After 9 years, Bears and Smith part ways

Chicago Tribune sports columnist Steve Rosenbloom on the Bears firing Lovie Smith. (Posted: Dec 31, 2012)

The epitaph for Lovie Smith's tenure as head coach of the Bears could read, "He couldn't fix the offense."

For all the good things Smith did in his nine years in Chicago, his undoing was his inability to take care of the side of the ball in which he had no background.

The Bears fired Smith on Monday after a 10-6 season, Tribune sources have confirmed. They started 7-1 but fell apart down the stretch, mostly because they couldn't score.

Since Smith took over in 2004, the Bears have ranked higher than 23rd in offense only once. They have ranked 28th or lower four times.

Smith tried four offensive coordinators during his Bears career. His first thought was to run a similar offense to the one he was familiar with when he was defensive coordinator of the Rams, so he hired Terry Shea.

The Bears finished last in the league in offense behind quarterbacks Chad Hutchinson, Craig Krenzel, Jonathan Quinn and Rex Grossman, and Shea was dismissed after one season.

Smith then turned to Ron Turner for his second stint as Bears offensive coordinator. Turner lasted five years in what was the heyday for Smith's offense.

It was during this period that Smith's stubborn allegiance to Grossman became an issue. "Rex is our quarterback," he said over and over again.

Those days Smith often talked frequently about how the Bears "get off the bus running," and the team achieved its offensive identity by pounding the ball with Thomas Jones, then Cedric Benson and finally Matt Forte.

But after the Bears traded for Jay Cutler in 2009 and they still finished 23rd in offense and missed the playoffs, Turner was made the scapegoat and fired.

An extensive job search that included interest in Jeremy Bates, Rob Chudzinski and Tom Clements led the Bears back to Smith's old friend Mike Martz, for whom he had worked in St. Louis. Going from the conservative Turner to the aggressive Martz was quite a philosophical shift for Smith.

Martz's offense sputtered in 2010 but started to come on the next season. Then Cutler broke his thumb in the 10th game, and the team unraveled. The Bears lost five straight, and Martz was fired along with general manager Jerry Angelo, the man who brought Smith to Chicago.

Smith's next move was to go conservative again, this time by promoting offensive line coach Mike Tice. A first-time play caller, Tice made great use of new acquisition Brandon Marshall but struggled to find other reliable targets or to overcome protection issues.

The Bears finished 28th in offense.

The only time Smith enjoyed a fairly efficient offense was in 2006, when the offense ranked 15th in a season that ended in the Super Bowl.

Defensively, the Bears were on the other end of the spectrum under Smith. With perennial Pro Bowlers Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs as the constants, Smith's defenses usually were among the best in the NFL.

Since 2004, the Bears defense ranks first in the league in takeaways, three-and-out drives forced and third-down percentage and is fourth in scoring defense.

Smith's defenders scored 34 touchdowns, which became a signature of the Bears' style of play.

It was Smith's defense that drove the Bears to their first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years after the 2006 season. Smith and Tony Dungy became the first two African-Americans to coach a Super Bowl team as the Bears took on the Colts.

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iPad App Video Review: Anomaly Korea

The tower offense pioneers over at 11 Bit Studios finally released the sequel to their smash hit, Anomaly Warzone Earth. They branched out a bit, releasing the amusing Funky Smugglers and the dreamlike puzzler, Sleepwalker’s Journey, but now they’re back, and as this game will remind you a few times, Baghdad was just the beginning. The battle against a mysterious alien tower menace continues with new visuals, units, modes, and an awesome but sometimes hilarious Korean undertone.

The core game here is still the same, with you planning convoy routes through enemy infested streets, able to change your route on the fly. You technically continue to play as the invisible but ever-present commando unit, with your various power-ups, such as smoke screen, repair field, and others, activating and placing them with a simple tap or two. New units like the Horangi tank join your ranks, with unique unit abilities, like the aforementioned tank’s area of effect blast. As you make your way through the world, you’ll collect resources and upgrade units as well.

