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Now he’s alerted me to a new study and related lecture on what he and his co-authors are calling “peak farmland” — an impending stabilization of the amount of land required for food as humanity’s growth spurt plays out. While laying out several important wild cards (expanded farming of biofuels among them), Ausubel and his co-authors see a reasonable prospect for conserving, and restoring, forests and other stressed terrestrial ecosystems even as humanity exerts an ever greater influence on the planet.
The study, “Peak Farmland and the Prospects for Sparing Nature,” is by Ausubel, Iddo K. Wernick and Paul E. Waggoner and will be published next year as part of a special supplement to the journal Population and Development Review, published by the Population Council.
Drawing on a host of data sets, the authors conclude that a combination of slowing population growth, moderated demand for land-intensive food (meat, for instance) and more efficient farming methods have resulted in a substantial “decoupling” of acreage and human appetites.
Here’s the optimistic opener:
Expecting that more and richer people will demand more from the land, cultivating wider fields, logging more forests, and pressing nature, comes naturally. The past half-century of disciplined and dematerializing demand and more intense and efficient land use encourage a rational hope that humanity’s pressure will not overwhelm nature.
Ausubel will describe the findings in a talk during a daylong symposium at his university on Tuesday honoring Paul Demeny, who at age 80 is stepping down as editor of the journal.
Ausubel’s prepared remarks are online. In his talk, he explains that while the common perception is that meeting humanity’s food needs is the task of farmers, there are many other players, including those of us who can choose what to eat and how many children to have:
[T]he main actors are parents changing population, workers changing affluence, consumers changing the diet (more or less calories, more or less meat) and also the portion of crops entering the food supply (corn can fuel people or cars), and farmers changing the crop production per hectare of cropland (yield).
The new paper builds on a long string of studies by Ausubel and the others, including the 2001 paper “How Much Will Feeding More and Wealthier People Encroach on Forests?.” Also relevant is “Restoring the Forests,” a 2000 article in Foreign Affairs co-written by Ausubel and David G. Victor (now at the University of California, San Diego)
This body of analysis is closely related to the core focus of this blog: finding ways to fit infinite human aspirations (and appetites) on a finite planet. The work presents a compelling case for concentrating agriculture through whatever hybrid mix of means — technological or traditional — that best fits particular situations, but also fostering moderation in consumption.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper’s conclusion, which notes the many wild cards that make the peak farmland scenario still only a plausible, and hardly inevitable, future:
[W]ild cards remain part of the game, both for and against land sparing. As discussed, the wild card of biofuels confounded expectations for the past 15 years. Most wild cards probably will continue to come from consumers. Will people choose to eat much more meat? If so, will it be beef, which requires more land than poultry and fish, which require less? Will people become vegetarian or even vegan? But if they become vegan, will they also choose clothing made from linen, hemp, and cotton, which require hectares? Will the average human continue to grow taller and thus require more calories? Will norms of beauty accept obesity and thus high average calories per capita? Will a global population with a median age of 40 eat less than one with a median age of 28? Will radical innovations in food production move humanity closer to landless agriculture (Ausubel 2010)? Will hunger or international investment encourage cropland expansion in Africa and South America? (Cropland may, of course, shrink in some countries while expanding in others as the global sum declines.) And will time moderate the disparities cloaked within global averages, in particular disparities of hunger and excess among regions and individuals?
Allowing for wild cards, we believe that projecting conservative values for population, affluence, consumers, and technology shows humanity peaking in the use of farmland. Over the next 50 years, the prospect is that humanity is likely to release at least 146 mHa [146 million hectares, or 563,710 square miles], one and a half times the size of Egypt, two and a half times that of France, or ten Iowas, and possibly multiples of this amount.
Notwithstanding the biofuels case, the trends of the past 15 years largely resemble those for the past 50 and 150. We see no evidence of exhaustion of the factors that allow the peaking of cropland and the subsequent restoration of nature.
In an e-mail exchange today, I asked Ausubel about another issue touched on in the paper:
Looking around the planet, it’s clear from a biodiversity standpoint that all forests — or farming pressures — are not equal. For instance, in Southeast Asia, palm oil and orangutans are having a particularly hard time co-existing. So while the overall trend is great, do you see the need for maintaining a focus on particular “hot spots,” to use a term familiar in environmental circles?
So far, I don’t see lots of evidence that conservation campaigners (you are one on ocean resources) have found a way to accept this kind of good news and/or incorporate it in their prescriptions for sustaining a rich and variegated biological sheath on Earth. If you agree, any idea why?
Indonesia is the number one place where letting the underlying trend work will not work fast enough. The list of threatened regions is quite well identified: parts of the central African forest, parts of the Amazon.
Some conservation groups have realized that the slow growth in demand for calories as well as pulp and paper are creating big chances to reserve or protect more land. In the right places, where crops are no longer profitable, some amounts of money can acquire large amounts of land for nature.
Conservation groups also ought to attend more to the ecological disaster called biofuels.
I encourage you to dig in on this paper and related work, which provides a useful guide for softening the human impact on a crowding planet. There’ll be plenty of losses, and surprises, but there are real prospects for sustaining a thriving, and peopled, orb.
6:57 p.m. | Addendum | For relevant work with somewhat different conclusions review the presentations from “Intensifying agriculture within planetary boundaries,” a session at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London last March. I’ll be adding links to other relevant analysis here.
|
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Now he’s alerted me to a new study and related lecture on what he and his co-authors are calling “peak farmland” — an impending stabilization of the amount of land required for food as humanity’s growth spurt plays out. While laying out several important wild cards (expanded farming of biofuels among them), Ausubel and his co-authors see a reasonable prospect for conserving, and restoring, forests and other stressed terrestrial ecosystems even as humanity exerts an ever greater influence on the planet.
The study, “Peak Farmland and the Prospects for Sparing Nature,” is by Ausubel, I
|
ddo K. Wernick and Paul E. Waggoner and will be published next year as part of a special supplement to the journal Population and Development Review, published by the Population Council.
Drawing on a host of data sets, the authors conclude that a combination of slowing population growth, moderated demand for land-intensive food (meat, for instance) and more efficient farming methods have resulted in a substantial “decoupling” of acreage and human appetites.
Here’s the optimistic opener:
Expecting that more and richer people will demand more from the land, cultivating wider fields, logging more forests, and pressing nature, comes naturally. The past half-century of disciplined and dematerializing demand and more intense and efficient land use encourage a rational hope that humanity’s pressure will not overwhelm nature.
Ausubel will describe the findings in a talk during a daylong symposium at his university on Tuesday honoring Paul Demeny, who at age 80 is stepping down as editor of the journal.
Ausubel’s prepared remarks are online. In his talk, he explains that while the common perception is that meeting humanity’s food needs is the task of farmers, there are many other players, including those of us who can choose what to eat and how many children to have:
[T]he main actors are parents changing population, workers changing affluence, consumers changing the diet (more or less calories, more or less meat) and also the portion of crops entering the food supply (corn can fuel people or cars), and farmers changing the crop production per hectare of cropland (yield).
The new paper builds on a long string of studies by Ausubel and the others, including the 2001 paper “How Much Will Feeding More and Wealthier People Encroach on Forests?.” Also relevant is “Restoring the Forests,” a 2000 article in Foreign Affairs co-written by Ausubel and David G. Victor (now at the University of California, San Diego)
This body of analysis is closely related to the core focus of this blog: finding ways to fit infinite human aspirations (and appetites) on a finite planet. The work presents a compelling case for concentrating agriculture through whatever hybrid mix of means — technological or traditional — that best fits particular situations, but also fostering moderation in consumption.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper’s conclusion, which notes the many wild cards that make the peak farmland scenario still only a plausible, and hardly inevitable, future:
[W]ild cards remain part of the game, both for and against land sparing. As discussed, the wild card of biofuels confounded expectations for the past 15 years. Most wild cards probably will continue to come from consumers. Will people choose to eat much more meat? If so, will it be beef, which requires more land than poultry and fish, which require less? Will people become vegetarian or even vegan? But if they become vegan, will they also choose clothing made from linen, hemp, and cotton, which require hectares? Will the average human continue to grow taller and thus require more calories? Will norms of beauty accept obesity and thus high average calories per capita? Will a global population with a median age of 40 eat less than one with a median age of 28? Will radical innovations in food production move humanity closer to landless agriculture (Ausubel 2010)? Will hunger or international investment encourage cropland expansion in Africa and South America? (Cropland may, of course, shrink in some countries while expanding in others as the global sum declines.) And will time moderate the disparities cloaked within global averages, in particular disparities of hunger and excess among regions and individuals?
Allowing for wild cards, we believe that projecting conservative values for population, affluence, consumers, and technology shows humanity peaking in the use of farmland. Over the next 50 years, the prospect is that humanity is likely to release at least 146 mHa [146 million hectares, or 563,710 square miles], one and a half times the size of Egypt, two and a half times that of France, or ten Iowas, and possibly multiples of this amount.
Notwithstanding the biofuels case, the trends of the past 15 years largely resemble those for the past 50 and 150. We see no evidence of exhaustion of the factors that allow the peaking of cropland and the subsequent restoration of nature.
In an e-mail exchange today, I asked Ausubel about another issue touched on in the paper:
Looking around the planet, it’s clear from a biodiversity standpoint that all forests — or farming pressures — are not equal. For instance, in Southeast Asia, palm oil and orangutans are having a particularly hard time co-existing. So while the overall trend is great, do you see the need for maintaining a focus on particular “hot spots,” to use a term familiar in environmental circles?
So far, I don’t see lots of evidence that conservation campaigners (you are one on ocean resources) have found a way to accept this kind of good news and/or incorporate it in their prescriptions for sustaining a rich and variegated biological sheath on Earth. If you agree, any idea why?
Indonesia is the number one place where letting the underlying trend work will not work fast enough. The list of threatened regions is quite well identified: parts of the central African forest, parts of the Amazon.
Some conservation groups have realized that the slow growth in demand for calories as well as pulp and paper are creating big chances to reserve or protect more land. In the right places, where crops are no longer profitable, some amounts of money can acquire large amounts of land for nature.
Conservation groups also ought to attend more to the ecological disaster called biofuels.
I encourage you to dig in on this paper and related work, which provides a useful guide for softening the human impact on a crowding planet. There’ll be plenty of losses, and surprises, but there are real prospects for sustaining a thriving, and peopled, orb.
6:57 p.m. | Addendum | For relevant work with somewhat different conclusions review the presentations from “Intensifying agriculture within planetary boundaries,” a session at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London last March. I’ll be adding links to other relevant analysis here.
|
Taking Play Seriously
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: February 17, 2008
On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play -- not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library's main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ''Speaking of Faith,'' discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ''developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.''
The message seemed to resonate with audience members, who asked anxious questions about what seemed to be the loss of play in their children's lives. Their concern came, no doubt, from the recent deluge of eulogies to play . Educators fret that school officials are hacking away at recess to make room for an increasingly crammed curriculum. Psychologists complain that overscheduled kids have no time left for the real business of childhood: idle, creative, unstructured free play. Public health officials link insufficient playtime to a rise in childhood obesity. Parents bemoan the fact that kids don't play the way they themselves did -- or think they did. And everyone seems to worry that without the chance to play stickball or hopscotch out on the street, to play with dolls on the kitchen floor or climb trees in the woods, today's children are missing out on something essential.
The success of ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' -- which has been on the best-seller list for the last nine months -- and its step-by-step instructions for activities like folding paper airplanes is testament to the generalized longing for play's good old days. So were the questions after Stuart Brown's library talk; one woman asked how her children will learn trust, empathy and social skills when their most frequent playing is done online. Brown told her that while video games do have some play value, a true sense of ''interpersonal nuance'' can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all five senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.
This is part of a larger conversation Americans are having about play. Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits. Alarming headlines about U.S. students falling behind other countries in science and math, combined with the ever-more-intense competition to get kids into college, make parents rush to sign up their children for piano lessons and test-prep courses instead of just leaving them to improvise on their own; playtime versus r?m?uilding.
Discussions about play force us to reckon with our underlying ideas about childhood, sex differences, creativity and success. Do boys play differently than girls? Are children being damaged by staring at computer screens and video games? Are they missing something when fantasy play is populated with characters from Hollywood's imagination and not their own? Most of these issues are too vast to be addressed by a single field of study (let alone a magazine article). But the growing science of play does have much to add to the conversation. Armed with research grounded in evolutionary biology and experimental neuroscience, some scientists have shown themselves eager -- at times perhaps a little too eager -- to promote a scientific argument for play. They have spent the past few decades learning how and why play evolved in animals, generating insights that can inform our understanding of its evolution in humans too. They are studying, from an evolutionary perspective, to what extent play is a luxury that can be dispensed with when there are too many other competing claims on the growing brain, and to what extent it is central to how that brain grows in the first place.
Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. Play, in their view, is a central part of neurological growth and development -- one important way that children build complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.
Their work still leaves some questions unanswered, including questions about play's darker, more ambiguous side: is there really an evolutionary or developmental need for dangerous games, say, or for the meanness and hurt feelings that seem to attend so much child's play? Answering these and other questions could help us understand what might be lost if children play less.
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Taking Play Seriously
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
Published: February 17, 2008
On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play -- not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking
|
at the New York Public Library's main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ''Speaking of Faith,'' discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ''developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.''
The message seemed to resonate with audience members, who asked anxious questions about what seemed to be the loss of play in their children's lives. Their concern came, no doubt, from the recent deluge of eulogies to play . Educators fret that school officials are hacking away at recess to make room for an increasingly crammed curriculum. Psychologists complain that overscheduled kids have no time left for the real business of childhood: idle, creative, unstructured free play. Public health officials link insufficient playtime to a rise in childhood obesity. Parents bemoan the fact that kids don't play the way they themselves did -- or think they did. And everyone seems to worry that without the chance to play stickball or hopscotch out on the street, to play with dolls on the kitchen floor or climb trees in the woods, today's children are missing out on something essential.
The success of ''The Dangerous Book for Boys'' -- which has been on the best-seller list for the last nine months -- and its step-by-step instructions for activities like folding paper airplanes is testament to the generalized longing for play's good old days. So were the questions after Stuart Brown's library talk; one woman asked how her children will learn trust, empathy and social skills when their most frequent playing is done online. Brown told her that while video games do have some play value, a true sense of ''interpersonal nuance'' can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all five senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.
This is part of a larger conversation Americans are having about play. Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits. Alarming headlines about U.S. students falling behind other countries in science and math, combined with the ever-more-intense competition to get kids into college, make parents rush to sign up their children for piano lessons and test-prep courses instead of just leaving them to improvise on their own; playtime versus r?m?uilding.
Discussions about play force us to reckon with our underlying ideas about childhood, sex differences, creativity and success. Do boys play differently than girls? Are children being damaged by staring at computer screens and video games? Are they missing something when fantasy play is populated with characters from Hollywood's imagination and not their own? Most of these issues are too vast to be addressed by a single field of study (let alone a magazine article). But the growing science of play does have much to add to the conversation. Armed with research grounded in evolutionary biology and experimental neuroscience, some scientists have shown themselves eager -- at times perhaps a little too eager -- to promote a scientific argument for play. They have spent the past few decades learning how and why play evolved in animals, generating insights that can inform our understanding of its evolution in humans too. They are studying, from an evolutionary perspective, to what extent play is a luxury that can be dispensed with when there are too many other competing claims on the growing brain, and to what extent it is central to how that brain grows in the first place.
Scientists who study play, in animals and humans alike, are developing a consensus view that play is something more than a way for restless kids to work off steam; more than a way for chubby kids to burn off calories; more than a frivolous luxury. Play, in their view, is a central part of neurological growth and development -- one important way that children build complex, skilled, responsive, socially adept and cognitively flexible brains.
Their work still leaves some questions unanswered, including questions about play's darker, more ambiguous side: is there really an evolutionary or developmental need for dangerous games, say, or for the meanness and hurt feelings that seem to attend so much child's play? Answering these and other questions could help us understand what might be lost if children play less.
|
LESSON PLANS AND TIMES MATERIALS FOR TEACHING:
The Academy Awards
The Film Industry
Film in Language Arts
Film in Social Studies/History
Film in Fine Arts
Technology in Film
Lessons on these pages are for grades 6-12, written in consultation with Bank Street College of Education. Each one is paired with a Times article.
Learning Network Features
Selected Times Articles on Film Adaptations
Resources on the Web
LESSONS ON THE ACADEMY AWARDS:
The Envelope, Please
Investigating the Cultural Context of Oscar-Winning Films in the Past and Present
And the Oscar Goes to...
Examining and Creating Criteria for Oscar-Worthy Films
And the Winner Is...
Exploring the Role of the Academy Awards and Film in American Society
LESSONS ON THE FILM INDUSTRY:
Creating Film Festivals that Inform and Entertain Audiences
The Sundance Kids
Exploring What Makes the Independent Film Industry So Attractive to So Many
The Raid on Raters
Exploring the Current Movie Rating System
Minding the Media
Examining Ethical Questions About Media Rating Systems
The Reel World
Exploring the Appropriateness of Movies for Children
Considering the Costs of Making Movies
Fit to Be Tied (In)
Examining How Companies Target the Right Audiences
Old Hobbits Are Hard to Break
Learning About the Marketing of Motion Pictures on the Web
LESSONS ON AND WITH FILMMAKING:
Quiet on the Set!
Exploring Character and Conflict Development by Creating Short Films
Drawing Upon Successful Elements of the "Harry Potter" Series to Develop Short Films
Producing a Documentary Film Spotlighting the Everyday Sights and Sounds of a School
Creating Documentaries About Students' Everyday Lives
Through the Eyes of a Child
Creating Documentaries from the Perspectives of Adolescents
Creating Documentaries About Important Social Issues
Creating a Documentary about Rituals Related to Books
Creating Biographical Films for Current Political Candidates' Campaigns
More Power to You
Creating Documentaries About Energy Sources
Exploring the Pacific Rim by Writing Documentary Film Treatments
LESSONS USING FILM IN LANGUAGE ARTS:
Writing Movie Reviews
Screening the Silver Screen
Writing New York Times Movie Reviews
Exploring Plot Similarities in Fiction and Nonfiction Stories
Constructing Movie Sets Through Descriptive Writing
The Battle of Good and Evil on the Big Screen
A Media Studies Lesson Plan
If I Could Talk Like the Animals. . .
Teaching Personification and Narrative Writing in the Language Arts Classroom
The Sorcerers Shown
Comparing Similar Character Genres in Literature and Film
Talk About the Passion
Creating an Educational Guide to Encourage Critical Thinking about the Film "The Passion of Christ"
Creating Vocabulary-Rich Advertisements to Recognize Glover's Contribution to "Happy Feet"
Analyzing Similarities and Differences Among the Live, Film and Written Versions of Tony Award Winning Productions
LESSONS USING FILM IN SOCIAL STUDIES/HISTORY:
Tell Me Something Good
Analyzing Moviegoers' Preferences in an Economic Recession
Golden Globe as Gauge
Exploring How Hollywood Reflects the American Political and Cultural Climate
Is All Cinema Verité?
Exploring the Relationship Between Movies and Culture
Los Artistas Unidos
Exploring Questions of Diversity in the Casting of Actors for Popular Television Shows and Movies
Exploring Legislation About Violence in the Media
Making Sense of Censorship
Clarifying Rating Systems for Entertainment
Let There Be Peace
Exploring the Accomplishments of Nobel Peace Prize Recipients
A Woman's Worth
Examining the Changing Roles of Women in Cultures Around the World
LESSONS USING FILM IN FINE ARTS:
Setting the Stage from the Page
Creating Original Artwork that Transforms Text to the Big Screen
The Art of Violence
Creating Original Works of Art That Explore the Depiction of Violence
Lyrics of Hazzard
Updating Classic Music for a Movie Soundtrack
State of the Art
Identifying the Merits of a Favorite Work of Art
LESSONS ON TECHNOLOGY IN FILM:
Exploring Plausible Inventions for Make-Believe Movies
The New Fant-"Asia"
Contrasting Animated and Live-Action Filmmaking
Actors and Actresses
Screen Actors Guild
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Sundance Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival
LEARNING NETWORK FEATURES:
Student Crossword: Oscar-Winning Films
News Snapshot: Best of the Bunch
News Snapshot: Hopeful Hollywood
News Snapshot: Pop + Art = Oscar?
News Snapshot: Holy Box Office, Batman!
News Snapshot: And the Nominees Are …
Times Movies Section
Times Critics' Picks
Times Reviews archive
The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
Blog: The Carpetbagger
Interactive Graphic: The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008
SELECTED TIMES ARTICLES ON FILM ADAPTATIONS:
All Right, You Try: Adaptation Isn't Easy
Article by screenwriter Stephen Schiff on the challenges of adapting source material for film, including Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," which became the Charlie Kaufman film "Adaptation."
Can a Film Do Justice to Literature?
Article about arguments over whether or not ''good literature is too substantial to fit through the lens of a camera.''
The Best Novelists, The Worst Movie Adaptations
Article about how great novels don't necessarily translate into great films.
Any Novel Can Be Shaped Into a Movie
Article on how some film adaptations, such as the one of "The English Patient," are as artistic as the novels they are based on.
Cuddling Up to Quasimodo and Friends
Article on film adaptations that are not true to their source material.
Is It Time To Trust Hollywood?
1990 essay by Molly Haskell that takes a broad look at Hollywood's history of book-to-movie adaptations.
Seen the Movie? Read the Book!
1987 essay by John Updike about adapting literature for film.
Adapting and Revising Twain's 'Huck Finn'
1986 essay by book critic Michiko Kakutani on the difficulties of adapting Twain.
2008 essay by Sophie Gee about adaptations of "Beowulf" and "Paradise Lost."
Romancing the Book…Once Again
1992 article about Hollywood's interest in literary classics.
RESOURCES ON THE WEB:
Scenarios USA holds an annual topical writing contest to pair student screenwriters in underserved communities with Hollywood filmmakers, who turn the students' stories into short films. The Scenarios USA Web site includes materials for teachers.
Teacher's Guide to Making Student Movies
From Scholastic Teaching Resources, designed for grades 3-12.
Mini Movie Makers
Resource for student filmmakers, developed by three young brothers.
MORE RESOURCES FOR TEACHING WITH THE TIMES:
Learning Network classroom resources on a wide range of topics.
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LESSON PLANS AND TIMES MATERIALS FOR TEACHING:
The Academy Awards
The Film Industry
Film in Language Arts
Film in Social Studies/History
Film in Fine Arts
Technology in Film
Lessons on these pages are for grades 6-12, written in consultation with Bank Street College of Education. Each one is paired with a Times article.
Learning Network Features
Selected Times Articles on Film Adaptations
Resources on the Web
LESSONS ON THE ACADEMY AWARDS:
The Envelope, Please
Investigating the Cultural Context of Oscar-Winning Films in the Past and
|
Present
And the Oscar Goes to...
Examining and Creating Criteria for Oscar-Worthy Films
And the Winner Is...
Exploring the Role of the Academy Awards and Film in American Society
LESSONS ON THE FILM INDUSTRY:
Creating Film Festivals that Inform and Entertain Audiences
The Sundance Kids
Exploring What Makes the Independent Film Industry So Attractive to So Many
The Raid on Raters
Exploring the Current Movie Rating System
Minding the Media
Examining Ethical Questions About Media Rating Systems
The Reel World
Exploring the Appropriateness of Movies for Children
Considering the Costs of Making Movies
Fit to Be Tied (In)
Examining How Companies Target the Right Audiences
Old Hobbits Are Hard to Break
Learning About the Marketing of Motion Pictures on the Web
LESSONS ON AND WITH FILMMAKING:
Quiet on the Set!
Exploring Character and Conflict Development by Creating Short Films
Drawing Upon Successful Elements of the "Harry Potter" Series to Develop Short Films
Producing a Documentary Film Spotlighting the Everyday Sights and Sounds of a School
Creating Documentaries About Students' Everyday Lives
Through the Eyes of a Child
Creating Documentaries from the Perspectives of Adolescents
Creating Documentaries About Important Social Issues
Creating a Documentary about Rituals Related to Books
Creating Biographical Films for Current Political Candidates' Campaigns
More Power to You
Creating Documentaries About Energy Sources
Exploring the Pacific Rim by Writing Documentary Film Treatments
LESSONS USING FILM IN LANGUAGE ARTS:
Writing Movie Reviews
Screening the Silver Screen
Writing New York Times Movie Reviews
Exploring Plot Similarities in Fiction and Nonfiction Stories
Constructing Movie Sets Through Descriptive Writing
The Battle of Good and Evil on the Big Screen
A Media Studies Lesson Plan
If I Could Talk Like the Animals. . .
Teaching Personification and Narrative Writing in the Language Arts Classroom
The Sorcerers Shown
Comparing Similar Character Genres in Literature and Film
Talk About the Passion
Creating an Educational Guide to Encourage Critical Thinking about the Film "The Passion of Christ"
Creating Vocabulary-Rich Advertisements to Recognize Glover's Contribution to "Happy Feet"
Analyzing Similarities and Differences Among the Live, Film and Written Versions of Tony Award Winning Productions
LESSONS USING FILM IN SOCIAL STUDIES/HISTORY:
Tell Me Something Good
Analyzing Moviegoers' Preferences in an Economic Recession
Golden Globe as Gauge
Exploring How Hollywood Reflects the American Political and Cultural Climate
Is All Cinema Verité?
Exploring the Relationship Between Movies and Culture
Los Artistas Unidos
Exploring Questions of Diversity in the Casting of Actors for Popular Television Shows and Movies
Exploring Legislation About Violence in the Media
Making Sense of Censorship
Clarifying Rating Systems for Entertainment
Let There Be Peace
Exploring the Accomplishments of Nobel Peace Prize Recipients
A Woman's Worth
Examining the Changing Roles of Women in Cultures Around the World
LESSONS USING FILM IN FINE ARTS:
Setting the Stage from the Page
Creating Original Artwork that Transforms Text to the Big Screen
The Art of Violence
Creating Original Works of Art That Explore the Depiction of Violence
Lyrics of Hazzard
Updating Classic Music for a Movie Soundtrack
State of the Art
Identifying the Merits of a Favorite Work of Art
LESSONS ON TECHNOLOGY IN FILM:
Exploring Plausible Inventions for Make-Believe Movies
The New Fant-"Asia"
Contrasting Animated and Live-Action Filmmaking
Actors and Actresses
Screen Actors Guild
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Sundance Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival
LEARNING NETWORK FEATURES:
Student Crossword: Oscar-Winning Films
News Snapshot: Best of the Bunch
News Snapshot: Hopeful Hollywood
News Snapshot: Pop + Art = Oscar?
News Snapshot: Holy Box Office, Batman!
News Snapshot: And the Nominees Are …
Times Movies Section
Times Critics' Picks
Times Reviews archive
The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
Blog: The Carpetbagger
Interactive Graphic: The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008
SELECTED TIMES ARTICLES ON FILM ADAPTATIONS:
All Right, You Try: Adaptation Isn't Easy
Article by screenwriter Stephen Schiff on the challenges of adapting source material for film, including Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," which became the Charlie Kaufman film "Adaptation."
Can a Film Do Justice to Literature?
Article about arguments over whether or not ''good literature is too substantial to fit through the lens of a camera.''
The Best Novelists, The Worst Movie Adaptations
Article about how great novels don't necessarily translate into great films.
Any Novel Can Be Shaped Into a Movie
Article on how some film adaptations, such as the one of "The English Patient," are as artistic as the novels they are based on.
Cuddling Up to Quasimodo and Friends
Article on film adaptations that are not true to their source material.
Is It Time To Trust Hollywood?
1990 essay by Molly Haskell that takes a broad look at Hollywood's history of book-to-movie adaptations.
Seen the Movie? Read the Book!
1987 essay by John Updike about adapting literature for film.
Adapting and Revising Twain's 'Huck Finn'
1986 essay by book critic Michiko Kakutani on the difficulties of adapting Twain.
2008 essay by Sophie Gee about adaptations of "Beowulf" and "Paradise Lost."
Romancing the Book…Once Again
1992 article about Hollywood's interest in literary classics.
RESOURCES ON THE WEB:
Scenarios USA holds an annual topical writing contest to pair student screenwriters in underserved communities with Hollywood filmmakers, who turn the students' stories into short films. The Scenarios USA Web site includes materials for teachers.
Teacher's Guide to Making Student Movies
From Scholastic Teaching Resources, designed for grades 3-12.
Mini Movie Makers
Resource for student filmmakers, developed by three young brothers.
MORE RESOURCES FOR TEACHING WITH THE TIMES:
Learning Network classroom resources on a wide range of topics.
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A.J. NesteBatteries at a station on a Philadelphia commuter line capture excess current when trains brake and store the power for use when a train accelerates.
A giant battery bank installed by the side of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority’s subway tracks a little over a month ago is saving about nine megawatt-hours of power a week, its manufacturer says, which is more electricity than the typical apartment-dweller uses in a year.
The battery system, which I wrote about last year, is allowing the trains to run a bit like Prius hybrids. When they slow down at a station, their motors turn into generators, converting torque into current. Before the battery bank was installed, some of that current was returned to the third rail; but if the voltage got too high, it was shunted instead into a giant electric heater under the train, which simply dissipated the energy as heat.
Now the battery captures excess current, about 3.5 to 4 kilowatt-hours per train that stops, and puts it back on the line when a train is accelerating. Sometimes it does this for several trains at once.
The battery bank is also receiving signals every four seconds from the regional grid operator and either absorbing energy or giving it back to the grid to help balance supply and demand.
Until very recently, the solar industry was mainly concerned with getting a toehold in the production of electricity at a utility-level scale. Now a New Jersey company is looking for its niche in a different field — how to handle a system that is saturated with solar energy, sometimes enough to destabilize the electric grid.
The company, Petra Solar, has a highly visible product: it is under contract to supply 200,000 panels that Public Service Electric & Gas will attached to utility poles around New Jersey. Around 75,000 are already up.
About six feet wide and four feet high, the panels make 200 watts when in full sun, and newer models will make 225 watts, the company says. On a mild day, one could almost meet the needs of an entire house in the daytime; on a hot day, four or five would run a window air conditioner.
On the top side of the panel, the side angled toward the sun, is the obvious attention-getter, the polycrystalline solar cell. What is different is the electronics bolted to the bottom, which are meant to prevent a solar power overdose. They could turn out to be crucial, according to company executives.
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A.J. NesteBatteries at a station on a Philadelphia commuter line capture excess current when trains brake and store the power for use when a train accelerates.
A giant battery bank installed by the side of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority’s subway tracks a little over a month ago is saving about nine megawatt-hours of power a week, its manufacturer says, which is more electricity than the typical apartment-dweller uses in a year.
The battery system, which I wrote about last year, is allowing the trains to run a bit like Prius hybrids. When they slow down at a station, their motors turn into generators
|
, converting torque into current. Before the battery bank was installed, some of that current was returned to the third rail; but if the voltage got too high, it was shunted instead into a giant electric heater under the train, which simply dissipated the energy as heat.
Now the battery captures excess current, about 3.5 to 4 kilowatt-hours per train that stops, and puts it back on the line when a train is accelerating. Sometimes it does this for several trains at once.
The battery bank is also receiving signals every four seconds from the regional grid operator and either absorbing energy or giving it back to the grid to help balance supply and demand.
Until very recently, the solar industry was mainly concerned with getting a toehold in the production of electricity at a utility-level scale. Now a New Jersey company is looking for its niche in a different field — how to handle a system that is saturated with solar energy, sometimes enough to destabilize the electric grid.
The company, Petra Solar, has a highly visible product: it is under contract to supply 200,000 panels that Public Service Electric & Gas will attached to utility poles around New Jersey. Around 75,000 are already up.
About six feet wide and four feet high, the panels make 200 watts when in full sun, and newer models will make 225 watts, the company says. On a mild day, one could almost meet the needs of an entire house in the daytime; on a hot day, four or five would run a window air conditioner.
On the top side of the panel, the side angled toward the sun, is the obvious attention-getter, the polycrystalline solar cell. What is different is the electronics bolted to the bottom, which are meant to prevent a solar power overdose. They could turn out to be crucial, according to company executives.
|
A few months ago we wrote about Kristianstad, Sweden, an area that now uses biomass to generate all of its heat and some of its electricity. That city pioneered use of this renewable technology, and gradually biomass evolved from a niche component of its fuel mix to the backbone of its fuel supply.
A number of rural areas in Germany and the Netherlands have undertaken similar projects. As the article noted, while biomass could be deployed in similar agricultural regions in the United States, adoption has been slow in this country.
That looks as if it might be changing.
This week the federal Department of Agriculture announced a host of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in rural America, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is touring the Midwest, seeding biomass projects as he goes.
On Friday, the departments of Agriculture and Energy announced that up to $30 million would go toward supporting research and development in advanced biofuels, bioenergy and “high-value biobased products” over the next three to four years.
The money is to be dispensed through the Biomass Research and Development Initiative, which started accepting proposals last year.
If properly produced, biomass heat and power produce fewer emissions than fossil fuels like coal or oil because much of the material used as fuel would otherwise sit in landfill releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as it rots. The use of biomass could also reduce the need to import oil. President Obama has called for a one-third reduction in the nation’s oil imports by 2025.
Biomass can include old tree cuttings, rice husks, corn stalks, manure -– almost any kind of biological farm waste. In the past these leftovers were typically left to rot. So a growing number of agricultural regions are burning them or degrading them through chemical digestion to produce biogas.
But new forms of biomass, like the algae biomass produced at the plant that Secretary Vilsack is visiting Friday afternoon, do not use agricultural leftovers; they rely on farmers or factories that grow plants specifically for use as fuel. That involves a different kind of trade-off, since those fields and farms could instead be growing food.
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A few months ago we wrote about Kristianstad, Sweden, an area that now uses biomass to generate all of its heat and some of its electricity. That city pioneered use of this renewable technology, and gradually biomass evolved from a niche component of its fuel mix to the backbone of its fuel supply.
A number of rural areas in Germany and the Netherlands have undertaken similar projects. As the article noted, while biomass could be deployed in similar agricultural regions in the United States, adoption has been slow in this country.
That looks as if it might be changing.
This week the federal Department of Agriculture announced a host of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects
|
in rural America, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is touring the Midwest, seeding biomass projects as he goes.
On Friday, the departments of Agriculture and Energy announced that up to $30 million would go toward supporting research and development in advanced biofuels, bioenergy and “high-value biobased products” over the next three to four years.
The money is to be dispensed through the Biomass Research and Development Initiative, which started accepting proposals last year.
If properly produced, biomass heat and power produce fewer emissions than fossil fuels like coal or oil because much of the material used as fuel would otherwise sit in landfill releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as it rots. The use of biomass could also reduce the need to import oil. President Obama has called for a one-third reduction in the nation’s oil imports by 2025.
Biomass can include old tree cuttings, rice husks, corn stalks, manure -– almost any kind of biological farm waste. In the past these leftovers were typically left to rot. So a growing number of agricultural regions are burning them or degrading them through chemical digestion to produce biogas.
But new forms of biomass, like the algae biomass produced at the plant that Secretary Vilsack is visiting Friday afternoon, do not use agricultural leftovers; they rely on farmers or factories that grow plants specifically for use as fuel. That involves a different kind of trade-off, since those fields and farms could instead be growing food.
|
Scientists have long projected that areas north and south of the tropics will grow drier in a warming world –- from the Middle East through the European Riviera to the American Southwest, from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Australia.
These regions are too far from the equator to benefit from the moist columns of heated air that result in steamy afternoon downpours. And the additional precipitation foreseen as more water evaporates from the seas is mostly expected to fall at higher latitudes. Essentially, a lot of climate scientists say, these regions may start to feel more like deserts under the influence of global warming.
Now scientists have measured a rapid recent expansion of desert-like barrenness in the subtropical oceans –- in places where surface waters have also been steadily warming. There could be a link to human-driven climate change, but it’s too soon to tell, the scientists said.
[UPDATED below, 3/6, 1 p..m] Read more…
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Scientists have long projected that areas north and south of the tropics will grow drier in a warming world –- from the Middle East through the European Riviera to the American Southwest, from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Australia.
These regions are too far from the equator to benefit from the moist columns of heated air that result in steamy afternoon downpours. And the additional precipitation foreseen as more water evaporates from the seas is mostly expected to fall at higher latitudes. Essentially, a lot of climate scientists say, these regions may start to feel more like deserts under the influence of global warming.
Now scientists have
|
measured a rapid recent expansion of desert-like barrenness in the subtropical oceans –- in places where surface waters have also been steadily warming. There could be a link to human-driven climate change, but it’s too soon to tell, the scientists said.
[UPDATED below, 3/6, 1 p..m] Read more…
|
The thick durable sea ice that routinely cloaked much of the Arctic Ocean in colder decades in the 20th century is increasingly relegated to a few clotted places along northern Canada and Greenland, according to the latest satellite analysis of the warming region.
The following video gives you a fascinating view of one patch of sea ice through 90 days, provided by a webcam left behind by researchers who annually set up camp near the North Pole to check ocean and ice conditions up close.
The new analysis, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Tuesday, is the latest of many findings supporting the idea that the region has shifted to a new state in which seasonal ice, which forms in winter and melts in the summer, dominates. This is the main reason biologists have concerns for the long-term welfare of polar bears, which have a harder time sustaining their weight and reproducing when summertime ice is thin. At the same time, the shift bodes well for shippers, like the German company Beluga, that have plans to start sending goods from Asia to northern Europe through the fabled, but long impassible, Northern Sea Route over Russia.
The study, conducted by scientists from NASA, the University of Washington and the California Institute of Technology estimated changes from 2003 to 2008 in the total volume and thickness of what’s called multi-year ice, the yards-thick floes that can persist through a summer (here’s some video I shot while standing on a mix of old and thinner ice in 2003), and seasonal ice, which can grow to 6 feet in thickness in winter but vanishes in summer.
For a look at how this summer’s Arctic sea-ice season may unfold, visit Sea Ice Outlook 2009, where more than a dozen groups of ice researchers are posting experimental forecasts of how the ice is likely to fare. There’s a strong consensus that the season will see much less sea ice than the average for the period monitored by satellites (from 1979 onward), but is unlikely to see the extent of open water measured in 2007.
To get a sense of how the views of Arctic experts have coalesced around a rising human influence on the region’s climate, you can scan previous stories from 2001, 2005, and 2007 on ice trends and possible causes.
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|
The thick durable sea ice that routinely cloaked much of the Arctic Ocean in colder decades in the 20th century is increasingly relegated to a few clotted places along northern Canada and Greenland, according to the latest satellite analysis of the warming region.
The following video gives you a fascinating view of one patch of sea ice through 90 days, provided by a webcam left behind by researchers who annually set up camp near the North Pole to check ocean and ice conditions up close.
The new analysis, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research on Tuesday, is the latest of many findings supporting the idea that the region has shifted to
|
a new state in which seasonal ice, which forms in winter and melts in the summer, dominates. This is the main reason biologists have concerns for the long-term welfare of polar bears, which have a harder time sustaining their weight and reproducing when summertime ice is thin. At the same time, the shift bodes well for shippers, like the German company Beluga, that have plans to start sending goods from Asia to northern Europe through the fabled, but long impassible, Northern Sea Route over Russia.
The study, conducted by scientists from NASA, the University of Washington and the California Institute of Technology estimated changes from 2003 to 2008 in the total volume and thickness of what’s called multi-year ice, the yards-thick floes that can persist through a summer (here’s some video I shot while standing on a mix of old and thinner ice in 2003), and seasonal ice, which can grow to 6 feet in thickness in winter but vanishes in summer.
For a look at how this summer’s Arctic sea-ice season may unfold, visit Sea Ice Outlook 2009, where more than a dozen groups of ice researchers are posting experimental forecasts of how the ice is likely to fare. There’s a strong consensus that the season will see much less sea ice than the average for the period monitored by satellites (from 1979 onward), but is unlikely to see the extent of open water measured in 2007.
To get a sense of how the views of Arctic experts have coalesced around a rising human influence on the region’s climate, you can scan previous stories from 2001, 2005, and 2007 on ice trends and possible causes.
|
The rare greenback cutthroat trout, Colorado’s state fish, is even more imperiled than scientists thought, a new study suggests. By analyzing DNA sampled from cutthroat trout specimens pickled in ethanol for 150 years, comparing it with the genes of today’s cutthroat populations, and cross-referencing more than 40,000 historic stocking records, researchers in Colorado and Australia have revealed that the fish survives not in five wild populations, but just one.
Stocking records and the tangled genetic patchwork of trout in the southern Rocky Mountain region suggest that efforts to replenish populations were far more extensive and began earlier than previously recognized. Between 1885 and 1953, state and federal agencies stocked more than 750 million brook trout, rainbow trout and cutthroat trout from hatcheries into streams and lakes in Colorado, the researchers found.
The study, published on Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Ecology as a follow-up to a 2007 study led by the same biologist, Jessica Metcalf, yielded some findings that “may be uncomfortable,” Kevin Rogers, a researcher for Colorado’s state parks authority, said in a call with reporters.
Doug Krieger, senior aquatic biologist for the same agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, predicted that the study would shift the direction of conservation efforts.
A shift in the scientific landscape is not an entirely new experience for fish managers working with the cutthroat trout in the region. The 2007 study shook the very foundations of cutthroat trout recovery efforts, showing that managers had accidentally mixed a different subspecies of cutthroat trout, the Colorado cutthroat, with the rare greenback, and then stocked these hybrid strains into otherwise pure greenback streams.
The latest study, whose co-authors also include the biologist Chris Kennedy of the Fish and Wildlife Service and scientists with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Center for Ancient DNA and the University of Colorado, Boulder, shows that the last surviving greenback population lies within a four-mile stretch of a small alpine stream known as Bear Creek. The stream is about five miles southwest of Colorado Springs, on the eastern slope of Pikes Peak.
Located outside the greenback’s native range, this holdout population is probably descended from fish stocked at the Bear Creek headwaters in the 1880’s by a hotelier seeking to promote a tourist route up Pikes Peak, the researchers say.
To map out the historic distribution and range of a species whose taxonomic record is, to quote the latest study, “rife with errors,” Dr. Metcalf sampled skin, gill, muscle and bone from trout specimens collected in Colorado and New Mexico from 1857 to 1889, before the state and federal efforts to propagate and stock native trout were ramped up.
Now housed in museums including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Sciences, the specimens were preserved in ethanol. “The DNA was very degraded, and there wasn’t very much of it,” Dr. Metcalf said. “So this took a lot of effort and repeated sequencing for each specimen.”
Still, ethanol preservation opened a window to the past. “After the 1900’s, a lot of things were fixed in formalin, which keeps them looking the way they were when they were collected,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Before that, things were just straight up pickled” in ethanol.”
The problem for latter-day genetic sleuths is that formalin actually binds with DNA, making the latter impossible to recover. It’s not always obvious what chemicals were used for a given specimen, but the fact that some fish appeared partially decayed was a good sign these trout were preserved the old-fashioned way (in ethanol only), leaving fragments of DNA intact.
