In 1983, when Microsoft was still a small (if fast-growing), privately-held software company, Allen left his company to battle Hodgkin's disease, undergoing radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant. (He retained a substantial stake in the company, which eventually made him fabulously wealthy.) A year ago, Allen underwent an "undisclosed medical procedure" that took him away from a local awards ceremony attended by his Microsoft partner Bill Gates.

His health then seemed to improve, but now Allen's announced a diagnosis of "diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common for of lymphoma." The good news: Allen believes he'll be able to continue his role as chairman of investment firm Vulcan, Inc. And he's been through this before. As Bill Gates told TechFlash, " I know [Allen] to be a strong and resilient individual."

(Pic: Allen, left, with his friend Gates at a 2000 Portland Trail Blazers game. Getty Images.)

It would seem, you see, that pundits on right-wing Fox News and lefty Huffington Post have arrived at the same place with regard to Swine Flu vaccines: They are dangerous and should be avoided!

Attached, find a clip of Fox's Glenn Beck riling up a studio audience against "this government's" flu shots, and saying the vaccines are kind of barbaric and backward.

And over here on HuffPo you can find "Dr. Frank Lipman" saying much the same thing: He advises "NO!" against swine flu vaccines (in bold and caps), due to an unholy alliance between the government and "the Pharmaceutical Industry" (again with the caps). But he does say "yes" to Vitamin D supplements, fish oil, "antiviral herbal supplements," "a probiotic daily... with 10-20 billion organisms," and a ready supply of "homeopathic Oscillococcinum."

Astronomer and former HuffPo contributor Phil Plait calls this "far-left New Age... antivax nonsense" over on Discover Magazine's website, advising, sensibly, that people consult their actual personal doctors on the matter. Controversy also dogged HuffPo's health coverage back in May, when another Living section writer suggested treating swine flu with colon cleanses. The writer, who just happened to be selling a cleanse book, was duly rebuked by a doctor writing for Salon.com.

At the time, we noted that the Living section, in which both these controversial swine flu articles have appeared, was stocked by writers recruited by Huffpo "Senior Editor At Large" Russell Bishop John Morton, a disciple of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, to which HuffPo publisher Arianna Huffington belongs. At least one Living section editor has reportedly been forced by Huffington to attend an "Insight" seminar, organized by a group with close ties to MSIA.

Former members have called MSIA a cult of personality around leader John-Roger (pictured, left, with Huffington in 2004), who acolytes believe can heal the ill and who is said to eschew Western medicine. One ex-member described in his memoir John-Roger scolding him for using prescription drugs, rather than just a "natural... nutritionist," to rid himself of parasites contracted on a trip Africa (see the end of this post for more).

We'd hoped HuffPo's new medical editor Dr. Dean Ornish, who joined in August, could improve HuffPo's health coverage. It's not clear if he signed off on this latest article; we're curious what his thoughts are. Perhaps he'll leave a comment here as he did on our last post. In the meantime we'll enjoy observing the comical similarities between the people near the furthest edges of Fox News and HuffPo.

But the internet has not completely usurped the retailing of poor body images to teenaged girls; the chair of the eating disorders section of the Royal College of Psychiatrists told Reuters, "the catwalks of international fashion events such as London Fashion Week can act as a showcase for underweight women" too. Economic problems or not, you're still in the game, old-school fashion industry.

(Pic: London Fashion Week 2009, Getty.)

Yes it was. In the summer, the coastal elites hailed Twitter's brilliant simplicity for allowing the microblogging service to route around authoritarian sensors and transmit poignant messages that made otherwise apathetic Americans really care about Iranian activists, as evidenced by their willingness to turn digital avatars green.

But now they're starting to fret that Twitter and its social networking brethren, like Facebook, are not so much simple as simplistic; reductive media that distill a complex debate like universal health care down to its most emotional, televisable sideshows. Of course, we've seen this flip flop before: Hollywood celebrities fell in love with Twitter as a free marketing channel, then despised it as a haven for uncouth and often unchecked imitators; earnest liberals loved what social nets did for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, but hated the eternal platform they have given birthers.