It’s not just new unit and enemy types mixing things up. For example, there are now artillery zones that will automatically be targeted and be fired upon as you pass through them, but only after a short countdown. Subtle additions like this are quite elegant, adding more dimensions of strategy without changing anything from previous games. Another great new addition is the Art of War trials. As you play and do well, you’ll unlock these brief but brutal challenges, and they are very satisfying to complete.

The visuals have received an upgrade, as has the voice acting. Still, there’s something kind of funny about all the Korean accented English speaking, along with the still excellent Asian-styled soundtrack. It’s not bad at all, but can feel out of place at first. All in all, Anomaly Korea offers more of the same, but improved, building upon the last game in all the right ways. You don’t even need to have played the first game to enjoy this one, so go ahead and download it for the current price of three dollars. I can’t wait to see where in the world this anomaly pops up next.

Download the Appolicious Android app

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Armstrong better, Green Day to resume tour in 2013

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Green Day is going back out on the road.

The Grammy-winning punk band announced new tour dates Monday.

The band canceled the rest of its 2012 club schedule and postponed the start of a 2013 arena tour after singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong‘s substance abuse problems emerged publicly in September when he had a profane meltdown on the stage of the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas.

Armstrong told fans in a statement Monday that he’s “getting better every day” and “the show must go on.”

The tour is scheduled to begin March 28 at the Allstate Arena in the Chicago area.

The band released its most recent album, “Tre,” on Dec. 11, more than a month ahead of schedule.

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Essay: In Pursuit of Answers One May Not Want to Know

I jogged into the Stanford Cancer Clinic with my boyfriend, the youngest people there by two decades. We stood there sweating and holding hands, a jarring sight in the sickly light.

“You are 18, right?” the receptionist asked. Behind me, a woman so gaunt that her cheekbones protruded rolled by in a wheelchair. The oncologist called me alone to the exam room, and I told her the story I had revealed to more doctors than friends: I carry the BRCA1 mutation, which gives you a 98 percent chance of developing cancer.

When my family found out that I might have inherited the mutation from my mother, we took it as a given that I would get tested. Scientists, atheists and lawyers, we are compulsively rational. Yet when I learned I carried the mutation, I felt the cruel weight of a paradox: you can never know whether you want to know until you already do.

At Stanford, I study artificial intelligence, in which math is used to resolve these sorts of dilemmas. My teachers claim that gaining information never hurts. It can be proved mathematically that a robot with more information never makes worse decisions But we are not robots. Our eyes don’t filigree the world with coordinates and probabilities, and they can be blinded by tears.

Still, we, too, display a preference for information. We dislike uncertainty so strongly that we sometimes even prefer bad news. One study of people at risk for a terminal disease found that those who learned they were going to die from it were happier a year later than those who remained uncertain about their fates. Most people have a deep intuition that a life lived cleareyed has inherent value, independent of whether the truth makes you happy. But surely this has limits.

I know there are some things I do not want to know: which other girls my boyfriend finds attractive or the day and manner of my death. The truth can hurt in two ways. It can worsen your options: you can’t live as happily with a significant other after learning of his infidelity. Or it can make you irrational: hearing about terrorists targeting airplanes may lead you to drive instead of fly, though planes remain much safer than cars.

So was I wrong to unwind my double helix?

My risks of getting cancer at 21 are too low for me to do anything differently to better my odds. The knowledge is both irrelevant and painful; it’s obsessed me and made me behave irrationally. I wake from nightmares in which I am dying from cancer. I reread the memoirs of patients with metastatic disease until I can’t see the text through my tears. In my supposedly rational pursuit of knowledge, I’ve gone a little mad.

Despite an excess of information, I pursued more, enrolling in Stanford’s cancer biology class. The professor filled his slides with dark oncological puns, lecturing with the almost robotic detachment I sometimes see in those who work closely with cancer. Maybe I, too, am becoming robotic. I can laugh at the puns, calmly press lecturers on survival rates for breast cancer, marvel at the elegant molecular mechanisms by which it eats us alive. Just as tumors eventually swell too large for their hosts to endure, will all this knowledge grow past what I can handle?