“The DNA I get out of 15,000-year-old, extremely degraded animals from Patagonia is in better shape than these ethanol-preserved fish,” she said.
Aside from presenting an approach for using pre-1900 museum specimens to provide a baseline for historic diversity, the study effectively yanks the rug out from under cutthroat trout restoration efforts and raises the stakes in a lawsuit filed last week by the Center for Biological Diversity against federal land managers.
The center claims that “rampant motorcycle use” permitted on trails running along and across Bear Creek is destroying precious habitat. “We’ve asked the forest service to close that trail to motorcycle use and move it,” the director of the organization’s endangered species program, Noah Greenwald, said in an interview.
Even after the construction of bridges and other projects designed to minimize erosion, Mr. Greenwald said, heavy trafficking of erosive soil around Bear Creek causes sediments to fill pools that are vital to cutthroat trout survival.
“It’s a really small stream,” he said. “So the pools are super-important during drought, when the stream freezes in the wintertime, and to hide from predators.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service does not plan to take immediate action around Bear Creek in response to the Metcalf research, which the agency helped finance as a member of the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team. Other funds flowed from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and Trout Unlimited.
A Fish and Wildlife Service representative told reporters on Monday that the greenback’s status would not be changed from threatened to endangered until a thorough scientific review was carried out and the public had a chance to weigh in. Separate research that the agency will use to crosscheck Dr. Metcalf’s genetic results is to be completed this fall.
Historic records indicate that Bear Creek, like many high-alpine streams made inaccessible by waterfalls and other natural barriers, once had no fish at all. When frontiersmen arrived in the area, they typically would settle near a creek, Dr. Metcalf said., “The first thing you’re going to do is stock it, so you have a good food resource right by your house all year round,” she said,
The revelation that Bear Creek is home to the last remaining greenback cutthroats underscores the importance of protecting the population, said Mr. Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
“If we can’t protect it, if we don’t do what’s necessary to protect it, “we’re at risk of losing another one of these cutthroat trout subspecies, and that would be a real tragedy,” he said.
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The rare greenback cutthroat trout, Colorado’s state fish, is even more imperiled than scientists thought, a new study suggests. By analyzing DNA sampled from cutthroat trout specimens pickled in ethanol for 150 years, comparing it with the genes of today’s cutthroat populations, and cross-referencing more than 40,000 historic stocking records, researchers in Colorado and Australia have revealed that the fish survives not in five wild populations, but just one.
Stocking records and the tangled genetic patchwork of trout in the southern Rocky Mountain region suggest that efforts to replenish
|
populations were far more extensive and began earlier than previously recognized. Between 1885 and 1953, state and federal agencies stocked more than 750 million brook trout, rainbow trout and cutthroat trout from hatcheries into streams and lakes in Colorado, the researchers found.
The study, published on Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Molecular Ecology as a follow-up to a 2007 study led by the same biologist, Jessica Metcalf, yielded some findings that “may be uncomfortable,” Kevin Rogers, a researcher for Colorado’s state parks authority, said in a call with reporters.
Doug Krieger, senior aquatic biologist for the same agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, predicted that the study would shift the direction of conservation efforts.
A shift in the scientific landscape is not an entirely new experience for fish managers working with the cutthroat trout in the region. The 2007 study shook the very foundations of cutthroat trout recovery efforts, showing that managers had accidentally mixed a different subspecies of cutthroat trout, the Colorado cutthroat, with the rare greenback, and then stocked these hybrid strains into otherwise pure greenback streams.
The latest study, whose co-authors also include the biologist Chris Kennedy of the Fish and Wildlife Service and scientists with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Center for Ancient DNA and the University of Colorado, Boulder, shows that the last surviving greenback population lies within a four-mile stretch of a small alpine stream known as Bear Creek. The stream is about five miles southwest of Colorado Springs, on the eastern slope of Pikes Peak.
Located outside the greenback’s native range, this holdout population is probably descended from fish stocked at the Bear Creek headwaters in the 1880’s by a hotelier seeking to promote a tourist route up Pikes Peak, the researchers say.
To map out the historic distribution and range of a species whose taxonomic record is, to quote the latest study, “rife with errors,” Dr. Metcalf sampled skin, gill, muscle and bone from trout specimens collected in Colorado and New Mexico from 1857 to 1889, before the state and federal efforts to propagate and stock native trout were ramped up.
Now housed in museums including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Sciences, the specimens were preserved in ethanol. “The DNA was very degraded, and there wasn’t very much of it,” Dr. Metcalf said. “So this took a lot of effort and repeated sequencing for each specimen.”
Still, ethanol preservation opened a window to the past. “After the 1900’s, a lot of things were fixed in formalin, which keeps them looking the way they were when they were collected,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Before that, things were just straight up pickled” in ethanol.”
The problem for latter-day genetic sleuths is that formalin actually binds with DNA, making the latter impossible to recover. It’s not always obvious what chemicals were used for a given specimen, but the fact that some fish appeared partially decayed was a good sign these trout were preserved the old-fashioned way (in ethanol only), leaving fragments of DNA intact.
“The DNA I get out of 15,000-year-old, extremely degraded animals from Patagonia is in better shape than these ethanol-preserved fish,” she said.
Aside from presenting an approach for using pre-1900 museum specimens to provide a baseline for historic diversity, the study effectively yanks the rug out from under cutthroat trout restoration efforts and raises the stakes in a lawsuit filed last week by the Center for Biological Diversity against federal land managers.
The center claims that “rampant motorcycle use” permitted on trails running along and across Bear Creek is destroying precious habitat. “We’ve asked the forest service to close that trail to motorcycle use and move it,” the director of the organization’s endangered species program, Noah Greenwald, said in an interview.
Even after the construction of bridges and other projects designed to minimize erosion, Mr. Greenwald said, heavy trafficking of erosive soil around Bear Creek causes sediments to fill pools that are vital to cutthroat trout survival.
“It’s a really small stream,” he said. “So the pools are super-important during drought, when the stream freezes in the wintertime, and to hide from predators.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service does not plan to take immediate action around Bear Creek in response to the Metcalf research, which the agency helped finance as a member of the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team. Other funds flowed from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and Trout Unlimited.
A Fish and Wildlife Service representative told reporters on Monday that the greenback’s status would not be changed from threatened to endangered until a thorough scientific review was carried out and the public had a chance to weigh in. Separate research that the agency will use to crosscheck Dr. Metcalf’s genetic results is to be completed this fall.
Historic records indicate that Bear Creek, like many high-alpine streams made inaccessible by waterfalls and other natural barriers, once had no fish at all. When frontiersmen arrived in the area, they typically would settle near a creek, Dr. Metcalf said., “The first thing you’re going to do is stock it, so you have a good food resource right by your house all year round,” she said,
The revelation that Bear Creek is home to the last remaining greenback cutthroats underscores the importance of protecting the population, said Mr. Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
“If we can’t protect it, if we don’t do what’s necessary to protect it, “we’re at risk of losing another one of these cutthroat trout subspecies, and that would be a real tragedy,” he said.
|
Exotic pests are nothing new. The hemlock wooly adelgid, which has turned woods from green to brown from the Poconos to the Great Smoky Mountains, arrived 70 years ago on a single hemlock a Virginia landowner imported for his Japanese-style garden.
But while federal agriculture officials struggle with adelgid and other established pests, emerging threats, like the citrus longhorned beetle, a wood-boring native of Asia, are presenting new headaches.
So destructive is the beetle that bans on an array of popular plants grown in Europe, including cherry trees, rhododendrons, and even cut roses from the Netherlands, are under consideration by federal officials, said Faith Campbell, a senior policy representative for the conservancy.
Europe is just one part of the $500 million international plant exporting business that has producers from Colombia to China sending more than three billion plants to the United States each year. Such foreign imports could be responsible for as much as 70 percent of the most damaging non-native insects and diseases afflicting American forests today, according to the study, which was conducted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Exotic pests are nothing new. The hemlock wooly adelgid, which has turned woods from green to brown from the Poconos to the Great Smoky Mountains, arrived 70 years ago on a single hemlock a Virginia landowner imported for his Japanese-style garden.
But while federal agriculture officials struggle with adelgid and other established pests, emerging threats, like the citrus longhorned beetle, a wood-boring native of Asia, are presenting new headaches.
So destructive is the beetle that bans on an array of popular plants grown in Europe, including cherry trees, rhododendrons,
|
and even cut roses from the Netherlands, are under consideration by federal officials, said Faith Campbell, a senior policy representative for the conservancy.
Europe is just one part of the $500 million international plant exporting business that has producers from Colombia to China sending more than three billion plants to the United States each year. Such foreign imports could be responsible for as much as 70 percent of the most damaging non-native insects and diseases afflicting American forests today, according to the study, which was conducted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
|
Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon provide the Second Sunday acrostic puzzles every second week. If you think that’s all they do, you need to read my interview with them from last year. This weekend we are treated to one of their Cryptic Crosswords.
I try to be careful writing about these puzzles because I’d rather not give too much away. Feel free to comment on any clues or answers, or to ask any questions, and we can let the conversation happen that way. If you’re new to these Cryptic shenanigans, it might be instructive to consider the first two clues, and then you’re on your own.
1 Across is “From stem to stern, tossed in the Sound (10).” The parenthetical number at the end tells us the number of letters in the answer. The trick to these puzzles is realizing that, for most clues, there are two parts that each point to the same answer. Often is it difficult to separate those parts, so you have to be on your toes. It looks as if this one might mean “from stem to stern” and there is a word meaning tossed inside another one meaning Sound.
That’s a perfectly logical parsing of the clue. It’s also wrong. Sound here means “sounds like,” so we’re looking for a single word meaning “from stem to stern” that sounds like a word or phrase meaning “tossed.” THROUGHOUT fits that description. Reread the explanation here if it doesn’t make sense right away.
The clue at 6 Across reads “Exchange hands, from right to left (4).” In this case, the answer is SWAP. It means exchange. What has swap to do with “hands from right to left”? Follow the directions in the clue to find out.
Cryptics are an acquired taste, but once you get over the hump, they’re great fun. They often benefit from solving with a friend, who might be able to look at the clues at a different angle when you’re stuck.
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Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon provide the Second Sunday acrostic puzzles every second week. If you think that’s all they do, you need to read my interview with them from last year. This weekend we are treated to one of their Cryptic Crosswords.
I try to be careful writing about these puzzles because I’d rather not give too much away. Feel free to comment on any clues or answers, or to ask any questions, and we can let the conversation happen that way. If you’re new to these Cryptic shenanigans, it might be instructive to consider the first two clues, and then you
|
’re on your own.
1 Across is “From stem to stern, tossed in the Sound (10).” The parenthetical number at the end tells us the number of letters in the answer. The trick to these puzzles is realizing that, for most clues, there are two parts that each point to the same answer. Often is it difficult to separate those parts, so you have to be on your toes. It looks as if this one might mean “from stem to stern” and there is a word meaning tossed inside another one meaning Sound.
That’s a perfectly logical parsing of the clue. It’s also wrong. Sound here means “sounds like,” so we’re looking for a single word meaning “from stem to stern” that sounds like a word or phrase meaning “tossed.” THROUGHOUT fits that description. Reread the explanation here if it doesn’t make sense right away.
The clue at 6 Across reads “Exchange hands, from right to left (4).” In this case, the answer is SWAP. It means exchange. What has swap to do with “hands from right to left”? Follow the directions in the clue to find out.
Cryptics are an acquired taste, but once you get over the hump, they’re great fun. They often benefit from solving with a friend, who might be able to look at the clues at a different angle when you’re stuck.
|
The Energy Information Administration has released “World Shale Gas Resources,” an important commissioned report providing an assessment of how much natural gas is locked in shale deposits in 14 regions around the world. (Here’s its overview of shale gas in the United States.) Here’s a map of the surveyed regions:
The report includes some pretty remarkable numbers from countries that currently have limited domestic gas options, including China and quite a few western European nations that have been held somewhat hostage by Russia. Its publication comes in sync with a disturbing article in The Times noting how much crop production, including tropical staples such as cassava, is being diverted to making biofuels.
I sent the following query to a batch of people immersed in assessing and/or developing the world’s energy menu but it’s a query for you, as well, of course (I’ve tweaked it to remove some e-mail shorthand):
I would greatly appreciate some reflection from you on the new shale gas assessment from EIA (global estimates for areas that have been surveyed) against the trends for food crops, including cassava, going to make fuels, as reported today by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The Times.
I’ve seen some fresh analysis saying this new shale report completely ices the case that gas is now (more than was already clear) a fundamental game changer.
The figures for China help explain why a team of Chinese gas experts, as I was told not long ago by folks at Oklahoma State University, has been there studying extraction technologies.
There are strong new hints that gas can play a much bigger role in energy for transport (for example LNG for big trucks) and that it will (and should?) outcompete nuclear, coal and renewables for electricity (at least in the US).
Can it compete with the political influence of big agriculture here, and, any time soon, with coal in China?
Jesse Ausubel long ago also noted that natural gas is a far better bet to link with carbon capture (through “zero emission power plant” technology), if you think carbon capture and sequestration is a serious prospect down the line.
So is this it?
One thing I note in that E.I.A. report is the big blank spots in assessed regions, many of which (like much of sub-Saharan Africa, of course) are also regions locked in deep energy poverty. How does this gas push relate to ending energy poverty in such places?
The first reply came from Ausubel, a Rockefeller University scholar who long ago predicted the ascendancy of gas as part of humanity’s move away from carbon and toward hydrogen. He stressed that more conventional gas deposits are already changing the energy game:
While the shale gas matters a lot for the overall outlook and industry confidence, my money remains on the “clean” deep gas, both offshore and continental, as the bigger source of supply delivered over the long run. Discoveries and technologies keep appearing. See [this link] – a rig for 3,000 meters of water and 10,000 meters of seafloor, delivered.
Google the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields off Israel.
I sent him this followup question:
Between the clean gas and the shale options, though, is it fair to say this is “The Gas Age”? Are we going to move off the “coal rung” of Loren Eiseley’s heat ladder more quickly?
Yes, we live in a world of Methane Abundance. Recognition is diffusing.
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The Energy Information Administration has released “World Shale Gas Resources,” an important commissioned report providing an assessment of how much natural gas is locked in shale deposits in 14 regions around the world. (Here’s its overview of shale gas in the United States.) Here’s a map of the surveyed regions:
The report includes some pretty remarkable numbers from countries that currently have limited domestic gas options, including China and quite a few western European nations that have been held somewhat hostage by Russia. Its publication comes in sync with a disturbing article in The Times noting how much crop production, including tropical staples such as cassava, is being
|
diverted to making biofuels.
I sent the following query to a batch of people immersed in assessing and/or developing the world’s energy menu but it’s a query for you, as well, of course (I’ve tweaked it to remove some e-mail shorthand):
I would greatly appreciate some reflection from you on the new shale gas assessment from EIA (global estimates for areas that have been surveyed) against the trends for food crops, including cassava, going to make fuels, as reported today by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The Times.
I’ve seen some fresh analysis saying this new shale report completely ices the case that gas is now (more than was already clear) a fundamental game changer.
The figures for China help explain why a team of Chinese gas experts, as I was told not long ago by folks at Oklahoma State University, has been there studying extraction technologies.
There are strong new hints that gas can play a much bigger role in energy for transport (for example LNG for big trucks) and that it will (and should?) outcompete nuclear, coal and renewables for electricity (at least in the US).
Can it compete with the political influence of big agriculture here, and, any time soon, with coal in China?
Jesse Ausubel long ago also noted that natural gas is a far better bet to link with carbon capture (through “zero emission power plant” technology), if you think carbon capture and sequestration is a serious prospect down the line.
So is this it?
One thing I note in that E.I.A. report is the big blank spots in assessed regions, many of which (like much of sub-Saharan Africa, of course) are also regions locked in deep energy poverty. How does this gas push relate to ending energy poverty in such places?
The first reply came from Ausubel, a Rockefeller University scholar who long ago predicted the ascendancy of gas as part of humanity’s move away from carbon and toward hydrogen. He stressed that more conventional gas deposits are already changing the energy game:
While the shale gas matters a lot for the overall outlook and industry confidence, my money remains on the “clean” deep gas, both offshore and continental, as the bigger source of supply delivered over the long run. Discoveries and technologies keep appearing. See [this link] – a rig for 3,000 meters of water and 10,000 meters of seafloor, delivered.
Google the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields off Israel.
I sent him this followup question:
Between the clean gas and the shale options, though, is it fair to say this is “The Gas Age”? Are we going to move off the “coal rung” of Loren Eiseley’s heat ladder more quickly?
Yes, we live in a world of Methane Abundance. Recognition is diffusing.
|
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In a violent denouement to the enormous set-piece battles of Second Bull Run and Antietam in the summer of 1862, that fall cavalry clashes raged across Northern Virginia. In dozens of farm villages and crossroads communities, roving bands of Union and Confederate horsemen engaged in a series of brief and often bloody skirmishes. One such fight took place near the hamlet of Little Washington on Nov. 8, 1862.
The action began when a squadron of Union Army regulars collided with an enemy picket composed of a Georgia lieutenant and 10 of his men. The Yankees charged the outnumbered rebels, but the rebels “gallantly met the onset, falling back slowly to a narrow lane, stubbornly contesting the ground,” reported an unidentified Confederate in a pamphlet published during the war. The mingled sounds of battle were heard by the main body of Georgia troops at their nearby camp, who hurriedly formed a column and rode to the relief of their endangered comrades. Among the first to saddle up was one of Georgia’s most admired horse soldiers, Will Delony.
Raw aggression coursed through the veins of this beau idéal of a Southern cavalryman. “His full brown or mahogany beard and high massive forehead, intellectual face and eagle eyes, marked him as a man among men, resembling the finer full-bearded engravings I have seen of Stonewall Jackson,” noted one Georgian soldier, Wiley C. Howard.
That day Delony was to prove himself worthy of such a comparison. Indeed, what occurred next was “one of the bloodiest little fights that the history of our great struggle for right and liberty will ever record,” Howard wrote.
The unidentified Confederate observer reported that “Delony, putting spurs to his horse, left the column behind and dashed up into the melee, and hand to hand with his own boys, nearly all of whom had been cut down, was delivering his blows right and left.” Howard remembered that Delony “was fighting like a mad boar with a whole pack of curs about him, having his bridle hand dreadfully hacked, his head gashed and side thrust.”
The bluecoats called on him to surrender, but Delony barked back at the federals to lay down their own arms instead: “Surrender! By God! I am the best man!” and felled one enemy soldier with a blow of his sword.
Suddenly Delony was attacked by another saber-swinging federal. “His new antagonist’s blows were dexterously dealt, and an instant parry saved his head; a quick, heavy blow, partially warded off, fell broadside and deadened his sword arm, causing it to fall by his side,” Howard reported. But just then the column of Georgians thundered upon the scene, led by Pvt. Jimmie Clanton, mounted “on a little keen black charger.” He made a beeline for the federal cavalryman, who was raising his sword to send the vulnerable Delony to his maker. Clanton, “with upraised gleaming sabre, arrests the fatal blow by cleaving the confident antagonist’s head in twain, and half raising it for another stroke, a pistol shot sends the noble lad, too, reeling from his saddle dangerously wounded.”
The rebel column tore into the Yankees. The unidentified Confederate reported that the federals “began to yield and give ground, when a body of our dismounted men gained their flanks.” He added, “Here our artillery came dashing up and completed the success and sent them scampering down the road at a most inconvenient speed.”
The next day in camp, Delony sat on a log in camp with his head and hand bandaged. Howard recalled that he “showed me a small metallic flask, which he carried in his inside coat pocket, near the region of the heart and lungs, which showed an entire saber point thrust nearly a quarter of an inch wide clear through the metal.” Delony remarked “that he had sometimes felt that he would hate for his wife, in case he fell in battle, to know that it was there; but, with a humorous smile said he now thought it a good idea for every man to have one on him at the vulnerable spot where the cold steel struck with such force.”
Neither Howard nor Delony mentioned if the flask was full or empty before the enemy saber pierced it. Chances are Delony had taken a deep draught before the fight; his habitual drinking had prompted several officers to express concern to Delony’s colonel, Thomas R.R. Cobb. Delony’s fondness of the flask disturbed Cobb very much. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he confessed in a letter to his wife.
No evidence exists that Delony drank before he joined the military. An honor graduate from the University of Georgia and a successful attorney in Athens, he raised a cavalry company known as the Georgia Troopers in 1861. The rank and file elected him captain, a common practice in the volunteer army. Delony and his men then joined the “Georgia Legion,” a force of artillery, cavalry and infantry designed loosely around a Roman legion and organized by Colonel Cobb, a popular and charismatic leader (in fact, the unit became better known as “Cobb’s Legion”).
The concept of a legion proved impractical, and it was not used as such during the war. The cavalry from Cobb’s Legion served with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, where Delony proved himself a caring leader. Howard exclaimed, “How his men loved him, and how he stood by them, contending always for their rights and looking after their comforts, when others would treat them indifferently! His heart and purse were ever open to their needs.”
As he showed that day in Little Washington, Delony was at his very best in combat. He could always be found in the hottest part of a battle, and inspired the ranks by his deeds. “He was a game fighter and dared to attempt anything,” Howard said, “even though it seemed impossible to others.”
Howard recalled Delony’s actions on June 9, 1863, at Brandy Station — the largest cavalry battle of the war. By this time Delony had advanced to lieutenant colonel, and Pierce M.B. Young had replaced Cobb as colonel. At one point during the engagement, the Georgians charged federal cavalry, “and soon their splendid line was all broken and each man of us was fencing and fighting for the time his individual foe, the fiery and impetuous onslaught of the Southron was too much for the steady courage of the Northman, and quick and fast as the blows fell and the cold steel slashed, the most of the enemy were making to their rear.”
Howard observed Delony “smiting Yankees right and left as he charged along in advance. He sat on his charger grandly, his fine physique and full mahogany beard flowing, he looked a very Titan war god, flushed with the exuberance and exhilaration of victory. He called to me to rally with others of his old company about him and on he led us pressing the retreating foe.”
On they charged until caught in devastating cross-fire by dismounted federals. Colonel Young ordered Delony to withdraw. “But,” Howard wrote, “shaking his head and lion-like beard Delony said, ‘Young, let’s charge them,’ and in two or three minutes five horses fell and a number of our men had been shot. By this time, however, the enemy’s whole line in sight were giving way and on we went, those not unhorsed or crippled. So fierce and fast was the fighting, we had not time to accept surrender offered by many Yankees — just rode on and left them behind.”
Several weeks later, in Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, Delony led a similar charge mounted on his bay, Marion. This time he went up against Union forces led by the newly minted brigadier general George Armstrong Custer in a cavalry fight at Hunterstown on July 2, 1863. Federal lead struck Marion, and the horse toppled onto Delony. He extricated himself with great difficulty and barely managed to escape the enemy.
His luck ran out at the Battle of Jack’s Shop, in Virginia, on Sept. 22, 1863. A Minié ball struck Delony in the left thigh, and, in a Gettysburg repeat, his horse was also hit and fell on top of him. This time, though, he could not get away and fell into federal hands. Transported to nearby Culpeper for a brief stay, he was then carried by ambulance to Washington. He was admitted to Stanton General Hospital and given a bed in a ward full of Union boys, where he befriended one of convalescing soldiers, John A. Wright of the 140th Pennsylvania Infantry.
Delony’s wound turned gangrenous. On Oct. 2, 1863, surgeons informed that his condition was mortal. Wright recalled that Delony then asked him to read from the Bible. “The 14th Chapter of John was selected, and the reader began: ‘Let not your heart be troubled…’” Delony broke down. “‘Oh, I could die in peace, I could died in peace,’ he sobbed, ‘if only I were home with my wife and children. But it is so hard to die away from home and among strangers.”
Delony was transferred to another hospital later that day, and died that night. He was 38 years old. Union authorities buried his remains in a numbered grave in the hospital cemetery. They were later disinterred and returned to his family in Athens.
Wright survived the war and became a minister, perhaps the last man touched directly by the charismatic Delony.
Sources: Ulysses R. Brooks, “Stories of the Confederacy”; Wiley C. Howard, “Sketch of Cobb Legion Cavalry and Some Incidents and Scenes Remembered”; William B. McCash, “Thomas R.R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist”; William G. Delony military service record, National Archives and Records Service; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; George F. Price, “Across the Continent With the Fifth Cavalry”; John F. Stegeman, “These Men She Gave: Civil War Diary of Athens, Georgia”; Robert L. Stewart, “History of the One Hundred and Fortieth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers”; Francis S. Reader, “Some Pioneers of Washington County, Pa.: A Family History.”
Ronald S. Coddington is the author of “Faces of the Civil War” and “Faces of the Confederacy.” His new book, “African American Faces of the Civil War,” was published in August. He writes “Faces of War,” a column for the Civil War News.
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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In a violent denouement to the enormous set-piece battles of Second Bull Run and Antietam in the summer of 1862, that fall cavalry clashes raged across Northern Virginia. In dozens of farm villages and crossroads communities, roving bands of Union and Confederate horsemen engaged in a series of brief and often bloody skirmishes. One such fight took place near the hamlet of Little Washington on Nov. 8, 1862.
The action began when a squadron of Union Army regulars collided with an enemy picket composed of a Georgia lieutenant
|
and 10 of his men. The Yankees charged the outnumbered rebels, but the rebels “gallantly met the onset, falling back slowly to a narrow lane, stubbornly contesting the ground,” reported an unidentified Confederate in a pamphlet published during the war. The mingled sounds of battle were heard by the main body of Georgia troops at their nearby camp, who hurriedly formed a column and rode to the relief of their endangered comrades. Among the first to saddle up was one of Georgia’s most admired horse soldiers, Will Delony.
Raw aggression coursed through the veins of this beau idéal of a Southern cavalryman. “His full brown or mahogany beard and high massive forehead, intellectual face and eagle eyes, marked him as a man among men, resembling the finer full-bearded engravings I have seen of Stonewall Jackson,” noted one Georgian soldier, Wiley C. Howard.
That day Delony was to prove himself worthy of such a comparison. Indeed, what occurred next was “one of the bloodiest little fights that the history of our great struggle for right and liberty will ever record,” Howard wrote.
The unidentified Confederate observer reported that “Delony, putting spurs to his horse, left the column behind and dashed up into the melee, and hand to hand with his own boys, nearly all of whom had been cut down, was delivering his blows right and left.” Howard remembered that Delony “was fighting like a mad boar with a whole pack of curs about him, having his bridle hand dreadfully hacked, his head gashed and side thrust.”
The bluecoats called on him to surrender, but Delony barked back at the federals to lay down their own arms instead: “Surrender! By God! I am the best man!” and felled one enemy soldier with a blow of his sword.
Suddenly Delony was attacked by another saber-swinging federal. “His new antagonist’s blows were dexterously dealt, and an instant parry saved his head; a quick, heavy blow, partially warded off, fell broadside and deadened his sword arm, causing it to fall by his side,” Howard reported. But just then the column of Georgians thundered upon the scene, led by Pvt. Jimmie Clanton, mounted “on a little keen black charger.” He made a beeline for the federal cavalryman, who was raising his sword to send the vulnerable Delony to his maker. Clanton, “with upraised gleaming sabre, arrests the fatal blow by cleaving the confident antagonist’s head in twain, and half raising it for another stroke, a pistol shot sends the noble lad, too, reeling from his saddle dangerously wounded.”
The rebel column tore into the Yankees. The unidentified Confederate reported that the federals “began to yield and give ground, when a body of our dismounted men gained their flanks.” He added, “Here our artillery came dashing up and completed the success and sent them scampering down the road at a most inconvenient speed.”
The next day in camp, Delony sat on a log in camp with his head and hand bandaged. Howard recalled that he “showed me a small metallic flask, which he carried in his inside coat pocket, near the region of the heart and lungs, which showed an entire saber point thrust nearly a quarter of an inch wide clear through the metal.” Delony remarked “that he had sometimes felt that he would hate for his wife, in case he fell in battle, to know that it was there; but, with a humorous smile said he now thought it a good idea for every man to have one on him at the vulnerable spot where the cold steel struck with such force.”
Neither Howard nor Delony mentioned if the flask was full or empty before the enemy saber pierced it. Chances are Delony had taken a deep draught before the fight; his habitual drinking had prompted several officers to express concern to Delony’s colonel, Thomas R.R. Cobb. Delony’s fondness of the flask disturbed Cobb very much. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he confessed in a letter to his wife.
No evidence exists that Delony drank before he joined the military. An honor graduate from the University of Georgia and a successful attorney in Athens, he raised a cavalry company known as the Georgia Troopers in 1861. The rank and file elected him captain, a common practice in the volunteer army. Delony and his men then joined the “Georgia Legion,” a force of artillery, cavalry and infantry designed loosely around a Roman legion and organized by Colonel Cobb, a popular and charismatic leader (in fact, the unit became better known as “Cobb’s Legion”).
The concept of a legion proved impractical, and it was not used as such during the war. The cavalry from Cobb’s Legion served with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, where Delony proved himself a caring leader. Howard exclaimed, “How his men loved him, and how he stood by them, contending always for their rights and looking after their comforts, when others would treat them indifferently! His heart and purse were ever open to their needs.”
As he showed that day in Little Washington, Delony was at his very best in combat. He could always be found in the hottest part of a battle, and inspired the ranks by his deeds. “He was a game fighter and dared to attempt anything,” Howard said, “even though it seemed impossible to others.”
Howard recalled Delony’s actions on June 9, 1863, at Brandy Station — the largest cavalry battle of the war. By this time Delony had advanced to lieutenant colonel, and Pierce M.B. Young had replaced Cobb as colonel. At one point during the engagement, the Georgians charged federal cavalry, “and soon their splendid line was all broken and each man of us was fencing and fighting for the time his individual foe, the fiery and impetuous onslaught of the Southron was too much for the steady courage of the Northman, and quick and fast as the blows fell and the cold steel slashed, the most of the enemy were making to their rear.”
Howard observed Delony “smiting Yankees right and left as he charged along in advance. He sat on his charger grandly, his fine physique and full mahogany beard flowing, he looked a very Titan war god, flushed with the exuberance and exhilaration of victory. He called to me to rally with others of his old company about him and on he led us pressing the retreating foe.”
On they charged until caught in devastating cross-fire by dismounted federals. Colonel Young ordered Delony to withdraw. “But,” Howard wrote, “shaking his head and lion-like beard Delony said, ‘Young, let’s charge them,’ and in two or three minutes five horses fell and a number of our men had been shot. By this time, however, the enemy’s whole line in sight were giving way and on we went, those not unhorsed or crippled. So fierce and fast was the fighting, we had not time to accept surrender offered by many Yankees — just rode on and left them behind.”
Several weeks later, in Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, Delony led a similar charge mounted on his bay, Marion. This time he went up against Union forces led by the newly minted brigadier general George Armstrong Custer in a cavalry fight at Hunterstown on July 2, 1863. Federal lead struck Marion, and the horse toppled onto Delony. He extricated himself with great difficulty and barely managed to escape the enemy.
His luck ran out at the Battle of Jack’s Shop, in Virginia, on Sept. 22, 1863. A Minié ball struck Delony in the left thigh, and, in a Gettysburg repeat, his horse was also hit and fell on top of him. This time, though, he could not get away and fell into federal hands. Transported to nearby Culpeper for a brief stay, he was then carried by ambulance to Washington. He was admitted to Stanton General Hospital and given a bed in a ward full of Union boys, where he befriended one of convalescing soldiers, John A. Wright of the 140th Pennsylvania Infantry.
Delony’s wound turned gangrenous. On Oct. 2, 1863, surgeons informed that his condition was mortal. Wright recalled that Delony then asked him to read from the Bible. “The 14th Chapter of John was selected, and the reader began: ‘Let not your heart be troubled…’” Delony broke down. “‘Oh, I could die in peace, I could died in peace,’ he sobbed, ‘if only I were home with my wife and children. But it is so hard to die away from home and among strangers.”
Delony was transferred to another hospital later that day, and died that night. He was 38 years old. Union authorities buried his remains in a numbered grave in the hospital cemetery. They were later disinterred and returned to his family in Athens.
Wright survived the war and became a minister, perhaps the last man touched directly by the charismatic Delony.
Sources: Ulysses R. Brooks, “Stories of the Confederacy”; Wiley C. Howard, “Sketch of Cobb Legion Cavalry and Some Incidents and Scenes Remembered”; William B. McCash, “Thomas R.R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist”; William G. Delony military service record, National Archives and Records Service; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; George F. Price, “Across the Continent With the Fifth Cavalry”; John F. Stegeman, “These Men She Gave: Civil War Diary of Athens, Georgia”; Robert L. Stewart, “History of the One Hundred and Fortieth Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers”; Francis S. Reader, “Some Pioneers of Washington County, Pa.: A Family History.”
Ronald S. Coddington is the author of “Faces of the Civil War” and “Faces of the Confederacy.” His new book, “African American Faces of the Civil War,” was published in August. He writes “Faces of War,” a column for the Civil War News.
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According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, cleanup crews working near the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, “dumped soil and leaves contaminated with radioactive fallout into rivers.”
CROOKED CLEANUP (1): Radioactive waste dumped into rivers during decontamination work in Fukushima http://t.co/vZ7BFMC9
A team of journalists who observed the decontamination work in the region last month added: “Water sprayed on contaminated buildings has been allowed to drain back into the environment. And supervisors have instructed workers to ignore rules on proper collection and disposal of the radioactive waste.”
Workers were apparently aware that they were breaking rules, the paper reported:
From Dec. 11 to 18, four Asahi reporters spent 130 hours observing work at various locations in Fukushima Prefecture. At 13 locations in Naraha, Iitate and Tamura, workers were seen simply dumping collected soil and leaves as well as water used for cleaning rather than securing them for proper disposal. Photographs were taken at 11 of those locations.
The reporters also talked to about 20 workers who said they were following the instructions of employees of the contracted companies or their subcontractors in dumping the materials. A common response of the workers was that the decontamination work could never be completed if they adhered to the strict rules.
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According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, cleanup crews working near the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, “dumped soil and leaves contaminated with radioactive fallout into rivers.”
CROOKED CLEANUP (1): Radioactive waste dumped into rivers during decontamination work in Fukushima http://t.co/vZ7BFMC9
A team of journalists who observed the decontamination work in the region last month added: “Water sprayed on contaminated buildings has been allowed to drain back into the environment. And supervisors have instructed workers to ignore rules on proper collection and disposal of the radioactive waste.”
Workers were apparently
|
aware that they were breaking rules, the paper reported:
From Dec. 11 to 18, four Asahi reporters spent 130 hours observing work at various locations in Fukushima Prefecture. At 13 locations in Naraha, Iitate and Tamura, workers were seen simply dumping collected soil and leaves as well as water used for cleaning rather than securing them for proper disposal. Photographs were taken at 11 of those locations.
The reporters also talked to about 20 workers who said they were following the instructions of employees of the contracted companies or their subcontractors in dumping the materials. A common response of the workers was that the decontamination work could never be completed if they adhered to the strict rules.
|
Eleven years ago today, Al Gore, for one important moment, was the most powerful man in our republic. The day before, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, halted the partial recount of presidential ballots in Florida that Gore had requested. But that did not mean the 2000 presidential election was over. George W. Bush could not declare victory until Gore conceded defeat.
This is our protocol in every presidential election, whether the results are clear on election night or weeks later. Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners. The first signal that this consent is granted comes with the losing candidate’s concession. At this moment, following a hard-fought election where passions have run high, the concession begins the process of reuniting an intensely divided country. Yet this vital service to the nation provided by losing presidential candidates is seldom appreciated.
It may seem unthinkable that Gore would not have conceded, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, yet he had supporters who urged him to push on and further challenge the legitimacy of the results. He had, after all, won the national popular vote.
In many countries, losing candidates do not peacefully accept defeat, and their obstinacy leads to political chaos, riots and sometimes civil war. Gore understood the risks to America from a prolonged dispute over an unresolved election.
Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners.
So, on Dec. 13, 2000, Gore choose to begin a process of healing. He did not merely concede, he gave a remarkably upbeat and friendly concession speech and quoted an earlier losing candidate, Stephen Douglas, who pledged to Abraham Lincoln upon losing the 1860 presidential election, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”
Most presidential elections are close, with roughly half having been won with 51 percent or less of the popular vote. This even division in our partisan alignment means supporters of either party have a reasonable expectation of victory, so defeat can come as a shock. Despite this, from our first losing presidential candidate, Thomas Jefferson in 1796 (George Washington won the first two presidential elections unopposed), to our most recent, John McCain, America has been blessed with men who have set aside crushing personal disappointment and embraced their responsibility to help maintain national unity.
In a society that worships winners, unsuccessful presidential candidates are considered losers, no matter how successful they were before and after the election. As John W. Davis, the Democratic nominee in 1924 and a brilliant constitutional lawyer, put it after his losing candidacy was vilified, “I believe I have been a fair success in life except as a candidate for president.”
It is often the losing candidate who is prophetic, while time proves that it was the winning candidate who was stuck in the past.
Winning the presidency does not guarantee the winner will leave a great mark upon history; the office has certainly had its share of non-entities. Many losing candidates, though, helped bring into being political dynamics that still define our politics. Men like Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Dewey, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern have created, transformed and realigned our political parties. Losing campaigns typically are the first to break barriers and expand participation. These include the first Catholic to be nominated for president, as well as the first woman and the first Jew to be named as vice presidential nominees.
Whether breaking barriers or introducing new policies, it is often the losing candidate who is prophetic, while time proves that it was the winning candidate who was stuck in the past. Andrew Jackson is an American icon, yet it was his nemesis Clay who more clearly understood that America’s future was as an industrial power, not a bucolic republic of yeoman farmers. The Democrat Bryan was considered a radical, yet the reforms he advocated — creating the Federal Reserve, enacting pure food and drug laws, granting women the right to vote and enacting a federal income tax — all became law within years of his candidacies. Adlai Stevenson first raised the idea of a nuclear test ban during his 1956 campaign, while Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, which analysts at the time thought had “discredited conservatism,” famously laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to be elected 16 years later.
Despite their belief that voters made the wrong choice, our losing presidential candidates have been almost unfailingly gracious, and suffered the wounds of defeat with good humor. Sometimes that humor is self-effacing, as when Goldwater lamented that America “is a great country where anybody can grow up to become president — except me.” And sometimes the humor is pointed, as when Adlai Stevenson was told his erudite campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 had educated the country and he replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course!”
Whether the election on Nov. 6, 2012, is a landslide or a nail-biter, and whether the victor is President Obama or his Republican opponent, the loser will have the same power that Gore wielded in 2000 and will be confronted with the same choice every losing candidate has had to make in the wake of defeat: bring America together or widen our divisions. Let’s hope that he or she will serve the national interest and recognize that while he lost an election, history may yet judge his political legacy a success. As Al Gore said in his concession speech in 2000, “defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.”
Scott Farris is the author of “Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation.”
|
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Eleven years ago today, Al Gore, for one important moment, was the most powerful man in our republic. The day before, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, halted the partial recount of presidential ballots in Florida that Gore had requested. But that did not mean the 2000 presidential election was over. George W. Bush could not declare victory until Gore conceded defeat.
This is our protocol in every presidential election, whether the results are clear on election night or weeks later. Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners. The first signal that this
|
consent is granted comes with the losing candidate’s concession. At this moment, following a hard-fought election where passions have run high, the concession begins the process of reuniting an intensely divided country. Yet this vital service to the nation provided by losing presidential candidates is seldom appreciated.
It may seem unthinkable that Gore would not have conceded, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, yet he had supporters who urged him to push on and further challenge the legitimacy of the results. He had, after all, won the national popular vote.
In many countries, losing candidates do not peacefully accept defeat, and their obstinacy leads to political chaos, riots and sometimes civil war. Gore understood the risks to America from a prolonged dispute over an unresolved election.
Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners.
So, on Dec. 13, 2000, Gore choose to begin a process of healing. He did not merely concede, he gave a remarkably upbeat and friendly concession speech and quoted an earlier losing candidate, Stephen Douglas, who pledged to Abraham Lincoln upon losing the 1860 presidential election, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”
Most presidential elections are close, with roughly half having been won with 51 percent or less of the popular vote. This even division in our partisan alignment means supporters of either party have a reasonable expectation of victory, so defeat can come as a shock. Despite this, from our first losing presidential candidate, Thomas Jefferson in 1796 (George Washington won the first two presidential elections unopposed), to our most recent, John McCain, America has been blessed with men who have set aside crushing personal disappointment and embraced their responsibility to help maintain national unity.
In a society that worships winners, unsuccessful presidential candidates are considered losers, no matter how successful they were before and after the election. As John W. Davis, the Democratic nominee in 1924 and a brilliant constitutional lawyer, put it after his losing candidacy was vilified, “I believe I have been a fair success in life except as a candidate for president.”
It is often the losing candidate who is prophetic, while time proves that it was the winning candidate who was stuck in the past.
Winning the presidency does not guarantee the winner will leave a great mark upon history; the office has certainly had its share of non-entities. Many losing candidates, though, helped bring into being political dynamics that still define our politics. Men like Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Dewey, Barry Goldwater and George McGovern have created, transformed and realigned our political parties. Losing campaigns typically are the first to break barriers and expand participation. These include the first Catholic to be nominated for president, as well as the first woman and the first Jew to be named as vice presidential nominees.
Whether breaking barriers or introducing new policies, it is often the losing candidate who is prophetic, while time proves that it was the winning candidate who was stuck in the past. Andrew Jackson is an American icon, yet it was his nemesis Clay who more clearly understood that America’s future was as an industrial power, not a bucolic republic of yeoman farmers. The Democrat Bryan was considered a radical, yet the reforms he advocated — creating the Federal Reserve, enacting pure food and drug laws, granting women the right to vote and enacting a federal income tax — all became law within years of his candidacies. Adlai Stevenson first raised the idea of a nuclear test ban during his 1956 campaign, while Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, which analysts at the time thought had “discredited conservatism,” famously laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to be elected 16 years later.
Despite their belief that voters made the wrong choice, our losing presidential candidates have been almost unfailingly gracious, and suffered the wounds of defeat with good humor. Sometimes that humor is self-effacing, as when Goldwater lamented that America “is a great country where anybody can grow up to become president — except me.” And sometimes the humor is pointed, as when Adlai Stevenson was told his erudite campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 had educated the country and he replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course!”
Whether the election on Nov. 6, 2012, is a landslide or a nail-biter, and whether the victor is President Obama or his Republican opponent, the loser will have the same power that Gore wielded in 2000 and will be confronted with the same choice every losing candidate has had to make in the wake of defeat: bring America together or widen our divisions. Let’s hope that he or she will serve the national interest and recognize that while he lost an election, history may yet judge his political legacy a success. As Al Gore said in his concession speech in 2000, “defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.”
Scott Farris is the author of “Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation.”
|
Developed in partnership with The Bank Street College of Education for grades 6-12.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR, 2003-PRESENT
Reflecting on Five Years of War in Iraq(3/19/2008)
The Voice of a New Generation
Examining Iraqi Youth Perspectives (3/5/2008)
A Fresh Start?