Of course, this dysfunctional, love-hate relationship is basically endless. The brands might change from year to year, but the practice of ultra-concise and often crude networked communication is only going to become more common. The lessons for the future are, as always, in the past; it was the current president who showed there was an emotional and reductive way to package online the candidacy of a novice black politician with a Kenyan father and a liberal political platform. There's got to be a way for him to similarly distill the health care debate. He could start by asking Michael Moore for tips.

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

Apple has posted video of its closed iPod event yesterday, material Wall Street will no doubt seize upon to double-check its initial reaction to Jobs' return yesterday, when Apple shares hit a 52-week high but closed down 1 percent. It could have been worse, had Jobs been a no-show, a stock analyst tells the Wall Street Journal. Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery.

Ideally they could take Jobs at his word, and leave the physical evaluations to the CEO's own medical caretakers. But Jobs' past obfuscations and distortions have made hard evidence an especially valuable commodity.

A study of 297 depressed people found that those who had "online therapy" were twice as likely to eventually report their depression had ended as those who just went to see a general practitioner, who in Britain typically prescribe antidepressants due to the wait for talking treatment. That's all according to a study summarized in the Guardian and funded by a foundation connected to the private UK insurer Bupa.

The takeaway for depressed, underinsured Americans: Bug your otherwise productive friends on instant messenger! It will probably make you feel better. The etiquette of the medium means an instant response is likely, and that usually feels vaguely affirming. Or at least that's our entirely uncredentialed sense of things. Which got us to speculating wildly about the anti-depressive potential of other internet media:

• Twitter: It's theoretically easy for your friends to write you back, since the expectations (140 characters or less) are enticingly low. But it can be like shouting into a void; people are here mostly to click on news links and funny videos, not to think about your feelings.
  
• Facebook: A slightly warmer and more social place than Twitter, but one that moves at a slower and thus less gratifying pace. You'll have more license to spill out your thoughts, but in a context where people are less likely to respond.
  
• Email: By the time you hear back, your mind is on to a completely different set of depressing thoughts.
  
• Tumblr: People can totally reblog and respond to you here! Tumblr people are big on replying to things. But they're also big on one-upsmanship and sniping, so make sure your feelings are, uh, sufficiently witty.
  
• Phone call: Probably the best option if you're feeling truly down: It's instant, intimate, and with about 10 million times the emotional depth of instant messenger. The only trouble is finding someone with the time to take your call; spilling out your heart to a friend whose clearly rushing from one meeting to another is going to make you miss the internet all over again.

These options are obviously suboptimal, but keep in mind they're just stopgaps until we all get our own personal robot therapists/government spies, in 2030.

UPDATE: The stat about a one-year delay came from this, in the Guardian story: "According to the Mental Health Foundation, it's common for British patients to wait more than a year to get talking treatment, and 78 percent of GPs have prescribed antidepressant drugs through lack of an alternative."

That certainly doesn't mean everyone waits that long, or that some of us wouldn't kill for a system like the NHS here. The story also notes that the NHS has launched a program to train more therapists.

(Emoticon via)

Jobs' parking job does, indeed, bode well for his health, as the blog iPhone Savior suggests. Prior to his liver transplant and medical leave, Jobs' Mercedes was repeatedly photographed in this very spot, always without the license plate, per his usual flouting of various automotive regulations. The one time it wasn't in a handicapped spot was, ironically, during the period when Jobs looked sickest in public. How heartening to see that his old brazenness is back.

(Pic by Nicholas Brown)

Back in January, word leaked that the Securities and Exchange Commission was informally looking into whether Steve Jobs misled investors when the Apple CEO downplayed his health problems just nine days before taking medical leave. At the time, Apple stock had dropped to just $78 per share on the news Jobs would be out of the office for at least six months.

Since then, company shares have zoomed back up to $145 and now trade at $135 (see chart below). But the SEC is still on the case, a Bloomberg source says:

A pivotal question for regulators is what Apple's board knew at the time of Jobs's Jan. 5 announcement that he had a hormone imbalance and a Jan. 14 statement that he was taking a five-and-a-half month medical leave, said the [source], who declined to be identified because the probe is confidential. Jobs went on to have a liver transplant during his leave. SEC investigators want to be sure that Jobs's January disclosures didn't mislead investors, the [source] said.

The point of securities enforcement isn't to make sure investors get rich, but to ensure they are treated like the owners of the company and told the truth. Those who bought Apple shares at its peak of nearly $200 per share must be especially keen to find our what Apple knew and when the company knew it.