The prospect was too much for my mother, a far tougher woman than I am. When she received a diagnosis of breast cancer, she ordered the doctors to give her chemotherapy as rapidly as possible and recovered completely. But she refused to learn her chances of long-term survival or look at her medical records. I became the first in my family to read them, and when I learned her cancer had been unusually lethal, my father asked me not to tell her.

I cannot shake the thought that this mutation was given to me for a reason. I don’t believe in God. I know my chromosomes divided along a random schism, not a divine skein. But while I reject the theist’s idea of God-granted purpose, I accept the existentialist’s idea of crafting your own. The world may be only sound and fury, but we can choose to see patterns in that chaos, stories in the stars.

So I choose to believe that I have been given this mutation so that I can discover how to overcome it. Like the protagonist in “Flowers for Algernon,” I will be both scientist and patient. Even if this sense of purpose is illusory, it lets me do what I couldn’t before. Fear has sharpened me: I wake at 3 in the morning to refine biological algorithms or to read papers on ovarian cancer.

While I believe this knowledge has made me live better, I am not sure it’s made me happier. True, there was the day I dropped by Stanford’s Relay for Life, a fund-raiser for cancer research, ran farther than I ever had and walked home full of joyful purpose. There was also the night I lost it completely and sobbed for hours in my boyfriend’s arms.

In this oscillation between light and dark, one thing remains constant: I’m no longer so eager to illuminate my fate. Recently, I went to the Web site of 23andMe, a company that will read from your genome your risk of dying from a hundred diseases. I clicked through the testimonials and was unnerved by how similar our reasons were for wanting information. I looked down at my fingertips, tempted: what else in my genome waits to be found?

But then I clicked away. The Bible doesn’t tell us if Eve ate any more apples, but I have had my fill of revelations. I am 21 years old, and I want to be free to live a normal life: fate unbound by double helix, future exploding with possibility. I don’t want to know.

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Airlines' plans for 2013 up in the air

Airfares will be on the rise in 2013, and those niggling airline fees will metamorphose into optional bundles of services.

Meanwhile, onboard amenities, such as Internet access, entertainment options and refreshed interiors, will abound among U.S. carriers, but tight seating in coach probably won't improve.

And 2013 might be the year you'll finally be able to keep your smartphone, iPad or Kindle turned on during takeoffs and landings.

Those are some of the predictions airline industry experts foresee in the new year. Here's the lowdown on fares, fees and flight experience for 2013.

Higher fares forecast

Airlines pushed through six fare increases in 2012. Expect a similar number in the new year, said Rick Seaney, co-founder of FareCompare.com.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see airfares rise like they did this year, between 3 and 6 percent domestically," Seaney said. That's because airlines will succeed in properly balancing supply and demand by trimming the number of seats they offer to match "decent, but bordering on tepid, demand."

Fares are typically driven by four main factors: competition, most of all, then supply, demand and oil prices. "If you look at those drivers, they are, for the most part, on the airlines' side, which gives them pricing power," Seaney said.

That doesn't mean there won't be good airfare deals on some flights on some routes. And consumers will still see lower prices during off-peak days, such as Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday departures and off-peak seasons, such as late January and early February. Like this year, summertime fares probably will stay relatively high, he said.

Airline mergers can also affect fares, and a huge one could take place early in 2013. American Airlines and US Airways are in talks about combining.

The general consensus among consumer advocates is that airline mergers aren't good for passengers.

"Any time you have two big airlines merging, that means consumers have less choice and competition is reduced, which only translates to higher prices," said Charlie Leocha, director of the Consumer Travel Alliance.

However, a bit of new evidence bucks that conventional wisdom. Despite four mega-mergers in the U.S. airline industry during the past seven years, fares have not increased significantly, just 1.8 percent per year, according to a December report from professional services firm PwC. In fact, average domestic fares decreased 1 percent from 2004 to 2011 when inflation is factored in, the report found.

Fliers know full well, however, that the fare isn't all that counts nowadays. There are those fees.