Discussing the Implications of a Resignation at the Department of Defense (11/9/2006)
Exploring the Ups and Downs During Three Years of War in Iraq (4/20/2006)
Same News, Different Stories
Evaluating Breaking News of Al-Zarqawi's Death (6/9/2006)
Examining New Developments in the Iraq War (11/10/2004)
Examining Controversies of International Humanitarian Law (10/22/2004)
Justice for Whom?
Assessing the Reasons to Bring Saddam Hussein to Trial (7/5/2004)
Taking Stock of Iraq
Learning About and Teaching Important Information on Iraq’s Transition (6/28/2004)
Abuse of Power
Examining and Reacting to the Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners in American Custody (5/6/2004)
The Captive's Audience
Analyzing the Capture of Deposed Iraqi Leader Saddam Hussein (12/15/2003)
Examining How Close (or Far) Coalition Forces Are from Achieving Their Goals (4/11/2003)
Weathering the War
Exploring How Weather and Topography Have Shaped Military Operations (3/26/2003)
DEBATE ABOUT THE WAR, 2002-PRESENT
Instability in Iraq
Analyzing the Debate on the Future of United States Involvement in Iraq (12/6/2006)
Exit to the Left
Exploring Community Reactions to the Iraq War (9/18/2006)
Weighing the War
Debating For and Against the War in Iraq (9/22/2004)
The Aftermath of War
Debating the Pros and Cons of U.S. Policy in Iraq (10/29/2003)
For Whom Does the Bell Toll?
Gauging Public Opinion about Death During War (4/9/2003)
Exploring Feelings About Invading Iraq Through Creative Writing (3/21/2003)
Acts of Defiance?
Contemplating War in Iraq (3/19/2003)
Europe's Last Resort
Understanding the European Union’s Position on the Use of Force in Iraq (2/19/2003)
Enacting a Meeting of the United Nations Security Council (1/29/2003)
And Then What Happened, Inspector?
Developing Interactive Scenarios about the United Nations Inspections in Iraq (12/4/2002)
To Inspect or Not to Inspect, That Is the Question
Exploring the Points of View of Those Involved in the Decision Whether to Allow U.N. Inspectors into Iraq (11/13/2002)
Exploring the Potential of United States Military Action Against Iraq (8/28/2002)
IRAQ AND DEMOCRACY
Exploring United States Interventions in the Middle East (4/29/2002)
A Good Government Is Hard to Build
Understanding Issues in Iraq's Government-Building Through a Student Simulation (3/30/2005)
And Now, the News from Iraq
Researching the Iraqi Election to Create a Television News Hour (1/31/2005)
Intimidation of a Nation
Analyzing Threats to the Scheduled Elections in Iraq (12/22/2004)
Operation Iraqi Democracy
Exploring International Models of Government (6/29/2004)
Assessing the Iraqi Interim Constitution's Purpose and Viability (3/10/2004)
By the People, For the People
Examining Key Elements of Democracy as the System Is Introduced in Iraq (6/23/2003)
A Tale of Two Wars
Comparing and Contrasting Vietnam and Iraq (10/30/2006)
Exploring the Endings and Consequences of Major Conflicts in Modern World History (12/16/2005)
Dictating the Future
Learning from the History of Overthrown Governments to Assess the Future of Iraq (5/26/2004)
Intervene or Interfere?
Exploring Forty Years of United States Intervention in Foreign Affairs (4/7/2003)
Changing of the Guard
Examining the Role of the United States in Democratic Transitions Around the World (4/28/2003)
Examining the Development of American Foreign Policy (3/17/2003)
Exploring the Evolution of Weapons Technology (11/14/2002)
Drums of War
Exploring How Historical Events Repeat Themselves (10/14/2002)
Exploring How Politics Shapes American War Policy (9/23/2002)
The Tug of War
Exploring the Rationale Behind Potential Future Military Strikes in the War Against Terrorism (1/9/2002)
IRAQ AND THE MEDIA
All the News That's Fit to Blog
Gathering First-Hand News Accounts through Web Logs
Imagining the Life of a War Correspondent in Iraq
That's News to Me
Examining the Escalating Violence in Iraq through Reporting (4/14/2004)
Learning to Write Persuasive Editorials about Current News (7/24/2003)
Exploring Marketing Strategies During Wartime (3/27/2003)
Interviewing Veterans to Help Create Need-Based Programs (5/25/2007)
Commemorating American Soldiers Who Have Lost Their Lives in Iraq (1/3/2007)
Reflecting on the Lives of Soldiers and Their Families (10/27/2005)
Gathering First-Hand Reports of a Soldier's Experience Far from Home (3/5/2003)
Test what you know about the war in Iraq by playing this interactive News Quiz. Each question relates to an article published in The New York Times from 2003-2007.
Explore recent New York Times graphics, videos and photographs about the war in Iraq.
Interactive Feature: Faces of the Dead (Ongoing)
Interactive Timeline: Iraq 5 Years In (3/19/2008)
Slideshow: A Tale of Three Cities (6/20/2008)
Interactive Graphic: Baghdad Neighborhoods (9/9/2007)
Video: Bush Addresses U.S. Troops in Iraq (9/2007)
Op-Chart: Benchmarks for Iraq (9/3/2007)
Photographs: 82nd Airborne Division (5/22/2007)
Video: A Search for Missing Soldiers (5/22/2007)
BAGHDAD BUREAU BLOG
"Iraq From the Inside" by reading a blog written by Times reporters in Baghdad.
Each News Snapshot features a Times photo and related article along with a 6-question student worksheet and a teacher answer key. The Snapshots below, about the war in Iraq, were published from March 2003 on.
The Reach of War
The Solace of Soccer
Serving the Country
War, What Is It Good For?
A Vote for Freedom
A Grand New Flag
Rehearsing for the Real Thing
American Friends, American Foes
A Message of Hope
A Nation at War
MORE FROM NYTIMES.COM
Visit NYTimes.com's The Reach of War special for the latest news and editorials from The New York Times.
FROM THE LEARNING NETWORK ARCHIVE
In response to Operation Desert Fox in 1998, The Learning Network created the special feature
Timeline: U.S. Intervention in Iraq - 1991 to 1998. In it, you'll find historical New York Times articles from that time period, lesson plans and a brief Web guide.
MORE ISSUES IN DEPTH TOPICS
Learning Network classroom resources on a wide range of topics.
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Developed in partnership with The Bank Street College of Education for grades 6-12.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR, 2003-PRESENT
Reflecting on Five Years of War in Iraq(3/19/2008)
The Voice of a New Generation
Examining Iraqi Youth Perspectives (3/5/2008)
A Fresh Start?
Discussing the Implications of a Resignation at the Department of Defense (11/9/2006)
Exploring the Ups and Downs During Three Years of War in Iraq (4/2
|
0/2006)
Same News, Different Stories
Evaluating Breaking News of Al-Zarqawi's Death (6/9/2006)
Examining New Developments in the Iraq War (11/10/2004)
Examining Controversies of International Humanitarian Law (10/22/2004)
Justice for Whom?
Assessing the Reasons to Bring Saddam Hussein to Trial (7/5/2004)
Taking Stock of Iraq
Learning About and Teaching Important Information on Iraq’s Transition (6/28/2004)
Abuse of Power
Examining and Reacting to the Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners in American Custody (5/6/2004)
The Captive's Audience
Analyzing the Capture of Deposed Iraqi Leader Saddam Hussein (12/15/2003)
Examining How Close (or Far) Coalition Forces Are from Achieving Their Goals (4/11/2003)
Weathering the War
Exploring How Weather and Topography Have Shaped Military Operations (3/26/2003)
DEBATE ABOUT THE WAR, 2002-PRESENT
Instability in Iraq
Analyzing the Debate on the Future of United States Involvement in Iraq (12/6/2006)
Exit to the Left
Exploring Community Reactions to the Iraq War (9/18/2006)
Weighing the War
Debating For and Against the War in Iraq (9/22/2004)
The Aftermath of War
Debating the Pros and Cons of U.S. Policy in Iraq (10/29/2003)
For Whom Does the Bell Toll?
Gauging Public Opinion about Death During War (4/9/2003)
Exploring Feelings About Invading Iraq Through Creative Writing (3/21/2003)
Acts of Defiance?
Contemplating War in Iraq (3/19/2003)
Europe's Last Resort
Understanding the European Union’s Position on the Use of Force in Iraq (2/19/2003)
Enacting a Meeting of the United Nations Security Council (1/29/2003)
And Then What Happened, Inspector?
Developing Interactive Scenarios about the United Nations Inspections in Iraq (12/4/2002)
To Inspect or Not to Inspect, That Is the Question
Exploring the Points of View of Those Involved in the Decision Whether to Allow U.N. Inspectors into Iraq (11/13/2002)
Exploring the Potential of United States Military Action Against Iraq (8/28/2002)
IRAQ AND DEMOCRACY
Exploring United States Interventions in the Middle East (4/29/2002)
A Good Government Is Hard to Build
Understanding Issues in Iraq's Government-Building Through a Student Simulation (3/30/2005)
And Now, the News from Iraq
Researching the Iraqi Election to Create a Television News Hour (1/31/2005)
Intimidation of a Nation
Analyzing Threats to the Scheduled Elections in Iraq (12/22/2004)
Operation Iraqi Democracy
Exploring International Models of Government (6/29/2004)
Assessing the Iraqi Interim Constitution's Purpose and Viability (3/10/2004)
By the People, For the People
Examining Key Elements of Democracy as the System Is Introduced in Iraq (6/23/2003)
A Tale of Two Wars
Comparing and Contrasting Vietnam and Iraq (10/30/2006)
Exploring the Endings and Consequences of Major Conflicts in Modern World History (12/16/2005)
Dictating the Future
Learning from the History of Overthrown Governments to Assess the Future of Iraq (5/26/2004)
Intervene or Interfere?
Exploring Forty Years of United States Intervention in Foreign Affairs (4/7/2003)
Changing of the Guard
Examining the Role of the United States in Democratic Transitions Around the World (4/28/2003)
Examining the Development of American Foreign Policy (3/17/2003)
Exploring the Evolution of Weapons Technology (11/14/2002)
Drums of War
Exploring How Historical Events Repeat Themselves (10/14/2002)
Exploring How Politics Shapes American War Policy (9/23/2002)
The Tug of War
Exploring the Rationale Behind Potential Future Military Strikes in the War Against Terrorism (1/9/2002)
IRAQ AND THE MEDIA
All the News That's Fit to Blog
Gathering First-Hand News Accounts through Web Logs
Imagining the Life of a War Correspondent in Iraq
That's News to Me
Examining the Escalating Violence in Iraq through Reporting (4/14/2004)
Learning to Write Persuasive Editorials about Current News (7/24/2003)
Exploring Marketing Strategies During Wartime (3/27/2003)
Interviewing Veterans to Help Create Need-Based Programs (5/25/2007)
Commemorating American Soldiers Who Have Lost Their Lives in Iraq (1/3/2007)
Reflecting on the Lives of Soldiers and Their Families (10/27/2005)
Gathering First-Hand Reports of a Soldier's Experience Far from Home (3/5/2003)
Test what you know about the war in Iraq by playing this interactive News Quiz. Each question relates to an article published in The New York Times from 2003-2007.
Explore recent New York Times graphics, videos and photographs about the war in Iraq.
Interactive Feature: Faces of the Dead (Ongoing)
Interactive Timeline: Iraq 5 Years In (3/19/2008)
Slideshow: A Tale of Three Cities (6/20/2008)
Interactive Graphic: Baghdad Neighborhoods (9/9/2007)
Video: Bush Addresses U.S. Troops in Iraq (9/2007)
Op-Chart: Benchmarks for Iraq (9/3/2007)
Photographs: 82nd Airborne Division (5/22/2007)
Video: A Search for Missing Soldiers (5/22/2007)
BAGHDAD BUREAU BLOG
"Iraq From the Inside" by reading a blog written by Times reporters in Baghdad.
Each News Snapshot features a Times photo and related article along with a 6-question student worksheet and a teacher answer key. The Snapshots below, about the war in Iraq, were published from March 2003 on.
The Reach of War
The Solace of Soccer
Serving the Country
War, What Is It Good For?
A Vote for Freedom
A Grand New Flag
Rehearsing for the Real Thing
American Friends, American Foes
A Message of Hope
A Nation at War
MORE FROM NYTIMES.COM
Visit NYTimes.com's The Reach of War special for the latest news and editorials from The New York Times.
FROM THE LEARNING NETWORK ARCHIVE
In response to Operation Desert Fox in 1998, The Learning Network created the special feature
Timeline: U.S. Intervention in Iraq - 1991 to 1998. In it, you'll find historical New York Times articles from that time period, lesson plans and a brief Web guide.
MORE ISSUES IN DEPTH TOPICS
Learning Network classroom resources on a wide range of topics.
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Note: This lesson was originally published on an older version of The Learning Network; the link to the related Times article will take you to a page on the old site.
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students use prototypical fantasy themes to create an original role-playing game and cast of characters based on their own community.
Rachel McClain, The New York Times Learning Network
Suggested Time Allowance: 45 minutes
1. Explore the importance of characters in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games.
2. Learn about the new movie “Dungeons and Dragons” by reading and discussing the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R.”
3. As a class, create the outline for a role-playing game based on their own community.
4. In groups, create character profiles for the game.
5. Write a dialogue between two of the characters from the game.
Resources / Materials:
-copies of the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R” (one per student)
Activities / Procedures:
1. WARM-UP/DO NOW: In their journals, students respond to the following prompt (written on the board prior to class): “If you could choose to be a character from any book or movie, who would you choose and why? How does your chosen character impact the plot and the other characters in the book or movie?” After 5-10 minutes, have some students read their journals aloud. As a class, discuss Dungeons and Dragons and how it offers people the opportunity to role-play fantastical and magical characters. Discuss the appeal of this and other role-playing games.
2. As a class, read the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R,” focusing on the following questions:
a. What is Dungeons and Dragons?
b. According to the article, what are some archetypes upon which Dungeons and Dragons is based?
c. How does A.O. Scott describe the special effects in the movie?
d. According to the article, why was the movie shot in Prague?
e. Which line of dialogue does A.O. Scott cite to show the low quality of the script? Why do you think he chose this line?
f. What is the main conflict in the plot of the film?
g. What phrase is used to advertise the film? How does A.O. Scott use this phrase to criticize the film?
3. Create a class role-playing game set in a mythical city that parallels the real one in which the students live. Have the class choose a name for their mythical city and create a map, including at least five key locations where action might take place(examples are a pizza shop, a school, a forest, etc.). The class should also brainstorm possible characters that might be included in the game, keeping in mind the types of characters usually found in such games (examples are an Evil Sorcerer Mayor, or the Wizard of the Pizza Shop). Avoid a sensitive situation by having students create prototypical characters and not ones based directly on actual people in the community. Divide the class into groups of 3 or 4. Each group creates a character profile of one of the characters discussed in class. The profile should consist of a brief description of the character, the character’s strengths and weaknesses, and an illustration of the character complete with the character’s mode of dress and special weapons or other articles that might assist him or her throughout the game.
4. WRAP-UP/HOMEWORK: Write a dialogue between two of the characters created by your class. Use a prototypical fantasy game conflict (such as the battle over the rod in the “Dungeons and Dragons” movie,) and set it in one of the key locations chosen in class. Keep in mind A.O. Scott’s criticism of the dialogue in the movie Dungeons and Dragons, and try to make your dialogue more realistic and compelling than the examples from the article.
Further Questions for Discussion:
– What do you think A.O. Scott is trying to achieve by using parentheses throughout the article?
– What is the overall tone of A.O. Scott’s review? How does he reveal his opinion of the movie?
– Do you think that role-playing games are a healthy outlet for the imagination? Do you think such games can have a negative effect on a person? How?
– Do you play or know people who play interactive role-playing games over the Internet? Do you think this is more or less exciting than playing these games on a board with a live group of people all in the same room?
– Are there certain modes of dress or behaviors that accompany being a player of games such as Dungeons and Dragons? Do the players of these games develop distinct social groups? If so, why do you think this is the case?
Evaluation / Assessment:
Students will be evaluated on completion of the journal entry, participation in class discussions, creation of a character profile, and completion of a dialogue between two of the characters created in class.
virtual, fantasy, sci-fi, jargon, grok, tedium, adherents, sorcery, murky, clotted, understatement, provocation, vexation, mages, antagonists, pontificate, raiment, conviction, plucky, mayhem
1. With a partner, perform the dialogue you wrote for homework for the class. Prepare the appropriate costumes and props based upon the profiles created for each character.
2. Movies based on books often do not live up to the expectations and imaginations of readers. This is especially true for movies based on fantasy books where elements like magical spells and mythical creatures are commonplace. Based on A.O. Scott’s criticism of the “Dungeons and Dragons” film, predict whether the Harry Potter film, expected to be released within the year, will impress or disappoint movie-goers who have already read the book.
3. Read a fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Write a movie pitch for a film version of the novel. Describe who you would cast the main roles and why, and how you would successfully recreate the fantasy world depicted by Tolkien on screen.
4. It is often difficult to differentiate between the literary genres of fantasy, science fiction, legend, and myth. Create a dictionary of terms defining each genre and explaining how each one differs from the others.
-Research fantastical creatures from different cultures. Create a poster with an illustration and short description of each creature, including the culture from which it originates. (Some examples of fantastic and/or mythical creatures from various cultures are the Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra, Big Foot, and Aswang.)
-Compare and contrast the themes and characters found in Arthurian and other Medieval legends (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf) to those in Dungeons and Dragons. Create a chart displaying your findings.
Journalism- See the movie “Dungeons and Dragons” and write your own movie review. Refer to A.O. Scott’s review by supporting or refuting his claims regarding the film.
Mathematics- The Dungeons and Dragons game uses numerical values to assess a character’s strengths and weaknesses. These values are initially chosen by rolling special dice with differing numbers of sides. Learn about how this process works and create a chart showing the various attributes chosen by this method, and the average number expected for each attribute when dice are rolled.
Social Studies- As A.O. Scott mentions in the article, an entire sub-culture has developed around fantasy and role-playing games. Research this culture and write a short (2-3 page) essay describing its development and characteristics since the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970’s.
Other Information on the Web:
DnDMovie.com (more. http://www.dndmovie.com/) features updated news, photos, cast information, and more.
Dungeons and Dragons (http://www.seednd.com/) is the official movie site from New Line.
Academic Content Standards:
Language Arts Standard 1- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses a variety of prewriting strategies; Uses a variety of strategies to draft and revise written work; Evaluates own and others’ writing; Uses style and structure appropriate for specific audiences and purposes; Writes narrative accounts; Writes in response to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’6-8’, ’1’)
Language Arts Standard 6- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of literary texts. Benchmarks: Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of literary forms and genres; Identifies specific questions of personal importance and seeks to answer them through literature; Understands the effects of the author’s style on a literary text; Understands that people respond differently to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’6-8’, ’6’)
Language Arts Standard 1- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses a variety of prewriting strategies; Uses a variety of strategies to draft and revise written work; Uses a variety of strategiesto edit and publish written work; Evaluates own and others’ writing; Writes compositions that fulfill different purposes; Writes fictional, biographical, autobiographical, and observational narrative compositions; Writes descriptive compositions; Writes in response to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’9-12’, ’1’)
Language Arts Standard 6- Demonstrates competencein the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of literary texts. Benchmarks: Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of literaryforms and genres; Understands historical and cultural influences on literary works; Relates personal response to the text with that seemingly intended by the author
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’9-12’, ’6’)
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Note: This lesson was originally published on an older version of The Learning Network; the link to the related Times article will take you to a page on the old site.
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students use prototypical fantasy themes to create an original role-playing game and cast of characters based on their own community.
Rachel McClain, The New York Times Learning Network
Suggested Time Allowance: 45 minutes
1. Explore the importance of characters in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games.
2. Learn about the new
|
movie “Dungeons and Dragons” by reading and discussing the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R.”
3. As a class, create the outline for a role-playing game based on their own community.
4. In groups, create character profiles for the game.
5. Write a dialogue between two of the characters from the game.
Resources / Materials:
-copies of the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R” (one per student)
Activities / Procedures:
1. WARM-UP/DO NOW: In their journals, students respond to the following prompt (written on the board prior to class): “If you could choose to be a character from any book or movie, who would you choose and why? How does your chosen character impact the plot and the other characters in the book or movie?” After 5-10 minutes, have some students read their journals aloud. As a class, discuss Dungeons and Dragons and how it offers people the opportunity to role-play fantastical and magical characters. Discuss the appeal of this and other role-playing games.
2. As a class, read the article “‘Dungeons and Dragons’: After D and D, You May Need R and R,” focusing on the following questions:
a. What is Dungeons and Dragons?
b. According to the article, what are some archetypes upon which Dungeons and Dragons is based?
c. How does A.O. Scott describe the special effects in the movie?
d. According to the article, why was the movie shot in Prague?
e. Which line of dialogue does A.O. Scott cite to show the low quality of the script? Why do you think he chose this line?
f. What is the main conflict in the plot of the film?
g. What phrase is used to advertise the film? How does A.O. Scott use this phrase to criticize the film?
3. Create a class role-playing game set in a mythical city that parallels the real one in which the students live. Have the class choose a name for their mythical city and create a map, including at least five key locations where action might take place(examples are a pizza shop, a school, a forest, etc.). The class should also brainstorm possible characters that might be included in the game, keeping in mind the types of characters usually found in such games (examples are an Evil Sorcerer Mayor, or the Wizard of the Pizza Shop). Avoid a sensitive situation by having students create prototypical characters and not ones based directly on actual people in the community. Divide the class into groups of 3 or 4. Each group creates a character profile of one of the characters discussed in class. The profile should consist of a brief description of the character, the character’s strengths and weaknesses, and an illustration of the character complete with the character’s mode of dress and special weapons or other articles that might assist him or her throughout the game.
4. WRAP-UP/HOMEWORK: Write a dialogue between two of the characters created by your class. Use a prototypical fantasy game conflict (such as the battle over the rod in the “Dungeons and Dragons” movie,) and set it in one of the key locations chosen in class. Keep in mind A.O. Scott’s criticism of the dialogue in the movie Dungeons and Dragons, and try to make your dialogue more realistic and compelling than the examples from the article.
Further Questions for Discussion:
– What do you think A.O. Scott is trying to achieve by using parentheses throughout the article?
– What is the overall tone of A.O. Scott’s review? How does he reveal his opinion of the movie?
– Do you think that role-playing games are a healthy outlet for the imagination? Do you think such games can have a negative effect on a person? How?
– Do you play or know people who play interactive role-playing games over the Internet? Do you think this is more or less exciting than playing these games on a board with a live group of people all in the same room?
– Are there certain modes of dress or behaviors that accompany being a player of games such as Dungeons and Dragons? Do the players of these games develop distinct social groups? If so, why do you think this is the case?
Evaluation / Assessment:
Students will be evaluated on completion of the journal entry, participation in class discussions, creation of a character profile, and completion of a dialogue between two of the characters created in class.
virtual, fantasy, sci-fi, jargon, grok, tedium, adherents, sorcery, murky, clotted, understatement, provocation, vexation, mages, antagonists, pontificate, raiment, conviction, plucky, mayhem
1. With a partner, perform the dialogue you wrote for homework for the class. Prepare the appropriate costumes and props based upon the profiles created for each character.
2. Movies based on books often do not live up to the expectations and imaginations of readers. This is especially true for movies based on fantasy books where elements like magical spells and mythical creatures are commonplace. Based on A.O. Scott’s criticism of the “Dungeons and Dragons” film, predict whether the Harry Potter film, expected to be released within the year, will impress or disappoint movie-goers who have already read the book.
3. Read a fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Write a movie pitch for a film version of the novel. Describe who you would cast the main roles and why, and how you would successfully recreate the fantasy world depicted by Tolkien on screen.
4. It is often difficult to differentiate between the literary genres of fantasy, science fiction, legend, and myth. Create a dictionary of terms defining each genre and explaining how each one differs from the others.
-Research fantastical creatures from different cultures. Create a poster with an illustration and short description of each creature, including the culture from which it originates. (Some examples of fantastic and/or mythical creatures from various cultures are the Loch Ness Monster, Chupacabra, Big Foot, and Aswang.)
-Compare and contrast the themes and characters found in Arthurian and other Medieval legends (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf) to those in Dungeons and Dragons. Create a chart displaying your findings.
Journalism- See the movie “Dungeons and Dragons” and write your own movie review. Refer to A.O. Scott’s review by supporting or refuting his claims regarding the film.
Mathematics- The Dungeons and Dragons game uses numerical values to assess a character’s strengths and weaknesses. These values are initially chosen by rolling special dice with differing numbers of sides. Learn about how this process works and create a chart showing the various attributes chosen by this method, and the average number expected for each attribute when dice are rolled.
Social Studies- As A.O. Scott mentions in the article, an entire sub-culture has developed around fantasy and role-playing games. Research this culture and write a short (2-3 page) essay describing its development and characteristics since the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons in the 1970’s.
Other Information on the Web:
DnDMovie.com (more. http://www.dndmovie.com/) features updated news, photos, cast information, and more.
Dungeons and Dragons (http://www.seednd.com/) is the official movie site from New Line.
Academic Content Standards:
Language Arts Standard 1- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses a variety of prewriting strategies; Uses a variety of strategies to draft and revise written work; Evaluates own and others’ writing; Uses style and structure appropriate for specific audiences and purposes; Writes narrative accounts; Writes in response to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’6-8’, ’1’)
Language Arts Standard 6- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of literary texts. Benchmarks: Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of literary forms and genres; Identifies specific questions of personal importance and seeks to answer them through literature; Understands the effects of the author’s style on a literary text; Understands that people respond differently to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’6-8’, ’6’)
Language Arts Standard 1- Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses a variety of prewriting strategies; Uses a variety of strategies to draft and revise written work; Uses a variety of strategiesto edit and publish written work; Evaluates own and others’ writing; Writes compositions that fulfill different purposes; Writes fictional, biographical, autobiographical, and observational narrative compositions; Writes descriptive compositions; Writes in response to literature
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’9-12’, ’1’)
Language Arts Standard 6- Demonstrates competencein the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of literary texts. Benchmarks: Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of literaryforms and genres; Understands historical and cultural influences on literary works; Relates personal response to the text with that seemingly intended by the author
(CTSS – ‘english’, ’9-12’, ’6’)
|
More women are obtaining Ph.D.’s in science than ever before, but those women — largely because of pressures from having a family — are far more likely than their male counterparts to “leak” out of the research science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university.
That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the loss of these scientists — together with the increased research capabilities of Asian and European countries — may threaten America’s pre-eminence in science.
The study, “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline,” found that women who are married with young children are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position after receiving a Ph.D. in science than are married men with young children and Ph.D.’s in science. Not only that, the married women with young children are 28 percent less likely than women without children to achieve tenure in the sciences.
Moreover, women Ph.D.’s with young children are 27 percent less likely than men with children to receive tenure after entering a tenure-track job in the sciences. The report notes that single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining tenure-track jobs. Read more…
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More women are obtaining Ph.D.’s in science than ever before, but those women — largely because of pressures from having a family — are far more likely than their male counterparts to “leak” out of the research science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university.
That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the loss of these scientists — together with the increased research capabilities of Asian and European countries — may threaten America’s pre-eminence in science.
The study, “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline,” found that women who are married with young children are 3
|
5 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position after receiving a Ph.D. in science than are married men with young children and Ph.D.’s in science. Not only that, the married women with young children are 28 percent less likely than women without children to achieve tenure in the sciences.
Moreover, women Ph.D.’s with young children are 27 percent less likely than men with children to receive tenure after entering a tenure-track job in the sciences. The report notes that single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining tenure-track jobs. Read more…
|
Jane Brody on health and aging.
Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.
Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.
But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:
Jane Brody speaks about hypertension.
¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.
¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.
¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.
¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.
Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.
Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.
Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.
“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”
But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.
“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.
The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.
¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.
¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.
¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.
According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.
One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.
After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.
But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.
Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.
Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.
“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.
How to Measure Your Blood Pressure
Mistaken readings, which can occur in doctors’ offices as well as at home, can result in misdiagnosis of hypertension and improper treatment. Dr. Samuel J. Mann, of Weill Cornell Medical College, suggests these guidelines to reduce the risk of errors:
¶ Use an automatic monitor rather than a manual one, and check the accuracy of your home monitor at the doctor’s office.
¶ Use a monitor with an arm cuff, not a wrist or finger cuff, and use a large cuff if you have a large arm.
¶ Sit quietly for a few minutes, without talking, after putting on the cuff and before checking your pressure.
¶ Check your pressure in one arm only, and take three readings (not more) one or two minutes apart.
¶ Measure your blood pressure no more than twice a week unless you have severe hypertension or are changing medications.
¶ Check your pressure at random, ordinary times of the day, not just when you think it is high.
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Jane Brody on health and aging.
Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.
Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.
But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of
|
drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:
Jane Brody speaks about hypertension.
¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.
¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.
¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.
¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.
Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.
Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.
Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.
“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”
But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.
“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.
The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.
¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.
¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.
¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.
According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.
One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.
After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.
But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.
Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.
Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.
“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.
How to Measure Your Blood Pressure
Mistaken readings, which can occur in doctors’ offices as well as at home, can result in misdiagnosis of hypertension and improper treatment. Dr. Samuel J. Mann, of Weill Cornell Medical College, suggests these guidelines to reduce the risk of errors:
¶ Use an automatic monitor rather than a manual one, and check the accuracy of your home monitor at the doctor’s office.
¶ Use a monitor with an arm cuff, not a wrist or finger cuff, and use a large cuff if you have a large arm.
¶ Sit quietly for a few minutes, without talking, after putting on the cuff and before checking your pressure.
¶ Check your pressure in one arm only, and take three readings (not more) one or two minutes apart.
¶ Measure your blood pressure no more than twice a week unless you have severe hypertension or are changing medications.
¶ Check your pressure at random, ordinary times of the day, not just when you think it is high.
|
Soon he came upon a peasant singing and scything. ‘You there, varlet,’ said Shrek. ‘Why so blithe?’” – William Steig, “Shrek”
“Shrek” inspired me to let the words fly around my children. Nope, I’m not talking about the movie “Shrek”, but about William Steig’s wonderful picture book “Shrek.” And I’m not talking about using curse words around my children, but about using a more sophisticated vocabulary in ordinary conversation.
The vocabulary in “Shrek” is extravagant. It’s so baroque that I did some research to find out why Steig had included phrases like “shady copse,” “churlish knave,” “rosy wens,” and “fusty fens.” Had he picked words at random from a dictionary and challenged himself to work them into his story? Did he have pet underused words that he was determined to bring back into favor? (I myself have waged a losing campaign to popularize “chirk.”)
Or had it been the product of a bet? Dr. Seuss wrote his masterpiece “Green Eggs and Ham” using just 50 different words, after his publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 that he couldn’t compose a book with such a limited vocabulary. (The words? A, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.)
But while I couldn’t find an explanation for Steig’s flamboyant vocabulary, I was inspired by his example — and by my daughters’ unquestioning acceptance of his range — to use more sophisticated vocabulary when talking to children. It made me realize that I’d unconsciously been simplifying my language, even though my daughters were perfectly able to handle words like “nacreous,” “nonplussed,” “ambivalent” and “palanquin.”
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: If we can express ourselves precisely, we can think precisely, and I want my children to be able to think as precisely as possible. Plus, it was hilarious to hear a 2-year-old use the word “unwieldy.”
Do you tailor your vocabulary to your children’s age? (Special case: do you use curse words in front of them?)
|
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Soon he came upon a peasant singing and scything. ‘You there, varlet,’ said Shrek. ‘Why so blithe?’” – William Steig, “Shrek”
“Shrek” inspired me to let the words fly around my children. Nope, I’m not talking about the movie “Shrek”, but about William Steig’s wonderful picture book “Shrek.” And I’m not talking about using curse words around my children, but about using a more sophisticated vocabulary in ordinary conversation.
The vocabulary in “Shrek” is extravagant. It’s so baroque that I did some research to find out
|
why Steig had included phrases like “shady copse,” “churlish knave,” “rosy wens,” and “fusty fens.” Had he picked words at random from a dictionary and challenged himself to work them into his story? Did he have pet underused words that he was determined to bring back into favor? (I myself have waged a losing campaign to popularize “chirk.”)
Or had it been the product of a bet? Dr. Seuss wrote his masterpiece “Green Eggs and Ham” using just 50 different words, after his publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 that he couldn’t compose a book with such a limited vocabulary. (The words? A, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.)
But while I couldn’t find an explanation for Steig’s flamboyant vocabulary, I was inspired by his example — and by my daughters’ unquestioning acceptance of his range — to use more sophisticated vocabulary when talking to children. It made me realize that I’d unconsciously been simplifying my language, even though my daughters were perfectly able to handle words like “nacreous,” “nonplussed,” “ambivalent” and “palanquin.”
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: If we can express ourselves precisely, we can think precisely, and I want my children to be able to think as precisely as possible. Plus, it was hilarious to hear a 2-year-old use the word “unwieldy.”
Do you tailor your vocabulary to your children’s age? (Special case: do you use curse words in front of them?)
|
The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others.
But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is hard to defend from the standpoint of rational public policy making.
Its arithmetic could require that the 300,000th dollar of income was taxed at a rate of about 50 percent – even while the three millionth dollar of income, or the three billionth, was taxed at a lower 35 percent rate instead.
The math behind these calculations is not all that complicated. It’s just a matter of understanding how marginal tax rates work.
Take an American who earns $400,000 a year in taxable income. (This is roughly the threshold at which a taxpayer reaches the top 1 percent of households.)
The top marginal federal income tax rate is now 35 percent, and kicks in at earnings above $388,350.
Someone making $400,000 is above the $388,350 threshold. Does this mean that she’d be taxed at a 35 percent rate on all $400,000 of income, meaning that she’d owe the government $140,000?
Not under current law. Instead, only a small fraction of the taxpayer’s income – the $11,650 she earns after she’s already reached $388,350 – is taxed at the top 35 percent rate.
This is because the tax rates are applied on a marginal basis. For every dollar that a taxpayer earns up to $8,700, she owes the federal government 10 cents in taxes — regardless of how much money she makes thereafter.
The government then taxes 15 cents of every dollar once the taxpayer reaches $8,701 in income, and continuing until she has earned $35,350. There are several more steps in the scale until the taxpayer reaches the top marginal rate.
Because tax rates are applied in this way, a taxpayer making $400,000 would owe about $117,000 in federal taxes, or about 29 percent of her earnings — rather than $140,000 if all her income had been taxed at the 35 percent rate.
Under the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article, that would change.
“One possible change would tax the entire salary earned by those making more than a certain level — $400,000 or so — at the top rate of 35 percent rather than allowing them to pay lower rates before they reach the target, as is the standard formula,” he reports.
In other words, under this proposal, the taxpayer making $400,000 would in fact pay 35 percent in overall income taxes and would owe $140,000 — about $23,000 more than she does currently.
The question is when the government would collect the additional $23,000 of taxes.
The most theoretically extreme case is if the government collected all of the additional taxes when the taxpayer made her 400,000th dollar of income exactly. That is, the taxpayer would owe about $117,000 in taxes if she made $399,999, but $140,000 if she made $400,000 instead. Thus, that one additional dollar of income would cost the taxpayer about $23,000 in taxes.
Of course, the government might never see the money, since the taxpayer might do everything in her power to avoid crossing the $400,000 threshold.
Here’s the problem: the government would now want to collect 35 percent of the taxpayer’s overall income, when it had been billing her at a lower rate on almost all the income she had earned so far.
If the government simply started collecting 35 percent of every dollar she earned above a certain threshold, it would have no way to make up for the lower rates it had been charging her previously.
Instead, it needs to make up the deficit somewhere to collect that additional $23,000 of taxes. It can only accomplish that by making the tax rate greater than 35 percent on at least some of the income that she has received.
For example, the taxpayer might be asked to pay additional taxes on the $150,000 of earnings between $250,000 and $400,000. To collect the extra $23,000, the government would need to tax this income at a rate of about 15 percent — in addition to the marginal tax rates that are already applied under current law, which now range between 33 and 35 percent.
Thus, the taxpayer would owe close to 50 percent in federal income taxes on earnings between $250,000 and $400,000. (If state taxes and Medicare taxes are also considered, her marginal tax rate could be close to 60 percent in some states.)
Perhaps you think that someone earning $300,000 or $400,000 should be taxed much more than they are now. There is still a perversity introduced by this proposal.
Specifically, after the taxpayer had hit her 400,000th dollar of income, her marginal tax rate would then decline. Rather than owing 50 cents for each dollar earned, she’d be back to a 35 percent rate instead.
Suppose that the taxpayer is considering taking on a part-time job that would make her an additional $50,000 in income. If the taxpayer had already earned $3,000,000 in income from her main job, then she would be able to keep 65 percent of the additional income from her side gig, owing 35 percent or $17,500 in taxes.
But if the taxpayer had “only” made $300,000 from her main job, she would get to keep only about $25,000 of earnings from her second job, owing the other $25,000 to the government. Faced with this steep tax rate, the taxpayer might decline the second job, meaning that the government would never collect the additional revenues from her earnings.
This is what’s known as a “tax bubble”: when someone earning less income might be taxed at a higher marginal rate than someone making more.
Tax bubbles have existed at various times in the federal tax code, such as from 1986 through 1990. They also exist in some state tax codes. But the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article would create an especially steep one.
To be clear, the people subjected to the tax bubble would be reasonably well off. An average family making $50,000 a year would not pay any additional taxes because of it, nor would its incentives be distorted in any substantial way.
Also to be clear: many of the people writing about tax policy, from academic economists to yours truly, make incomes that are considerably above the national average.
Nonetheless, the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article would place its heaviest tax burden on the somewhat wealthy as opposed to the very wealthy, particularly as it is being proposed as an alternative to raising the top marginal rate.
If the tax bubble were implemented, but the tax code were otherwise unchanged, then someone making $400,000 would owe $140,000 in federal income taxes, $23,000 more than she does now, increasing her overall tax rate to 35 percent from about 29 percent.
Someone making $4 million would owe $1.4 million in taxes, also reflecting a $23,000 increase. But the increase would be minimal on a percentage basis, since it comes from a larger pool of income. Their overall tax rate would rise to 35.0 percent from 34.4 percent.
If, instead, the top two marginal tax rates were increased to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, as they were under the Clinton administration, then someone making $400,000 would owe about $124,000 in federal income taxes – or about 31 percent of her income. This would reflect a tax increase, but less than under the tax bubble proposal.
However, the government would collect more taxes from the $4 million earner. Someone making that much would owe $1.55 million if the Clinton-era rates were restored, with their tax rate rising to 38.7 percent from 34.4 percent.
Either policy would reflect a tax increase – whatever semantics the Congress might use to describe it. It’s a question of which taxpayers would bear more of the burden.
It’s also a question of whether the tax increase would make the tax code more efficient or less so. One might favor a flatter schedule of marginal tax rates or a steeper one. All taxes have the potential to discourage work. But smoother increases in marginal tax rates, as
under current law, create less economic friction, and fewer deadweight losses, then those with a number of peaks and valleys. It is hard to see the economic rationale for creating a bubble in the middle of the tax code.
|
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The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others.
But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is hard to defend from the standpoint of rational public policy making.
Its arithmetic could require that the 300,000th dollar of income was taxed at a rate of about 50 percent – even while the three millionth dollar of income, or the three billionth, was taxed at a lower 35 percent rate instead
|
.
The math behind these calculations is not all that complicated. It’s just a matter of understanding how marginal tax rates work.
Take an American who earns $400,000 a year in taxable income. (This is roughly the threshold at which a taxpayer reaches the top 1 percent of households.)
The top marginal federal income tax rate is now 35 percent, and kicks in at earnings above $388,350.
Someone making $400,000 is above the $388,350 threshold. Does this mean that she’d be taxed at a 35 percent rate on all $400,000 of income, meaning that she’d owe the government $140,000?
Not under current law. Instead, only a small fraction of the taxpayer’s income – the $11,650 she earns after she’s already reached $388,350 – is taxed at the top 35 percent rate.
This is because the tax rates are applied on a marginal basis. For every dollar that a taxpayer earns up to $8,700, she owes the federal government 10 cents in taxes — regardless of how much money she makes thereafter.
The government then taxes 15 cents of every dollar once the taxpayer reaches $8,701 in income, and continuing until she has earned $35,350. There are several more steps in the scale until the taxpayer reaches the top marginal rate.
Because tax rates are applied in this way, a taxpayer making $400,000 would owe about $117,000 in federal taxes, or about 29 percent of her earnings — rather than $140,000 if all her income had been taxed at the 35 percent rate.
Under the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article, that would change.
“One possible change would tax the entire salary earned by those making more than a certain level — $400,000 or so — at the top rate of 35 percent rather than allowing them to pay lower rates before they reach the target, as is the standard formula,” he reports.
In other words, under this proposal, the taxpayer making $400,000 would in fact pay 35 percent in overall income taxes and would owe $140,000 — about $23,000 more than she does currently.
The question is when the government would collect the additional $23,000 of taxes.
The most theoretically extreme case is if the government collected all of the additional taxes when the taxpayer made her 400,000th dollar of income exactly. That is, the taxpayer would owe about $117,000 in taxes if she made $399,999, but $140,000 if she made $400,000 instead. Thus, that one additional dollar of income would cost the taxpayer about $23,000 in taxes.
Of course, the government might never see the money, since the taxpayer might do everything in her power to avoid crossing the $400,000 threshold.
Here’s the problem: the government would now want to collect 35 percent of the taxpayer’s overall income, when it had been billing her at a lower rate on almost all the income she had earned so far.
If the government simply started collecting 35 percent of every dollar she earned above a certain threshold, it would have no way to make up for the lower rates it had been charging her previously.
Instead, it needs to make up the deficit somewhere to collect that additional $23,000 of taxes. It can only accomplish that by making the tax rate greater than 35 percent on at least some of the income that she has received.
For example, the taxpayer might be asked to pay additional taxes on the $150,000 of earnings between $250,000 and $400,000. To collect the extra $23,000, the government would need to tax this income at a rate of about 15 percent — in addition to the marginal tax rates that are already applied under current law, which now range between 33 and 35 percent.
Thus, the taxpayer would owe close to 50 percent in federal income taxes on earnings between $250,000 and $400,000. (If state taxes and Medicare taxes are also considered, her marginal tax rate could be close to 60 percent in some states.)
Perhaps you think that someone earning $300,000 or $400,000 should be taxed much more than they are now. There is still a perversity introduced by this proposal.
Specifically, after the taxpayer had hit her 400,000th dollar of income, her marginal tax rate would then decline. Rather than owing 50 cents for each dollar earned, she’d be back to a 35 percent rate instead.
Suppose that the taxpayer is considering taking on a part-time job that would make her an additional $50,000 in income. If the taxpayer had already earned $3,000,000 in income from her main job, then she would be able to keep 65 percent of the additional income from her side gig, owing 35 percent or $17,500 in taxes.
