total outside app count up to 10, a ton fewer than Xbox and Roku. And yet, many have talked about Apple TV as the gadget that will change everything. Perhaps techies overlooked the deficit because the company has been in secret talks with cable companies to supposedly revolutionize TV for years. It’s coming, the Apple rumors promised, fending off any doubts that Apple would deliver something great. But, nothing exceptional has arrived yet, certainly nothing that sounds like the Apple TV code Steve Jobs claimed to have cracked shortly before his death. Rather, this sounds like something Apple should have done years ago. Apple, if anything, is playing catch-up. 

RELATED: Apple Might Be Making Apple TV Content Deals

But maybe Apple isn’t the place to look for the future of television. Elsewhere in TV land, something new, different, and possibly revolutionary is happening. Netflix, an entity that does not require a cable subscription, will release its first big-budget TV drama today. Unlike Apple, Netflix is trying to operate outside of the traditional cable-bundle structure in order to create an alternative for people who don’t want to pay into the old system. Instead of playing by HBO’s rules and selling its shows on its strict terms, Netflix wants to be the HBO of streaming TV, by creating premium shows that will draw people to Netflix for a premium price. Also in an attempt to do things differently, Netflix has released all the episodes at once, to appeal to our binge watching sensibilities. The experiment might not work. But at least, unlike Apple, Netflix is trying. 

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Why is Beckham sitting on the bench for nothing?

PARIS (AP) — David Beckham has won league championships in three countries on two continents, earns millions of dollars in endorsements and his name is practically synonymous with celebrity itself. He has his own cologne, for goodness sake. So why is he even bothering to sit on the bench for the Paris Saint-Germain football club?

His royal highness of football doesn't need the money — and he's said he'll donate his PSG salary to charity — but he does need to start thinking about life after the game. At 37, Beckham is practically a dinosaur for the sport, and he acknowledged in his welcoming press conference on Thursday that he probably won't be in the team's starting lineup.

Instead, Beckham may be beginning to put in place a plan for life after the final whistle. Ellis Cashmore, a sociologist who writes about sports and media culture at Staffordshire University, said that prolonged exposure is always useful to celebrities building empires. In that way, the deal with PSG does double work: It keeps his name in lights for longer and also garners extra attention for the charitable contribution.

"When he does stop playing, which is going to be quite soon, his overall brand appeal will inevitably decline because we will inevitably forget about this guy," he said. "I think he's probably thinking, I want to stay in the shop window for a bit longer."

But Cashmore also cautioned against being too cynical in assessing Beckham's motives: "The guy is an athlete. He wants to do what he loves to do."

Bruno Satin, an independent players' agent who was with IMG for a decade, also said that the move to PSG — even if it's to sit on the bench — is a step up for Beckham.

"For him, to be on the PSG team, it's a higher level than being on the Los Angeles Galaxy," he said. "For the world of football, for real football, the Los Angeles Galaxy is nothing on the map of football."

Some wondered if Beckham was trying to avoid the notoriously sticky fingers of the French state with his plans to donate his salary.

But Sandra Hodzic, a tax lawyer with Salans, said the deduction an individual can take on such contributions is limited. Instead, it would be smarter for PSG to directly donate the salary — and take a big tax break in the process.

Doing so would have an added benefit for the club: UEFA, the governing body for European football, mandates that clubs break even. The donation could allow PSG to essentially write off Beckham's entire salary — a huge help for a team notorious for mega-contracts.

Beckham, meanwhile, would be better off trying to avoid becoming a French tax resident at all. So far, Hodzic said, he is making all the right moves: His family is staying in London, he plans to live only part-time in the country for less than six months, and his primary source of income —whether or not he donates his salary — isn't being earned in France.

Beckham's agent did not return calls for comment on specifics of the contract.

Still, the charitable contribution has raised the question about what Beckham is getting out of the deal. For one, he likely is still getting a cut of rights to his image. Jerseys with his name on them were already selling out at the PSG store on the Champs-Elysees on Friday.

Cashmore, who wrote a book called "Beckham," calls him a "marketing phenomenon" and estimates that about 70 percent of Beckham's income comes from endorsement deals — with Adidas, for instance. That makes salary almost irrelevant — especially for a man estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List to be worth 160 million pounds ($253 million).

But the football feeds the endorsements, Cashmore says.

"It makes an awful lot of business sense to perpetuate, to prolong his active competitive football career," he said, especially with a team that's doing fairly well this year. "It makes an awful lot of sense for him to showcase himself because it will generate more income from his various other sponsorship and licensing activities."

But certainly this move, as any at this late-stage in his playing career, is being made with an eye on what will come next. Cashmore said that when Beckham signed with the L.A. Galaxy, there was an understanding that he would eventually become an ambassador for American soccer. That plan clearly fell by the wayside — perhaps because Major League Soccer decided it was just too expensive to keep on the star after his presence on American soil failed to generate more interest in the game.

It's possible, Cashmore said, that Beckham is looking for a similar deal after his stint at PSG, which is Qatari-owned. The tiny, wealthy nation is hosting the World Cup in 2022, and Beckham's contract with PSG will establish a relationship with it; from there, a role as, say, an ambassador for the tournament would seem more natural.

"For his after-career conversion, it's important to have links with major actors in the world of sports," said Satin. And Qatar is certainly one. It has poured money into PSG, drawing major names like striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic. It also funds the satellite network Al Jazeera, which could provide Beckham with a platform. And then there's the World Cup.

In the end, though, Satin said the clue to Beckham's thinking may be as simple as the eternal draw of Paris.

"PSG has become a glamorous club, a pretty nice club in a beautiful city," said Bruno Satin, an agent. "It's just two hours on the Eurostar (train) from London."

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AP Sports Writer Rob Harris contributed to this report from London.

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Follow Sarah DiLorenzo at http://www.twitter.com/sdilorenzo

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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