(Top pic: Jobs at Apple headquarters, October 2008. Via Getty Images.)

The deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal went so far as to call out individual board members on Twitter. "Gore, Jung, Schmidt, York, Levinson - where are you?" Alan Murray wrote. Yesterday, before the hospital confirmation, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera accused the directors of "dereliction of duty."

Like a hung computer operating system, Apple's board is neglecting pressing information-retrieval work. Data on the effectiveness of liver transplants for Jobs' condition is, at once, scant and unpromising. Yet some specific information about Jobs' condition would be useful in evaluating his prognosis, according to an anonymous surgeon's blog (see prior link, via).

The kindest and most generous characterization that can be made is that that the evidence for treating neuroendocrine tumors metastatic to the liver with liver transplantation is mixed at best.

But obviously Jobs' is recovering nicely if he's going back to work next week, right? Perhaps, but it's not clear how hard he'll be able to work; recall that Jobs may be working part-time, per a Journal report earlier this week. Or he might not. He might be already back to week, per an anonymous (read: probably spoon-fed by Apple) report from CNBC's Jim Goldman. Or he might not be returning until June 30.

It should go without saying, but apparently needs to be said: Apple shareholders deserve to know who is running Apple — and who will be running Apple a month from now.

Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin of The Wall Street Journal - who, it now appears has an outright monopoly on exclusives and leaks regarding Jobs (something that'd make sense, considering the most direct implication of the Apple CEO's various health crisis: Apple's stock price) - reported last night on the revelation. Though not going to far as to state anything but the actual surgery as outright fact, the Journal's filing vaguely speculated that Jobs' 2004 pancreatic cancer came back, and spread to his liver:

William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. "All total, 75% of patients are going to have the disease spread over the course of their life," said Dr. Hawkins, who has not treated Mr. Jobs.

Getting a liver transplant to treat a metastasized neuroendocrine tumor is controversial because livers are scarce and the surgery's efficacy as a cure hasn't been proved, Dr. Hawkins added. He said that patients whose tumors have metastasized can live for as many as 10 years without any treatment so it is hard to determine how successful a transplant has been in curing the disease.

Jobs took a leave of absence in January, handing control of Apple's day-to-day over to COO Tim Cook after publicly disclosing that he had a "hormone imbalance" that was "robbing" Jobs of his body's healthy proteins. Which sounds nothing like what causes one to get their liver removed.

The Apple CEO's been beset by rampant speculation about his health problems by Apple shareholders, journalists and bloggers of the tech and financial stripe, and some very self-entitled fanboys since said 2004 cancer scare. He's also been notoriously mum on the details of said health. Even when more or less busted red-handed, like this, the company continues to run interference, with Apple flack Katie Cotton barely even dignifying the question ("Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there's nothing further to say.") and Jobs not returning anything for comment to the Journal.

The notoriously showy CEO enjoys managing his own press, and probably isn't too ecstatic about this bit of news leaking; then again, after what sounded like a pretty traumatic few months, he could probably care less. The guy's got his health back, and a company to run. No doubt the inevitably glitzy Steve Jobs Comeback Special will happen soon in front of a grey curtain, with cheeky jokes and maybe a not-so-subtle U2 soundtrack.

Meanwhile, the company didn't go down the shitter while he was gone (at least no more than maybe this), and other than what's no doubt going to be rampant speculation on this potential efficacy (or lack thereof) of Jobs' procedure and a few nutty conspiracy theories on whether or not Jobs pulled a Woz and cut in line, there's not too much more to see here until the guy gets back up on stage and shows us his about-town face. Don't worry, fanboys, haters, and otherwise: your vicariously lived-through deity carries on.

Jobs Had Liver Transplant [WSJ]
Apple boss 'had liver transplant' [BBC]

Previously: Why Steve Jobs's Health Matters to Us

Speculation had been thick that Jobs would put in a cameo at the conference. Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the CEO would likely return to Apple at the end of June, as planned, and might drop by today's event.

Instead, Jobs left senior VP Phil Schiller to handle his second major Apple event without the CEO.