But if the taxpayer had “only” made $300,000 from her main job, she would get to keep only about $25,000 of earnings from her second job, owing the other $25,000 to the government. Faced with this steep tax rate, the taxpayer might decline the second job, meaning that the government would never collect the additional revenues from her earnings.
This is what’s known as a “tax bubble”: when someone earning less income might be taxed at a higher marginal rate than someone making more.
Tax bubbles have existed at various times in the federal tax code, such as from 1986 through 1990. They also exist in some state tax codes. But the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article would create an especially steep one.
To be clear, the people subjected to the tax bubble would be reasonably well off. An average family making $50,000 a year would not pay any additional taxes because of it, nor would its incentives be distorted in any substantial way.
Also to be clear: many of the people writing about tax policy, from academic economists to yours truly, make incomes that are considerably above the national average.
Nonetheless, the proposal described in Mr. Weisman’s article would place its heaviest tax burden on the somewhat wealthy as opposed to the very wealthy, particularly as it is being proposed as an alternative to raising the top marginal rate.
If the tax bubble were implemented, but the tax code were otherwise unchanged, then someone making $400,000 would owe $140,000 in federal income taxes, $23,000 more than she does now, increasing her overall tax rate to 35 percent from about 29 percent.
Someone making $4 million would owe $1.4 million in taxes, also reflecting a $23,000 increase. But the increase would be minimal on a percentage basis, since it comes from a larger pool of income. Their overall tax rate would rise to 35.0 percent from 34.4 percent.
If, instead, the top two marginal tax rates were increased to 36 percent and 39.6 percent, as they were under the Clinton administration, then someone making $400,000 would owe about $124,000 in federal income taxes – or about 31 percent of her income. This would reflect a tax increase, but less than under the tax bubble proposal.
However, the government would collect more taxes from the $4 million earner. Someone making that much would owe $1.55 million if the Clinton-era rates were restored, with their tax rate rising to 38.7 percent from 34.4 percent.
Either policy would reflect a tax increase – whatever semantics the Congress might use to describe it. It’s a question of which taxpayers would bear more of the burden.
It’s also a question of whether the tax increase would make the tax code more efficient or less so. One might favor a flatter schedule of marginal tax rates or a steeper one. All taxes have the potential to discourage work. But smoother increases in marginal tax rates, as
under current law, create less economic friction, and fewer deadweight losses, then those with a number of peaks and valleys. It is hard to see the economic rationale for creating a bubble in the middle of the tax code.
|
Scientists have designed a brain implant that sharpened decision making and restored lost mental capacity in monkeys, providing the first demonstration in primates of the sort of brain prosthesis that could eventually help people with damage from dementia, strokes or other brain injuries.
The device, though years away from commercial development, gives researchers a model for how to support and enhance fairly advanced mental skills in the frontal cortex of the brain, the seat of thinking and planning.
The new report appeared Thursday in The Journal of Neural Engineering.
In just the past decade, scientists have developed brain implants that improve vision or allow disabled people to use their thoughts to control prosthetic limbs or move computer cursors. The new paper, led by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California, describes a device that improves brain function internally, by fine-tuning communication among neurons.
Previous studies have shown that a neural implant can do this for memory in rodents, but the new report extends that work significantly, experts said — into brains that are much closer to those of humans.
In the study, researchers at Wake Forest trained five rhesus monkeys to play a picture-matching game. The monkeys saw an image on a large screen — of a toy, a person, a mountain range — and tried to select the same image from a larger group of images that appeared on the same screen a little while later. The monkeys got a treat for every correct answer.
After two years of practice, the animals developed some mastery, getting about 75 percent of the easier matches correct and 40 percent of the harder ones, markedly better than chance guessing.
The monkeys were implanted with a tiny probe with two sensors; it was threaded through the forehead and into two neighboring layers of the cerebral cortex, the thin outer covering of the brain.
The two layers, called L-2/3 and L-5, are known to communicate with each other during decision making of the sort that the monkeys were doing when playing the matching game.
The device recorded the crackle of firing neurons during the animals’ choices and transmitted it to a computer. Researchers at U.S.C., led by Theodore Berger, analyzed this neural signal, and determined its pattern when the monkeys made correct choices.
To test the device, the team relayed this “correct” signal into the monkeys’ brains when they were in the middle of choosing a possible picture match, and it improved their performance by about 10 percent.
The researchers then impaired the monkeys’ performance deliberately, by dosing them with cocaine. Their scores promptly fell by 20 percent.
“But when you turn on the stimulator, they don’t make those errors; in fact, they do a little better than normal,” said Robert E. Hampson of Wake Forest, a study author.
His co-authors were Sam A. Deadwyler, Ioan Opris and Lucas Santos, all of Wake Forest; Dr. Berger, Vasilis Marmarelis and Dong Song of U.S.C.; and Greg A. Gerhardt of the University of Kentucky.
The technology used in the study could easily be contained on an implantable chip, Dr. Deadwyler said, and it is possible to envision a system that could help people with brain damage.
“The whole idea is that the device would generate an output pattern that bypasses the damaged area, providing an alternative connection” in the brain, he said.
Many hurdles remain. Decision making, like memory, is a multifaceted process that involves many neural circuits, depending on the decision being made.
A device focused on just one circuit is likely to be very limited. But not long ago, even a simple neural prosthesis would have seemed like science fiction.
|
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Scientists have designed a brain implant that sharpened decision making and restored lost mental capacity in monkeys, providing the first demonstration in primates of the sort of brain prosthesis that could eventually help people with damage from dementia, strokes or other brain injuries.
The device, though years away from commercial development, gives researchers a model for how to support and enhance fairly advanced mental skills in the frontal cortex of the brain, the seat of thinking and planning.
The new report appeared Thursday in The Journal of Neural Engineering.
In just the past decade, scientists have developed brain implants that improve vision or allow disabled people to use their thoughts to control prosthetic limbs or move
|
computer cursors. The new paper, led by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California, describes a device that improves brain function internally, by fine-tuning communication among neurons.
Previous studies have shown that a neural implant can do this for memory in rodents, but the new report extends that work significantly, experts said — into brains that are much closer to those of humans.
In the study, researchers at Wake Forest trained five rhesus monkeys to play a picture-matching game. The monkeys saw an image on a large screen — of a toy, a person, a mountain range — and tried to select the same image from a larger group of images that appeared on the same screen a little while later. The monkeys got a treat for every correct answer.
After two years of practice, the animals developed some mastery, getting about 75 percent of the easier matches correct and 40 percent of the harder ones, markedly better than chance guessing.
The monkeys were implanted with a tiny probe with two sensors; it was threaded through the forehead and into two neighboring layers of the cerebral cortex, the thin outer covering of the brain.
The two layers, called L-2/3 and L-5, are known to communicate with each other during decision making of the sort that the monkeys were doing when playing the matching game.
The device recorded the crackle of firing neurons during the animals’ choices and transmitted it to a computer. Researchers at U.S.C., led by Theodore Berger, analyzed this neural signal, and determined its pattern when the monkeys made correct choices.
To test the device, the team relayed this “correct” signal into the monkeys’ brains when they were in the middle of choosing a possible picture match, and it improved their performance by about 10 percent.
The researchers then impaired the monkeys’ performance deliberately, by dosing them with cocaine. Their scores promptly fell by 20 percent.
“But when you turn on the stimulator, they don’t make those errors; in fact, they do a little better than normal,” said Robert E. Hampson of Wake Forest, a study author.
His co-authors were Sam A. Deadwyler, Ioan Opris and Lucas Santos, all of Wake Forest; Dr. Berger, Vasilis Marmarelis and Dong Song of U.S.C.; and Greg A. Gerhardt of the University of Kentucky.
The technology used in the study could easily be contained on an implantable chip, Dr. Deadwyler said, and it is possible to envision a system that could help people with brain damage.
“The whole idea is that the device would generate an output pattern that bypasses the damaged area, providing an alternative connection” in the brain, he said.
Many hurdles remain. Decision making, like memory, is a multifaceted process that involves many neural circuits, depending on the decision being made.
A device focused on just one circuit is likely to be very limited. But not long ago, even a simple neural prosthesis would have seemed like science fiction.
|
Updated with more Inaugural resources: Jan. 22, 2013
Though President Obama actually took the oath of office on Jan. 20, public inaugural celebrations take place on Jan. 21, the same day that Martin Luther King will be celebrated this year.
In honor of both of these occasions, this will be our only post on Monday. Below, some resources for teaching and learning about each.
Martin Luther King Day
The slide show of historic Times photos about the Civil Rights Movement at the top of this post is a collection we first published last February. You might apply the three questions we ask weekly in our What’s Going On in This Picture? series to any one of them to think more about what is depicted, why and who.
Below, more from The Learning Network about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement — each with links to historic Times articles, lesson plans, crosswords, Student Opinion questions and more:
- Celebrating MLK Day
- Reader Ideas: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement
- Resources: Black History Month
- Historic Headlines: April 4, 1968 | The Assassination of Martin Luther King
If you were to write your own Inaugural Address, what would you say?
How would you draw on America’s past while acknowledging the present moment? How would you unite Americans? What challenges would you note, and what would you say about the role of government?
One way to play with those questions is through The Times’s interactive Build Your Own Inaugural Address. Below, more resources for celebrating Inauguration Day:
On the 2013 Inauguration
- Article | Obama Offers Liberal Vision: ‘We Must Act’
- Interactive | President Obama’s Inaugural Address
- Slide Show | President Obama’s Second Inauguration
- Interactive | A Closer Look at the Inaugural Ceremony
- News Analysis | A Call for Progressive Values: Evolved, Unapologetic and Urgent
- Article | Speech Gives Climate Goals Center Stage
- Op-Ed | A Map of Human Dignity
- Article | A Day of Celebration for a Diverse Crowd Savoring a Moment in History
- Article | Washington Prepares for Festive but Scaled-Down Version of 2009 Events
- Room for Debate Forum | What Should Obama Say?
- Op-Ed | A Sneaky Peek at Obama’s Speech
- Article | As Droves Flock to Washington, Republicans Find Somewhere Else to Be
On Inaugural Speeches and Celebrations Past:
- 2013 Graphic | Annotating the Second Inaugural Addresses
- 2009 Illustration | Maira Kalman | The Inauguraton. At Last (2009)
- 2009 Lesson Plan | An Oath for the Ages: Examining Historic Inaugural Addresses (2009)
- 2009 Lesson Plan | Hope in a Capsule: Creating Predictions and Times Capsules to Mark President Obama’s Inauguration
On President Obama’s First Term
- 2013 Graphic | First-Term Promises Made, Kept and Broken
- 2013 Article | Change Comes: After 4 Years, Friends See Shifts in the Obamas
- 2013 Article | Obama’s First Term: A Romantic Oral History
- 2013 Article | A White House Aware of Second-Term Perils
- 2013 Essay | Managing the Oval Office
- 2009 Lesson Plan | Promises and Priorities: Assessing President Obama’s First 100 Days in Office
- 2012 Resource Collection | Election 2012
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Updated with more Inaugural resources: Jan. 22, 2013
Though President Obama actually took the oath of office on Jan. 20, public inaugural celebrations take place on Jan. 21, the same day that Martin Luther King will be celebrated this year.
In honor of both of these occasions, this will be our only post on Monday. Below, some resources for teaching and learning about each.
Martin Luther King Day
The slide show of historic Times photos about the Civil Rights Movement at the top of this post is a collection we first published last February. You might apply the three questions we
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ask weekly in our What’s Going On in This Picture? series to any one of them to think more about what is depicted, why and who.
Below, more from The Learning Network about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement — each with links to historic Times articles, lesson plans, crosswords, Student Opinion questions and more:
- Celebrating MLK Day
- Reader Ideas: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement
- Resources: Black History Month
- Historic Headlines: April 4, 1968 | The Assassination of Martin Luther King
If you were to write your own Inaugural Address, what would you say?
How would you draw on America’s past while acknowledging the present moment? How would you unite Americans? What challenges would you note, and what would you say about the role of government?
One way to play with those questions is through The Times’s interactive Build Your Own Inaugural Address. Below, more resources for celebrating Inauguration Day:
On the 2013 Inauguration
- Article | Obama Offers Liberal Vision: ‘We Must Act’
- Interactive | President Obama’s Inaugural Address
- Slide Show | President Obama’s Second Inauguration
- Interactive | A Closer Look at the Inaugural Ceremony
- News Analysis | A Call for Progressive Values: Evolved, Unapologetic and Urgent
- Article | Speech Gives Climate Goals Center Stage
- Op-Ed | A Map of Human Dignity
- Article | A Day of Celebration for a Diverse Crowd Savoring a Moment in History
- Article | Washington Prepares for Festive but Scaled-Down Version of 2009 Events
- Room for Debate Forum | What Should Obama Say?
- Op-Ed | A Sneaky Peek at Obama’s Speech
- Article | As Droves Flock to Washington, Republicans Find Somewhere Else to Be
On Inaugural Speeches and Celebrations Past:
- 2013 Graphic | Annotating the Second Inaugural Addresses
- 2009 Illustration | Maira Kalman | The Inauguraton. At Last (2009)
- 2009 Lesson Plan | An Oath for the Ages: Examining Historic Inaugural Addresses (2009)
- 2009 Lesson Plan | Hope in a Capsule: Creating Predictions and Times Capsules to Mark President Obama’s Inauguration
On President Obama’s First Term
- 2013 Graphic | First-Term Promises Made, Kept and Broken
- 2013 Article | Change Comes: After 4 Years, Friends See Shifts in the Obamas
- 2013 Article | Obama’s First Term: A Romantic Oral History
- 2013 Article | A White House Aware of Second-Term Perils
- 2013 Essay | Managing the Oval Office
- 2009 Lesson Plan | Promises and Priorities: Assessing President Obama’s First 100 Days in Office
- 2012 Resource Collection | Election 2012
|
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
But in Virginia, Confederates were having a summer of unprecedented successes. Stonewall Jackson humiliated five different federal commanders in the Shenandoah Valley and at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Robert E. Lee had stymied George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign aimed at Richmond, and in August joined Jackson to humiliate John Pope at Second Manassas.
Confederate leaders saw this as the moment to capitalize on these successes with a bold military incursion into Kentucky in August. The Union’s breadbasket, the western border states lying astride the Ohio River, was about to become the next front.
Beginning in the mid-18th century, the Ohio River was one of the great highways of North America. Tens of thousands of people used it to float westward down from the Appalachian Mountains into the interior of the continent. The region filled up quickly: by 1790, 73,677 people lived in Kentucky, then a Virginia county, and 35,691 more in Tennessee. By 1810, 15 percent of the American population lived west of the Appalachians, by then including the newest state, Ohio. Within a decade, six more Western states would be added to the national Union. Three decades later, in 1840, more than a third of all Americans lived in this so-called First West.
The early settlements in the western region quickly thrived because of the river trade. The Ohio and its tributaries, which stretched north to nearly the Great Lakes, south to the Nashville Basin, and east to the Cumberland Plateau, sustained the growing population of the valley with crops and goods. Farmers loaded flatboats filled with products of their summer labors, with wheat milled into flour, corn distilled into whiskey and hogs slaughtered into bacon and soap. These and innumerable other goods floated down the Big Sandy, Scioto, Licking, Kentucky, Wabash, Cumberland and Tennessee, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi and on to even hungrier markets in Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans and beyond.
The appearance of the steamboat in the first decade of the 1800s revolutionized river traffic, making it possible to return upriver without walking, riding, pushing or pulling against the river currents. Before the arrival of the steamboat, items had to be carried over the Appalachians to western Pennsylvania and floated downriver. By 1820, 73 steamboats were working the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, bringing as much as 33,000 tons of goods back up to Louisville, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. A canal-building craze soon followed, cheaply and efficiently connecting the inland areas, especially north of the Ohio, with the rivers. In 1852, at the peak of the steamboat trade, 8,000 landings were recorded at Cincinnati.
Owing in large part to the steamboat, in a single generation after the Revolution, bustling cities grew from these once isolated river towns: Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Evansville. These were business towns — with regularity of design standard in all of these river cities, travelers talked of their attractive business climates rather than their physical beauty. Merchants dominated local society and politics, accumulating wealth by the southern river trade that both drove and exemplified their cities’ growing class stratification.
But civic leaders also planted and cultivated the seeds of culture that sprouted first in these cities: newspapers, churches, opera houses and theaters, bookstores, museums, lyceums and debating societies, libraries and schools and colleges. Although St. Louis led all cities in the West in sophistication, by the early 19th century Lexington, Ky., was known as the “Athens of the West” because of its educational facilities, most notably Transylvania University. Other cities were not far behind. By the 1830s Cincinnati, the West’s Queen City with nearly 50,000 people, had replaced Lexington as the region’s cultural and commercial epicenter.
Fast on the heels of the steamboat boom came rail. By the eve of the Civil War, Ohio boasted some 3,000 miles of track, 76 times what it had in 1840 and the most of any state in the entire nation. Illinois was second in the region and nation with 2,799 miles, and Indiana followed (fifth in the country) with 2,163; only New York and Pennsylvania boasted more. Missouri and Kentucky, too, had engaged heavily in railroad construction, but their 817 and 534 miles of track, respectively, left them lagging far behind even most of the cotton states, much less their immediate neighbors. Even in Missouri, virtually all of the main railroad lines ran along or north of the Missouri River.
Industrial expansion in the West followed these states’ respective railroad booms, contributing to population explosions in all of them. The 1850s saw the floodtide. In 1860, Ohio’s 2.3 million residents represented a more than 50 percent increase since 1840, making it the third largest state in the country. Illinois’ population doubled each decade, reaching 1.8 million, while Indiana’s population had nearly doubled to 1.4 million. Kentucky’s population had, like Ohio’s, increased by half to some 919,000 residents and had spread noticeably westward.
Some of the new settlers came from Eastern cities, but many of them came from a new wave of immigration from Europe, which favored the railroaded portions of these states, creating new population centers away from the traditional riverine sections. As late as the 1840s, many of the unorganized areas or fledgling counties of the northern portions of the Northwestern states had been sparsely settled. But soon boggy forests were drained by industrious laborers and settlers, with railroads following, allowing these counties to account for much of their states’ growth in the final antebellum decade. All of the counties of northern Indiana and Illinois saw their populations double or more; even in Ohio, they increased by half in the decade. Propelled by the lake trade, Cleveland became a city and Chicago became the region’s colossus within decades of its founding.
The northward shift of these states’ populations contributed much to the western region’s population’s exceeding those of all other national regions, including the fast-growing cotton frontier. The towns and villages of the southern portions of these states, their traditional locus of population, declined proportionally. By 1860, between a quarter and a sixth of the population of the Ohio River states lay in the valley itself.
At the same time, though, the Ohio Valley cities thrived. Where in 1840 just less than four percent of the region’s overall population was urban (and only three cities boasted as many as 8,000 residents), by 1860 some 14 percent lived in villages, towns and cities, and the region boasted 14 cities with 10,000 or more residents.
This new urban population was unlike any the region had seen before. Between 1820 and 1849, nearly 2.5 million foreigners came to the United States, largely from northern Europe, representing a seven-fold increase in the incidence of immigration. By 1850, 47.2 percent of Cincinnatians were immigrants, and more than 70 percent came from either Ireland or Germany, in part responses to the terrible potato famine of the later 1840s in Ireland and the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 for the Germans. Nearly a contiguous square mile of the cityscape was a virtual German “stadt,” with bustling streets bearing names like Berlin, Schiller and Goethe, and with street signs and business placards posted in German script. The vibrant 10th Ward was known simply as “Über der Rhein,” or for Anglos, “Over-the-Rhine,” a descriptive term that originated from the area’s proximity to the Miami Canal, which separated it from the rest of the city.
Many, like those in Cincinnati, were Catholics, which for many native-born Protestants caused more consternation than the newcomers’ ethnicities. By 1850, Cincinnati was only the third most densely immigrant city in the nation. But those with more were also Western cities: Chicago and St. Louis. (Surprisingly, all three led New York City, in which foreigners constituted 45.7 percent of the population.) But immigrants flocked to all the Western cities. They made up some 17 percent of Louisville’s population. They likewise settled heavily in Covington, Ky., and Evansville, Ind., creating a unique culture. The diversity that became much of America was as much the western border region’s as the nation’s.
Many of these Germans were strongly antislavery.Yet as the second year of the war began, positions on slavery did not easily divide north and south of the Ohio. Many of the region’s Irish Catholics supported slavery’s protection, while in large sections of the free states fighting-age “Butternut” men, called “Copperheads” by their Republican opponents, laid out of the fight altogether or threatened to leave it, should they be conscripted or slavery be abolished by the “friction of war,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. Others sympathized outright with the Confederacy, and fights commonly broke out between them and their pro-war Republican neighbors.
For many of the border region’s dissenting white residents, the course and events of the Civil War pointed out clearly that a new alliance had emerged, one in which Republicans in the Northern and Northwestern states appeared to be uniting in a conspiracy against liberty, which for many included the right of slaveholding. Angry and disillusioned, many of these Westerner dissenters sympathized with the region that now embodied their sense of betrayal and victimization — the beleaguered South. In the rural areas of Missouri, and western Kentucky and Tennessee, guerrillas were waging a desperate fight against occupying troops and local unionists that grew out of their recognition that the cities in their states were virtual fortresses: recruiting and staging centers for the Federal armies impossibly defended by hordes of blue-clad troops who guarded the supply and munitions depots and manufacturing centers for the federal government’s war machine.
As the newly appointed general in chief, Henry Halleck, later realized, Jefferson Davis and his advisers had “boldly determined to reoccupy Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky and, if possible, invade the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois while our attention was distracted by the invasion of Maryland.” Coordinated invasions of the border states on both sides of the Appalachians, as well as west of the Mississippi, would threaten the West’s major river cities and even the nation’s capital, perhaps turning the tide militarily.
But the decision was more than strategic; it was political. The federal government’s midterm elections loomed. Success on the new war front would embolden dissenters and moderates in the border states, especially in the Ohio Valley, to vote against Lincoln’s party, turn public support in the free states against the war, and possibly gain for the Confederacy its most elusive prize: foreign recognition. The cumulative effect would be to force the Lincoln administration to sue for peace. The Confederacy’s Tet Offensive was set to begin.
Christopher Phillips is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of six books on the Civil War era, including “Damned Yankee: The Life of Nathaniel Lyon” and the forthcoming “The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism.”
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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
But in Virginia, Confederates were having a summer of unprecedented successes. Stonewall Jackson humiliated five different federal commanders in the Shenandoah Valley and at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Robert E. Lee had stymied George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign aimed at Richmond, and in August joined Jackson to humiliate John Pope at Second Manassas.
Confederate leaders saw this as the moment to capitalize on these successes with a bold military incursion into Kentucky in August. The Union’s breadbasket, the western
|
border states lying astride the Ohio River, was about to become the next front.
Beginning in the mid-18th century, the Ohio River was one of the great highways of North America. Tens of thousands of people used it to float westward down from the Appalachian Mountains into the interior of the continent. The region filled up quickly: by 1790, 73,677 people lived in Kentucky, then a Virginia county, and 35,691 more in Tennessee. By 1810, 15 percent of the American population lived west of the Appalachians, by then including the newest state, Ohio. Within a decade, six more Western states would be added to the national Union. Three decades later, in 1840, more than a third of all Americans lived in this so-called First West.
The early settlements in the western region quickly thrived because of the river trade. The Ohio and its tributaries, which stretched north to nearly the Great Lakes, south to the Nashville Basin, and east to the Cumberland Plateau, sustained the growing population of the valley with crops and goods. Farmers loaded flatboats filled with products of their summer labors, with wheat milled into flour, corn distilled into whiskey and hogs slaughtered into bacon and soap. These and innumerable other goods floated down the Big Sandy, Scioto, Licking, Kentucky, Wabash, Cumberland and Tennessee, then down the Ohio to the Mississippi and on to even hungrier markets in Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans and beyond.
The appearance of the steamboat in the first decade of the 1800s revolutionized river traffic, making it possible to return upriver without walking, riding, pushing or pulling against the river currents. Before the arrival of the steamboat, items had to be carried over the Appalachians to western Pennsylvania and floated downriver. By 1820, 73 steamboats were working the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, bringing as much as 33,000 tons of goods back up to Louisville, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. A canal-building craze soon followed, cheaply and efficiently connecting the inland areas, especially north of the Ohio, with the rivers. In 1852, at the peak of the steamboat trade, 8,000 landings were recorded at Cincinnati.
Owing in large part to the steamboat, in a single generation after the Revolution, bustling cities grew from these once isolated river towns: Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Evansville. These were business towns — with regularity of design standard in all of these river cities, travelers talked of their attractive business climates rather than their physical beauty. Merchants dominated local society and politics, accumulating wealth by the southern river trade that both drove and exemplified their cities’ growing class stratification.
But civic leaders also planted and cultivated the seeds of culture that sprouted first in these cities: newspapers, churches, opera houses and theaters, bookstores, museums, lyceums and debating societies, libraries and schools and colleges. Although St. Louis led all cities in the West in sophistication, by the early 19th century Lexington, Ky., was known as the “Athens of the West” because of its educational facilities, most notably Transylvania University. Other cities were not far behind. By the 1830s Cincinnati, the West’s Queen City with nearly 50,000 people, had replaced Lexington as the region’s cultural and commercial epicenter.
Fast on the heels of the steamboat boom came rail. By the eve of the Civil War, Ohio boasted some 3,000 miles of track, 76 times what it had in 1840 and the most of any state in the entire nation. Illinois was second in the region and nation with 2,799 miles, and Indiana followed (fifth in the country) with 2,163; only New York and Pennsylvania boasted more. Missouri and Kentucky, too, had engaged heavily in railroad construction, but their 817 and 534 miles of track, respectively, left them lagging far behind even most of the cotton states, much less their immediate neighbors. Even in Missouri, virtually all of the main railroad lines ran along or north of the Missouri River.
Industrial expansion in the West followed these states’ respective railroad booms, contributing to population explosions in all of them. The 1850s saw the floodtide. In 1860, Ohio’s 2.3 million residents represented a more than 50 percent increase since 1840, making it the third largest state in the country. Illinois’ population doubled each decade, reaching 1.8 million, while Indiana’s population had nearly doubled to 1.4 million. Kentucky’s population had, like Ohio’s, increased by half to some 919,000 residents and had spread noticeably westward.
Some of the new settlers came from Eastern cities, but many of them came from a new wave of immigration from Europe, which favored the railroaded portions of these states, creating new population centers away from the traditional riverine sections. As late as the 1840s, many of the unorganized areas or fledgling counties of the northern portions of the Northwestern states had been sparsely settled. But soon boggy forests were drained by industrious laborers and settlers, with railroads following, allowing these counties to account for much of their states’ growth in the final antebellum decade. All of the counties of northern Indiana and Illinois saw their populations double or more; even in Ohio, they increased by half in the decade. Propelled by the lake trade, Cleveland became a city and Chicago became the region’s colossus within decades of its founding.
The northward shift of these states’ populations contributed much to the western region’s population’s exceeding those of all other national regions, including the fast-growing cotton frontier. The towns and villages of the southern portions of these states, their traditional locus of population, declined proportionally. By 1860, between a quarter and a sixth of the population of the Ohio River states lay in the valley itself.
At the same time, though, the Ohio Valley cities thrived. Where in 1840 just less than four percent of the region’s overall population was urban (and only three cities boasted as many as 8,000 residents), by 1860 some 14 percent lived in villages, towns and cities, and the region boasted 14 cities with 10,000 or more residents.
This new urban population was unlike any the region had seen before. Between 1820 and 1849, nearly 2.5 million foreigners came to the United States, largely from northern Europe, representing a seven-fold increase in the incidence of immigration. By 1850, 47.2 percent of Cincinnatians were immigrants, and more than 70 percent came from either Ireland or Germany, in part responses to the terrible potato famine of the later 1840s in Ireland and the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 for the Germans. Nearly a contiguous square mile of the cityscape was a virtual German “stadt,” with bustling streets bearing names like Berlin, Schiller and Goethe, and with street signs and business placards posted in German script. The vibrant 10th Ward was known simply as “Über der Rhein,” or for Anglos, “Over-the-Rhine,” a descriptive term that originated from the area’s proximity to the Miami Canal, which separated it from the rest of the city.
Many, like those in Cincinnati, were Catholics, which for many native-born Protestants caused more consternation than the newcomers’ ethnicities. By 1850, Cincinnati was only the third most densely immigrant city in the nation. But those with more were also Western cities: Chicago and St. Louis. (Surprisingly, all three led New York City, in which foreigners constituted 45.7 percent of the population.) But immigrants flocked to all the Western cities. They made up some 17 percent of Louisville’s population. They likewise settled heavily in Covington, Ky., and Evansville, Ind., creating a unique culture. The diversity that became much of America was as much the western border region’s as the nation’s.
Many of these Germans were strongly antislavery.Yet as the second year of the war began, positions on slavery did not easily divide north and south of the Ohio. Many of the region’s Irish Catholics supported slavery’s protection, while in large sections of the free states fighting-age “Butternut” men, called “Copperheads” by their Republican opponents, laid out of the fight altogether or threatened to leave it, should they be conscripted or slavery be abolished by the “friction of war,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. Others sympathized outright with the Confederacy, and fights commonly broke out between them and their pro-war Republican neighbors.
For many of the border region’s dissenting white residents, the course and events of the Civil War pointed out clearly that a new alliance had emerged, one in which Republicans in the Northern and Northwestern states appeared to be uniting in a conspiracy against liberty, which for many included the right of slaveholding. Angry and disillusioned, many of these Westerner dissenters sympathized with the region that now embodied their sense of betrayal and victimization — the beleaguered South. In the rural areas of Missouri, and western Kentucky and Tennessee, guerrillas were waging a desperate fight against occupying troops and local unionists that grew out of their recognition that the cities in their states were virtual fortresses: recruiting and staging centers for the Federal armies impossibly defended by hordes of blue-clad troops who guarded the supply and munitions depots and manufacturing centers for the federal government’s war machine.
As the newly appointed general in chief, Henry Halleck, later realized, Jefferson Davis and his advisers had “boldly determined to reoccupy Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky and, if possible, invade the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois while our attention was distracted by the invasion of Maryland.” Coordinated invasions of the border states on both sides of the Appalachians, as well as west of the Mississippi, would threaten the West’s major river cities and even the nation’s capital, perhaps turning the tide militarily.
But the decision was more than strategic; it was political. The federal government’s midterm elections loomed. Success on the new war front would embolden dissenters and moderates in the border states, especially in the Ohio Valley, to vote against Lincoln’s party, turn public support in the free states against the war, and possibly gain for the Confederacy its most elusive prize: foreign recognition. The cumulative effect would be to force the Lincoln administration to sue for peace. The Confederacy’s Tet Offensive was set to begin.
Christopher Phillips is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of six books on the Civil War era, including “Damned Yankee: The Life of Nathaniel Lyon” and the forthcoming “The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism.”
|
Flip-flops are a mainstay of summertime footwear, but they can be painfully bad for your feet and legs, new research shows.
Researchers from Auburn University in Alabama studied the biomechanics of the flip-flop and determined that wearing thong-style flip-flops can result in sore feet, ankles and legs.
“We found that when people walk in flip-flops, they alter their gait, which can result in problems and pain from the foot up into the hips and lower back,” said Justin Shroyer, a biomechanics doctoral student who presented the findings to the recent annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis.
For the study, the researchers recruited 39 college-age men and women and asked them to wear flip-flops or athletic shoes. They then had them walk a platform that measured vertical force as their feet hit the ground. A video camera measured stride length and limb angles.
Flip-flop wearers took shorter steps and their heels hit the ground with less vertical force than when the same walkers wore athletic shoes. People wearing flip-flops also don’t bring their toes up as much as the leg swings forward. That results in a larger angle to the ankle and a shorter stride length, the study showed. The reason may be that people tend to grip flip-flops with their toes.
Mr. Shroyer notes that he himself owns two pairs of flip-flops, and the research doesn’t mean people shouldn’t wear them. However, flip-flops are best worn for short periods of time, like at the beach or for comfort after an athletic event. But they are not designed to properly support the foot and ankle during all-day wear, he notes.
Update: For more on flip-flops, listen to the Well Podcast here.
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Flip-flops are a mainstay of summertime footwear, but they can be painfully bad for your feet and legs, new research shows.
Researchers from Auburn University in Alabama studied the biomechanics of the flip-flop and determined that wearing thong-style flip-flops can result in sore feet, ankles and legs.
“We found that when people walk in flip-flops, they alter their gait, which can result in problems and pain from the foot up into the hips and lower back,” said Justin Shroyer, a biomechanics doctoral student who presented the findings to the recent annual meeting of the American College
|
of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis.
For the study, the researchers recruited 39 college-age men and women and asked them to wear flip-flops or athletic shoes. They then had them walk a platform that measured vertical force as their feet hit the ground. A video camera measured stride length and limb angles.
Flip-flop wearers took shorter steps and their heels hit the ground with less vertical force than when the same walkers wore athletic shoes. People wearing flip-flops also don’t bring their toes up as much as the leg swings forward. That results in a larger angle to the ankle and a shorter stride length, the study showed. The reason may be that people tend to grip flip-flops with their toes.
Mr. Shroyer notes that he himself owns two pairs of flip-flops, and the research doesn’t mean people shouldn’t wear them. However, flip-flops are best worn for short periods of time, like at the beach or for comfort after an athletic event. But they are not designed to properly support the foot and ankle during all-day wear, he notes.
Update: For more on flip-flops, listen to the Well Podcast here.
|
In an era when almost every energy technology is unpopular with somebody, the people who don’t want wind turbines, generating stations or new transmission lines installed in their neighborhoods often raise the idea of improving energy efficiency as an alternative.
That argument is particularly common in New York State and in Vermont, where state governments are trying to close nuclear reactors within their borders. So, how effectively can efficiency replace a reactor, making up for the loss of this zero-carbon energy source?
Not very, according to a new study of carbon dioxide output in Japan in the months around the Fukushima disaster.
Figures collected by the Breakthrough Institute, a group that often presents contrarian views on environmentalism and energy conservation, found that despite stringent efforts to use less energy, Japan emitted 4 percent more carbon dioxide in November 2011 than it did in the same month the previous year. After a quake and tsunami in March 2011 led to three meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan began closing other plants as well, one because it appeared vulnerable to tsunami and others because local officials did not want them running.
Energy consumption dropped sharply and was nearly 10 percent lower last November than in November 2010, the institute’s figures show. But with natural gas, oil and coal substituting for about 46 reactors, the production of carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced ran about 15 percent higher.
The pattern was the same all year after the March 11 tsunami and quake: consumption dropped but fuel burn increased. This was true even though Japan ran office air-conditioners at far reduced levels last summer and some demand had disappeared because of damage from the disaster.
What analogy can be drawn at Indian Point, 30 miles north of New York City, or Vermont Yankee, near Brattleboro? This month, a New York State Assembly committee concluded that Indian Point was replaceable, an assertion sharply disputed by a business consumer group.
Jason Grumet, an air pollution expert and founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it was hard to draw direct parallels. “The circumstances in the United States are obviously different from Japan,’’ he said. For one thing, Japan was parsimonious in its use of electricity even before Fukushima, and American consumers probably have more fat to cut.
But in either country, he said, it is true that “a decrease in nuclear production in favor of fossil fuels will increase carbon intensity of the power sector, and total carbon dioxide emissions.’’
“It’s an incredibly difficult public policy challenge’’ for the United States, Mr. Grumet said, with different imperatives colliding. “One is to ensure that the aging fleet of nuclear plants is held to the highest safety standards, and the second is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,’’ he said. “And the third is to keep the lights on.”
|
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In an era when almost every energy technology is unpopular with somebody, the people who don’t want wind turbines, generating stations or new transmission lines installed in their neighborhoods often raise the idea of improving energy efficiency as an alternative.
That argument is particularly common in New York State and in Vermont, where state governments are trying to close nuclear reactors within their borders. So, how effectively can efficiency replace a reactor, making up for the loss of this zero-carbon energy source?
Not very, according to a new study of carbon dioxide output in Japan in the months around the Fukushima disaster.
Figures collected by the Breakthrough Institute, a group that often
|
presents contrarian views on environmentalism and energy conservation, found that despite stringent efforts to use less energy, Japan emitted 4 percent more carbon dioxide in November 2011 than it did in the same month the previous year. After a quake and tsunami in March 2011 led to three meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan began closing other plants as well, one because it appeared vulnerable to tsunami and others because local officials did not want them running.
Energy consumption dropped sharply and was nearly 10 percent lower last November than in November 2010, the institute’s figures show. But with natural gas, oil and coal substituting for about 46 reactors, the production of carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced ran about 15 percent higher.
The pattern was the same all year after the March 11 tsunami and quake: consumption dropped but fuel burn increased. This was true even though Japan ran office air-conditioners at far reduced levels last summer and some demand had disappeared because of damage from the disaster.
What analogy can be drawn at Indian Point, 30 miles north of New York City, or Vermont Yankee, near Brattleboro? This month, a New York State Assembly committee concluded that Indian Point was replaceable, an assertion sharply disputed by a business consumer group.
Jason Grumet, an air pollution expert and founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it was hard to draw direct parallels. “The circumstances in the United States are obviously different from Japan,’’ he said. For one thing, Japan was parsimonious in its use of electricity even before Fukushima, and American consumers probably have more fat to cut.
But in either country, he said, it is true that “a decrease in nuclear production in favor of fossil fuels will increase carbon intensity of the power sector, and total carbon dioxide emissions.’’
“It’s an incredibly difficult public policy challenge’’ for the United States, Mr. Grumet said, with different imperatives colliding. “One is to ensure that the aging fleet of nuclear plants is held to the highest safety standards, and the second is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,’’ he said. “And the third is to keep the lights on.”
|
BRITISH MARKETS FOR COMMODITIES; Results of New Agricultural Wage Scale Still Viewed as Uncertain
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. ();
November 23, 1941,
, Section Financial and Business, Page F3, Column , words
LONDON, Nov. 22 -- The dispute over agricultural wages in Britain was settled this week by the decision of the Central Wages Board to raise the national minimum 25 per cent to 60s a week. The increase, costing the farmers about u17,500,000 annually, lifts the minimums, according to districts, from 60 to 85 per cent above prewar levels.
|
<urn:uuid:c19d526f-aeab-4a1b-b285-106ad6935b39>
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BRITISH MARKETS FOR COMMODITIES; Results of New Agricultural Wage Scale Still Viewed as Uncertain
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. ();
November 23, 1941,
, Section Financial and Business, Page F3, Column , words
LONDON, Nov. 22 -- The dispute over agricultural wages in Britain was settled this week by the decision of the Central Wages Board to raise the national minimum 25 per cent to 60s a week. The increase, costing the farmers about u17,500,0
|
00 annually, lifts the minimums, according to districts, from 60 to 85 per cent above prewar levels.
|
Does drinking water before a meal help you lose weight? That’s the question explored by Anahad O’Connor in today’s “Really?” column.
Dieters have been encouraged to employ this trick for ages, with the reasoning quite simple: the water fills the stomach, thus reducing hunger. But only in recent years have studies borne this out.
In the most recent, a randomized trial published in the journal Obesity in February, scientists at Virginia Tech followed a group of overweight subjects age 55 and up on low-calorie diets for about three months. Half the people were told to drink two cups of water before every meal. At the end of the study, the water group had lost an average of 15.5 pounds, compared with 11 pounds in the other group.
To learn more, read the full story, “The Claim: Drinking Water Before Meals Aids Weight Loss,” and then please join the discussion below.
|
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|
Does drinking water before a meal help you lose weight? That’s the question explored by Anahad O’Connor in today’s “Really?” column.
Dieters have been encouraged to employ this trick for ages, with the reasoning quite simple: the water fills the stomach, thus reducing hunger. But only in recent years have studies borne this out.
In the most recent, a randomized trial published in the journal Obesity in February, scientists at Virginia Tech followed a group of overweight subjects age 55 and up on low-calorie diets for about three months. Half the people were told to drink two cups of water before
|
every meal. At the end of the study, the water group had lost an average of 15.5 pounds, compared with 11 pounds in the other group.
To learn more, read the full story, “The Claim: Drinking Water Before Meals Aids Weight Loss,” and then please join the discussion below.
|
In the year after an expert panel’s recommendation that women delay regular breast cancer screenings until age 50, the number of women in their 40s undergoing mammograms slightly declined, a new study shows.
The study, carried out by the Mayo Clinic, found a drop of roughly 6 percent in the number of mammograms among these younger women, a change that the researchers called modest but still significant. At the same time, while the panel had recommended that older women get a mammogram every other year rather than yearly up to age 74, the number of mammograms among women ages 50 to 64 remained fairly steady, the study found.
The recommendations were made in late 2009 by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of outside medical experts. The recommendation that women in their 40s forgo routine mammograms stirred particular controversy, in part because of widespread belief among many breast cancer patients that the screening test saved their lives and because it conflicted with those of other medical groups, like the American Cancer Society, which advise annual mammograms starting at 40.
The federal task force said that unless a woman has unusual risk factors for breast cancer, being screened so early could potentially lead to more harm than good because mammograms tend to spot cancers that grow slowly and might never prove lethal and could lead to unnecessary biopsies and other invasive tests and treatments.
In the new study, which was presented last week in Orlando at the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth, a research and policy group, Mayo Clinic researchers analyzed data from 100 health plans across the country. Looking specifically at the number of mammograms performed from January 2006 to December 2010, they compared the number of procedures that took place before the task force’s guidelines with the number that were performed in the year that followed. Over all, about eight million women ages 40 to 64 were included in the study.
In the year after the guidelines were published, nearly 54,000 fewer mammograms were performed on women ages 40 to 49. That represented a 5.72 percent decrease from the previous period. The authors said that the modest reductions probably reflected some public resistance to the new recommendations, in part because of conflicting guidelines from other groups that urge more frequent routine screenings.
“I don’t think we expected a huge impact from the guidelines,” said Nilay D. Shah, an author of the study and a researcher at the Mayo Clinic Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery.
Nonetheless, Dr. Shah pointed out that he and his colleagues expected to receive new data from 2011 on nationwide screenings soon. An analysis of that data, which should be completed in six to eight weeks, will reveal if the decline continued through 2011 or leveled off.
“We’re hoping to learn more as we see the next full year of data,” he said. “Will this continue, or did we go back to baseline practices?”
|
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|
In the year after an expert panel’s recommendation that women delay regular breast cancer screenings until age 50, the number of women in their 40s undergoing mammograms slightly declined, a new study shows.
The study, carried out by the Mayo Clinic, found a drop of roughly 6 percent in the number of mammograms among these younger women, a change that the researchers called modest but still significant. At the same time, while the panel had recommended that older women get a mammogram every other year rather than yearly up to age 74, the number of mammograms among women ages 50 to 6
|
4 remained fairly steady, the study found.