Fees get a makeover

The most noticeable trend in recent years with airline fees is that there are more of them: fees for checked bags, aisle seats, onboard meals, among many others. 

"What we hear is that people pay their fare and get to the airport and feel they're constantly being nickeled-and-dimed to death for things that used to be included," said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org. 

The top five U.S. carriers alone generated more than $12 billion in fees in 2011, with even more expected through 2012, according to the PwC report.

What consumers call fees, airlines call "unbundling" — making a la carte choices from services that used to be included in the fare.

A likely trend for 2013 might be called "rebundling," airlines packaging a few now-optional services and charging for a tier of service.

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4th quarter: Bears 26, Lions 24

The Chicago Bears did their part Sunday, beating the Detroit Lions 26-24. Now they need help from the Green Bay Packers, who must beat the Minnesota Vikings to send the Bears into the playoffs.

The victory didn't come easily. The Lions cut the Bears' lead to 26-24 on a 9-yard Matthew Stafford pass to Brian Robiskie with 6:55 to play in the game. The nine-play, 80-yard drive was kept alive by an unnecessary roughness penalty on linebacker Lance Briggs for a hit on a sliding Stafford.

Olindo Mare's fourth field goal -- this one from 20 yards out -- boosted the Bears' lead to 26-17 with 10:47 left. It capped an 11-play, 59-yard drive that took 4:25 off the clock.

Mare's 28-yard field goal increased the Bears' lead to 23-17 with 1:50 left in the third quarter. The score was set up when safety Major Wright came up with the Lions' fourth turnover of the day, recovering a Mikel Leshoure fumble at the Detroit 13.

Detroit fought back and trimmed the Bears' once-commanding lead to 20-17 with a 10-yard TD pass from Matthew Stafford to Will Heller at the 6:35 mark of the third quarter.

The Lions cut the Bears' lead to 20-10 just before halftime, as Stafford hit Kris Durham on a 25-yard TD pass with 12 seconds to play before intermission.

Mare's 40-yard field goal extended the Bears' lead to 20-3 with 1:49 to play.

Tim Jennings made his league-high ninth interception with 2:38 left in the half to put the Bears' offense back in business inside Lions territory.

Matt Forte's 1-yard touchdown run -- after a pass-interference call against Detroit drawn by Brandon Marshall -- gave the Bears a 17-3 lead with 3:26 to go in the first half.

The Bears' defense delivered again to set up the score. Israel Idonije knocked the ball from quarterback Matthew Stafford's hand and Julius Peppers recovered on the Lions' 10-yard line.

Mare's 33-yard field goal gave the Bears a 10-3 lead with 2:59 left in the first quarter. Joe Anderson forced a fumble on the kickoff after the Bears' first score and Eric Weems recovered, setting up Mare's kick.

Mare blew a chance to extend the lead, missing a 43-yard attempt wide right with just under five minutes remaining in the half.

The Bears grabbed a 7-3 lead when Earl Bennett caught a screen pass from Jay Cutler and took it 60 yards for a touchdown with 4:33 left in the first quarter.

The Lions struck first, with Jason Hanson connecting on a 44-yard field goal for a 3-0 Detroit lead with 5:54 to go in the quarter. The kick came after replay overturned a fumble that had been ruled on Stafford and recovered by the Bears.

The Bears' offense started well, with Cutler hitting receiver Alshon Jeffery for a 55-yard gain on their first play. But the drive sputtered and the Bears were forced to punt.

The Bears have been to the playoffs three times under coach Lovie Smith, with the last playoff appearance coming in 2010.

General manager Phil Emery had praise for Smith while speaking before the game on WBBM-AM (780).

"Great team-first person," Emery said of Smith. "He's done an outstanding job coaching the Bears."

As to whether Smith must reach the playoffs to retain his job, Emery said, "When you're evaluating players, you're always looking for body of work. No different when you're evaluating coaches.

"It's is the full season, and the whole body of work. ... It's about steady progress toward our goals, which is to win championships.''