Even barring a brief on-stage appearance, Jobs, at the tail end of his medical leave, had other options. He'd have been great for demonstrating the video camera on the new iPhone, for example, via a recorded greeting for the conference keynote audience.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if this is Apple without Jobs, it doesn't look so terrible. Early indications are that the company's new products will receive the customary lavish attention in the mainstream press, even though anyone who's got the old model will have to fork over at least $500 for the upgrade (read the fineprint) and the best new software features are still useless for American customers. Just like Apple's stock, the company's products can still muster cultlike interest, even in the cult leader's absence.

Writes the Journal:

Two people who do business with Apple said senior Apple managers have told them the company is now trying to coordinate Mr. Jobs's return with a product launch or public event.

The prospect of a public return by Apple's CEO, following a six-month medical leave, will no doubt help build buzz for the company's developer event, where Apple is expected to launch a new iPhone into a barrage of free publicity.

But the inside information leaked to the Journal also helps highlight how traumatic Jobs' health scare has been for him and his company — despite past indications to the contrary.

Apple once attributed Jobs' rail-thin appearance to a "common bug." When later announcing his medical leave, Jobs avoided disclosing the seriousness of the situation, saying he was leaving due to the complexity of his health issues and even because of the distracting "curiosity" over them."

But things got pretty bad, at least according to the Journal's well-placed source. Select members of Apple's board received weekly updates about his condition, a "person familiar with the matter" told the paper, and they wouldn't have all been pretty:

He was one real sick guy... Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. [But] he took corrective action.

From a PR standpoint, it seems unlikely Apple's directors and executives would want Jobs up on any stage until he looks as healthy as he feels. But the CEO is notoriously headstrong about these sorts of things. If he wants to show up Monday, he will.

Sharon Adams uploaded a picture of her post-mastectomy chest to the social network as part of an effort to encourage women to get regular breast exams. Facebook removed it within a day as "sexual and abusive."

After 900 people joined a Facebook protest group, the company backed down and reinstated the picture (the graphic image is attached to this Daily Mail story).

The site even went so far as to say it was sorry:

Our user operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something-that doesn't actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. We apologise.

Better than an apology would be for Facebook to finally fix its long-abused content-flagging system, perhaps by hiring enough staff to keep up with the growth in its user base. Or maybe the company just needs a seminar to get its moderators more comfortable with the sight of the female chest.

Wozniak told the Journal's Ben Charny that Jobs, who went on leave in January, "doesn't sound like he's sick." His comments came during a side conversation at the newspaper's D tech conference in Carlsbad, California.

But Woz added he hadn't actually asked his old friend about his health directly. So perhaps it's no surprise that traders didn't take the ballroom-dancing computer engineer's medical evaluation too seriously; in the two hours after Woz's quote was published, Apple shares traded basically sideways.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Jobs is still in charge, with little-known COO Tim Cook running things day to day. Wall Street analysts expect a minor shift after Jobs returns to work in July — Jobs becoming chairman, say, with Cook as CEO.

Yet there seem to be some fears on Apple's campus — perhaps of Apple's long-term prospects without Jobs at the helm, or perhaps of something else happening inside the computer and smartphone maker. The Journal reports that Apple's rivals are finding it easier to poach people from Apple:

Job recruiters say they aren't seeing significant employee turnover at Apple. But executives at several Silicon Valley companies say they are getting more interest than before from Apple managers, particularly those in the mid-to-upper levels. Most recently, Greg Dudey, one of the lead engineers for Apple TV software, left the company to work for Dell Inc. Mr. Jobs's health is not necessarily the driver of such job moves, according to these people.

Palm, which is rolling out the Pre, a smartphone which hopes to compete with Apple's iPhone, has hired away several people. We also hear that an engineer working on a secret project to build an Apple-branded videogame console is being wooed by other Valley companies. And the company's efforts to improve its online services has been stymied, we hear, by difficulties in hiring the right talent.

Jobs, despite his reputation as a tyrant, has always been an excellent recruiter. Most recently he pried longtime IBM executive Mark Papermaster away from Big Blue, despite a legal fight. Will the industry's best brains want to work for an Apple without Jobs at the helm?

(Photo by Getty Images)

Still, he scored a modest 17 out of 30, and the judges told him he needed to work on things like "dance quality" and "endurance." Oh, please. This is America! No one succeeds on actual talent anymore. You just have to be liked. And who can't like a rotund dude who ends his dance with a Tom Selleck beefcake pose?