The recommendations were made in late 2009 by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of outside medical experts. The recommendation that women in their 40s forgo routine mammograms stirred particular controversy, in part because of widespread belief among many breast cancer patients that the screening test saved their lives and because it conflicted with those of other medical groups, like the American Cancer Society, which advise annual mammograms starting at 40.
The federal task force said that unless a woman has unusual risk factors for breast cancer, being screened so early could potentially lead to more harm than good because mammograms tend to spot cancers that grow slowly and might never prove lethal and could lead to unnecessary biopsies and other invasive tests and treatments.
In the new study, which was presented last week in Orlando at the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth, a research and policy group, Mayo Clinic researchers analyzed data from 100 health plans across the country. Looking specifically at the number of mammograms performed from January 2006 to December 2010, they compared the number of procedures that took place before the task force’s guidelines with the number that were performed in the year that followed. Over all, about eight million women ages 40 to 64 were included in the study.
In the year after the guidelines were published, nearly 54,000 fewer mammograms were performed on women ages 40 to 49. That represented a 5.72 percent decrease from the previous period. The authors said that the modest reductions probably reflected some public resistance to the new recommendations, in part because of conflicting guidelines from other groups that urge more frequent routine screenings.
“I don’t think we expected a huge impact from the guidelines,” said Nilay D. Shah, an author of the study and a researcher at the Mayo Clinic Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery.
Nonetheless, Dr. Shah pointed out that he and his colleagues expected to receive new data from 2011 on nationwide screenings soon. An analysis of that data, which should be completed in six to eight weeks, will reveal if the decline continued through 2011 or leveled off.
“We’re hoping to learn more as we see the next full year of data,” he said. “Will this continue, or did we go back to baseline practices?”
|
Jerome Jay Wolken, a biophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who delved into the mysteries of sight and light and invented a lens system that gave sight to some legally blind people, died on May 10 at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 82.
Dr. Wolken's Light Concentrating Lens System, developed in the 1980's and used in eyeglasses, opened new vistas on medical science, photography, astronomy and the collection of sunlight. One of the patents for the system involves a pear-shaped lens 10 times more sensitive to light than a standard camera lens.
The system reproduced the lenses that deep-sea creatures adapted over millions of years to see objects at depths of up to 1,500 feet in almost total darkness. The key was a special geometric relationship between the curvature of the top and the curvature of the bottom of the lens.
Made of glass or plastic for an eyeglass frame, the system increased the light-gathering ability of eyes that could not send enough light to their retinas. It was used primarily by people with cataracts.
In researching deep-sea optics, Dr. Wolken worked with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Oceanographic Research Institute at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Mass., and with similar institutions in Miami, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Europe and Japan. He applied his findings to lenses of enhanced photosensitivity.
Jerome Jay Wolken was born in Pittsburgh and received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1946. He received a master's degree in biological sciences in 1948 and a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1949, both from Pittsburgh, where he taught in the 1950's and was named a professor of biophysics physiology in 1962.
Two years later, Carnegie Mellon appointed Dr. Wolken a professor and head of the biological sciences department at Morrison Carnegie College. He wrote nine books in his field, edited two more and contributed some 120 papers to scientific journals. He retired in 1982, but he continued his work until recently.
Dr. Wolken is survived by his wife of 43 years, Tobey Holstein Wolken; their daughter and son, Johanna Zorn of Chicago and Erik A., of Chapel Hill, N.C.; a daughter and son by an earlier marriage, Ann Wolken of Los Angeles, and Jonathan, of Washington Depot, Conn., and five grandchildren. His first wife, Dorothy Mallinger Wolken, died in 1954.
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Jerome Jay Wolken, a biophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who delved into the mysteries of sight and light and invented a lens system that gave sight to some legally blind people, died on May 10 at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 82.
Dr. Wolken's Light Concentrating Lens System, developed in the 1980's and used in eyeglasses, opened new vistas on medical science, photography, astronomy and the collection of sunlight. One of the patents for the system involves a pear-shaped lens 10 times more sensitive to light than a standard camera lens.
|
The system reproduced the lenses that deep-sea creatures adapted over millions of years to see objects at depths of up to 1,500 feet in almost total darkness. The key was a special geometric relationship between the curvature of the top and the curvature of the bottom of the lens.
Made of glass or plastic for an eyeglass frame, the system increased the light-gathering ability of eyes that could not send enough light to their retinas. It was used primarily by people with cataracts.
In researching deep-sea optics, Dr. Wolken worked with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Oceanographic Research Institute at Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Mass., and with similar institutions in Miami, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Europe and Japan. He applied his findings to lenses of enhanced photosensitivity.
Jerome Jay Wolken was born in Pittsburgh and received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh in 1946. He received a master's degree in biological sciences in 1948 and a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1949, both from Pittsburgh, where he taught in the 1950's and was named a professor of biophysics physiology in 1962.
Two years later, Carnegie Mellon appointed Dr. Wolken a professor and head of the biological sciences department at Morrison Carnegie College. He wrote nine books in his field, edited two more and contributed some 120 papers to scientific journals. He retired in 1982, but he continued his work until recently.
Dr. Wolken is survived by his wife of 43 years, Tobey Holstein Wolken; their daughter and son, Johanna Zorn of Chicago and Erik A., of Chapel Hill, N.C.; a daughter and son by an earlier marriage, Ann Wolken of Los Angeles, and Jonathan, of Washington Depot, Conn., and five grandchildren. His first wife, Dorothy Mallinger Wolken, died in 1954.
|
The world’s first authorized test in people of a treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells has been cleared to begin by the Food and Drug Administration.
The trial will test cells developed by Geron Corporation and the University of California, Irvine in patients with new spinal cord injuries.
The F.D.A. had initially cleared the clinical trial in January 2009, in what was viewed at the time as a research milestone.
But before the study could begin, the agency then put a so-called hold on the trial after cysts were discovered in some mice injected with the cells. Geron had to do another mouse study and develop better ways to check the purity of its cells.
On Friday, the company announced in a press release that the F.D.A. had lifted the hold. Geron shares rose in morning trading.
Embryonic stem cells can turn into any type of cell in the body. Scientists envision one day making replacements for injured or diseased tissues to treat a wide variety of illnesses.
Clarification: but the cells have been controversial because their creation has required the destruction of human embryos, although some scientists claim they now avoid that.
Geron, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., helped finance the isolation of the first human embryonic stem cells at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1990s, so it holds certain patent rights on use of the cells.
Geron turns embryonic stem cells into precursors of neural support cells called oligodendrocytes, which would be injected into the spinal cord at the site of the injury. The hope is that the injected cells will repair the insulation, known as myelin, around nerve cells, restoring the ability of some of the nerves to carry signals.
The first trial, a so-called phase 1 study, will have a small number of patients and is aimed mainly at testing the safety of the therapy. Years of further testing will be required before the therapy would be proven and ready for widespread use, assuming it works.
Some experts have worried that this particularly therapy has not been adequately proven in animals and could spur a backlash against the embryonic stem cell field should it fail in the trial or cause harm to patients.
“We really want the best trial to be done for this first trial, and this might not be it,’’ Dr. John A. Kessler, chairman of neurology and director of the stem cell institute at Northwestern University said at the time the F.D.A. first cleared the trial.
Still, Dr. Kessler’s own institution will apparently participate in the trial. Geron’s press release Friday morning quoted Dr. Richard Fessler, professor of neurological surgery at Northwestern, saying that if it worked the therapy would be “revolutionary for the field.’’
|
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|
The world’s first authorized test in people of a treatment derived from human embryonic stem cells has been cleared to begin by the Food and Drug Administration.
The trial will test cells developed by Geron Corporation and the University of California, Irvine in patients with new spinal cord injuries.
The F.D.A. had initially cleared the clinical trial in January 2009, in what was viewed at the time as a research milestone.
But before the study could begin, the agency then put a so-called hold on the trial after cysts were discovered in some mice injected with the cells. Geron had to do another mouse study and develop better ways to
|
check the purity of its cells.
On Friday, the company announced in a press release that the F.D.A. had lifted the hold. Geron shares rose in morning trading.
Embryonic stem cells can turn into any type of cell in the body. Scientists envision one day making replacements for injured or diseased tissues to treat a wide variety of illnesses.
Clarification: but the cells have been controversial because their creation has required the destruction of human embryos, although some scientists claim they now avoid that.
Geron, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., helped finance the isolation of the first human embryonic stem cells at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1990s, so it holds certain patent rights on use of the cells.
Geron turns embryonic stem cells into precursors of neural support cells called oligodendrocytes, which would be injected into the spinal cord at the site of the injury. The hope is that the injected cells will repair the insulation, known as myelin, around nerve cells, restoring the ability of some of the nerves to carry signals.
The first trial, a so-called phase 1 study, will have a small number of patients and is aimed mainly at testing the safety of the therapy. Years of further testing will be required before the therapy would be proven and ready for widespread use, assuming it works.
Some experts have worried that this particularly therapy has not been adequately proven in animals and could spur a backlash against the embryonic stem cell field should it fail in the trial or cause harm to patients.
“We really want the best trial to be done for this first trial, and this might not be it,’’ Dr. John A. Kessler, chairman of neurology and director of the stem cell institute at Northwestern University said at the time the F.D.A. first cleared the trial.
Still, Dr. Kessler’s own institution will apparently participate in the trial. Geron’s press release Friday morning quoted Dr. Richard Fessler, professor of neurological surgery at Northwestern, saying that if it worked the therapy would be “revolutionary for the field.’’
|
A power failure on July 2, which affected two million people from Canada to Mexico, began with an Idaho transmission line that short-circuited when electricity jumped to a tree that had grown too close, investigators say.
The failure in that line, combined with record demands of power during hot weather, led to a ripple effect that cut power to 15 Western states and parts of Canada and Mexico, said Corry Alsberg, a spokeswoman for a group of regional utilities.
Investigators announced their conclusions about the blackout -- which lasted a few hours -- at a closed meeting of the Western Systems Coordinating Council on Friday.
The tree caused the electricity to arc, or flashover, in a remote area about 100 miles east of the Kinport substation in southeastern Idaho. The Idaho line carries 345,000 volts.
The flashover, in combination with several other factors, was enough to trip the first in a series of blackouts. Other factors in the failure included near-record hydropower generation in the Pacific Northwest and California as well as high power transfers on lines between the Pacific Northwest and California.
|
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A power failure on July 2, which affected two million people from Canada to Mexico, began with an Idaho transmission line that short-circuited when electricity jumped to a tree that had grown too close, investigators say.
The failure in that line, combined with record demands of power during hot weather, led to a ripple effect that cut power to 15 Western states and parts of Canada and Mexico, said Corry Alsberg, a spokeswoman for a group of regional utilities.
Investigators announced their conclusions about the blackout -- which lasted a few hours -- at a closed meeting of the Western Systems Coordinating Council on Friday
|
.
The tree caused the electricity to arc, or flashover, in a remote area about 100 miles east of the Kinport substation in southeastern Idaho. The Idaho line carries 345,000 volts.
The flashover, in combination with several other factors, was enough to trip the first in a series of blackouts. Other factors in the failure included near-record hydropower generation in the Pacific Northwest and California as well as high power transfers on lines between the Pacific Northwest and California.
|
In a city known for its glass and steel jungles and crisscross of traffic-choked asphalt byways, one building in New York has fended off not just the crush of built-up modernity, but also seemingly time itself.
Perched on a lush promontory in Washington Heights, there is the 244-year-old Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan’s oldest house.
And today, with its lush lawns and panoramic views, stained glass windows and creaky wood floors, the house still looks like a sliver of the 18th century, time-warped onto the cityscape. It’s hard to imagine that when it was built, the property’s lot stretched from river to river across Manhattan.
As if the house itself wasn’t enough of a window into New York’s past, the Morris-Jumel Mansion Museum is exhibiting dozens of photographs from the site’s past — with modern shots by two photographers right next to them. The show, titled “It’s About Time: 244 Years at the Morris-Jumel Mansion,” runs until next Tuesday and is free with admission ($5 for adults, free for children under 12).
The museum’s education director, Carol Ward, who worked to produce the display, said one of the exhibit’s purposes is to stress the importance of linking the past with the present.
“Why do we take photographs now? Why did they take photographs in 1885?” Ms. Ward asked rhetorically as she gave a tour of the exhibit this week. “To document these moments in our lives, these memories we want to share.”
Spanning from 1887 until today, the photographs document the ways the house has been used over the years, changed, and in many ways, stayed the same.
Some images by the photographer Trish Mayo zoom in to the richly detailed French furniture still left over by the former owners Stephen and Eliza Jumel, who acquired the house in 1810. Originally built by the British colonel Roger Morris, who had an American wife, the house changed hands during the Revolutionary War.
In one photograph, Ms. Mayo focuses on the clawed foot of a centuries-old sofa. The same sofa appears in the background of some of the historic photographs as just a piece of furniture in a mansion as lived in as any other.
“The furniture is 200 years old, but it can still be seen in a modern way,” Ms. Mayo said.
The other photographs in the exhibit are documentary-style interior and external shots by Tom Stoelker.
|
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In a city known for its glass and steel jungles and crisscross of traffic-choked asphalt byways, one building in New York has fended off not just the crush of built-up modernity, but also seemingly time itself.
Perched on a lush promontory in Washington Heights, there is the 244-year-old Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan’s oldest house.
And today, with its lush lawns and panoramic views, stained glass windows and creaky wood floors, the house still looks like a sliver of the 18th century, time-warped onto the cityscape
|
. It’s hard to imagine that when it was built, the property’s lot stretched from river to river across Manhattan.
As if the house itself wasn’t enough of a window into New York’s past, the Morris-Jumel Mansion Museum is exhibiting dozens of photographs from the site’s past — with modern shots by two photographers right next to them. The show, titled “It’s About Time: 244 Years at the Morris-Jumel Mansion,” runs until next Tuesday and is free with admission ($5 for adults, free for children under 12).
The museum’s education director, Carol Ward, who worked to produce the display, said one of the exhibit’s purposes is to stress the importance of linking the past with the present.
“Why do we take photographs now? Why did they take photographs in 1885?” Ms. Ward asked rhetorically as she gave a tour of the exhibit this week. “To document these moments in our lives, these memories we want to share.”
Spanning from 1887 until today, the photographs document the ways the house has been used over the years, changed, and in many ways, stayed the same.
Some images by the photographer Trish Mayo zoom in to the richly detailed French furniture still left over by the former owners Stephen and Eliza Jumel, who acquired the house in 1810. Originally built by the British colonel Roger Morris, who had an American wife, the house changed hands during the Revolutionary War.
In one photograph, Ms. Mayo focuses on the clawed foot of a centuries-old sofa. The same sofa appears in the background of some of the historic photographs as just a piece of furniture in a mansion as lived in as any other.
“The furniture is 200 years old, but it can still be seen in a modern way,” Ms. Mayo said.
The other photographs in the exhibit are documentary-style interior and external shots by Tom Stoelker.
|
Conservationists tend to think of wildlife sanctuaries as the most beneficial possible use for a given piece of land, for air, water and endangered species alike. But what if there is a competing claim from an endangered culture?
As I write in The Times, that’s the situation in an area of coastal Georgia called Harris Neck, a lovely maritime forest surrounded by marsh that was once home to a self-sufficient Gullah/Geechee community. The Gullah/Geechee are descendants of West African slaves with highly valued rice-growing skills. After the Civil War, Gullah families stayed on the barrier islands and coastal lands of Georgia and nearby states, where isolation helped preserve their distinctive ways of speaking, cooking, boat-building, basket-weaving and storytelling.
In the late 1990s, in fact, anthropologists introduced Mary Moran, a former resident of Harris Neck, to villagers in Sierra Leone who sang the same Mende song that Ms. Moran remembered hearing her mother sing. In 1942, residents were forced out by the federal government, who condemned the land for use as an air base. It later became the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge.
Meanwhile, the advent of air-conditioning and mosquito repellent, which opened the lush coastal areas to development, encroaching on both wildlife habitat and Gullah communities. Attempts to preserve Gullah culture have largely been limited to oral history projects, festivals and museum displays. But Harris Neck residents dreamed that they could go that one better: live where they used to live and fish where they used to fish.
The Harris Neck Land Trust, formed to help the former residents and their descendants reclaim the land, says its plans include limited development, alternative energy, gray water recycling and other methods of minimizing human impact and keeping wildlife happy.
That leaves environmental advocates like Deborah Sheppard, the executive director of Altamaha Riverkeeper, in a difficult position. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” she said. “I’d like to see both sides win.”
|
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Conservationists tend to think of wildlife sanctuaries as the most beneficial possible use for a given piece of land, for air, water and endangered species alike. But what if there is a competing claim from an endangered culture?
As I write in The Times, that’s the situation in an area of coastal Georgia called Harris Neck, a lovely maritime forest surrounded by marsh that was once home to a self-sufficient Gullah/Geechee community. The Gullah/Geechee are descendants of West African slaves with highly valued rice-growing skills. After the Civil War, Gullah families stayed on the barrier islands and coastal lands of
|
Georgia and nearby states, where isolation helped preserve their distinctive ways of speaking, cooking, boat-building, basket-weaving and storytelling.
In the late 1990s, in fact, anthropologists introduced Mary Moran, a former resident of Harris Neck, to villagers in Sierra Leone who sang the same Mende song that Ms. Moran remembered hearing her mother sing. In 1942, residents were forced out by the federal government, who condemned the land for use as an air base. It later became the Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge.
Meanwhile, the advent of air-conditioning and mosquito repellent, which opened the lush coastal areas to development, encroaching on both wildlife habitat and Gullah communities. Attempts to preserve Gullah culture have largely been limited to oral history projects, festivals and museum displays. But Harris Neck residents dreamed that they could go that one better: live where they used to live and fish where they used to fish.
The Harris Neck Land Trust, formed to help the former residents and their descendants reclaim the land, says its plans include limited development, alternative energy, gray water recycling and other methods of minimizing human impact and keeping wildlife happy.
That leaves environmental advocates like Deborah Sheppard, the executive director of Altamaha Riverkeeper, in a difficult position. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” she said. “I’d like to see both sides win.”
|
A new study adds to growing evidence that the complications of diabetes may extend to the brain, causing declines in memory, attention and other cognitive skills.
The new research showed that over the course of about a decade, elderly men and women with diabetes — primarily Type 2, the form of the disease related to obesity and inactivity — had greater drops in cognitive test scores than other people of a similar age. The more poorly managed their disease, the greater the deterioration in mental function. And the declines were seen not just in those with advanced diabetes. The researchers found that people who did not have diabetes at the start of the study but developed it later on also deteriorated to a greater extent than those without the disease.
“What we’ve shown is a clear association with diabetes and cognitive aging in terms of the slope and the rate of decline on these cognitive tests,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s very powerful.”
While correlation does not equal causation and the relationship between diabetes and brain health needs further study, the findings, if confirmed, could have significant implications for a large segment of the population. Nationwide, nearly a third of Americans over the age of 65, or roughly 11 million people, have diabetes. By 2034, about 15 million Medicare-eligible Americans are expected to have the disease.
Previous studies have shown that Type 2 diabetes correlates with a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life. But how one leads to the other has not been well understood. While some scientists speculate that inflammation and vascular damage caused by chronically high blood sugar levels over many years is the culprit, findings from research have been inconsistent. And until now, little was known about the effect, if any, that newly diagnosed diabetes would have on cognitive function.
In the new study, published in Archives of Neurology, Dr. Yaffe and her colleagues relied on extensive data from the Health, Aging and Body Composition project, or Health ABC, a long-running study of white and black older adults living in Pittsburgh and Tennessee. The researchers looked at 3,069 people, many of them in their 70s. When the study began, 23 percent of the subjects had diabetes. And 5 percent were free of diabetes at the outset but went on to develop it later.
While the researchers did not distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, they said that given the average age of the subjects, about 74, most if not all had Type 2 diabetes.
Over the course of the research, the subjects were repeatedly given cognitive tests that looked at things like their memory, their coordination, dexterity and ability to concentrate, as well as their overall mental health. At the start of the study, those who already had diabetes had slightly lower baseline scores than the subjects who did not have the disease.
But nine years later, the gap in cognitive test scores had widened significantly between those with and without diabetes. The differences remained even after the researchers adjusted their results for the effects of age, race, sex and education. They also found that the subjects who were free of diabetes at the beginning of the study but developed it later on had scores that fell between those of the other two groups.
The researchers then delved further by looking at the effect of poor glucose control. In this case, they took measures of something called glycosylated hemoglobin. Unlike traditional blood sugar tests, which provide a momentary snapshot of a person’s glucose levels, glycosylated hemoglobin gives doctors a much broader picture, providing an idea of blood sugar management over the course of weeks. It is considered one of the best ways for doctors to assess the progress of diabetes treatment.
In the new study, higher measures of the compound, which indicate poorer control of blood glucose levels, were the best predictor of cognitive decline.
The findings suggest that more aggressive approaches to managing and especially preventing diabetes in midlife or before may help stave off mental declines in large segments of the population. But Dr. Yaffe warned that doctors should be cautious about lowering blood sugar levels too far in elderly diabetics, since they are especially vulnerable to the effects of hypoglycemia.
“There’s this idea that the better your glucose control, the better off you are in terms of trying to prevent complications of diabetes,” she said. “But in older people it’s a slippery slope. The elderly are more sensitive to hypoglycemia, they’ve got other medications that may interact, and they’ve got other conditions.”
“When you lower their blood sugar levels too aggressively,” she added, “you might do more harm than good.”
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A new study adds to growing evidence that the complications of diabetes may extend to the brain, causing declines in memory, attention and other cognitive skills.
The new research showed that over the course of about a decade, elderly men and women with diabetes — primarily Type 2, the form of the disease related to obesity and inactivity — had greater drops in cognitive test scores than other people of a similar age. The more poorly managed their disease, the greater the deterioration in mental function. And the declines were seen not just in those with advanced diabetes. The researchers found that people who did not have diabetes at the start of the study but developed it
|
later on also deteriorated to a greater extent than those without the disease.
“What we’ve shown is a clear association with diabetes and cognitive aging in terms of the slope and the rate of decline on these cognitive tests,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s very powerful.”
While correlation does not equal causation and the relationship between diabetes and brain health needs further study, the findings, if confirmed, could have significant implications for a large segment of the population. Nationwide, nearly a third of Americans over the age of 65, or roughly 11 million people, have diabetes. By 2034, about 15 million Medicare-eligible Americans are expected to have the disease.
Previous studies have shown that Type 2 diabetes correlates with a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life. But how one leads to the other has not been well understood. While some scientists speculate that inflammation and vascular damage caused by chronically high blood sugar levels over many years is the culprit, findings from research have been inconsistent. And until now, little was known about the effect, if any, that newly diagnosed diabetes would have on cognitive function.
In the new study, published in Archives of Neurology, Dr. Yaffe and her colleagues relied on extensive data from the Health, Aging and Body Composition project, or Health ABC, a long-running study of white and black older adults living in Pittsburgh and Tennessee. The researchers looked at 3,069 people, many of them in their 70s. When the study began, 23 percent of the subjects had diabetes. And 5 percent were free of diabetes at the outset but went on to develop it later.
While the researchers did not distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, they said that given the average age of the subjects, about 74, most if not all had Type 2 diabetes.
Over the course of the research, the subjects were repeatedly given cognitive tests that looked at things like their memory, their coordination, dexterity and ability to concentrate, as well as their overall mental health. At the start of the study, those who already had diabetes had slightly lower baseline scores than the subjects who did not have the disease.
But nine years later, the gap in cognitive test scores had widened significantly between those with and without diabetes. The differences remained even after the researchers adjusted their results for the effects of age, race, sex and education. They also found that the subjects who were free of diabetes at the beginning of the study but developed it later on had scores that fell between those of the other two groups.
The researchers then delved further by looking at the effect of poor glucose control. In this case, they took measures of something called glycosylated hemoglobin. Unlike traditional blood sugar tests, which provide a momentary snapshot of a person’s glucose levels, glycosylated hemoglobin gives doctors a much broader picture, providing an idea of blood sugar management over the course of weeks. It is considered one of the best ways for doctors to assess the progress of diabetes treatment.
In the new study, higher measures of the compound, which indicate poorer control of blood glucose levels, were the best predictor of cognitive decline.
The findings suggest that more aggressive approaches to managing and especially preventing diabetes in midlife or before may help stave off mental declines in large segments of the population. But Dr. Yaffe warned that doctors should be cautious about lowering blood sugar levels too far in elderly diabetics, since they are especially vulnerable to the effects of hypoglycemia.
“There’s this idea that the better your glucose control, the better off you are in terms of trying to prevent complications of diabetes,” she said. “But in older people it’s a slippery slope. The elderly are more sensitive to hypoglycemia, they’ve got other medications that may interact, and they’ve got other conditions.”
“When you lower their blood sugar levels too aggressively,” she added, “you might do more harm than good.”
|
Through the first three weeks of the season, the number of broken bats has dropped slightly compared to last season, baseball officials said Friday.
An average of about .8 bats per game have broken this season compared to about one bat per game last season, said Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball. Under baseball’s count, a broken bat is considered one that has broken into two or more pieces.
Although many manufacturers have responded to new guidelines implemented last December by baseball officials, some manufacturers still provide players with bats that do not comply with the guidelines, Courtney said.
“We are in a period of getting manufacturers to adjust and comply with the new regulations,” he said in an e-mail message.
The companies that have not followed the guidelines will be warned, Courtney said, and they will be barred from supplying bats to major league players if they fail to comply.
A study by Major League Baseball last year found that many broken bats had poor-quality slope of grain, a term that refers to how straight the grain is along a bat. When the straightness decreases, so does the durability of the bat.
Along with monitoring the slope of grain, baseball officials are examining other factors that may be causing bats to break, including their geometry and whether the wood being used is too dry, Courtney said.
After the number of broken bats surged last season, management and union officials conducted a study on how to lower the number of broken bats. Last December, baseball implemented nine recommendations in response to the study, which found that the increasingly popular maple bats were three times more likely to break than ash bats. Courtney said baseball did not yet have figures on the types of bats that have broken this season.
Although the number of broken bats has decreased, flying shards have caused some injuries. On April 21, Umpire Kerwin Danley sustained a concussion and had to be hospitalized for a day after he was hit in the head with a piece of a broken bat.
|
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Through the first three weeks of the season, the number of broken bats has dropped slightly compared to last season, baseball officials said Friday.
An average of about .8 bats per game have broken this season compared to about one bat per game last season, said Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball. Under baseball’s count, a broken bat is considered one that has broken into two or more pieces.
Although many manufacturers have responded to new guidelines implemented last December by baseball officials, some manufacturers still provide players with bats that do not comply with the guidelines, Courtney said.
“We are in a period of getting manufacturers to adjust and comply with the
|
new regulations,” he said in an e-mail message.
The companies that have not followed the guidelines will be warned, Courtney said, and they will be barred from supplying bats to major league players if they fail to comply.
A study by Major League Baseball last year found that many broken bats had poor-quality slope of grain, a term that refers to how straight the grain is along a bat. When the straightness decreases, so does the durability of the bat.
Along with monitoring the slope of grain, baseball officials are examining other factors that may be causing bats to break, including their geometry and whether the wood being used is too dry, Courtney said.
After the number of broken bats surged last season, management and union officials conducted a study on how to lower the number of broken bats. Last December, baseball implemented nine recommendations in response to the study, which found that the increasingly popular maple bats were three times more likely to break than ash bats. Courtney said baseball did not yet have figures on the types of bats that have broken this season.
Although the number of broken bats has decreased, flying shards have caused some injuries. On April 21, Umpire Kerwin Danley sustained a concussion and had to be hospitalized for a day after he was hit in the head with a piece of a broken bat.
|
THE great gardens of the world - the Tivolis, Bellingraths and Sissinghursts - have flourished in latitudes blessed with a genial sun. Yet a mere 6 degrees below the Arctic Circle, where the thin winter sun visits for 6 hours out of 24, is the small and tidy plot of Karl von Linne, known to the botanical world as Carolus Linnaeus.
In 1741, at the age of 34, Linnaeus was appointed professor of medicine and botany at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. In this capacity he took over the university botanical garden, with an accompanying house where he could collect his specimens and, with his wife, raise their five children. Linnaeus proceeded to transform this two-and-a-half-acre patch of cool Swedish soil into a major scientific resource, a genetic living library.
In his lifetime, Linnaeus' garden became a pilgrimage site for the scholarly and the titled. The garden, which still flourishes in the form he gave it 200 years ago, and his house are open to visitors. While the garden remains a place of study for professional and amateur botanists, the charm of the place, with its orangery and ancient shade trees, also delights the casual visitor. The baroque layout of the garden, all rectangles and semicircles, pleases the eye and has the added benefit of orderliness, so necessary to the science of classification, or taxonomy. If Linnaeus could enter his garden today, he would do so with familiarity and delight, ready to lecture to students or plant a new flower.
The scientific community honors Linnaeus for his system of sexual plant classification and for his structure of dual nomenclature for natural science. Since Linnaeus, we refer to the world's flora and fauna with two (sometimes three) Latin names, and recognize ourselves within that order as Homo sapiens.
Linnaeus is a man honored in his own country. His avuncular face beams from every 100-krona note, and beyond his professional achievements he is adored as a true native son. Linneaus, who was born in 1707, loved nature and had a passion to categorize and name everything in it. His dream of order was a joyous one, acknowledging nature's fecundity in anthropomorphic terms that were shocking to his peers. In his great taxonomy of plants, ''Systema Naturae,'' Linnaeus spoke frankly and poetically of the stamen and pistil structures of flowers as ''brides and their bridegrooms'' who relish their ''meeting in the wedding chamber.'' Of plants whose reproductive organs are visible in the flower, Linnaeus wrote, ''The nuptuals are celebrated openly before the whole world.''
Entering Linnaeus' garden today, with the 18th-century orangery as a backdrop, the visitor finds a space suggesting a stage set for Mozart's ''Marriage of Figaro'' - the place where the principals hide and meet in their final assignations, betrayals and resolutions. When Linnaeus first moved into the house in the southeast corner of the garden, he complained that residence and garden alike resembled a messy owl's nest. Through neglect, his predecessors had allowed the number of species in the garden to dwindle from 1,870 to 300. With characteristic energy and organization, Linnaeus set about creating the garden we see today. He plied the university for funds to build the orangery, so necessary to growing tender southern plants, which now frames the north end of the garden. Today, the orangery contains a little cafe and art gallery and is used in the summer for literary readings and concerts.
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THE great gardens of the world - the Tivolis, Bellingraths and Sissinghursts - have flourished in latitudes blessed with a genial sun. Yet a mere 6 degrees below the Arctic Circle, where the thin winter sun visits for 6 hours out of 24, is the small and tidy plot of Karl von Linne, known to the botanical world as Carolus Linnaeus.
In 1741, at the age of 34, Linnaeus was appointed professor of medicine and botany at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. In this capacity he took over the university
|
botanical garden, with an accompanying house where he could collect his specimens and, with his wife, raise their five children. Linnaeus proceeded to transform this two-and-a-half-acre patch of cool Swedish soil into a major scientific resource, a genetic living library.
In his lifetime, Linnaeus' garden became a pilgrimage site for the scholarly and the titled. The garden, which still flourishes in the form he gave it 200 years ago, and his house are open to visitors. While the garden remains a place of study for professional and amateur botanists, the charm of the place, with its orangery and ancient shade trees, also delights the casual visitor. The baroque layout of the garden, all rectangles and semicircles, pleases the eye and has the added benefit of orderliness, so necessary to the science of classification, or taxonomy. If Linnaeus could enter his garden today, he would do so with familiarity and delight, ready to lecture to students or plant a new flower.
The scientific community honors Linnaeus for his system of sexual plant classification and for his structure of dual nomenclature for natural science. Since Linnaeus, we refer to the world's flora and fauna with two (sometimes three) Latin names, and recognize ourselves within that order as Homo sapiens.
Linnaeus is a man honored in his own country. His avuncular face beams from every 100-krona note, and beyond his professional achievements he is adored as a true native son. Linneaus, who was born in 1707, loved nature and had a passion to categorize and name everything in it. His dream of order was a joyous one, acknowledging nature's fecundity in anthropomorphic terms that were shocking to his peers. In his great taxonomy of plants, ''Systema Naturae,'' Linnaeus spoke frankly and poetically of the stamen and pistil structures of flowers as ''brides and their bridegrooms'' who relish their ''meeting in the wedding chamber.'' Of plants whose reproductive organs are visible in the flower, Linnaeus wrote, ''The nuptuals are celebrated openly before the whole world.''
Entering Linnaeus' garden today, with the 18th-century orangery as a backdrop, the visitor finds a space suggesting a stage set for Mozart's ''Marriage of Figaro'' - the place where the principals hide and meet in their final assignations, betrayals and resolutions. When Linnaeus first moved into the house in the southeast corner of the garden, he complained that residence and garden alike resembled a messy owl's nest. Through neglect, his predecessors had allowed the number of species in the garden to dwindle from 1,870 to 300. With characteristic energy and organization, Linnaeus set about creating the garden we see today. He plied the university for funds to build the orangery, so necessary to growing tender southern plants, which now frames the north end of the garden. Today, the orangery contains a little cafe and art gallery and is used in the summer for literary readings and concerts.
|
The framers of the United States Constitution so highly valued free speech that they enshrined it in the document’s very first amendment. India, the world’s other mammoth democracy, has a first amendment too, but its intent and meaning are quite the opposite.
Lawrence Liang, a legal expert and co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum, a legal collective based in India focused on social justice, has written a sharp legal analysis of the ways in which the fundamental right to free speech in India is limited. He remarks on the irony of the phrase “the First Amendment:” in the United States, he notes, the First Amendment refers to the right to free speech, a right that has been held almost absolute, while in India, the First Amendment refers to the attempt to “strengthen state regulation over free speech.”
That distinction is worth remembering when considering the dustup over Communications Minister Kapil Sibal’s call for “pre-screening” of the Internet, in response to what he sees as a problem of offensive and abusive speech online. While he faced accusations of censorship, his controversial and probably impractical proposal is in keeping with India’s ambiguous relationship with the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.
India certainly allows more freedom of expression than countries like Iraq, Malaysia, Afghanistan, China and North Korea. But the two organizations that rank press freedom, an important indicator of free expression in any society, have consistently ranked India lower than you might expect. India doesn’t even make the top 50 in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2011 ranking: it comes in at number 77, along with Bulgaria and East Timor, behind South Africa, South Korea and Lithuania. Reporters Sans Frontieres ranks India even lower on its press freedom index for 2010. The country is at number 122, below Congo, Indonesia and Nepal.
The intention behind Article 19 (1) a, which guarantees citizens the right to freedom of speech and of expression in India’s Constitution, was inspired in some measure by the U. S. Constitution, which made a profound and lasting commitment to free speech.
In its original form, the fundamental right to free speech and expression in India lasted for two years. By 1951, the first serious curbs and limitations had been placed on free speech, reflecting not just political expediency, but perhaps a larger and very Indian discomfort with the idea of untrammeled freedom of expression.
In 1951, the section of the Constitution that dealt with restrictions on free speech was expanded to include threats to public order as a possible restriction. The state’s control was extended to “reasonable restrictions,” a vague provision that would be debated for decades to come. This was also the decade when the state set a certain direction for book bans.
The 1940s carry the stamp of British prudery and paranoia. Among the books banned by the Raj government in its final years were “The Perfumed Garden,” an erotic manual; incendiary pamphlets on Kashmir; and a potentially inflammatory article that dealt with the life of “Codijah, First and Devoted Wife of Mahomet.” The blanket protection that the U.S. Constitution allotted to free speech—“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—had little counterpart in India.
By the mid-1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government had shifted direction. The political book ban was the most common: a play from Pakistan (Agha Babar’s “Cease-Fire”) and the newspaper Hamara Kashmir were barred from entering India. The decade saw two book bans that would greatly narrow the definition of what was acceptable in terms of free expression. The 1955 ban on Aubrey Menen’s “Rama Retold” revealed a discomfort with religious parody and inquiries into faith. A ban in 1959 on Alexander Campbell’s “Heart of India” was an early indicator of a very Indian prickliness about “outsider” histories that show the country in a bad light.
It is one of the ironies of the history of free speech that the leaders of free India who, often reluctantly, endorsed the growing encroachment of the state on this particular right were those, like Mr. Nehru and Congress Party leader Sardar Patel, who had spent decades fighting for the Indian right to free expression before 1947.
“The First Amendment,” Mr. Liang writes, “signaled the kinds of battles that would take place between the project of nation building and the sphere of the media. It marked the rather premature end of the vision of a ‘seamless web’ with the promotion of national security and sovereignty being prioritized over the promotion of democratic institutions.”
Perhaps no one, not even Mr. Nehru, realized how much of a turning point the First Amendment would be to the fundamental right of free speech. His government had a choice, in independent India, to walk away from the fear-driven bans of the British Raj, where officers scanned books, plays, pamphlets, popular songs and periodicals for any sign of sedition or offensiveness. But they chose a path that privileged the idea that we are a nation of delicate sensibilities that must not be offended over the idea that a democracy is better built on a robust foundation of free expression.
Mr. Sibal’s proposal to pre-screen the Internet is in practical terms impossible, born of a lack of understanding of the nature of the Internet. The only way to filter it of all undesirable and objectionable material is to go down the labor-intensive route that China has followed, where censorship is a thriving economic industry, employing thousands.
But Mr. Sibal’s demands to be shielded from abuse, and his belief that the state has the right to impose controls, is no knee-jerk response to a new problem. It goes back to the time when Mr. Nehru’s government made a deliberate decision to pick up the Imperial burden of censorship, and it has its roots in a deep unease with the implications of a society based on the belief that free expression is a valuable, non-negotiable commodity.
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The framers of the United States Constitution so highly valued free speech that they enshrined it in the document’s very first amendment. India, the world’s other mammoth democracy, has a first amendment too, but its intent and meaning are quite the opposite.
Lawrence Liang, a legal expert and co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum, a legal collective based in India focused on social justice, has written a sharp legal analysis of the ways in which the fundamental right to free speech in India is limited. He remarks on the irony of the phrase “the First Amendment:” in the United States, he notes, the First Amendment refers
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to the right to free speech, a right that has been held almost absolute, while in India, the First Amendment refers to the attempt to “strengthen state regulation over free speech.”
That distinction is worth remembering when considering the dustup over Communications Minister Kapil Sibal’s call for “pre-screening” of the Internet, in response to what he sees as a problem of offensive and abusive speech online. While he faced accusations of censorship, his controversial and probably impractical proposal is in keeping with India’s ambiguous relationship with the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.
India certainly allows more freedom of expression than countries like Iraq, Malaysia, Afghanistan, China and North Korea. But the two organizations that rank press freedom, an important indicator of free expression in any society, have consistently ranked India lower than you might expect. India doesn’t even make the top 50 in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2011 ranking: it comes in at number 77, along with Bulgaria and East Timor, behind South Africa, South Korea and Lithuania. Reporters Sans Frontieres ranks India even lower on its press freedom index for 2010. The country is at number 122, below Congo, Indonesia and Nepal.
The intention behind Article 19 (1) a, which guarantees citizens the right to freedom of speech and of expression in India’s Constitution, was inspired in some measure by the U. S. Constitution, which made a profound and lasting commitment to free speech.
In its original form, the fundamental right to free speech and expression in India lasted for two years. By 1951, the first serious curbs and limitations had been placed on free speech, reflecting not just political expediency, but perhaps a larger and very Indian discomfort with the idea of untrammeled freedom of expression.
In 1951, the section of the Constitution that dealt with restrictions on free speech was expanded to include threats to public order as a possible restriction. The state’s control was extended to “reasonable restrictions,” a vague provision that would be debated for decades to come. This was also the decade when the state set a certain direction for book bans.
The 1940s carry the stamp of British prudery and paranoia. Among the books banned by the Raj government in its final years were “The Perfumed Garden,” an erotic manual; incendiary pamphlets on Kashmir; and a potentially inflammatory article that dealt with the life of “Codijah, First and Devoted Wife of Mahomet.” The blanket protection that the U.S. Constitution allotted to free speech—“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—had little counterpart in India.
By the mid-1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government had shifted direction. The political book ban was the most common: a play from Pakistan (Agha Babar’s “Cease-Fire”) and the newspaper Hamara Kashmir were barred from entering India. The decade saw two book bans that would greatly narrow the definition of what was acceptable in terms of free expression. The 1955 ban on Aubrey Menen’s “Rama Retold” revealed a discomfort with religious parody and inquiries into faith. A ban in 1959 on Alexander Campbell’s “Heart of India” was an early indicator of a very Indian prickliness about “outsider” histories that show the country in a bad light.
It is one of the ironies of the history of free speech that the leaders of free India who, often reluctantly, endorsed the growing encroachment of the state on this particular right were those, like Mr. Nehru and Congress Party leader Sardar Patel, who had spent decades fighting for the Indian right to free expression before 1947.
“The First Amendment,” Mr. Liang writes, “signaled the kinds of battles that would take place between the project of nation building and the sphere of the media. It marked the rather premature end of the vision of a ‘seamless web’ with the promotion of national security and sovereignty being prioritized over the promotion of democratic institutions.”
Perhaps no one, not even Mr. Nehru, realized how much of a turning point the First Amendment would be to the fundamental right of free speech. His government had a choice, in independent India, to walk away from the fear-driven bans of the British Raj, where officers scanned books, plays, pamphlets, popular songs and periodicals for any sign of sedition or offensiveness. But they chose a path that privileged the idea that we are a nation of delicate sensibilities that must not be offended over the idea that a democracy is better built on a robust foundation of free expression.
Mr. Sibal’s proposal to pre-screen the Internet is in practical terms impossible, born of a lack of understanding of the nature of the Internet. The only way to filter it of all undesirable and objectionable material is to go down the labor-intensive route that China has followed, where censorship is a thriving economic industry, employing thousands.
But Mr. Sibal’s demands to be shielded from abuse, and his belief that the state has the right to impose controls, is no knee-jerk response to a new problem. It goes back to the time when Mr. Nehru’s government made a deliberate decision to pick up the Imperial burden of censorship, and it has its roots in a deep unease with the implications of a society based on the belief that free expression is a valuable, non-negotiable commodity.
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Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored? Do you thrive in conditions that seem chaotic to others, or do you like everything well organized? Read what a Science Times article says about new research showing how novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble, can now be a predictor of well-being.
In “What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits,” John Tierney writes:
As researchers analyzed its genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this [novelty-seeking] with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior.
Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being.
“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.
“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”
Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley.
Students: Tell us where you rank on the novelty-seeking, or “neophilia,” scale. Do you thrive in chaos, and embrace change? Do these traits get you into trouble sometimes? Do you agree with those scientists who consider novelty-seeking to be an essential survival skill in a world where new information comes at us faster all the time? Do you also have persistence and “self-transcendence,” or the capacity to “get lost in the moment”? If you do, scientists think you have an especially high chance of life satisfaction, since the three traits can balance each other. If you’re not a novelty-seeker, tell us what traits you have that help you flourish, whether that means feeling happy, having close friends, achieving what you set out to do, or anything else that gives you satisfaction.