As for needing help from Green Bay to reach the playoffs, Emery said, "We're rooting against Minnesota. ... We're not rooting for Green Bay."
 
fmitchell@tribune.com

Twitter@kicker34

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Hidden Powers of Your Mouse

You use your mouse for just about everything: you drag, you drop, you highlight, you scroll. But even if you click your mouse a thousand times a day, I bet I’ve got a few secret mouse tricks you’ve never heard of.

Click Tricks
You surely know that double clicking highlights a word, and you might even know that triple clicking highlights a paragraph. But have you ever wanted to select a column of text in a Word document, without getting all the text to the left and right of it? Here’s how you can: Hold down the alt and left mouse button (on a Mac, option-left mouse), and drag the cursor over the section you want to select. The coolest thing about this trick is that the text you are selecting does not even need to be formatted as a column for this to work.

[Related: 8 Microsoft Word Shortcuts You Probably Don't Know]

Scroll Tricks
Most mice have a scroll wheel. Sure, it takes you up and down on a page, but in combination with other keys, it can do much more:

• Scroll sideways: In many versions of Excel, holding down the shift key while scrolling will take you sideways. That’s super helpful in a big spreadsheet.


• Scroll wheel as back button: In most web browsers, if you hold the shift key while using the scroll wheel, it works like the back button: You can fly through all the sites you’ve recently visited. (Some mice have side buttons that work like back and forward buttons in your browser, too.)


• Scroll to zoom: Holding ctrl and scrolling lets you zoom in or out of the page you’re viewing. Ctrl-scroll up zooms you in; ctrl-scroll down zooms you back out. On a Mac, this trick will zoom in and out your whole screen, not just the document you’re in.

Windows-Specific Tricks
While most of the tricks I’ve listed so far work in either Windows or Mac OS, here are a few that are specific to Windows machines:

• To maximize a window: drag the title bar to the top.


• To minimize all windows except the active window: “Shake” the title bar. Then if you want to restore all the windows you just minimized with this shortcut, just click again on the title bar of the window in view.


• To view two windows in a 50-50 split: Drag the title bar of one document to the left edge of your screen, then drag a second document to the right edge; they will snap into position in a nifty side-by-side view.

Bonus Sneaky Trick
Suppose you want to walk away from your hyper-secure work computer for a few minutes and not have to re-log in when you get back. Sure, you could change the sleep settings, but this idea is much more clever: Set your mouse on top of your analog watch or a clock. The mouse tracks the second hand’s movement and it tricks your computer into thinking you’re still busy working. Of course, there are valid security reasons for NOT using this trick, but I still think it’s cool that it works.

Did we miss your favorite mouse trick? Like us on Facebook, and share your secret there.

[Related: How to Speed Up Your Internet Browsing]

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‘The Hobbit’ stays atop box office for third week

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” continues to rule them all at the box office, staying on top for a third-straight week with nearly $ 33 million.

The Warner Bros. fantasy epic from director Peter Jackson, based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novel, has made $ 222.7 million domestically alone.

Two big holiday movies — and potential awards contenders — also had strong openings. Quentin Tarantino‘s spaghetti Western-blaxploitation mash-up “Django Unchained” came in second place for the weekend with $ 30.7 million. The Weinstein Co. revenge epic, starring Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, has earned $ 64 million since its Christmas Day opening.

And in third place with $ 28 million was the sweeping, all-singing “Les Miserables.” The Universal Pictures musical starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway has made $ 67.5 million since debuting on Christmas.

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongooses, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

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Wall Street extends losses, Dow slides 1 percent

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell for a fifth straight day on Friday, dropping 1 percent and marking the S&P 500's longest losing streak in three months as the federal government edged closer to the "fiscal cliff" with no solution in sight.

Based on the latest available data, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 158.20 points, or 1.21 percent, to finish unofficially at 12,938.11. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index dropped 15.67 points, or 1.11 percent, to close unofficially at 1,402.43. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 25.59 points, or 0.86 percent, to end unofficially at 2,960.31.

For the week, the Dow and the S&P 500 each lost about 1.9 percent, while the Nasdaq dropped 2 percent.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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