Watch for Woz's ex, comedienne Kathy Griffin, in the audience:

Woz was photographed leaving dancing practice with a cast on his left leg. His next dance will be "wild and fast and all-over crazy and fun, just like the first one," he told fans in an email that one republished on his Facebook page. Entertaintment Tonight reports that an ABC spokesperson has confirmed Woz's plans to keep competing.

Wild, fast, and crazy, with a fractured leg? That's the kind of braggadocio that led Woz to create Apple's first hit computers, the Apple I and Apple II three decades ago — and led him to enter the dance competition in the first place. But human bodies are not mutable digital objects, like the silicon chips and digital bits he manipulated into personal computers. We can admire his resilience even as we scratch our heads at his quixotic terpsichorean quest. A leg fracture isn't simply something you can debug. But this drama — geek obstinance versus corporeal decomposition — makes for must-see TV.

(Photo via Entertainment Tonight/Adrian Varnedoe/Pacific Coast News)

This is as much our fault as it is his. Since he returned to Apple a decade ago, he made himself the company's indispensable man. Since he had a brush with pancreatic cancer in 2003, he has reminded us all of De Gaulle's saying about indispensible men — that the graveyards are full of them. The panic that ensued after he appeared gaunt and unwell at an Apple event last summer, his subsequent skipping of his Macworld keynote speech, his disclosure of new medical problems, and his decision last month to take a six-month medical leave have all done nothing to relieve people's worries about what the state of his health will mean for Apple as a business.

The latest tick-tock of concern: A report by tech columnist Robert X. Cringely that Jobs has stopped logging into his IM client. Cringely dug further and confirmed that Jobs has been completely offline for weeks. The always-on generation instantly grasps the meaning of this: If you're not in constant communication with the rest of the world, you're as good as dead to them. People are taking the IM thing more seriously than an earlier report, from a hospital worker, of Stanford Hospital prepping to host Jobs for surgery.

Is the fascination with Steve Jobs's health morbid? As surely morbid as it is necessary. Jobs has not stepped down as Apple's CEO. After the surgery report surfaced, some blogs reported Jobs had been at Apple for meetings. Is he in? Is he out? This nonstop dance has the effect of keeping Jobs at the center of any talk of Apple even when he's ostensibly removed himself from its daily affairs.

Only someone with an overweening sense of self-importance would allow this to continue. Unfortunately, that describes Jobs.

Which is why he needs to step down, for good. Apple is too important a company, its employees and shareholders too dependent on its health, to rely on one raging egotist's welfare. We all need to learn what it means to have an Apple running without Steve Jobs. The sooner we take Jobs off our collective buddy list, the better.

On Monday, Valleywag relayed some gossip from a party Sunday night: The hospital was making special preparations to admit Jobs, who recently began a six-month medical leave from Apple for surgery the next morning. This statement came from a Stanford staffer who had no apparent reason to lie in front of a dozen people.

Later that day,several media outlets received a similar set of denials from an anonymous source. The common thread: Jobs, their source told them, was in meetings at Apple Monday.

• Silicon Alley Insider:
  

  A Valley source tells us this is wrong. "He was in Apple meetings today, as a matter of fact. Valleywag is 100 percent wrong."

• TechCrunch:
  

  Our own source, who is significantly more believable than some person at some party, says Jobs is in the office today in meetings and most definitely not undergoing surgery.

• And writers at Gizmodo, Time, and the New York Times all received statements almost identical in wording to the one received by Silicon Alley insider.

Did all these publications just coincidentally receive the same denial from different sources? Or was some senior Silicon Valley executive close to Jobs deliberately working to throw cold water on the rumor? Is it really impossible, as he seems to argue, that Jobs underwent surgery first thing Monday morning and attended meetings later that day? (One hospital describes exploratory surgery for pancreatic conditions like the one Jobs has as something that can be done without an overnight stay.) And why is this source afraid to drop Valleywag a line directly?

Jobs and Apple have offered so many misleading disclosures about the status of his health that we're left with party gossip and shadowy Valley execs as our best source of information. Meanwhile, no one's asking the most important question.

Namely, if Jobs is on a six-month medical leave, with COO Tim Cook running Apple in his absence, why is he going to meetings on campus? Is his "leave" just another Jobsian obfuscation?

(Photo by Getty Images)