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Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored? Do you thrive in conditions that seem chaotic to others, or do you like everything well organized? Read what a Science Times article says about new research showing how novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble, can now be a predictor of well-being.
In “What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits,” John Tierney writes:
As researchers analyzed its genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this [novel
|
ty-seeking] with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior.
Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being.
“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.
“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”
Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley.
Students: Tell us where you rank on the novelty-seeking, or “neophilia,” scale. Do you thrive in chaos, and embrace change? Do these traits get you into trouble sometimes? Do you agree with those scientists who consider novelty-seeking to be an essential survival skill in a world where new information comes at us faster all the time? Do you also have persistence and “self-transcendence,” or the capacity to “get lost in the moment”? If you do, scientists think you have an especially high chance of life satisfaction, since the three traits can balance each other. If you’re not a novelty-seeker, tell us what traits you have that help you flourish, whether that means feeling happy, having close friends, achieving what you set out to do, or anything else that gives you satisfaction.
|
Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: October 6, 2005
Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.
''You see any cracks in that?'' he asked. ''Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked.'' The material ''had to be soft'' to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, ''That's just a theory.''
''It's all theory, right?'' asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. ''Except what's in the Good Book.''
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations -- but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls ''biblical glasses.'' Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.
''Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces,'' Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. ''To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual.''
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.
Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth.
But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge.
Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings ''pretty much in their present form'' within the last 10,000 years.
Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the ''Young Earth'' view.
The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people. Indeed, all the American adults on Mr. Vail's boats voted for President Bush last fall, while all but two on the evolutionists' rafts cast ballots for Senator John Kerry.
When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings.
Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week.
When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each ''geology moment,'' Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, ''My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed.''
Mr. Vail, whose book on the Grand Canyon scientists tried to ban from park stores last year, describes this natural wonder as ''Exhibit A'' for Young Earth creationists. Dr. Scott calls it a scientists' Louvre.
To Kathryn Crotts, 56, a pastor's wife from Greensboro, N.C. , touching the canyon's basement rock was a spiritual moment.
''In the book of Genesis, it talks about God walking the face of the earth,'' Mrs. Crotts explained. ''Maybe His footprints are there.''
But to Charlie Webb, 58, an emergency-room doctor in Colorado Springs, it is evolution that answers ''the great philosophical questions why are we here, where did we come from.''
|
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Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: October 6, 2005
Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,50
|
0 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.
''You see any cracks in that?'' he asked. ''Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked.'' The material ''had to be soft'' to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, ''That's just a theory.''
''It's all theory, right?'' asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. ''Except what's in the Good Book.''
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations -- but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls ''biblical glasses.'' Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.
''Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces,'' Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. ''To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual.''
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.
Science unequivocally dates the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, and the canyon's layers at some two billion years. Even the intelligent design movement, which argues that evolution alone cannot explain life's complexity, does not challenge the long history of the earth.
But a core of creationists like Mr. Vail continue to champion a Bible-based theory of the canyon's carving. And polls show many Americans are unconvinced by scientific knowledge.
Though it did not ask specifically about the global flood or six-day creation, a November 2004 Gallup survey found that a third of the public believes the Bible is the actual word of God that should be taken literally and that 45 percent think God created human beings ''pretty much in their present form'' within the last 10,000 years.
Gallup found in another poll that 5 percent of scientists, and fewer than 1 percent of earth and life scientists, adopted the ''Young Earth'' view.
The twin rafting trips epitomize the parallel universes often inhabited by Americans with polarized positions. Members of both groups said they had signed up for these charters to be surrounded by like-minded people. Indeed, all the American adults on Mr. Vail's boats voted for President Bush last fall, while all but two on the evolutionists' rafts cast ballots for Senator John Kerry.
When not running the rapids, Mr. Vail's group, which included three pastors, sat in makeshift sanctuaries of sand and stone to offer psalms and prayers of praise for their surroundings.
Some were committed creationists and others were still asking questions. But all began with a literal interpretation of the Bible, seeking examples in the rocks to support its story that God did it all in less than a week.
When they made camp, Dr. Scott's rafters, nearly half with Ph.D.'s in science, had evening discussions of tidal patterns and plateau shifts, as well as tutorials on tactics in the evolution debate. Most of them ardently secular, a few practicing believers, they started with what they see as unchallengeable facts about the Earth's age, and dismissed creationism as unscientific. After each ''geology moment,'' Dr. Scott play-acted the creationists, saying sarcastically of their evidence, ''My part of the lesson is always a lot shorter and less detailed.''
Mr. Vail, whose book on the Grand Canyon scientists tried to ban from park stores last year, describes this natural wonder as ''Exhibit A'' for Young Earth creationists. Dr. Scott calls it a scientists' Louvre.
To Kathryn Crotts, 56, a pastor's wife from Greensboro, N.C. , touching the canyon's basement rock was a spiritual moment.
''In the book of Genesis, it talks about God walking the face of the earth,'' Mrs. Crotts explained. ''Maybe His footprints are there.''
But to Charlie Webb, 58, an emergency-room doctor in Colorado Springs, it is evolution that answers ''the great philosophical questions why are we here, where did we come from.''
|
Almost every day, it seems, there is another alarming study about the dangers of being fat or a new theory about its causes and cures. Just this week, VH1 announced a new reality show called ''Flab to Fab,'' in which overweight women get a personal staff to whip them into shape.
But a growing group of historians and cultural critics who study fat say this obsession is based less on science than on morality. Insidious attitudes about politics, sex, race or class are at the heart of the frenzy over obesity, these scholars say, a frenzy they see as comparable to the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism and even the eugenics movement.
''We are in a moral panic about obesity,'' said Sander L. Gilman, distinguished professor of liberal arts, sciences and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of ''Fat Boys: A Slim Book,'' published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. ''People are saying, 'Fat is the doom of Western civilization.' ''
Now, says Peter Stearns, a leading historian in the field, the rising concern with obesity ''is triggering a new burst of scholarship.'' These researchers don't condone morbid obesity, but they do focus on the ways the definition of obesity and its meaning have shifted, often arbitrarily, throughout history.
Mr. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, has written that plumpness was once associated with ''good health in a time when many of the most troubling diseases were wasting diseases like tuberculosis.'' He traces the equation of obesity and moral deficiency to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In 1914, an article in the magazine Living Age, for example, stated, ''Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime.'' Mr. Stearns cites it in an essay he wrote for the aptly named ''Cultures of the Abdomen,'' a collection to be published by Palgrave Macmillan next November, edited by Christopher E. Forth, a senior lecturer at Australian National University, and Ana Carden-Coyne, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, in England. During World War I, Mr. Stearns writes, some popular magazines actually said that eating too much and gaining weight were unpatriotic, presumably because of concerns about food shortages.
In ''Fat Boys,'' Mr. Gilman describes how plumpness used to be associated with affluence and the aristocracy, while today it is associated with the poor and their supposedly bad eating habits. Louis XIV padded his body to look more imposing. During the French Revolution, obesity inspired a rallying cry, ''The People Against the Fat,'' he says. And whereas once the fat man was generally seen as hypersexual, like Falstaff, now he is seen as asexual, like Santa Claus.
The first popular modern diet book, ''Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public,'' written by William Banting, an undertaker, appeared in 1863. Banting wrote that when he was fat he was regarded as a useless parasite. He went on a diet and lost 35 pounds. ''I can honestly assert that I feel restored in health, 'bodily and mentally,' '' he wrote. Before long, Mr. Gilman points out, the word ''banting'' became a synonym for dieting.
In Mr. Stearns's view, 19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. ''I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations,'' he said in an interview. ''Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence,'' Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism.
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Almost every day, it seems, there is another alarming study about the dangers of being fat or a new theory about its causes and cures. Just this week, VH1 announced a new reality show called ''Flab to Fab,'' in which overweight women get a personal staff to whip them into shape.
But a growing group of historians and cultural critics who study fat say this obsession is based less on science than on morality. Insidious attitudes about politics, sex, race or class are at the heart of the frenzy over obesity, these scholars say, a frenzy they see as comparable to the Salem witch trials, Mc
|
Carthyism and even the eugenics movement.
''We are in a moral panic about obesity,'' said Sander L. Gilman, distinguished professor of liberal arts, sciences and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of ''Fat Boys: A Slim Book,'' published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. ''People are saying, 'Fat is the doom of Western civilization.' ''
Now, says Peter Stearns, a leading historian in the field, the rising concern with obesity ''is triggering a new burst of scholarship.'' These researchers don't condone morbid obesity, but they do focus on the ways the definition of obesity and its meaning have shifted, often arbitrarily, throughout history.
Mr. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, has written that plumpness was once associated with ''good health in a time when many of the most troubling diseases were wasting diseases like tuberculosis.'' He traces the equation of obesity and moral deficiency to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In 1914, an article in the magazine Living Age, for example, stated, ''Fat is now regarded as an indiscretion and almost a crime.'' Mr. Stearns cites it in an essay he wrote for the aptly named ''Cultures of the Abdomen,'' a collection to be published by Palgrave Macmillan next November, edited by Christopher E. Forth, a senior lecturer at Australian National University, and Ana Carden-Coyne, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, in England. During World War I, Mr. Stearns writes, some popular magazines actually said that eating too much and gaining weight were unpatriotic, presumably because of concerns about food shortages.
In ''Fat Boys,'' Mr. Gilman describes how plumpness used to be associated with affluence and the aristocracy, while today it is associated with the poor and their supposedly bad eating habits. Louis XIV padded his body to look more imposing. During the French Revolution, obesity inspired a rallying cry, ''The People Against the Fat,'' he says. And whereas once the fat man was generally seen as hypersexual, like Falstaff, now he is seen as asexual, like Santa Claus.
The first popular modern diet book, ''Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public,'' written by William Banting, an undertaker, appeared in 1863. Banting wrote that when he was fat he was regarded as a useless parasite. He went on a diet and lost 35 pounds. ''I can honestly assert that I feel restored in health, 'bodily and mentally,' '' he wrote. Before long, Mr. Gilman points out, the word ''banting'' became a synonym for dieting.
In Mr. Stearns's view, 19th-century changes in attitudes toward obesity were a guilty reaction to the new abundance of food, the rise of the consumer culture and the growth of sedentary work habits. ''I don't think we were comfortable with it because of religious legacies and hesitations,'' he said in an interview. ''Having a target for self-control, like dieting, helped express but also reconcile moral concerns about consumer affluence,'' Mr. Stearns writes; the dieting fad become a new kind of Puritanism.
|
When the Long Island Power Authority said last summer that it was going to need new power capacity in the next few years, most people assumed that meant new generating stations or new transmission cables. But of the 16 companies that submitted proposals, one, AES Energy Storage, took an entirely different tack: it proposed batteries.
When all is said and done, batteries are not a source of energy; in fact, they consume it. For every 10 kilowatt-hours put into a battery, only about nine come back out. The battery is a little like a savings account at a bank, but with a negative interest rate. Still, withdrawals are possible at times when they are most useful.
Batteries are a temporary source of energy and power, with the instantaneous ability to meet load and do work. AES is proposing the use of a 400-megawatt battery, with the same output as a medium-size natural gas plant, that can operate for four hours. It would be about 10 times larger than the biggest grid-connected battery system now in service.
|
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When the Long Island Power Authority said last summer that it was going to need new power capacity in the next few years, most people assumed that meant new generating stations or new transmission cables. But of the 16 companies that submitted proposals, one, AES Energy Storage, took an entirely different tack: it proposed batteries.
When all is said and done, batteries are not a source of energy; in fact, they consume it. For every 10 kilowatt-hours put into a battery, only about nine come back out. The battery is a little like a savings account at a bank, but with a negative interest rate.
|
Still, withdrawals are possible at times when they are most useful.
Batteries are a temporary source of energy and power, with the instantaneous ability to meet load and do work. AES is proposing the use of a 400-megawatt battery, with the same output as a medium-size natural gas plant, that can operate for four hours. It would be about 10 times larger than the biggest grid-connected battery system now in service.
|
shoddy •\ˈshä-dē\• adjective
1. of inferior workmanship and materials
2. designed to deceive or mislead either deliberately or inadvertently
The word shoddy has appeared in 141 New York Times articles in the past year, including on March 12 in “Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives,” by James Glanz and Norimitsu Onishi:
Hidden inside the skeletons of high-rise towers, extra steel bracing, giant rubber pads and embedded hydraulic shock absorbers make modern Japanese buildings among the sturdiest in the world during a major earthquake. And all along the Japanese coast, tsunami warning signs, towering seawalls and well-marked escape routes offer some protection from walls of water.
… Unlike Haiti, where shoddy construction vastly increased the death toll last year, or China, where failure to follow construction codes worsened the death toll in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Japan enforces some of the world’s most stringent building codes. Japanese buildings tend to be much stiffer and stouter than similar structures in earthquake-prone areas in California as well, said Mr. Moehle, the Berkeley engineer: Japan’s building code allows for roughly half as much sway back and forth at the top of a high rise during a major quake.
The Word of the Day and its definitions have been provided by the Visual Thesaurus. Click on the word below to map it and hear it pronounced:
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shoddy •\ˈshä-dē\• adjective
1. of inferior workmanship and materials
2. designed to deceive or mislead either deliberately or inadvertently
The word shoddy has appeared in 141 New York Times articles in the past year, including on March 12 in “Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives,” by James Glanz and Norimitsu Onishi:
Hidden inside the skeletons of high-rise towers, extra steel bracing, giant rubber pads and embedded hydraulic shock absorbers make modern Japanese buildings among the sturdiest in the world during a major earthquake
|
. And all along the Japanese coast, tsunami warning signs, towering seawalls and well-marked escape routes offer some protection from walls of water.
… Unlike Haiti, where shoddy construction vastly increased the death toll last year, or China, where failure to follow construction codes worsened the death toll in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Japan enforces some of the world’s most stringent building codes. Japanese buildings tend to be much stiffer and stouter than similar structures in earthquake-prone areas in California as well, said Mr. Moehle, the Berkeley engineer: Japan’s building code allows for roughly half as much sway back and forth at the top of a high rise during a major quake.
The Word of the Day and its definitions have been provided by the Visual Thesaurus. Click on the word below to map it and hear it pronounced:
|
In the low country, Gullah refers to several things: language, people, and a culture. Though not all speak it, most locally-born African-Americans in the area understand Gullah. More than 300 years old, this rhythmic language has survived, in part, because of the geographic isolation of the people who speak it. Gullah (the word itself is believed to be a version of Angola), an English-based dialect rooted in African languages, is the unique language of the African-Americans of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Descended from thousands of slaves who were imported by planters in the Carolinas during the 18th century, the Gullah people have maintained not only their dialect but also their heritage.
Much of Gullah culture traces back to the African rice coast culture and survives today in the art forms and skills, including sweet-grass basket making, of Sea Islanders. During the colonial period, when rice was king, Africans from the West African rice kingdoms drew high premiums as slaves. Those with basket-making skills were extremely valuable because baskets were needed for agricultural and household use. Still made by hand, sweet-grass baskets are intricate coils of a marsh grass called sweet grass. Highly prized by residents and visitors alike, the baskets are named for the sweet, haylike aroma of the sweet grass. Other Gullah art forms can be seen in hand-carved bateaus and gourds and in hand-tied nets used to catch shrimp in local creeks and rivers.
Nowhere is Gullah culture more evident than in the foods of the region. Rice, of course, appears at nearly every meal. Africans taught planters how to grow rice and how to cook and serve it as well. Like many African dishes, low country dishes use okra, peanuts, benne (the African word for sesame seeds), field peas, and hot peppers. Gullah food reflects the bounty of the islands: shrimp, crabs, oysters, fish, and vegetables such as greens, tomatoes, and corn. Watermelons, indigenous to West Africa, are grown all over the low country.
Many dishes are prepared in one pot, similar to the stew-pot cooking of West Africa. Frogmore stew calls for cooking shrimp, potatoes, sausage, and corn together in one large pot. Hoppin' John -- a one-pot mixture of rice and field peas traditionally served on New Year's Day -- is similar to rice and pigeon peas, a mainstay in West Africa.
The practices of plantation owners unknowingly helped the Gullah culture survive: from praise houses -- one-room houses of worship where Christianity was introduced to keep slaves from running away -- came plantation melodies. These songs live on in performances by groups including the Hallelujah Singers, Sea Island Singers, Mt. Zion Spiritual Singers, and Ron and Natalie Daise, all of whom perform regularly in Charleston and Beaufort.
The Penn Center on St. Helena Island near Beaufort is the unofficial Gullah headquarters, preserving the culture and developing opportunities for Gullahs. Until 1927 or so, St. Helena felt little influence from the outside world. Blacks retained the land, their language, and their unique culture. Many still go shrimping with hand-tied nets, harvest oysters, and grow their own vegetables. Nearby on Daufuskie Island, as well as on Edisto, Wadmalaw and Johns islands near Charleston, Gullah communities can still be found, though development continues to encroach.
A famous Gullah proverb says: If oonuh ent kno weh oonuh dah gwine, oonuh should kno weh oonuh come f'um. Translation: If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you come from.
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In the low country, Gullah refers to several things: language, people, and a culture. Though not all speak it, most locally-born African-Americans in the area understand Gullah. More than 300 years old, this rhythmic language has survived, in part, because of the geographic isolation of the people who speak it. Gullah (the word itself is believed to be a version of Angola), an English-based dialect rooted in African languages, is the unique language of the African-Americans of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Descended from thousands of slaves who were imported by planters in the Carolinas during the
|
18th century, the Gullah people have maintained not only their dialect but also their heritage.
Much of Gullah culture traces back to the African rice coast culture and survives today in the art forms and skills, including sweet-grass basket making, of Sea Islanders. During the colonial period, when rice was king, Africans from the West African rice kingdoms drew high premiums as slaves. Those with basket-making skills were extremely valuable because baskets were needed for agricultural and household use. Still made by hand, sweet-grass baskets are intricate coils of a marsh grass called sweet grass. Highly prized by residents and visitors alike, the baskets are named for the sweet, haylike aroma of the sweet grass. Other Gullah art forms can be seen in hand-carved bateaus and gourds and in hand-tied nets used to catch shrimp in local creeks and rivers.
Nowhere is Gullah culture more evident than in the foods of the region. Rice, of course, appears at nearly every meal. Africans taught planters how to grow rice and how to cook and serve it as well. Like many African dishes, low country dishes use okra, peanuts, benne (the African word for sesame seeds), field peas, and hot peppers. Gullah food reflects the bounty of the islands: shrimp, crabs, oysters, fish, and vegetables such as greens, tomatoes, and corn. Watermelons, indigenous to West Africa, are grown all over the low country.
Many dishes are prepared in one pot, similar to the stew-pot cooking of West Africa. Frogmore stew calls for cooking shrimp, potatoes, sausage, and corn together in one large pot. Hoppin' John -- a one-pot mixture of rice and field peas traditionally served on New Year's Day -- is similar to rice and pigeon peas, a mainstay in West Africa.
The practices of plantation owners unknowingly helped the Gullah culture survive: from praise houses -- one-room houses of worship where Christianity was introduced to keep slaves from running away -- came plantation melodies. These songs live on in performances by groups including the Hallelujah Singers, Sea Island Singers, Mt. Zion Spiritual Singers, and Ron and Natalie Daise, all of whom perform regularly in Charleston and Beaufort.
The Penn Center on St. Helena Island near Beaufort is the unofficial Gullah headquarters, preserving the culture and developing opportunities for Gullahs. Until 1927 or so, St. Helena felt little influence from the outside world. Blacks retained the land, their language, and their unique culture. Many still go shrimping with hand-tied nets, harvest oysters, and grow their own vegetables. Nearby on Daufuskie Island, as well as on Edisto, Wadmalaw and Johns islands near Charleston, Gullah communities can still be found, though development continues to encroach.
A famous Gullah proverb says: If oonuh ent kno weh oonuh dah gwine, oonuh should kno weh oonuh come f'um. Translation: If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you come from.
|
This may be the perfect complement to an article on Wednesday about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to reduce the flow of sewage into the city’s water bodies: a video on YouTube showing a sheet of sewage and storm water coating the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn with a muddy brown.
The video, dated Sept. 16 and already posted on sites like that of Riverkeeper, the environmental group that monitors the city’s waterways, is so graphic that viewers can almost smell the stench. But city officials say it is a prime example of a problem plaguing the city’s ancient sewer system and prompting the designation of the Gowanus and Newtown Creek as federal Superfund sites. Both are scheduled for half-billion-dollar cleanups over the next 10 to 15 years.
When it rains, untreated sewage and storm water can overwhelm sewage treatment plants. So the sewer system releases the combined overflows into bodies of water like New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and, of course, the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek, which straddles Brooklyn and Queens.
The city is already spending billions of dollars under consent orders with the state to upgrade the system so it can handle its waste better. But on Tuesday, the mayor also announced plans for creating a “green infrastructure” to capture and retain storm water before it can reach the sewer system and overload it.
“Gowanus, especially, is one of the drainage areas that can take advantage of green infrastructure,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
In the meantime, the video shows the post-storm, sewage-choked Gowanus in all its fearsome glory.
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This may be the perfect complement to an article on Wednesday about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to reduce the flow of sewage into the city’s water bodies: a video on YouTube showing a sheet of sewage and storm water coating the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn with a muddy brown.
The video, dated Sept. 16 and already posted on sites like that of Riverkeeper, the environmental group that monitors the city’s waterways, is so graphic that viewers can almost smell the stench. But city officials say it is a prime example of a problem plaguing the city’s ancient sewer system and prompting the
|
designation of the Gowanus and Newtown Creek as federal Superfund sites. Both are scheduled for half-billion-dollar cleanups over the next 10 to 15 years.
When it rains, untreated sewage and storm water can overwhelm sewage treatment plants. So the sewer system releases the combined overflows into bodies of water like New York Harbor, Jamaica Bay and, of course, the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek, which straddles Brooklyn and Queens.
The city is already spending billions of dollars under consent orders with the state to upgrade the system so it can handle its waste better. But on Tuesday, the mayor also announced plans for creating a “green infrastructure” to capture and retain storm water before it can reach the sewer system and overload it.
“Gowanus, especially, is one of the drainage areas that can take advantage of green infrastructure,” said Farrell Sklerov, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.
In the meantime, the video shows the post-storm, sewage-choked Gowanus in all its fearsome glory.
|
Thousands of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered in a suburban Washington convention center on Monday for the annual three-day meeting of Arpa-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy. It wasn’t quite the Oscars. At the registration desk, attendees received a goody bag that included a report on clean energy from the Pew Charitable Trusts and a refrigerator magnet that showed the periodic table of the elements.
But the breakout sessions held true to Arpa-E’s tradition: there were lots of swing-for-the-fence ideas. These included finding a high-efficiency, low-cost way to turn surplus natural gas into liquid fuel for cars and trucks, and identifying something to burn other than hydrocarbons so that carbon dioxide is not one of the byproducts.
One researcher proposed burning aluminum instead. One challenge is that the ashes, or oxidized metal, would be hard to recycle back into aluminum without big releases of carbon dioxide.
Arpa-E is the Energy Department’s effort to imitate the better-known Pentagon arm known as the Defense Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Darpa laid the groundwork for the Internet and still finances high-potential ideas in their early speculative stages in the expectation that a few will be major breakthroughs; Arpa-E tries to do the same in energy.
So far the agency has invested $770 million in 285 projects, “and we’re proud of every single one of them,’’ said Cheryl Martin, the agency’s deputy director, in opening remarks to several thousand attendees. Although most will never be commercialized, the strikeouts are not as important as the home runs.
One particularly ambitious idea presented on Monday was to re-engineer plants so that their leaves reflect rather than absorb more light. In an age of global climate change, with shifting rainfall patterns, changing reflectivity holds appeal. The technology would save water, which means saving energy because the water that the plants need often must be pumped. It could prove a way to help crops grow with less rainfall.
Some of those crops can be used to produce energy as well. And increasing the amount of light that bounces back into space would help to limit global warming.
The notion is that crops will absorb light in the visible spectrum yet reflect some of the infrared and ultraviolet light, which heats the leaves. “Plants have a maximum efficiency of about 6 percent,’’ said Robert Conrado, an agency scientist. And plants regulate their temperature much the way people do, by giving off water, which cools as it evaporates. “All energy that is not able to be captured is dissipated as heat,’’ he said. “And that’s a lot of water.’’
In a hot climate, a cornfield can give off the equivalent of eight inches of rainfall in a month, he said, and agricultural irrigation accounts for 81 percent of water use in this country. The proportion is even higher in poorer places, which have fewer dishwashers and washing machines.
And some of that energy would radiate back into space, reducing global warming, Dr. Conrado said.Whether butterfly wings or fruits, he said, “nature has already evolved mechanisms for tailored light reflection.”
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Thousands of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered in a suburban Washington convention center on Monday for the annual three-day meeting of Arpa-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy. It wasn’t quite the Oscars. At the registration desk, attendees received a goody bag that included a report on clean energy from the Pew Charitable Trusts and a refrigerator magnet that showed the periodic table of the elements.
But the breakout sessions held true to Arpa-E’s tradition: there were lots of swing-for-the-fence ideas. These included finding a high-efficiency, low-cost way to turn surplus natural gas into liquid fuel
|
for cars and trucks, and identifying something to burn other than hydrocarbons so that carbon dioxide is not one of the byproducts.
One researcher proposed burning aluminum instead. One challenge is that the ashes, or oxidized metal, would be hard to recycle back into aluminum without big releases of carbon dioxide.
Arpa-E is the Energy Department’s effort to imitate the better-known Pentagon arm known as the Defense Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Darpa laid the groundwork for the Internet and still finances high-potential ideas in their early speculative stages in the expectation that a few will be major breakthroughs; Arpa-E tries to do the same in energy.
So far the agency has invested $770 million in 285 projects, “and we’re proud of every single one of them,’’ said Cheryl Martin, the agency’s deputy director, in opening remarks to several thousand attendees. Although most will never be commercialized, the strikeouts are not as important as the home runs.
One particularly ambitious idea presented on Monday was to re-engineer plants so that their leaves reflect rather than absorb more light. In an age of global climate change, with shifting rainfall patterns, changing reflectivity holds appeal. The technology would save water, which means saving energy because the water that the plants need often must be pumped. It could prove a way to help crops grow with less rainfall.
Some of those crops can be used to produce energy as well. And increasing the amount of light that bounces back into space would help to limit global warming.
The notion is that crops will absorb light in the visible spectrum yet reflect some of the infrared and ultraviolet light, which heats the leaves. “Plants have a maximum efficiency of about 6 percent,’’ said Robert Conrado, an agency scientist. And plants regulate their temperature much the way people do, by giving off water, which cools as it evaporates. “All energy that is not able to be captured is dissipated as heat,’’ he said. “And that’s a lot of water.’’
In a hot climate, a cornfield can give off the equivalent of eight inches of rainfall in a month, he said, and agricultural irrigation accounts for 81 percent of water use in this country. The proportion is even higher in poorer places, which have fewer dishwashers and washing machines.
And some of that energy would radiate back into space, reducing global warming, Dr. Conrado said.Whether butterfly wings or fruits, he said, “nature has already evolved mechanisms for tailored light reflection.”
|
That weather-related catastrophes cause a lot of destruction is well known. But the prospect that increasing floods, droughts and storms will prompt many millions of people to migrate to safer areas is still poorly understood and anticipated, according to a forthcoming report from the Asian Development Bank.
“In the past year alone, extreme weather in Malaysia, Pakistan, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines and Sri Lanka has caused temporary or longer-term dislocation of millions,” the organization, which is based in Manila, said on Monday, citing the study, which is to be released in early March. “This process is set to accelerate in coming decades as climate change leads to more extreme weather.”
No international cooperation mechanism has been set up to manage these migration flows, the bank warned, and protection and assistance plans remain “inadequate, poorly coordinated and scattered.” It urged national governments and the international community to urgently address this issue.
Forecasts of global migration related to environmental factors range from 150 million to 300 million people by the middle of this century, the Asian Development Bank said Monday, and the Asia-Pacific region is expected to be at the epicenter of this trend.
In a report in October, the bank warned that Asia’s coastal megacities would “flood more often, on a larger scale and affect millions more people,” if climate change brings rising sea levels, more intense tropical cyclones and storm surges.
Of the 10 most populous cities with heavy exposure to coastal flooding in 2005 that were cited in that report, five were in Asia: Mumbai; Kolkata, also known as Calcutta; Shanghai; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Guangzhou, China. By 2070, nine of the top 10 cities in terms of population are expected to be in developing countries in Asia.
The resultant migration flows need to be addressed with “greater urgency” and receive “more attention from the region’s decision-makers,” the bank said on Monday.
“We still have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve on this issue in Asia and the Pacific,” said Bob Dobias, head of the Asian Development Bank’s climate change team.
|
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That weather-related catastrophes cause a lot of destruction is well known. But the prospect that increasing floods, droughts and storms will prompt many millions of people to migrate to safer areas is still poorly understood and anticipated, according to a forthcoming report from the Asian Development Bank.
“In the past year alone, extreme weather in Malaysia, Pakistan, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines and Sri Lanka has caused temporary or longer-term dislocation of millions,” the organization, which is based in Manila, said on Monday, citing the study, which is to be released in early March. “This process is set to accelerate in coming decades as climate
|
change leads to more extreme weather.”
No international cooperation mechanism has been set up to manage these migration flows, the bank warned, and protection and assistance plans remain “inadequate, poorly coordinated and scattered.” It urged national governments and the international community to urgently address this issue.
Forecasts of global migration related to environmental factors range from 150 million to 300 million people by the middle of this century, the Asian Development Bank said Monday, and the Asia-Pacific region is expected to be at the epicenter of this trend.
In a report in October, the bank warned that Asia’s coastal megacities would “flood more often, on a larger scale and affect millions more people,” if climate change brings rising sea levels, more intense tropical cyclones and storm surges.
Of the 10 most populous cities with heavy exposure to coastal flooding in 2005 that were cited in that report, five were in Asia: Mumbai; Kolkata, also known as Calcutta; Shanghai; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Guangzhou, China. By 2070, nine of the top 10 cities in terms of population are expected to be in developing countries in Asia.
The resultant migration flows need to be addressed with “greater urgency” and receive “more attention from the region’s decision-makers,” the bank said on Monday.
“We still have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve on this issue in Asia and the Pacific,” said Bob Dobias, head of the Asian Development Bank’s climate change team.
|
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Khumbu Glacier in Nepal in the Himalayas.
Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ended up with a bit of mud on its face when it had to retract an alarming claim in its landmark 2007 assessment: that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” Climate skeptics pilloried the panel for including what proved to be an unsubstantiated and, glaciologists said, unlikely figure. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the head of the panel, called the inclusion of the statistic a “regrettable error.”
In fact, there is still a paucity of scientific information about the Himalayan glaciers, whose melt supplies water to hundreds of millions of mostly poor people in Asia. While historical photographs clearly indicate that some glaciers are retreating in a striking pattern, there is no verifiable sense of how fast this is occurring, which parts of the Himalayas are at greatest risk and what factors influence the melt most, and how.
A paper published recently in Nature Geoscience sets out to systematically and scientifically answer these questions. Using new remote sensing methods and satellite images, Bodo Bookhagen of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Dirk Scherler of the University of Potsdam found that different parts of the Himalayas were reacting differently.
An update from Andy Revkin at Dot Earth: the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has retreated from his request that participating scientists keep a distance from the media.
After months of controversy, a review of the workings of the United Nations’ main scientific body on climate change has just gotten under way in Amsterdam. Over the next few months, a 12-member panel of scientific experts will analyze the makeup, procedures and conduct of the body, known as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The review, organized by Britain’s InterAcademy Council, was requested at a meeting of the United Nations Environment Program in February, and the findings are due in August.
As you may recall, the panel found itself in hot water about six months ago when critics accused it of scientific sloppiness. They also accused the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, of conflicts of interest because he served on some corporate boards.
Yet many noted that the most serious charges originated with a camp that denies that global warming is even under way, even though mainstream scientists agree that human-caused climate change is a reality. Read more…
Harold T. Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University and the University of Michigan, will lead a 12-member panel that will review the practices of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been criticized for errors.
Dr. Shapiro, an economist, will lead a group that was assembled by the InterAcademy Council, an organization of the world’s leading scientific academies, at the request of the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. It will look into the management and review policies of the I.P.C.C. that led to errors in the panel’s most recent report, including a faulty estimate of the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers and several smaller mistakes.
The New York Times Harold T. Shapiro
“We approach this review with an open mind,” Dr. Shapiro said in a statement. “I’m confident we have the experts on this committee necessary to supply the U.N. with a stronger process for providing policy makers the best assessment of climate change possible.”
The I.P.C.C. has been faulted for failing to consider alternate views of climate science, sloppy citation of sources and for reliance on some research that was not properly peer-reviewed. The panel will make recommendations on how to avoid such problems and how to identify and quickly correct errors in future reports. Read more…
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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The Khumbu Glacier in Nepal in the Himalayas.
Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ended up with a bit of mud on its face when it had to retract an alarming claim in its landmark 2007 assessment: that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” Climate skeptics pilloried the panel for including what proved to be an unsubstantiated and, glaciologists said, unlikely figure. Rajendra K. Pachauri,
|
the head of the panel, called the inclusion of the statistic a “regrettable error.”
In fact, there is still a paucity of scientific information about the Himalayan glaciers, whose melt supplies water to hundreds of millions of mostly poor people in Asia. While historical photographs clearly indicate that some glaciers are retreating in a striking pattern, there is no verifiable sense of how fast this is occurring, which parts of the Himalayas are at greatest risk and what factors influence the melt most, and how.
A paper published recently in Nature Geoscience sets out to systematically and scientifically answer these questions. Using new remote sensing methods and satellite images, Bodo Bookhagen of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Dirk Scherler of the University of Potsdam found that different parts of the Himalayas were reacting differently.
An update from Andy Revkin at Dot Earth: the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has retreated from his request that participating scientists keep a distance from the media.
After months of controversy, a review of the workings of the United Nations’ main scientific body on climate change has just gotten under way in Amsterdam. Over the next few months, a 12-member panel of scientific experts will analyze the makeup, procedures and conduct of the body, known as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The review, organized by Britain’s InterAcademy Council, was requested at a meeting of the United Nations Environment Program in February, and the findings are due in August.
As you may recall, the panel found itself in hot water about six months ago when critics accused it of scientific sloppiness. They also accused the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, of conflicts of interest because he served on some corporate boards.
Yet many noted that the most serious charges originated with a camp that denies that global warming is even under way, even though mainstream scientists agree that human-caused climate change is a reality. Read more…
Harold T. Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University and the University of Michigan, will lead a 12-member panel that will review the practices of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been criticized for errors.
Dr. Shapiro, an economist, will lead a group that was assembled by the InterAcademy Council, an organization of the world’s leading scientific academies, at the request of the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. It will look into the management and review policies of the I.P.C.C. that led to errors in the panel’s most recent report, including a faulty estimate of the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers and several smaller mistakes.
The New York Times Harold T. Shapiro
“We approach this review with an open mind,” Dr. Shapiro said in a statement. “I’m confident we have the experts on this committee necessary to supply the U.N. with a stronger process for providing policy makers the best assessment of climate change possible.”
The I.P.C.C. has been faulted for failing to consider alternate views of climate science, sloppy citation of sources and for reliance on some research that was not properly peer-reviewed. The panel will make recommendations on how to avoid such problems and how to identify and quickly correct errors in future reports. Read more…
|
A massage after vigorous exercise unquestionably feels good, and it seems to reduce pain and help muscles recover. Many people — both athletes and health professionals – have long contended it eases inflammation, improves blood flow and reduces muscle tightness. But until now no one has understood why massage has this apparently beneficial effect.
Now researchers have found what happens to muscles when a masseur goes to work on them.
Their experiment required having people exercise to exhaustion and undergo five incisions in their legs in order to obtain muscle tissue for analysis. Despite the hurdles, the scientists still managed to find 11 brave young male volunteers. The study was published in the Feb. 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
On a first visit, they biopsied one leg of each subject at rest. At a second session, they had them vigorously exercise on a stationary bicycle for more than an hour until they could go no further. Then they massaged one thigh of each subject for 10 minutes, leaving the other to recover on its own. Immediately after the massage, they biopsied the thigh muscle in each leg again. After allowing another two-and-a-half hours of rest, they did a third biopsy to track the process of muscle injury and repair.
Vigorous exercise causes tiny tears in muscle fibers, leading to an immune reaction — inflammation — as the body gets to work repairing the injured cells. So the researchers screened the tissue from the massaged and unmassaged legs to compare their repair processes, and find out what difference massage would make.
They found that massage reduced the production of compounds called cytokines, which play a critical role in inflammation. Massage also stimulated mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside cells that convert glucose into the energy essential for cell function and repair. “The bottom line is that there appears to be a suppression of pathways in inflammation and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis,” helping the muscle adapt to the demands of increased exercise, said the senior author, Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky.
Dr. Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said that massage works quite differently from Nsaids and other anti-inflammatory drugs, which reduce inflammation and pain but may actually retard healing. Many people, for instance, pop an aspirin or Aleve at the first sign of muscle soreness. “There’s some theoretical concern that there is a maladaptive response in the long run if you’re constantly suppressing inflammation with drugs,” he said. “With massage, you can have your cake and eat it too—massage can suppress inflammation and actually enhance cell recovery.”
“This is important research, because it is the first to show that massage can reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines which may be involved in pain,” said Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School. She was not involved in the study. “We have known from many studies that pain can be reduced by massage based on self-report, but this is the first demonstration that the pain-related pro-inflammatory cytokines can be reduced.” she said.
Getting a massage from a professional masseur is obviously more expensive than taking an aspirin. But, as Dr. Field points out, massage techniques can be taught. “People within families can learn to massage each other,” she said. “If you can teach parents to massage kids, couples to massage each other. This can be cost effective.”
Dr. Tarnopolsky suggests that, in the long run, a professional massage may even be a better bargain than a pill. “If someone says “This is free and it might make you feel better, but it may slow down your recovery, do you still want it?” he asked. “Or would you rather spend the 50 bucks for a post-exercise massage that also might enhance your recovery?”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified where mitochondria are found; they are inside of cells, but in the cytoplasm, not the nuclei.
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A massage after vigorous exercise unquestionably feels good, and it seems to reduce pain and help muscles recover. Many people — both athletes and health professionals – have long contended it eases inflammation, improves blood flow and reduces muscle tightness. But until now no one has understood why massage has this apparently beneficial effect.
Now researchers have found what happens to muscles when a masseur goes to work on them.
Their experiment required having people exercise to exhaustion and undergo five incisions in their legs in order to obtain muscle tissue for analysis. Despite the hurdles, the scientists still managed to find 11 brave young male volunteers. The
|
study was published in the Feb. 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine.
On a first visit, they biopsied one leg of each subject at rest. At a second session, they had them vigorously exercise on a stationary bicycle for more than an hour until they could go no further. Then they massaged one thigh of each subject for 10 minutes, leaving the other to recover on its own. Immediately after the massage, they biopsied the thigh muscle in each leg again. After allowing another two-and-a-half hours of rest, they did a third biopsy to track the process of muscle injury and repair.
Vigorous exercise causes tiny tears in muscle fibers, leading to an immune reaction — inflammation — as the body gets to work repairing the injured cells. So the researchers screened the tissue from the massaged and unmassaged legs to compare their repair processes, and find out what difference massage would make.
They found that massage reduced the production of compounds called cytokines, which play a critical role in inflammation. Massage also stimulated mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside cells that convert glucose into the energy essential for cell function and repair. “The bottom line is that there appears to be a suppression of pathways in inflammation and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis,” helping the muscle adapt to the demands of increased exercise, said the senior author, Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky.
Dr. Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said that massage works quite differently from Nsaids and other anti-inflammatory drugs, which reduce inflammation and pain but may actually retard healing. Many people, for instance, pop an aspirin or Aleve at the first sign of muscle soreness. “There’s some theoretical concern that there is a maladaptive response in the long run if you’re constantly suppressing inflammation with drugs,” he said. “With massage, you can have your cake and eat it too—massage can suppress inflammation and actually enhance cell recovery.”
“This is important research, because it is the first to show that massage can reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines which may be involved in pain,” said Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School. She was not involved in the study. “We have known from many studies that pain can be reduced by massage based on self-report, but this is the first demonstration that the pain-related pro-inflammatory cytokines can be reduced.” she said.
Getting a massage from a professional masseur is obviously more expensive than taking an aspirin. But, as Dr. Field points out, massage techniques can be taught. “People within families can learn to massage each other,” she said. “If you can teach parents to massage kids, couples to massage each other. This can be cost effective.”
Dr. Tarnopolsky suggests that, in the long run, a professional massage may even be a better bargain than a pill. “If someone says “This is free and it might make you feel better, but it may slow down your recovery, do you still want it?” he asked. “Or would you rather spend the 50 bucks for a post-exercise massage that also might enhance your recovery?”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified where mitochondria are found; they are inside of cells, but in the cytoplasm, not the nuclei.
|
Scientists studied 6,183 women over age 65, tracking their fat consumption and changes in their mental abilities over four years. The women completed a food questionnaire at the start of the study, then periodically took tests of mental ability.
The researchers assigned a “change score” to each volunteer, summarizing changes in memory and abstract thinking over time — the lower the score, the greater the decline. The study appeared online Thursday in the journal Annals of Neurology.
After controlling for many health and socioeconomic factors, the researchers found that women who consumed the most saturated fat were 60 percent more likely than those consuming the least to have change scores that put them below the 10th percentile. On the other hand, women who reported consuming the most monounsaturated fat were 44 percent less likely to have change scores in lowest one-tenth. Consumption of polyunsaturated fats and trans fats was not associated with any change, nor was total fat.
“People might consider making changes or substitutions in their diet, switching out saturated fats in favor of monounsaturated fats,” said the lead author, Dr. Olivia I. Okereke, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard.
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Scientists studied 6,183 women over age 65, tracking their fat consumption and changes in their mental abilities over four years. The women completed a food questionnaire at the start of the study, then periodically took tests of mental ability.
The researchers assigned a “change score” to each volunteer, summarizing changes in memory and abstract thinking over time — the lower the score, the greater the decline. The study appeared online Thursday in the journal Annals of Neurology.
After controlling for many health and socioeconomic factors, the researchers found that women who consumed the most saturated fat were 60 percent more likely than those
|
consuming the least to have change scores that put them below the 10th percentile. On the other hand, women who reported consuming the most monounsaturated fat were 44 percent less likely to have change scores in lowest one-tenth. Consumption of polyunsaturated fats and trans fats was not associated with any change, nor was total fat.
“People might consider making changes or substitutions in their diet, switching out saturated fats in favor of monounsaturated fats,” said the lead author, Dr. Olivia I. Okereke, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard.
|
May 23, 2013,
Iron in Diet
News & Features
For about a decade, a project called HarvestPlus has been promoting an idea for fighting malnutrition in the third world: develop crops with higher levels of vitamins and minerals. Now HarvestPlus will get a chance to put its plan into action. It received a $25 million grant last week from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation giving it the money to jump-start its effort. The approach represents ''a new paradigm of agriculture as an instrument for public health,'' said Joachim Voss, director general of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, an organization involved in the HarvestPlus program. The first goal will be to increase levels of iron, zinc and vitamin A in third world staple crops like rice, wheat, cassava and beans.
Surviving the Heat Think it's hot, eh? Had enough of 90-degree days? Tired of coming back from lunch to have a colleague ask if you have been splashing around in a fountain, when it's just sweat that's soaking through your shirt? Sorry, but you don't know hot.
A new study has found the first physical clue to the cause of restless leg syndrome, a condition that disturbs the sleep of millions of Americans. The syndrome, which causes sufferers to move their legs frequently to avoid unpleasant sensations like tingling and throbbing, particularly at night, has sometimes been considered psychological.
Pregnancy and childbirth are rife with hazards. Those factors under personal control -- like weight issues and poor nutrition, overwork or lack of fitness -- should not become additional burdens. Unfortunately, for many millions of women of childbearing age, one or more of these problems compromise their chances of having a healthy, full-term pregnancy and increase the health risks to both mothers and their babies.
With growing concerns about the adequacy of the nation's blood supply, blood bank officials may welcome a new study suggesting that people with an uncommon blood disease can make suitable donors. The study, published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at people with hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder in which they retain too much iron in their blood. The overabundance of iron can lead to organ damage.
ACE inhibitors are among the most widely used drugs used to treat heart disease and high blood pressure. But despite their proven benefits, many patients find they cannot take them because they bring on a persistent dry cough. Now researchers believe that iron supplements may be the remedy. Writing in the current issue of Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, scientists say it appears that small amounts of iron can suppress the cough.
Pitter-Patter Geckos have admirable stick-to-itiveness, as anyone who has watched one of the lizards scamper across a ceiling can attest. But just how they are able to adhere to surfaces has never been completely understood. Now, scientists at Berkeley, Stanford and Lewis and Clark College have gone a long way toward solving the riddle. Geckos don't use suction, or friction or some kind of gluelike secretion. Instead, they appear to rely on the weak molecular interactions known as Van der Waals forces for their staying power.
From Fries to Fuel Diesel engines are hardly picky eaters. In addition to petroleum-based fuel, they will run, relatively cleanly, on just about any kind of vegetable oil. But a driver can't simply pour a bottle of Mazola into the tank. A bit of chemistry has to take place first. And there, alas, is the rub. Converting vegetable oil into diesel fuel takes time, can be done only in batches and creates a waste water problem.
The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, arguably the most influential pediatrician of all time, has left children and their parents with a surprising and rather demanding legacy: advice that they stick to a vegetarian diet devoid of all dairy products after the age of 2. In the seventh edition of his world-famous book, ''Baby and Child Care,'' issued last month by Pocket Books just weeks after his death at age 94, Dr. Spock recommends an approach to childhood nutrition that many experts, including his co-author, Dr. Steven J. Parker, consider too extreme and likely to result in nutritional deficiencies unless it is very carefully planned and executed.
GENERATIONS of Americans have been exhorted to eat spinach or liver for the iron that supposedly made Popeye's muscles bulge or to take iron-rich tonics like Geritol to revive their ''tired blood.'' But while some iron in the diet is critical for health and life itself, the overconsumption or overabsorption of this well-known mineral is now under intense scrutiny as a possible cause or contributor to killer ailments like heart disease and cancer as well as serious infections. The story of iron is a classic illustration of ''Just because a little is good does not mean more is better.'' Iron is essential to the formation of the oxygen-carrying pigments: hemoglobin in the blood and myoglobin in the muscles. But people should not take iron supplements or stuff themselves with iron-rich foods unless medical tests have demonstrated an iron deficiency, those who study iron overload warn. Some researchers are also concerned about the widespread use of vitamin C supplements, which can enhance the absorption of dietary iron when both are present in the gut at the same time. And questions have been raised about the wisdom of fortifying cereals and bread with iron in a country like the United States where a lot of iron-rich meat is consumed by most people.
THE idea is to fertilize the sea with iron, creating such a bloom of sea plants that they gulp down tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and curb the buildup of this climate-warming gas. Long derided as foolish and politically dangerous, the idea has now been put to the test after years of foot dragging and has given strikingly good results, stirring hot debate over whether ecological tinkering might help save the planet from climatic disaster.
An international group of researchers is working to develop nutrient-enriched varieties of rice, corn and other common food crops to help prevent malnutrition, disease and death in millions of the world's poorest people. Wheat varieties that are twice as adept as commonly grown strains at extracting zinc and iron from the soil and packing the minerals into seeds have already been developed by Robin Graham, a plant scientist at the University of Adelaide's Waite Agricultural Research Institute in Australia.
TWENTY years ago, nutritionists routinely predicted dire consequences for people who did not eat meat. Today it's difficult to find a nutritionist who will not, at least grudgingly, admit that a vegetarian diet, especially a lacto-ovo one, which includes milk and eggs, can even be perfectly adequate for proper growth. And there are those who will tell you that vegetarians are likely to have a better quality of life and live a lot longer than people who eat meat. But even the most enthusiastic advocates of vegetarianism acknowledge that someone following such a diet has to know a lot more about nutrition than the ordinary omnivore. And especially when it comes to the eating habits of growing children.
Three women who say they were fed a solution with radioactive iron as part of a nutrition study filed a lawsuit today on behalf of more than 800 women. The suit seeks damages from Vanderbilt University, its medical center and others for deaths, illnesses and emotional suffering by women involved in the study, which began in 1945 and lasted four years.
"AT $5 a box I'm not going to buy any of those," said the woman who was poring over the shelves of cold cereals at a supermarket. "I'm going to stick with oatmeal." She was reflecting a growing sentiment among shoppers that cold cereals, as well as many other brand-name products, cost too much. And they are registering their disapproval in numerous ways: switching to other brands or waiting for coupons and two-for-one offers that reduce the cost by as much as $1.
IN a startling report published last year, a Finnish study suggested that a high level of iron more than doubles the risk for heart attacks in men. Now three new American studies have left the issue of iron as a risk factor for heart attacks far from settled. The new studies do not dispute the Finnish report, but they do not confirm its findings, either, researchers said at a meeting of the American Heart Association last week in Santa Fe, N.M.
THE Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine, whose interests include both preventive medicine and alternatives to animal research, has declared war on that great American icon milk. "Parents," the committee said in a statement released in Boston yesterday, "should be alerted to the potential risks to their children from cow's-milk products." It added, "Milk should not be required or recommended in Government guidelines." But while many pediatric experts say that cow's milk should not be given to infants, they strongly disagree with some of the committee's recommendations.
Iron has long been considered safe and a promoter of good health. But a new study from Finland raises the possibility that high levels of iron may increase the risk of heart attacks. The study of more than 1,900 men from 42 to 60 years old found that the risk of heart attacks was greater among men with high levels of iron than those with lower amounts.
Surprising new findings from a large study in Finland show that high levels of iron are a strong risk factor for heart attacks. The study, which is being reported today in a leading scientific journal, provides the first empirical evidence for a theory advanced 11 years ago that high amounts of iron promote heart attacks and low levels protect against them.
The young children of employed women fare as well nutritionally as the children of full-time homemakers, a new study has found. But the bad news is that many children in both groups eat too much fat and too little calcium, iron, zinc and vitamin E.
Iron supplements, which some children mistake for candy, are the biggest cause of accidental poisoning deaths of children under 6 years old, a new study reports. The study, which looked at poisoning deaths over an eight-year period, also found pesticides, kerosene and lighter fluid to be leading killers of small children.
FIFTEEN years ago reducing regimes like the grapefruit diet, the Stillman diet, and "five pounds in five days of chicken" were detailed in the pages of women's magazines, promising a quick fix for everything from thunder thighs to those embarrassingly protruding tummies. Today, such high-protein diets -- grapefruit and beef, or hard-boiled eggs and beef, or chicken -- have been shunted from the quick-weight-loss spotlight and back to the wings where starchy foods and the occasional dessert once lurked. While nutritionists say that most Americans consume nearly twice as much animal protein as necessary, they warn that protein deficiency can lead to anemia in women of child-bearing age and to growth deficiency in young children.
LEAD: Ten years ago almost every cookbook remotely connected with nutrition was for a reducing diet. Today, the nutrition-related cookbooks are more concerned with overall health than with weight reduction.
LEAD: COULD it be that such fashionable ingredients as broccoli di rape, chilies, morels, carambola, passion fruit and cherimoyas add not only variety to the modern diet but also a generous dose of good health?
LEAD: Can infants grow and develop normally on a diet devoid of all animal products except mother's milk? Can teen-agers and young adults mature properly and meet the physical, intellectual and emotional demands of their lives if they eat no meat, chicken or fish? Can you tell if your children are getting enough of the needed nutrients from a vegetarian diet, and what the risks are if they don't?
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May 23, 2013,
Iron in Diet
News & Features
For about a decade, a project called HarvestPlus has been promoting an idea for fighting malnutrition in the third world: develop crops with higher levels of vitamins and minerals. Now HarvestPlus will get a chance to put its plan into action. It received a $25 million grant last week from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation giving it the money to jump-start its effort. The approach represents ''a new paradigm of agriculture as an instrument for public health,'' said Joachim Voss, director general of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia,
|
an organization involved in the HarvestPlus program. The first goal will be to increase levels of iron, zinc and vitamin A in third world staple crops like rice, wheat, cassava and beans.
Surviving the Heat Think it's hot, eh? Had enough of 90-degree days? Tired of coming back from lunch to have a colleague ask if you have been splashing around in a fountain, when it's just sweat that's soaking through your shirt? Sorry, but you don't know hot.
A new study has found the first physical clue to the cause of restless leg syndrome, a condition that disturbs the sleep of millions of Americans. The syndrome, which causes sufferers to move their legs frequently to avoid unpleasant sensations like tingling and throbbing, particularly at night, has sometimes been considered psychological.
Pregnancy and childbirth are rife with hazards. Those factors under personal control -- like weight issues and poor nutrition, overwork or lack of fitness -- should not become additional burdens. Unfortunately, for many millions of women of childbearing age, one or more of these problems compromise their chances of having a healthy, full-term pregnancy and increase the health risks to both mothers and their babies.
With growing concerns about the adequacy of the nation's blood supply, blood bank officials may welcome a new study suggesting that people with an uncommon blood disease can make suitable donors. The study, published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at people with hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder in which they retain too much iron in their blood. The overabundance of iron can lead to organ damage.
ACE inhibitors are among the most widely used drugs used to treat heart disease and high blood pressure. But despite their proven benefits, many patients find they cannot take them because they bring on a persistent dry cough. Now researchers believe that iron supplements may be the remedy. Writing in the current issue of Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, scientists say it appears that small amounts of iron can suppress the cough.
Pitter-Patter Geckos have admirable stick-to-itiveness, as anyone who has watched one of the lizards scamper across a ceiling can attest. But just how they are able to adhere to surfaces has never been completely understood. Now, scientists at Berkeley, Stanford and Lewis and Clark College have gone a long way toward solving the riddle. Geckos don't use suction, or friction or some kind of gluelike secretion. Instead, they appear to rely on the weak molecular interactions known as Van der Waals forces for their staying power.
From Fries to Fuel Diesel engines are hardly picky eaters. In addition to petroleum-based fuel, they will run, relatively cleanly, on just about any kind of vegetable oil. But a driver can't simply pour a bottle of Mazola into the tank. A bit of chemistry has to take place first. And there, alas, is the rub. Converting vegetable oil into diesel fuel takes time, can be done only in batches and creates a waste water problem.
The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, arguably the most influential pediatrician of all time, has left children and their parents with a surprising and rather demanding legacy: advice that they stick to a vegetarian diet devoid of all dairy products after the age of 2. In the seventh edition of his world-famous book, ''Baby and Child Care,'' issued last month by Pocket Books just weeks after his death at age 94, Dr. Spock recommends an approach to childhood nutrition that many experts, including his co-author, Dr. Steven J. Parker, consider too extreme and likely to result in nutritional deficiencies unless it is very carefully planned and executed.
GENERATIONS of Americans have been exhorted to eat spinach or liver for the iron that supposedly made Popeye's muscles bulge or to take iron-rich tonics like Geritol to revive their ''tired blood.'' But while some iron in the diet is critical for health and life itself, the overconsumption or overabsorption of this well-known mineral is now under intense scrutiny as a possible cause or contributor to killer ailments like heart disease and cancer as well as serious infections. The story of iron is a classic illustration of ''Just because a little is good does not mean more is better.'' Iron is essential to the formation of the oxygen-carrying pigments: hemoglobin in the blood and myoglobin in the muscles. But people should not take iron supplements or stuff themselves with iron-rich foods unless medical tests have demonstrated an iron deficiency, those who study iron overload warn. Some researchers are also concerned about the widespread use of vitamin C supplements, which can enhance the absorption of dietary iron when both are present in the gut at the same time. And questions have been raised about the wisdom of fortifying cereals and bread with iron in a country like the United States where a lot of iron-rich meat is consumed by most people.
THE idea is to fertilize the sea with iron, creating such a bloom of sea plants that they gulp down tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and curb the buildup of this climate-warming gas. Long derided as foolish and politically dangerous, the idea has now been put to the test after years of foot dragging and has given strikingly good results, stirring hot debate over whether ecological tinkering might help save the planet from climatic disaster.
An international group of researchers is working to develop nutrient-enriched varieties of rice, corn and other common food crops to help prevent malnutrition, disease and death in millions of the world's poorest people. Wheat varieties that are twice as adept as commonly grown strains at extracting zinc and iron from the soil and packing the minerals into seeds have already been developed by Robin Graham, a plant scientist at the University of Adelaide's Waite Agricultural Research Institute in Australia.
TWENTY years ago, nutritionists routinely predicted dire consequences for people who did not eat meat. Today it's difficult to find a nutritionist who will not, at least grudgingly, admit that a vegetarian diet, especially a lacto-ovo one, which includes milk and eggs, can even be perfectly adequate for proper growth. And there are those who will tell you that vegetarians are likely to have a better quality of life and live a lot longer than people who eat meat. But even the most enthusiastic advocates of vegetarianism acknowledge that someone following such a diet has to know a lot more about nutrition than the ordinary omnivore. And especially when it comes to the eating habits of growing children.
Three women who say they were fed a solution with radioactive iron as part of a nutrition study filed a lawsuit today on behalf of more than 800 women. The suit seeks damages from Vanderbilt University, its medical center and others for deaths, illnesses and emotional suffering by women involved in the study, which began in 1945 and lasted four years.
"AT $5 a box I'm not going to buy any of those," said the woman who was poring over the shelves of cold cereals at a supermarket. "I'm going to stick with oatmeal." She was reflecting a growing sentiment among shoppers that cold cereals, as well as many other brand-name products, cost too much. And they are registering their disapproval in numerous ways: switching to other brands or waiting for coupons and two-for-one offers that reduce the cost by as much as $1.
IN a startling report published last year, a Finnish study suggested that a high level of iron more than doubles the risk for heart attacks in men. Now three new American studies have left the issue of iron as a risk factor for heart attacks far from settled. The new studies do not dispute the Finnish report, but they do not confirm its findings, either, researchers said at a meeting of the American Heart Association last week in Santa Fe, N.M.
THE Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine, whose interests include both preventive medicine and alternatives to animal research, has declared war on that great American icon milk. "Parents," the committee said in a statement released in Boston yesterday, "should be alerted to the potential risks to their children from cow's-milk products." It added, "Milk should not be required or recommended in Government guidelines." But while many pediatric experts say that cow's milk should not be given to infants, they strongly disagree with some of the committee's recommendations.
Iron has long been considered safe and a promoter of good health. But a new study from Finland raises the possibility that high levels of iron may increase the risk of heart attacks. The study of more than 1,900 men from 42 to 60 years old found that the risk of heart attacks was greater among men with high levels of iron than those with lower amounts.
Surprising new findings from a large study in Finland show that high levels of iron are a strong risk factor for heart attacks. The study, which is being reported today in a leading scientific journal, provides the first empirical evidence for a theory advanced 11 years ago that high amounts of iron promote heart attacks and low levels protect against them.
The young children of employed women fare as well nutritionally as the children of full-time homemakers, a new study has found. But the bad news is that many children in both groups eat too much fat and too little calcium, iron, zinc and vitamin E.
Iron supplements, which some children mistake for candy, are the biggest cause of accidental poisoning deaths of children under 6 years old, a new study reports. The study, which looked at poisoning deaths over an eight-year period, also found pesticides, kerosene and lighter fluid to be leading killers of small children.
FIFTEEN years ago reducing regimes like the grapefruit diet, the Stillman diet, and "five pounds in five days of chicken" were detailed in the pages of women's magazines, promising a quick fix for everything from thunder thighs to those embarrassingly protruding tummies. Today, such high-protein diets -- grapefruit and beef, or hard-boiled eggs and beef, or chicken -- have been shunted from the quick-weight-loss spotlight and back to the wings where starchy foods and the occasional dessert once lurked. While nutritionists say that most Americans consume nearly twice as much animal protein as necessary, they warn that protein deficiency can lead to anemia in women of child-bearing age and to growth deficiency in young children.
LEAD: Ten years ago almost every cookbook remotely connected with nutrition was for a reducing diet. Today, the nutrition-related cookbooks are more concerned with overall health than with weight reduction.
LEAD: COULD it be that such fashionable ingredients as broccoli di rape, chilies, morels, carambola, passion fruit and cherimoyas add not only variety to the modern diet but also a generous dose of good health?
LEAD: Can infants grow and develop normally on a diet devoid of all animal products except mother's milk? Can teen-agers and young adults mature properly and meet the physical, intellectual and emotional demands of their lives if they eat no meat, chicken or fish? Can you tell if your children are getting enough of the needed nutrients from a vegetarian diet, and what the risks are if they don't?
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Alison Zimbalist, The New York Times Learning Network
Subjects: Journalism, Language Arts, Social Studies
Review the Academic Content Standards related to this lesson. Suggested Time Allowance:
1. Assess the place in history of significant events and birthdays found on today's On This Day in History page of The New York Times Learning Network.
2. Explore the historic significance of a recent front-page New York Times event by reading and discussing "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce."
3. Analyze how historic New York Times front page articles reflect the values and language of the times in which they were written, as well as provide accounts of significant events as they happened.
4. Evaluate today's Times front page from the perspective of the student as historian in the year 2030.
Resources / Materials:
-copies of today's On This Day in History page (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday) (one per student)
-copies of "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce" (one per student)
-copies of several historic New York Times front pages from the On This Day in History archives (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/archive.html) (click on the image of the front page on each day's On This Day page to access the scans and transcriptions; choose one historic front page for each small group, and make enough copies of each article for each member of a group)
-copies of the most current New York Times front page [one per student; alternately, you might print out copies of the front page of The New York Times on the Web, which provides short summaries of many articles, found at (http://www.nytimes.com)]
--Read the brief description of the historic Times front page for today. Why do you think that this event was selected as a very significant event in history? How do you think this event impacted history?
--Read the brief description of the historic person born on this day in history. Why do you think that this person is featured as a very significant person born on this day? How do you think this person impacted history?
--Read the list of historic events that happened on this day in history. In what way did each event impact history?
--Compare the lists of current birthdays and historic birthdays of people born on this day in history. What similarities and differences do you note regarding the impacts of these people on history?
Review answers with the class.
2. As a class, read and discuss "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce," focusing on the following questions (note to teachers: any front page New York Times article can be used for this exercise):
3. Distribute copies of historic Times front pages to groups. Each group should be assigned a different article, and each student in a group should receive a copy of that article. You may select front pages that relate specifically to content covered in your class (such as all science-related or all American history-related articles), or use the following suggestions [the archive is found at (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/archive.html)]:
-death of Theodore Roosevelt on January 6, 1919 (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0106.html)
Each group reads its article together and responds to the following questions in short answers on a piece of paper (written on the board for easier student access):
4. WRAP-UP/HOMEWORK: Students respond to the following (written on the board for them to copy before leaving class): "Carefully review the front page of the most current New York Times (NOTE TO TEACHER: you may wish to distribute front pages of the paper or the Web site before students leave class). Then, imagine that you are a historian in the year 2030. Write an analysis of how the day in history presented on this now-historic Times front page is remembered in your time. Since you were a student when these events occurred, be sure to share not only how the events impact today's society in 2030, but also reflect on their importance in the year in which they happened." Students should share their writings in a future class.
--Why might one news story be presented differently in different countries? What examples can you think of to support this?
--How and why has language changed over the past 100 years? What does language reflect about society?
--How are front page articles at a newspaper selected on a daily basis?
2. Research a historic time period or event. Then, create on a poster a New York Times front page for a significant day in that era or event. Include all of the details that one sees on a Times front page, such as the name of the paper, other "masthead" information, headlines, photos, articles, etc. Display your work in the classroom.
3. Find your birthday in the On This Day in History archive (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/onthisday/archive.html), and look at the articles, events and birthdays presented. To what people and events do you feel connected, and why? If you could add yourself as a birthday, how would you describe yourself?
4. Choose a historic New York Times front page from the On This Day in History archive (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/onthisday/archive.html), and look at the other headlines provided from that day in history. Try to locate the text of the other articles that made the front page, and assess their importance in history at the time when they were written. (Most local and university libraries have the entire New York Times archive in microfiche. Articles after 1980 are also available on CD-ROM).
Media Studies- Keep a log of the top stories on both a local and national news broadcast on one night. Then, compare these stories to the front page stories in the next day's paper. What similarities and differences do you note, and why?
Science- Create an On This Day in Science page similar to the On This Day in History page of The New York Times Learning Network. Teachers may assign one significant day to each student. Write a news story covering what you feel was the most important scientific achievement on this day, as well as a related biography of a person in the science world born on this day.
Technology- Compare a print newspaper front page to the front page of the paper's Web site. What stories do these front pages share, and which differ? Why might this be?
History Channel: This Day in History (http://www.historychannel.com/tdih/) offers historic events in a number of categories.
This lesson plan may be used to address the academic standards listed below. These standards are drawn from Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K-12 Education: 2nd Edition and have been provided courtesy of the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colorado. In addition, this lesson plan may be used to address the academic standards of a specific state. Links are provided where available from each McREL standard to the Achieve website containing state standards for over 40 states. The state standards are from Achieve's National Standards Clearinghouse and have been provided courtesy of Achieve, Inc. in Cambridge Massachusetts and Washington, DC.
Historical Understanding Standard 2: Understands the historical perspective. Benchmarks: Understands that specific individuals and the values those individuals held had an impact on history; Analyzes the influence specific ideas and beliefs had on a period of history; Analyzes the effect that specific "chance events" had on history; Analyzes the effects specific decisions had on history
Connect to State Standard
Language Arts Standard 1: Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses style and structure appropriate for specific audiences and purposes; Writes narrative accounts; Writes in response to literature
Connect to State Standard
Language Arts Standard 7: Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of informational texts. Benchmarks: Applies reading skills and strategies to a variety of informational texts; Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of informational texts; Identifies techniques used to convey viewpoint; Seeks peer help to understand information; Draws conclusions and makes inferences based on explicit and implicit information in texts;; Differentiates between fact and opinion in informational texts
Connect to State Standard
Send feedback on this lesson.
Browse or search the lesson plan archive.
|
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Alison Zimbalist, The New York Times Learning Network
Subjects: Journalism, Language Arts, Social Studies
Review the Academic Content Standards related to this lesson. Suggested Time Allowance:
1. Assess the place in history of significant events and birthdays found on today's On This Day in History page of The New York Times Learning Network.
2. Explore the historic significance of a recent front-page New York Times event by reading and discussing "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce."
3. Analyze how historic New York Times front page articles reflect the values and language
|
of the times in which they were written, as well as provide accounts of significant events as they happened.
4. Evaluate today's Times front page from the perspective of the student as historian in the year 2030.
Resources / Materials:
-copies of today's On This Day in History page (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday) (one per student)
-copies of "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce" (one per student)
-copies of several historic New York Times front pages from the On This Day in History archives (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/archive.html) (click on the image of the front page on each day's On This Day page to access the scans and transcriptions; choose one historic front page for each small group, and make enough copies of each article for each member of a group)
-copies of the most current New York Times front page [one per student; alternately, you might print out copies of the front page of The New York Times on the Web, which provides short summaries of many articles, found at (http://www.nytimes.com)]
--Read the brief description of the historic Times front page for today. Why do you think that this event was selected as a very significant event in history? How do you think this event impacted history?
--Read the brief description of the historic person born on this day in history. Why do you think that this person is featured as a very significant person born on this day? How do you think this person impacted history?
--Read the list of historic events that happened on this day in history. In what way did each event impact history?
--Compare the lists of current birthdays and historic birthdays of people born on this day in history. What similarities and differences do you note regarding the impacts of these people on history?
Review answers with the class.
2. As a class, read and discuss "President Heads to Mideast Talks Hoping for Truce," focusing on the following questions (note to teachers: any front page New York Times article can be used for this exercise):
3. Distribute copies of historic Times front pages to groups. Each group should be assigned a different article, and each student in a group should receive a copy of that article. You may select front pages that relate specifically to content covered in your class (such as all science-related or all American history-related articles), or use the following suggestions [the archive is found at (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/archive.html)]:
-death of Theodore Roosevelt on January 6, 1919 (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0106.html)
Each group reads its article together and responds to the following questions in short answers on a piece of paper (written on the board for easier student access):
4. WRAP-UP/HOMEWORK: Students respond to the following (written on the board for them to copy before leaving class): "Carefully review the front page of the most current New York Times (NOTE TO TEACHER: you may wish to distribute front pages of the paper or the Web site before students leave class). Then, imagine that you are a historian in the year 2030. Write an analysis of how the day in history presented on this now-historic Times front page is remembered in your time. Since you were a student when these events occurred, be sure to share not only how the events impact today's society in 2030, but also reflect on their importance in the year in which they happened." Students should share their writings in a future class.
--Why might one news story be presented differently in different countries? What examples can you think of to support this?
--How and why has language changed over the past 100 years? What does language reflect about society?
--How are front page articles at a newspaper selected on a daily basis?
2. Research a historic time period or event. Then, create on a poster a New York Times front page for a significant day in that era or event. Include all of the details that one sees on a Times front page, such as the name of the paper, other "masthead" information, headlines, photos, articles, etc. Display your work in the classroom.
3. Find your birthday in the On This Day in History archive (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/onthisday/archive.html), and look at the articles, events and birthdays presented. To what people and events do you feel connected, and why? If you could add yourself as a birthday, how would you describe yourself?
4. Choose a historic New York Times front page from the On This Day in History archive (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/onthisday/archive.html), and look at the other headlines provided from that day in history. Try to locate the text of the other articles that made the front page, and assess their importance in history at the time when they were written. (Most local and university libraries have the entire New York Times archive in microfiche. Articles after 1980 are also available on CD-ROM).
Media Studies- Keep a log of the top stories on both a local and national news broadcast on one night. Then, compare these stories to the front page stories in the next day's paper. What similarities and differences do you note, and why?
Science- Create an On This Day in Science page similar to the On This Day in History page of The New York Times Learning Network. Teachers may assign one significant day to each student. Write a news story covering what you feel was the most important scientific achievement on this day, as well as a related biography of a person in the science world born on this day.
Technology- Compare a print newspaper front page to the front page of the paper's Web site. What stories do these front pages share, and which differ? Why might this be?
History Channel: This Day in History (http://www.historychannel.com/tdih/) offers historic events in a number of categories.
This lesson plan may be used to address the academic standards listed below. These standards are drawn from Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K-12 Education: 2nd Edition and have been provided courtesy of the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning in Aurora, Colorado. In addition, this lesson plan may be used to address the academic standards of a specific state. Links are provided where available from each McREL standard to the Achieve website containing state standards for over 40 states. The state standards are from Achieve's National Standards Clearinghouse and have been provided courtesy of Achieve, Inc. in Cambridge Massachusetts and Washington, DC.
Historical Understanding Standard 2: Understands the historical perspective. Benchmarks: Understands that specific individuals and the values those individuals held had an impact on history; Analyzes the influence specific ideas and beliefs had on a period of history; Analyzes the effect that specific "chance events" had on history; Analyzes the effects specific decisions had on history
Connect to State Standard
Language Arts Standard 1: Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies of the writing process. Benchmarks: Uses style and structure appropriate for specific audiences and purposes; Writes narrative accounts; Writes in response to literature
Connect to State Standard
Language Arts Standard 7: Demonstrates competence in the general skills and strategies for reading a variety of informational texts. Benchmarks: Applies reading skills and strategies to a variety of informational texts; Knows the defining characteristics of a variety of informational texts; Identifies techniques used to convey viewpoint; Seeks peer help to understand information; Draws conclusions and makes inferences based on explicit and implicit information in texts;; Differentiates between fact and opinion in informational texts
Connect to State Standard
Send feedback on this lesson.
Browse or search the lesson plan archive.
|
The population of gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region is healthy enough that it no longer merits protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal Fish and Wildlife said Friday.
The proposed rule change, which is likely to be challenged by environmentalists, states that gray wolves are thriving in the region, with more than 4,000 counted in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
“Wolves in the western Great Lakes have achieved recovery,” Rowan Gould, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s acting director, said in a statement.
Once federal protection is ended, individual states would be required to adopt management plans to ensure that wolf populations remained healthy.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, praised the proposal. “The focus here is to restore balance to the natural habitat and I’m glad this important first step has been taken,” she was quoted as saying by The Minneapolis Post.
The agency will take public comment on the proposed rule change for 60 days, giving ample time for opponents to prepare a legal challenge. A previous attempt by federal officials to strip protections from the wolves was stymied by lawsuits by environmental groups.
The agency is bracing for another legal battle on the issue, Laura Ragan, a wildlife biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service, told The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
“No matter what we put out there, they probably will challenge it,” Ms. Ragan said. “My hope is we have come up with something that is solid and can withstand that litigation.”
The proposal comes only a few days after Congress took the controversial step of removing gray wolf populations in Montana and Idaho from the endangered species list. It was the first time a species had been dropped from the list through the direct intervention of federal legislators, and the decision was criticized by conservationists as a triumph of politics over science.
Unlike the delisting proposed for the Great Lakes wolves, the removal of federal protections for the Idaho and Montana wolves cannot be overturned by a federal judge.
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The population of gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region is healthy enough that it no longer merits protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal Fish and Wildlife said Friday.
The proposed rule change, which is likely to be challenged by environmentalists, states that gray wolves are thriving in the region, with more than 4,000 counted in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
“Wolves in the western Great Lakes have achieved recovery,” Rowan Gould, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s acting director, said in a statement.
Once federal protection is ended, individual states would be required to adopt management plans to ensure that
|
wolf populations remained healthy.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, praised the proposal. “The focus here is to restore balance to the natural habitat and I’m glad this important first step has been taken,” she was quoted as saying by The Minneapolis Post.
The agency will take public comment on the proposed rule change for 60 days, giving ample time for opponents to prepare a legal challenge. A previous attempt by federal officials to strip protections from the wolves was stymied by lawsuits by environmental groups.
The agency is bracing for another legal battle on the issue, Laura Ragan, a wildlife biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service, told The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
“No matter what we put out there, they probably will challenge it,” Ms. Ragan said. “My hope is we have come up with something that is solid and can withstand that litigation.”
The proposal comes only a few days after Congress took the controversial step of removing gray wolf populations in Montana and Idaho from the endangered species list. It was the first time a species had been dropped from the list through the direct intervention of federal legislators, and the decision was criticized by conservationists as a triumph of politics over science.
Unlike the delisting proposed for the Great Lakes wolves, the removal of federal protections for the Idaho and Montana wolves cannot be overturned by a federal judge.
|
THE FEED; In the Farm Bill, a Creature From the Black Lagoon?
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: January 13, 2008
IT may not surprise you to learn that much of the pork and chicken and beef and milk that you buy at the grocery store comes from huge, industrial-size operations that bear little resemblance to the quaint family farms that adorn many food packages.
But you may be surprised to learn that your tax dollars have helped pave the way for the growth of these livestock megafarms by paying farmers to deal with the mountains of excrement that their farms generate. All of this is carried out under the rubric of ''conservation.'' Congress is about to renew the program -- and possibly even expand it -- as part of a new farm bill wending its way through the Capitol.
It's called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, also known as EQIP -- a name that suggests an initiative to encourage farmers to improve environmental standards.
And, in fact, when the program was created as part of the 1996 farm bill, that's exactly what it was. At the time, the government agreed to pay a share -- up to 75 percent -- of a conservation project, and the payments were limited to $10,000 a year. Farmers used the money for small-scale projects that had environmental benefits, like planting cover crops to prevent erosion and soak up excess nitrogen or installing fencing to better manage grazing cattle.
But in the 2002 farm bill, the program was changed at the livestock industry's behest, and funding for the program was raised from $200 million a year to, eventually, $1.3 billion. Yearly payment limits were scratched, replaced by a provision that farmers could get no more than $450,000 during the bill's life.
Another change: large-scale livestock facilities that once were not eligible for EQIP money were encouraged to participate under the 2002 bill.
As a result, many farmers are using their EQIP money for animal waste management practices, which include helping to pay for lagoons to store manure. The lagoons are lined ponds that are used to keep the waste until it can be pumped out for some other use, usually as fertilizer on nearby fields. In some instances, manure lagoons have leaked or overflowed into the groundwater or neighboring streams.
They don't smell very nice, either. So I'm sure families living downwind of the lagoons would be pleased to learn their tax dollars helped to finance them.
For the 2006 fiscal year, for instance, the Department of Agriculture paid farmers about $179 million for animal waste management practices, with Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina getting the most money. More recent data was not available, nor were individual payments.
That compares with $125 million for soil erosion and sediment control, $139 million for irrigation water management and $74 million for grazing land practices, according to Department of Agriculture records.
Livestock industry officials argue that farmers should be allowed to use EQIP money for animal waste to help comply with environmental regulations for air and water quality.
Christopher Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, argues that bigger livestock farms should be eligible for more EQIP money, not less, because they are the focus of the strictest regulations. (Farms with more than 1,000 animal units, equal to 700 dairy cows, face tougher regulations.) ''If larger farms are going to be viewed -- accurately or not -- as part of the problem, then the resources necessary to implement the solution also need to be available to those farms,'' he said in a statement.
Others maintain that EQIP money has helped to stop runoff from farms that was polluting local and regional waterways.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, says that while he doesn't believe conservation funds should be spent on industrial livestock farms, the money is a relatively small share of the EQIP total. He says that most of it is spent on valuable environmental initiatives.
The questions, then, remain: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for manure lagoons, particularly under the flag of environmental conservation? Why should taxpayers subsidize expansion of livestock farms? And if livestock farms have created environmental problems, shouldn't the polluters have to pay for the mess that they created, rather than the taxpayers?
''Having a lagoon that doesn't leak into groundwater, that's the cost of doing business,'' said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. ''You shouldn't be justifying that as a conservation payment. You are building things that have been proven time and time again to cause severe environmental damage when they misfunction.''
Much criticism of the proposed farm bill has focused on subsidy payments to farmers, particularly when they are receiving sky-high prices for corn, soybeans and wheat. EQIP doesn't get nearly the same level of scrutiny, in part because environmentalists are split on the merits of using EQIP money to manage manure on big farms.
THE Senate passed a version of the farm bill that includes about the same amount for EQIP in coming years. A proposal to scale back individual payments to a $240,000 maximum was squelched in part by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who maintains that construction costs are higher in the Northeast and that EQIP money is helping to clean up Lake Champlain.
Industrial dairies and manure lagoons in Vermont? Guess I'll rent a cabin in New Hampshire next summer.
The House version of the farm bill would expand EQIP by taking money from another conservation program. The House and Senate will work out their differences in conference committee. But I doubt that they will change the payment formula for EQIP.
So if Congress is to keep sending taxpayer money to farmers to build manure lagoons, it may want to consider a more honest name for the program.
How about ''Factory Farm Incentive Program''?
The DealBook column now appears on Tuesdays.
PHOTO: A hog farm and manure lagoon in Iowa. Many farmers use money from a federal program for animal waste management practices, which include using lagoons to store manure. (PHOTOGRAPH BY IOWA CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT)
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THE FEED; In the Farm Bill, a Creature From the Black Lagoon?
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: January 13, 2008
IT may not surprise you to learn that much of the pork and chicken and beef and milk that you buy at the grocery store comes from huge, industrial-size operations that bear little resemblance to the quaint family farms that adorn many food packages.
But you may be surprised to learn that your tax dollars have helped pave the way for the growth of these livestock megafarms by paying farmers to deal with the mountains of excrement that their farms generate
|
. All of this is carried out under the rubric of ''conservation.'' Congress is about to renew the program -- and possibly even expand it -- as part of a new farm bill wending its way through the Capitol.
It's called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, also known as EQIP -- a name that suggests an initiative to encourage farmers to improve environmental standards.
And, in fact, when the program was created as part of the 1996 farm bill, that's exactly what it was. At the time, the government agreed to pay a share -- up to 75 percent -- of a conservation project, and the payments were limited to $10,000 a year. Farmers used the money for small-scale projects that had environmental benefits, like planting cover crops to prevent erosion and soak up excess nitrogen or installing fencing to better manage grazing cattle.
But in the 2002 farm bill, the program was changed at the livestock industry's behest, and funding for the program was raised from $200 million a year to, eventually, $1.3 billion. Yearly payment limits were scratched, replaced by a provision that farmers could get no more than $450,000 during the bill's life.
Another change: large-scale livestock facilities that once were not eligible for EQIP money were encouraged to participate under the 2002 bill.
As a result, many farmers are using their EQIP money for animal waste management practices, which include helping to pay for lagoons to store manure. The lagoons are lined ponds that are used to keep the waste until it can be pumped out for some other use, usually as fertilizer on nearby fields. In some instances, manure lagoons have leaked or overflowed into the groundwater or neighboring streams.
They don't smell very nice, either. So I'm sure families living downwind of the lagoons would be pleased to learn their tax dollars helped to finance them.
For the 2006 fiscal year, for instance, the Department of Agriculture paid farmers about $179 million for animal waste management practices, with Iowa, Wisconsin and North Carolina getting the most money. More recent data was not available, nor were individual payments.
That compares with $125 million for soil erosion and sediment control, $139 million for irrigation water management and $74 million for grazing land practices, according to Department of Agriculture records.
Livestock industry officials argue that farmers should be allowed to use EQIP money for animal waste to help comply with environmental regulations for air and water quality.
Christopher Galen, spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, argues that bigger livestock farms should be eligible for more EQIP money, not less, because they are the focus of the strictest regulations. (Farms with more than 1,000 animal units, equal to 700 dairy cows, face tougher regulations.) ''If larger farms are going to be viewed -- accurately or not -- as part of the problem, then the resources necessary to implement the solution also need to be available to those farms,'' he said in a statement.
Others maintain that EQIP money has helped to stop runoff from farms that was polluting local and regional waterways.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, says that while he doesn't believe conservation funds should be spent on industrial livestock farms, the money is a relatively small share of the EQIP total. He says that most of it is spent on valuable environmental initiatives.
The questions, then, remain: Why should taxpayers foot the bill for manure lagoons, particularly under the flag of environmental conservation? Why should taxpayers subsidize expansion of livestock farms? And if livestock farms have created environmental problems, shouldn't the polluters have to pay for the mess that they created, rather than the taxpayers?
''Having a lagoon that doesn't leak into groundwater, that's the cost of doing business,'' said Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. ''You shouldn't be justifying that as a conservation payment. You are building things that have been proven time and time again to cause severe environmental damage when they misfunction.''
Much criticism of the proposed farm bill has focused on subsidy payments to farmers, particularly when they are receiving sky-high prices for corn, soybeans and wheat. EQIP doesn't get nearly the same level of scrutiny, in part because environmentalists are split on the merits of using EQIP money to manage manure on big farms.
THE Senate passed a version of the farm bill that includes about the same amount for EQIP in coming years. A proposal to scale back individual payments to a $240,000 maximum was squelched in part by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who maintains that construction costs are higher in the Northeast and that EQIP money is helping to clean up Lake Champlain.
Industrial dairies and manure lagoons in Vermont? Guess I'll rent a cabin in New Hampshire next summer.
The House version of the farm bill would expand EQIP by taking money from another conservation program. The House and Senate will work out their differences in conference committee. But I doubt that they will change the payment formula for EQIP.
So if Congress is to keep sending taxpayer money to farmers to build manure lagoons, it may want to consider a more honest name for the program.
How about ''Factory Farm Incentive Program''?
The DealBook column now appears on Tuesdays.
PHOTO: A hog farm and manure lagoon in Iowa. Many farmers use money from a federal program for animal waste management practices, which include using lagoons to store manure. (PHOTOGRAPH BY IOWA CITIZENS FOR COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT)
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The World Future Council, a group of 50 activists, politicians and thinkers from around the world, is focused on finding ways to prevent today’s actions from constraining tomorrow’s choices. The group just wrapped up a two-day symposium in Montreal at which more than 100 experts in international law explored ways to use legal tools, most of which are oriented toward doling out justice among those alive now, to avert what amount to crimes against the future.
These include such actions as driving species to extinction and adding long-lived greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in ways that have few impacts now, but could disrupt climate patterns, ocean ecosystems and coastal settlements in decades to come. In a news release, the council said that world leaders, through decades of statements on sustainable development, have pledged to balance current needs with the obligation to avoid impoverishing the future. “But the legal enforcement of these agreements is still very limited,” it noted.
In a news release, C.G. Weeramantry, a member of the council and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, described the group’s goal this way:
We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come. This forecloses to future generations their rights to the basic fundamentals of civilized existence: acknowledging them as holders of rights in the eyes of our law.”
This harks back to a post here about a proposal for the creation of a government position of “legal guardian of future generations.”
What do you think? Are we mature enough as a species to safeguard the rights of future generations without the threat of a day in court?
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The World Future Council, a group of 50 activists, politicians and thinkers from around the world, is focused on finding ways to prevent today’s actions from constraining tomorrow’s choices. The group just wrapped up a two-day symposium in Montreal at which more than 100 experts in international law explored ways to use legal tools, most of which are oriented toward doling out justice among those alive now, to avert what amount to crimes against the future.
These include such actions as driving species to extinction and adding long-lived greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in ways that have few impacts now, but could disrupt climate patterns, ocean ecosystems
|
and coastal settlements in decades to come. In a news release, the council said that world leaders, through decades of statements on sustainable development, have pledged to balance current needs with the obligation to avoid impoverishing the future. “But the legal enforcement of these agreements is still very limited,” it noted.
In a news release, C.G. Weeramantry, a member of the council and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, described the group’s goal this way:
We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come. This forecloses to future generations their rights to the basic fundamentals of civilized existence: acknowledging them as holders of rights in the eyes of our law.”
This harks back to a post here about a proposal for the creation of a government position of “legal guardian of future generations.”
What do you think? Are we mature enough as a species to safeguard the rights of future generations without the threat of a day in court?
|
Better get used to it. More frequent and intense storms are what studies and New York City’s own panel on climate change have predicted for the city as average temperatures and sea levels rise over the next decades.
By midcentury, city officials say, New York City’s average temperature is projected to increase three to five degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels are expected to rise by more than two feet. By the end of the century, they say, New York City may feel more like North Carolina.
Hurricane Irene is a reminder of the city’s vulnerabilities, but some environmental groups say the good news is that the city is taking steps to prepare.
“We consider New York City to be one of the leaders nationally,” said Ben Chou, a water policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “They are already looking at how climate change is going to impact the city.”
The N.R.D.C. this month released a report summarizing water-related threats to a dozen cities around the country. Most face increased flooding and problems like shoreline erosion and saltwater intrusion into sources of drinking water. The report recommends that cities undertake full assessments of the risks now so they can start protecting their water resources and taking other necessary measures to prepare.
New York City has already convened a panel on climate change and an adaptation task force. It has also begun investing in environmental techniques to capture and retain storm water and is moving critical equipment in city buildings to higher elevations— like pump motors and circuit breakers at the Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant in Queens.
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Better get used to it. More frequent and intense storms are what studies and New York City’s own panel on climate change have predicted for the city as average temperatures and sea levels rise over the next decades.
By midcentury, city officials say, New York City’s average temperature is projected to increase three to five degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels are expected to rise by more than two feet. By the end of the century, they say, New York City may feel more like North Carolina.
Hurricane Irene is a reminder of the city’s vulnerabilities, but some environmental groups say the good news is that the city is taking steps
|
to prepare.
“We consider New York City to be one of the leaders nationally,” said Ben Chou, a water policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “They are already looking at how climate change is going to impact the city.”
The N.R.D.C. this month released a report summarizing water-related threats to a dozen cities around the country. Most face increased flooding and problems like shoreline erosion and saltwater intrusion into sources of drinking water. The report recommends that cities undertake full assessments of the risks now so they can start protecting their water resources and taking other necessary measures to prepare.
New York City has already convened a panel on climate change and an adaptation task force. It has also begun investing in environmental techniques to capture and retain storm water and is moving critical equipment in city buildings to higher elevations— like pump motors and circuit breakers at the Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant in Queens.
|
Daniel Song, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, writes from Hovsgol National Park, Mongolia, where he is studying how plants and pollinators form interaction networks.
Tuesday, June 21
Next time you grab a snack or sit down for a meal, take a minute to think about what you’re eating; chances are plants and insect pollinators were involved. Tomatoes, almonds, apples and coffee are just a few examples of the hundreds of foods consumed daily by people around the world that are insect-pollinated. How do pollinators behave in natural habitats? What goes into the decision to pollinate a certain flowering species? What is it about the flowers that attract pollinators? Especially in light of colony collapse disorder, it is ever more important that we study how natural plant communities maintain their pollination services.
Our field site in the Dalbay Valley is interesting in that it has, in close proximity, two drastically different areas: the valley floor and the upper slope. The two areas differ in almost every way: plants, soil moisture, air temperature and grazing pressure, to name just a few. Using this natural divide, I can compare and contrast pollination activity in two ecologically distinct areas. As for the pollinators, there is a diverse collection of insect pollinators buzzing around: butterflies, moths, hoverflies and bumblebees, among others.
In this beautiful backdrop, I spend my summers in northern Mongolia studying floral visual cues and pollinators. My dissertation work is divided into two parts: measuring floral and pollinator traits and monitoring pollinator visitation to flowers. The traits I am looking to measure are ones that are relevant in the act of pollinating. Take, for example, two traits I am measuring: the depth of the flower (corolla tube depth) and bumblebee tongue (proboscis) length. One reason for pollinators to visit flowers is to extract energy in the form of sugary, caloric nectar. The nectar typically sits at the base of the flower, and to reach it the bumblebee has to unfurl its tongue to taste the flower’s sweet reward. If the depth of the flower is longer than the tongue of the bumblebee, it’s unlikely that the bumblebee would visit that flower to get nectar. Corolla tube depth can, in an overly simplistic case, explain why certain bumblebees visit, or do not visit, certain flowers.
What connects the floral traits and the pollinator traits to each other is the monitoring of pollinator visitation to the flowers. The observations are painstaking and tedious but provide the key to the lock. I set up several four-square-meter plots upslope and on the valley floor to monitor pollinator visitation and flower production daily. Recording pollinator visitation to the flowers allows us to link their respective traits. This allows us to see if any repeating patterns emerge, as in the example with the corolla depth and proboscis: longer-tongued bees exclusively visit deeper flower tubes.
I will spend a full 11 summer weeks at the field site to capture the beginning and end of pollination activity as well as flower production. As the climate changes, plant and animal communities may respond in unpredictable ways. Natural pollination services (involving both the flower and pollinator) need to be studied now to anticipate how one of our most precious natural commodities will be affected.
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Daniel Song, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, writes from Hovsgol National Park, Mongolia, where he is studying how plants and pollinators form interaction networks.
Tuesday, June 21
Next time you grab a snack or sit down for a meal, take a minute to think about what you’re eating; chances are plants and insect pollinators were involved. Tomatoes, almonds, apples and coffee are just a few examples of the hundreds of foods consumed daily by people around the world that are insect-pollinated. How do pollinators behave in natural habitats? What goes into the decision to
|
pollinate a certain flowering species? What is it about the flowers that attract pollinators? Especially in light of colony collapse disorder, it is ever more important that we study how natural plant communities maintain their pollination services.
Our field site in the Dalbay Valley is interesting in that it has, in close proximity, two drastically different areas: the valley floor and the upper slope. The two areas differ in almost every way: plants, soil moisture, air temperature and grazing pressure, to name just a few. Using this natural divide, I can compare and contrast pollination activity in two ecologically distinct areas. As for the pollinators, there is a diverse collection of insect pollinators buzzing around: butterflies, moths, hoverflies and bumblebees, among others.
In this beautiful backdrop, I spend my summers in northern Mongolia studying floral visual cues and pollinators. My dissertation work is divided into two parts: measuring floral and pollinator traits and monitoring pollinator visitation to flowers. The traits I am looking to measure are ones that are relevant in the act of pollinating. Take, for example, two traits I am measuring: the depth of the flower (corolla tube depth) and bumblebee tongue (proboscis) length. One reason for pollinators to visit flowers is to extract energy in the form of sugary, caloric nectar. The nectar typically sits at the base of the flower, and to reach it the bumblebee has to unfurl its tongue to taste the flower’s sweet reward. If the depth of the flower is longer than the tongue of the bumblebee, it’s unlikely that the bumblebee would visit that flower to get nectar. Corolla tube depth can, in an overly simplistic case, explain why certain bumblebees visit, or do not visit, certain flowers.
What connects the floral traits and the pollinator traits to each other is the monitoring of pollinator visitation to the flowers. The observations are painstaking and tedious but provide the key to the lock. I set up several four-square-meter plots upslope and on the valley floor to monitor pollinator visitation and flower production daily. Recording pollinator visitation to the flowers allows us to link their respective traits. This allows us to see if any repeating patterns emerge, as in the example with the corolla depth and proboscis: longer-tongued bees exclusively visit deeper flower tubes.
I will spend a full 11 summer weeks at the field site to capture the beginning and end of pollination activity as well as flower production. As the climate changes, plant and animal communities may respond in unpredictable ways. Natural pollination services (involving both the flower and pollinator) need to be studied now to anticipate how one of our most precious natural commodities will be affected.
|
Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
A recent report by the American Association of University Women found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields). Does your own experience bear out these findings? Why do you think fewer women go into these fields?
In “Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences,” Tamar Lewin reports that researchers examined decades of research to cull recommendations for drawing more women into the STEM fields:
The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”
At the top level of math abilities, where boys are overrepresented, the report found that the gender gap is rapidly shrinking. Among mathematically precocious youth — sixth and seventh graders who score more than 700 on the math SAT — 30 years ago boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1, but only about 3 to 1 now.
“That’s not biology at play, it doesn’t change so fast,” Ms. Hill said. “Even if there are biological factors in boys outnumbering girls, they’re clearly not the whole story. There’s a real danger in assuming that innate differences are important in determining who will succeed, so we looked at the cultural factors, to see what evidence there is on the nurture side of nature or nurture.”
The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.
Students: Tell us about your experiences with science, technology, engineering or math, in school or out. Have you seen or experienced the kinds of stereotypes and biases described in this article? Why do you think women are underrepresented in these fields? What do you think could be done about it?
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Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
A recent report by the American Association of University Women found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields). Does your own experience bear out these findings? Why do you think fewer women go into these fields?
In “Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences,” Tamar Lewin reports that researchers examined decades of research to cull recommendations for drawing more women into the STEM fields:
The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But
|
Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”
At the top level of math abilities, where boys are overrepresented, the report found that the gender gap is rapidly shrinking. Among mathematically precocious youth — sixth and seventh graders who score more than 700 on the math SAT — 30 years ago boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1, but only about 3 to 1 now.
“That’s not biology at play, it doesn’t change so fast,” Ms. Hill said. “Even if there are biological factors in boys outnumbering girls, they’re clearly not the whole story. There’s a real danger in assuming that innate differences are important in determining who will succeed, so we looked at the cultural factors, to see what evidence there is on the nurture side of nature or nurture.”
The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.
Students: Tell us about your experiences with science, technology, engineering or math, in school or out. Have you seen or experienced the kinds of stereotypes and biases described in this article? Why do you think women are underrepresented in these fields? What do you think could be done about it?
|
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
The Family Health Clinic of Carroll County, in Delphi, Ind., and its smaller sibling about 40 minutes away in Monon provide full-service health care for about 10,000 people a year, most of them farmers or employees of the local pork production plant. About half the patients are Hispanic but there are also many German Baptist Brethren. Most of the patients are uninsured, and pay according to their income — the vast majority paying the $20 minimum charge for an appointment. About 30 percent are on Medicaid. The clinics, which are part of Purdue University’s School of Nursing, offer family care, pediatrics, mental health and pregnancy care. Many patients come in for chronic problems: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression, alcoholism.
Doctors are trained to focus on a disease. Nurses are trained to think more holistically.
What these clinics don’t offer are doctors. They are two of around 250 health clinics across America run completely by nurse practitioners: nurses with a master’s degree that includes two or three years of advanced training in diagnosing and treating disease. A proposal endorsed by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing for 2015 would require nurse practitioners to have a doctorate of nursing practice, which would mean two or three more years of study. Nurse practitioners do everything primary care doctors do, including prescribing, although some states require that a physician provide review. Like doctors, of course, nurse practitioners refer patients to specialists or a hospital when needed.
America has a serious shortage of primary care physicians, and the deficit is growing. The population is aging — and getting sicker, with chronic disease ever more prevalent. Obamacare will bring 32 million uninsured people into the health system — and these newbies will need a lot of medical care. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, the United States will be short some 45,000 primary care physicians by 2020.
The primary care physicians who do exist are badly distributed — 90 percent of internal medicine physicians, for example, work in urban areas. Some doctors go to work in rural areas or the poor parts of major cities, treating people who have Medicaid or no insurance. But they are few.
In part it’s the money. Primary care doctors make less than specialists anywhere, but they take an even larger financial hit to treat the poor. Particularly in the countryside — even with programs that offer partial loan forgiveness, it’s very hard to pay off medical school debt treating Medicaid patients, much less those with no insurance at all.
And the job of a primary care doctor today is largely managing chronic disease — coordinating the patient’s care with specialists, convincing him to exercise or eat better. Poor patients can be a frustrating struggle. Compared with wealthier patients, they tend to have more serious diseases and fewer resources for getting better. They are less educated, take worse care of themselves and have lower levels of compliance with doctors’ orders. Very few people start medical school hoping to do this kind of work. Those who do it may burn out quickly.
It might seem that offering the rural poor a clinic staffed only by nurses is to give them second-class primary care. It is not. The alternative for residents of Carroll County was not first-class primary care, but none. Before the clinic opened in 1996, the area had some family physicians, but very few accepted Medicaid or uninsured patients. When people got sick, they went to the emergency room. Or they waited it out — and then often landed in the emergency room anyway, now much sicker.
Just as important, while nurses take a different approach to patient care than doctors, it has proven just as effective. It might be particularly useful for treating chronic diseases, where so much depends on the patients’ behavioral choices.
Doctors are trained to focus on a disease — what is it? How do we make it go away?
Nurses are trained to think more holistically. The medical profession is trying to get doctors to ask about their patients’ lives, listen more, coach more and lecture less — being “patient-centered” is the term — in order to better understand what ails them.
“I’ve been out of nursing school since 1972 and I still remember that when faculty members finished talking about the scientific parts of the disease they would talk about the psycho-social part,” said Donna Torrisi, the executive director of the Family Practice and Counseling Network, which has three clinics in Philadelphia. “It’s not about the disease, it’s about the person who has the disease. While in the hospital you’ll often hear doctors refer to a patient as ‘the cardiac down the hall.’”
Younger doctors are no doubt better at this than their older peers. But the system conspires against them. The 15-minute appointment standard in fee-for-service medicine — which pays doctors according to how many patients they see and treatments they provide — makes it unlikely that doctors will spend time discussing a patient’s life in any detail. Physician reimbursement places a zero value on talking to the patient. But nurse practitioners are salaried, giving them the luxury of time. At the Family Health clinics, appointments last half an hour — an hour for a new diabetic or pregnant patient.
Jennifer Coddington, a pediatric nurse practitioner who is a co-clinical director of Family Health Clinics, said that she spends a lot of time teaching patients and their families about their diseases and how to manage it. “We want to know socially and economically what’s going on in their life — their educational level, how are they making it financially,” she said. “You can’t teach patients if you’re not at their educational level. And if a patient can’t afford something, what’s the point of trying to prescribe it? He’s going to be non-compliant.”
A physician might suggest that a patient lose weight and hand him a diet plan — or refer him to a nutritionist. At the Family Health clinics, nutrition counselors — graduate students at Purdue — will sit down with patients to talk about the specific consequence of their diet, and suggest good foods and how to cook them, Coddington said. “When you don’t have enough money to buy fruits and vegetables, so you go to the dollar menu at McDonald’s — we help those people put planners together for the week.”
Data has shown that nurse practitioners provide good health care. A review of 118 published studies over 18 years comparing health outcomes and patient satisfaction at doctor-led and nurse practioner-led clinics found the two groups to be equivalent on most outcomes. The nurses did better at controlling blood glucose and lipid levels, and on many aspects of birthing. There were no measures on which the nurses did worse.
Nurse-led clinics can save money — but not always in the obvious way. Many are cheaper than comparable physician-led clinics. Suzan Overholser, the business manager of the Family Health clinics, said that their cost per patient was $453 per year — lower than the Indiana average for similarly federally qualified clinics (all the others physician-led) of $549. But nurse-led clinics aren’t always cheaper. Coddington examined published studies of clinic costs and found that in some cases, nurse-managed clinics had slightly higher per-patient costs than traditional clinics.
Although nurses are paid less than doctors (Medicare reimburses them at 85 percent of what it pays doctors,) nurse-led clinics are often very small, and so don’t have the variety of practitioners necessary to keep a clinic running at full capacity. They also serve the most difficult and expensive patients.
The biggest financial benefit, however, likely comes from offering patients an alternative to the emergency room. Coddington’s review cites studies showing large savings in paramedic, police, emergency room and hospital use. A traditional clinic in an underserved area would do that, too, of course — it’s just that nurses tend to go where doctors won’t.
There are about 150,000 nurse practitioners in America today. The vast majority practice in traditional settings — only about a thousand are in nurse-managed clinics. One reason these clinics are rare is that they may equal traditional clinics in health care, but not in business success.
Read previous contributions to this series.
Nurse-managed clinics have to overcome regulatory and financial obstacles that traditional clinics don’t face. Powerful physicians’ groups such as the American Academy of Family Physicians oppose allowing nurses to practice independently. “Granting independent practice to nurse practitioners would be creating two classes of care: one run by a physician-led team and one run by less-qualified health professionals,” says a paper from the A.A.F.P., citing the fact that doctors get more years of education and training. “Americans should not be forced into this two-tier scenario. Everyone deserves to be under the care of a doctor.”
Only 16 states and Washington, D.C., allow nurses complete independence. In other states, some of the restrictions are bizarre — in Indiana, for example, nurse practitioners may do everything doctors do, with two exceptions: they can’t prescribe physical therapy or do physicals for high school sports.
Jim Layman, the executive director of the Family Health clinics, said he thought that nurse practitioners cared for the majority of Medicaid patients in Indiana. But if you look through Medicaid records, you’ll find only doctors — nurses are not allowed to be the primary caregiver of record. So the Family Health clinics, like others, employ a physician off-site from 4 to 6 hours a week who uses electronic health records to examine a sample of cases and consult when necessary. Medicaid is billed in his name.
It is not easy for nurse-run clinics to win status as a Federally Qualified Community Health clinic, which would allow them to get federal grants. This is largely because most come out of universities, and most universities don’t want to cede control to the community — a requirement for this status. Purdue decided it would, and the Family Health clinics qualified in 2009. Before that, they received some money from the state, and raised the rest from local March of Dimes, United Way and Chamber of Commerce donations, plus fund-raising dinners and auctions. This was enough to support just one full-time provider at each clinic. Getting F.Q.C.H. status allowed them to hire more staff and move the Carroll County clinic into a modern new building — and probably saved them from collapse. “It would have been very difficult for us had we not gotten F.Q.C.H. status,” said Coddington. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — did authorize $50 million for five years for nurse-managed clinics. So far 10 clinics have gotten a total of $15 million.
In some ways, the nurse practitioner-managed clinic is a throwback to the small-town family practice, when your doctor asked about the schoolyard bully and your dad’s unemployment. Among the many changes needed in how America values and reimburses health care, it’s important to encourage and support these clinics. They may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t mean they should be financed with bake sales.
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author of, most recently, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 26, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that nurse practitioners will be required by 2015 to have a doctorate of nursing practice. While the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, which sets the rules, has endorsed this change, it has not yet become policy.
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Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
The Family Health Clinic of Carroll County, in Delphi, Ind., and its smaller sibling about 40 minutes away in Monon provide full-service health care for about 10,000 people a year, most of them farmers or employees of the local pork production plant. About half the patients are Hispanic but there are also many German Baptist Brethren. Most of the patients are uninsured, and pay according to their income — the vast majority paying the $20 minimum charge for an appointment. About 30 percent are on Medicaid. The clinics,
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which are part of Purdue University’s School of Nursing, offer family care, pediatrics, mental health and pregnancy care. Many patients come in for chronic problems: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression, alcoholism.
Doctors are trained to focus on a disease. Nurses are trained to think more holistically.
What these clinics don’t offer are doctors. They are two of around 250 health clinics across America run completely by nurse practitioners: nurses with a master’s degree that includes two or three years of advanced training in diagnosing and treating disease. A proposal endorsed by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing for 2015 would require nurse practitioners to have a doctorate of nursing practice, which would mean two or three more years of study. Nurse practitioners do everything primary care doctors do, including prescribing, although some states require that a physician provide review. Like doctors, of course, nurse practitioners refer patients to specialists or a hospital when needed.
America has a serious shortage of primary care physicians, and the deficit is growing. The population is aging — and getting sicker, with chronic disease ever more prevalent. Obamacare will bring 32 million uninsured people into the health system — and these newbies will need a lot of medical care. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, the United States will be short some 45,000 primary care physicians by 2020.
The primary care physicians who do exist are badly distributed — 90 percent of internal medicine physicians, for example, work in urban areas. Some doctors go to work in rural areas or the poor parts of major cities, treating people who have Medicaid or no insurance. But they are few.
In part it’s the money. Primary care doctors make less than specialists anywhere, but they take an even larger financial hit to treat the poor. Particularly in the countryside — even with programs that offer partial loan forgiveness, it’s very hard to pay off medical school debt treating Medicaid patients, much less those with no insurance at all.
And the job of a primary care doctor today is largely managing chronic disease — coordinating the patient’s care with specialists, convincing him to exercise or eat better. Poor patients can be a frustrating struggle. Compared with wealthier patients, they tend to have more serious diseases and fewer resources for getting better. They are less educated, take worse care of themselves and have lower levels of compliance with doctors’ orders. Very few people start medical school hoping to do this kind of work. Those who do it may burn out quickly.
It might seem that offering the rural poor a clinic staffed only by nurses is to give them second-class primary care. It is not. The alternative for residents of Carroll County was not first-class primary care, but none. Before the clinic opened in 1996, the area had some family physicians, but very few accepted Medicaid or uninsured patients. When people got sick, they went to the emergency room. Or they waited it out — and then often landed in the emergency room anyway, now much sicker.
Just as important, while nurses take a different approach to patient care than doctors, it has proven just as effective. It might be particularly useful for treating chronic diseases, where so much depends on the patients’ behavioral choices.
Doctors are trained to focus on a disease — what is it? How do we make it go away?
Nurses are trained to think more holistically. The medical profession is trying to get doctors to ask about their patients’ lives, listen more, coach more and lecture less — being “patient-centered” is the term — in order to better understand what ails them.
“I’ve been out of nursing school since 1972 and I still remember that when faculty members finished talking about the scientific parts of the disease they would talk about the psycho-social part,” said Donna Torrisi, the executive director of the Family Practice and Counseling Network, which has three clinics in Philadelphia. “It’s not about the disease, it’s about the person who has the disease. While in the hospital you’ll often hear doctors refer to a patient as ‘the cardiac down the hall.’”
Younger doctors are no doubt better at this than their older peers. But the system conspires against them. The 15-minute appointment standard in fee-for-service medicine — which pays doctors according to how many patients they see and treatments they provide — makes it unlikely that doctors will spend time discussing a patient’s life in any detail. Physician reimbursement places a zero value on talking to the patient. But nurse practitioners are salaried, giving them the luxury of time. At the Family Health clinics, appointments last half an hour — an hour for a new diabetic or pregnant patient.
Jennifer Coddington, a pediatric nurse practitioner who is a co-clinical director of Family Health Clinics, said that she spends a lot of time teaching patients and their families about their diseases and how to manage it. “We want to know socially and economically what’s going on in their life — their educational level, how are they making it financially,” she said. “You can’t teach patients if you’re not at their educational level. And if a patient can’t afford something, what’s the point of trying to prescribe it? He’s going to be non-compliant.”
A physician might suggest that a patient lose weight and hand him a diet plan — or refer him to a nutritionist. At the Family Health clinics, nutrition counselors — graduate students at Purdue — will sit down with patients to talk about the specific consequence of their diet, and suggest good foods and how to cook them, Coddington said. “When you don’t have enough money to buy fruits and vegetables, so you go to the dollar menu at McDonald’s — we help those people put planners together for the week.”
Data has shown that nurse practitioners provide good health care. A review of 118 published studies over 18 years comparing health outcomes and patient satisfaction at doctor-led and nurse practioner-led clinics found the two groups to be equivalent on most outcomes. The nurses did better at controlling blood glucose and lipid levels, and on many aspects of birthing. There were no measures on which the nurses did worse.
Nurse-led clinics can save money — but not always in the obvious way. Many are cheaper than comparable physician-led clinics. Suzan Overholser, the business manager of the Family Health clinics, said that their cost per patient was $453 per year — lower than the Indiana average for similarly federally qualified clinics (all the others physician-led) of $549. But nurse-led clinics aren’t always cheaper. Coddington examined published studies of clinic costs and found that in some cases, nurse-managed clinics had slightly higher per-patient costs than traditional clinics.
Although nurses are paid less than doctors (Medicare reimburses them at 85 percent of what it pays doctors,) nurse-led clinics are often very small, and so don’t have the variety of practitioners necessary to keep a clinic running at full capacity. They also serve the most difficult and expensive patients.
The biggest financial benefit, however, likely comes from offering patients an alternative to the emergency room. Coddington’s review cites studies showing large savings in paramedic, police, emergency room and hospital use. A traditional clinic in an underserved area would do that, too, of course — it’s just that nurses tend to go where doctors won’t.
There are about 150,000 nurse practitioners in America today. The vast majority practice in traditional settings — only about a thousand are in nurse-managed clinics. One reason these clinics are rare is that they may equal traditional clinics in health care, but not in business success.
Read previous contributions to this series.
Nurse-managed clinics have to overcome regulatory and financial obstacles that traditional clinics don’t face. Powerful physicians’ groups such as the American Academy of Family Physicians oppose allowing nurses to practice independently. “Granting independent practice to nurse practitioners would be creating two classes of care: one run by a physician-led team and one run by less-qualified health professionals,” says a paper from the A.A.F.P., citing the fact that doctors get more years of education and training. “Americans should not be forced into this two-tier scenario. Everyone deserves to be under the care of a doctor.”
Only 16 states and Washington, D.C., allow nurses complete independence. In other states, some of the restrictions are bizarre — in Indiana, for example, nurse practitioners may do everything doctors do, with two exceptions: they can’t prescribe physical therapy or do physicals for high school sports.
Jim Layman, the executive director of the Family Health clinics, said he thought that nurse practitioners cared for the majority of Medicaid patients in Indiana. But if you look through Medicaid records, you’ll find only doctors — nurses are not allowed to be the primary caregiver of record. So the Family Health clinics, like others, employ a physician off-site from 4 to 6 hours a week who uses electronic health records to examine a sample of cases and consult when necessary. Medicaid is billed in his name.
It is not easy for nurse-run clinics to win status as a Federally Qualified Community Health clinic, which would allow them to get federal grants. This is largely because most come out of universities, and most universities don’t want to cede control to the community — a requirement for this status. Purdue decided it would, and the Family Health clinics qualified in 2009. Before that, they received some money from the state, and raised the rest from local March of Dimes, United Way and Chamber of Commerce donations, plus fund-raising dinners and auctions. This was enough to support just one full-time provider at each clinic. Getting F.Q.C.H. status allowed them to hire more staff and move the Carroll County clinic into a modern new building — and probably saved them from collapse. “It would have been very difficult for us had we not gotten F.Q.C.H. status,” said Coddington. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — did authorize $50 million for five years for nurse-managed clinics. So far 10 clinics have gotten a total of $15 million.
In some ways, the nurse practitioner-managed clinic is a throwback to the small-town family practice, when your doctor asked about the schoolyard bully and your dad’s unemployment. Among the many changes needed in how America values and reimburses health care, it’s important to encourage and support these clinics. They may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t mean they should be financed with bake sales.
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author of, most recently, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 26, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that nurse practitioners will be required by 2015 to have a doctorate of nursing practice. While the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, which sets the rules, has endorsed this change, it has not yet become policy.
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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Humans emerge from lower beings but aren’t reducible to them.
But reductionism is also afoot, often not within science itself but in the way scientific findings get interpreted. John Gray writes in his 2002 British best seller, “Straw Dogs,” “Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals.” The neurologist-philosopher Raymond Tallis lambastes such notions in his 2011 book, “Aping Mankind,” where he cites many more examples of reductionism from all corners of contemporary culture.
Now, what do I mean by reductionism, and what’s wrong with it? Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations. Here I’ll provide a little historical perspective on this kind of thinking and explain why adopting it is a bad bargain: it wipes out the meaning of your own life.
Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle argued in his “Physics” that we should try to explain natural phenomena in four different but compatible ways, traditionally known as the four causes. We can identify a moving cause, or what initiates a change: the impact of a cue stick on a billiard ball is the moving cause of the ball’s motion. We can account for some properties of things in terms of what they’re made of (material cause), as when we explain why a balloon is stretchy by pointing out that it’s made of rubber. We can understand the nature or kind of a phenomenon (formal cause), as when we define a cumulus cloud. And we can understand a thing’s function or end (final cause), as when we say that eyes are for seeing.
You’ll notice that the first two kinds of cause sound more modern than the others. Since Galileo, we have increasingly been living in a post-Aristotelian world where talk of “natures” and “ends” strikes us as unscientific jargon — although it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Aristotle thought that final causality applied to all natural things, but many of his final-cause explanations now seem naïve — say, the idea that heavy things fall because their natural end is to reach the earth. Final cause plays no part in our physics. In biology and medicine, though, it’s still at least convenient to use final-cause language and say, for instance, that a function of the liver is to aid in digestion. As for formal cause, every science works with some notion of what kind of thing it studies — such as what an organism is, what an economy is, or what language is.
But do things really come in a profusion of different kinds? For example, are living things irreducibly different from nonliving things? Reductionists would answer that a horse isn’t ultimately different in kind from a chunk of granite; the horse is just a more complicated effect of the moving and material causes that physics investigates. This view flattens life down to more general facts about patterns of matter and energy.
Likewise, reductionists will say that human beings aren’t irreducibly different from horses: politics, music, money and romance are just complex effects of biological phenomena, and these are just effects of the phenomena we observe in nonliving things. Humans get flattened down along with the rest of nature.
We’ve developed a wealth of irreducibly human abilities, desires, responsibilities, predicaments, insights and questions that other species approximate only vaguely.
Reductionism, then, tries to limit reality to as few kinds as possible. For reductionists, as things combine into more complicated structures, they don’t turn into something that they really weren’t before, or reach any qualitatively new level. In this sense, reality is flat.
Notice that in this world view, since modern physics doesn’t use final causes and physics is the master science, ends or purposes play no role in reality, although talk of such things may be a convenient figure of speech. The questions “How did we get here?” and “What are we made of?” make sense for a reductionist, but questions such as “What is human nature?” and “How should we live?”— if they have any meaning at all — have to be reframed as questions about moving or material physical causes.
Now let’s consider a nonreductionist alternative: there are a great many different kinds of beings, with different natures. Reality is messy and diverse, with lumps and gaps, peaks and valleys.
But what would account for these differences in kind? The traditional Western answer is that there is a highest being who is responsible for giving created beings their natures and their very existence.
Today this traditional answer doesn’t seem as convincing as it once did. As Nietzsche complains in “Twilight of the Idols” (1889), in the traditional view “the higher is not allowed to develop from the lower, is not allowed to have developed at all.” But Darwin has helped us see that new species can develop from simpler ones. Nietzsche abandoned not just traditional creationism but God as well; others find evolution compatible with monotheism. The point for our present purposes is that Nietzsche is opposing not only the view that things require a top-down act of creation, but also reductionists who flatten everything down to the same level; he suggests that reality has peaks and valleys, and the higher emerges from the lower. Some call such a view emergentism.
An emergentist account of reality could go something like this. Over billions of years, increasingly complex beings have evolved from simpler ones. But there isn’t just greater complexity — new kinds of beings emerge, living beings, and new capacities: feeling pleasure and pain, instead of just interacting chemically and physically with other things; becoming aware of other things and oneself; and eventually, human love, freedom and reason. Reality isn’t flat.
Higher beings continue to have lower dimensions. People are still animals, and animals are still physical things — throw me out a window and I’ll follow the law of gravity, with deleterious consequences for my freedom and reason. So we can certainly study ourselves as biological, chemical and physical beings. We can correctly reconstruct the moving causes that brought us about, and analyze our material causes.
However, these findings aren’t enough for a full understanding of what humans are. We must also understand our formal cause — what’s distinctive about us in our evolved state. Thanks to the process of emergence, we have become something more than other animals.
That doesn’t mean we’re all morally excellent (we can become heroic or vile); it doesn’t gives us the right to abuse and exterminate other species; and it doesn’t mean humans can do everything better (a cheetah will outrun me and a bloodhound will outsniff me every time). But we’ve developed a wealth of irreducibly human abilities, desires, responsibilities, predicaments, insights and questions that other species, as far as we can tell, approximate only vaguely.
In particular, recognizing our connections to other animals isn’t enough for us to understand ethics and politics. As incomplete, open-ended, partially self-determining animals, we must deliberate on how to live, acting in the light of what we understand about human virtue and vice, human justice and injustice. We will often go astray in our choices, but the realm of human freedom and purposes is irreducible and real: we really do envision and debate possibilities, we really do take decisions, and we really do reach better or worse goals.
As for our computing devices, who knows? Maybe we’ll find a way to jump-start them into reaching a higher level, so that they become conscious actors instead of the blind, indifferent electron pushers they’ve been so far — although, like anyone who’s seen a few science fiction movies, I’m not sure this project is particularly wise.
So is something like this emergentist view right, or is reductionism the way to go?
Read previous contributions to this series.
One thing is clear: a totally flattened-out explanation of reality far exceeds our current scientific ability. Our knowledge of general physics has to be enriched with new concepts when we study complex systems such as a muddy stream or a viral infection, not to mention human phenomena such as the Arab Spring, Twitter or “Glee.” We have to develop new ideas when we look at new kinds of reality.
In principle, though, is reductionism ultimately true? Serious thinkers have given serious arguments on both sides of this metaphysical question. For great philosophers with a reductionist cast of mind, read Spinoza or Hobbes. For brilliant emergentists, read John Dewey or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Such issues can’t be settled in a single essay.
But make no mistake, reductionism comes at a very steep price: it asks you to hammer your own life flat. If you believe that love, freedom, reason and human purpose have no distinctive nature of their own, you’ll have to regard many of your own pursuits as phantasms and view yourself as a “deluded animal.”
Everything you feel that you’re choosing because you affirm it as good — your career, your marriage, reading The New York Times today, or even espousing reductionism — you’ll have to regard intellectually as just an effect of moving and material causes. You’ll have to abandon trust in your own experience for the sake of trust in the metaphysical principle of reductionism.
That’s what I’d call a bad bargain.
Richard Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His books include “Heidegger: An Introduction.”
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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Humans emerge from lower beings but aren’t reducible to them.
But reductionism is also afoot, often not within science itself but in the way scientific findings get interpreted. John Gray writes in his 2002 British best seller, “Straw Dogs,” “Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals.” The neurologist-philosopher Raymond Tallis lambastes such notions in his 2011
|
book, “Aping Mankind,” where he cites many more examples of reductionism from all corners of contemporary culture.
Now, what do I mean by reductionism, and what’s wrong with it? Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations. Here I’ll provide a little historical perspective on this kind of thinking and explain why adopting it is a bad bargain: it wipes out the meaning of your own life.
Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle argued in his “Physics” that we should try to explain natural phenomena in four different but compatible ways, traditionally known as the four causes. We can identify a moving cause, or what initiates a change: the impact of a cue stick on a billiard ball is the moving cause of the ball’s motion. We can account for some properties of things in terms of what they’re made of (material cause), as when we explain why a balloon is stretchy by pointing out that it’s made of rubber. We can understand the nature or kind of a phenomenon (formal cause), as when we define a cumulus cloud. And we can understand a thing’s function or end (final cause), as when we say that eyes are for seeing.
You’ll notice that the first two kinds of cause sound more modern than the others. Since Galileo, we have increasingly been living in a post-Aristotelian world where talk of “natures” and “ends” strikes us as unscientific jargon — although it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Aristotle thought that final causality applied to all natural things, but many of his final-cause explanations now seem naïve — say, the idea that heavy things fall because their natural end is to reach the earth. Final cause plays no part in our physics. In biology and medicine, though, it’s still at least convenient to use final-cause language and say, for instance, that a function of the liver is to aid in digestion. As for formal cause, every science works with some notion of what kind of thing it studies — such as what an organism is, what an economy is, or what language is.
But do things really come in a profusion of different kinds? For example, are living things irreducibly different from nonliving things? Reductionists would answer that a horse isn’t ultimately different in kind from a chunk of granite; the horse is just a more complicated effect of the moving and material causes that physics investigates. This view flattens life down to more general facts about patterns of matter and energy.
Likewise, reductionists will say that human beings aren’t irreducibly different from horses: politics, music, money and romance are just complex effects of biological phenomena, and these are just effects of the phenomena we observe in nonliving things. Humans get flattened down along with the rest of nature.
We’ve developed a wealth of irreducibly human abilities, desires, responsibilities, predicaments, insights and questions that other species approximate only vaguely.
Reductionism, then, tries to limit reality to as few kinds as possible. For reductionists, as things combine into more complicated structures, they don’t turn into something that they really weren’t before, or reach any qualitatively new level. In this sense, reality is flat.
Notice that in this world view, since modern physics doesn’t use final causes and physics is the master science, ends or purposes play no role in reality, although talk of such things may be a convenient figure of speech. The questions “How did we get here?” and “What are we made of?” make sense for a reductionist, but questions such as “What is human nature?” and “How should we live?”— if they have any meaning at all — have to be reframed as questions about moving or material physical causes.
Now let’s consider a nonreductionist alternative: there are a great many different kinds of beings, with different natures. Reality is messy and diverse, with lumps and gaps, peaks and valleys.
But what would account for these differences in kind? The traditional Western answer is that there is a highest being who is responsible for giving created beings their natures and their very existence.
Today this traditional answer doesn’t seem as convincing as it once did. As Nietzsche complains in “Twilight of the Idols” (1889), in the traditional view “the higher is not allowed to develop from the lower, is not allowed to have developed at all.” But Darwin has helped us see that new species can develop from simpler ones. Nietzsche abandoned not just traditional creationism but God as well; others find evolution compatible with monotheism. The point for our present purposes is that Nietzsche is opposing not only the view that things require a top-down act of creation, but also reductionists who flatten everything down to the same level; he suggests that reality has peaks and valleys, and the higher emerges from the lower. Some call such a view emergentism.
An emergentist account of reality could go something like this. Over billions of years, increasingly complex beings have evolved from simpler ones. But there isn’t just greater complexity — new kinds of beings emerge, living beings, and new capacities: feeling pleasure and pain, instead of just interacting chemically and physically with other things; becoming aware of other things and oneself; and eventually, human love, freedom and reason. Reality isn’t flat.
Higher beings continue to have lower dimensions. People are still animals, and animals are still physical things — throw me out a window and I’ll follow the law of gravity, with deleterious consequences for my freedom and reason. So we can certainly study ourselves as biological, chemical and physical beings. We can correctly reconstruct the moving causes that brought us about, and analyze our material causes.
However, these findings aren’t enough for a full understanding of what humans are. We must also understand our formal cause — what’s distinctive about us in our evolved state. Thanks to the process of emergence, we have become something more than other animals.
That doesn’t mean we’re all morally excellent (we can become heroic or vile); it doesn’t gives us the right to abuse and exterminate other species; and it doesn’t mean humans can do everything better (a cheetah will outrun me and a bloodhound will outsniff me every time). But we’ve developed a wealth of irreducibly human abilities, desires, responsibilities, predicaments, insights and questions that other species, as far as we can tell, approximate only vaguely.
In particular, recognizing our connections to other animals isn’t enough for us to understand ethics and politics. As incomplete, open-ended, partially self-determining animals, we must deliberate on how to live, acting in the light of what we understand about human virtue and vice, human justice and injustice. We will often go astray in our choices, but the realm of human freedom and purposes is irreducible and real: we really do envision and debate possibilities, we really do take decisions, and we really do reach better or worse goals.
As for our computing devices, who knows? Maybe we’ll find a way to jump-start them into reaching a higher level, so that they become conscious actors instead of the blind, indifferent electron pushers they’ve been so far — although, like anyone who’s seen a few science fiction movies, I’m not sure this project is particularly wise.
So is something like this emergentist view right, or is reductionism the way to go?
Read previous contributions to this series.
One thing is clear: a totally flattened-out explanation of reality far exceeds our current scientific ability. Our knowledge of general physics has to be enriched with new concepts when we study complex systems such as a muddy stream or a viral infection, not to mention human phenomena such as the Arab Spring, Twitter or “Glee.” We have to develop new ideas when we look at new kinds of reality.
In principle, though, is reductionism ultimately true? Serious thinkers have given serious arguments on both sides of this metaphysical question. For great philosophers with a reductionist cast of mind, read Spinoza or Hobbes. For brilliant emergentists, read John Dewey or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Such issues can’t be settled in a single essay.
But make no mistake, reductionism comes at a very steep price: it asks you to hammer your own life flat. If you believe that love, freedom, reason and human purpose have no distinctive nature of their own, you’ll have to regard many of your own pursuits as phantasms and view yourself as a “deluded animal.”
Everything you feel that you’re choosing because you affirm it as good — your career, your marriage, reading The New York Times today, or even espousing reductionism — you’ll have to regard intellectually as just an effect of moving and material causes. You’ll have to abandon trust in your own experience for the sake of trust in the metaphysical principle of reductionism.
That’s what I’d call a bad bargain.
Richard Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His books include “Heidegger: An Introduction.”
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By Henry Fountain
Published: October 12, 2004
How're you going to keep the birds and insects down on the farm? Not easily, if it's one that produces cotton. Cotton fields, where herbicides and insecticides are heavily used and the soil is frequently tilled, are dead zones when it comes to birds and bugs.
But there are other ways to grow cotton that are more ecologically friendly. Conservation tilling techniques, for example, can leave a large amount of the crop residue on the soil surface. Strip-cover planting, in which clover or another winter cover crop is sown between rows of cotton plants, achieves the same goal of creating habitat for insects and birds.
Now a study in the current issue of the journal Conservation Biology shows how well these techniques can work.
Scientists at the University of Georgia surveyed bird density and insect abundance in cotton fields in the east-central part of the state.
They found that fields where both strip-cover and conservation tilling methods were used had up to 20 times as many meadowlarks, blackbirds, sparrows and other birds as those farmed with conventional methods, and up to six times as many as in fields where only conservation tilling was used.
The strip-cover and conservation tilling fields also had a greater abundance of insects like ants and beetles, although the differences were not as pronounced.
The two ecologically friendly techniques are good not just for birds and insects. They are potentially valuable to the farmer as well.
With more birds and nonpest bugs around to prey on insect pests, there is less need for chemical treatment of the cotton plants.
The clover or other strip-cover crop also helps nourish the soil when it dies, reducing the need for fertilizer. The researchers suggest that the techniques can lower costs by $100 or more per acre.
Elsewhere on the farm, bad things are happening in the henhouse. The bullies are on the loose.
Particularly when overcrowding or feeding problems exist, some birds peck mercilessly at others, removing patches of feathers. The pecking offers no benefit to the chicken doing it, but it can kill the victim.
Now scientists in Sweden have identified a genetic factor that makes some chickens vulnerable to this behavior but spares others. Birds suffer more severe pecking, the scientists report in Nature, when the pigmentation of their feathers is controlled by a wild recessive variant gene.
The researchers studied chickens that were a cross between a white leghorn domestic fowl and a wild relative, the red jungle fowl. Through genetic analysis, they identified a chromosomal region associated with feather-pecking damage. This is the same region, it turns out, where feather pigmentation is controlled.
In the domestic white chicken, a dominant gene at this site inhibits pigmentation, keeping the feathers white. But crossbred birds that get a recessive gene from both parents develop a lot of nonwhite plumage. These birds were much more prone to being pecked than the white ones. Birds with one dominant and one recessive gene and only small amounts of pigmentation were generally left alone as well.
The researchers found that among a group of chickens, pecking tended to spread when birds with the recessive gene were more common. In other words, the more pigmented birds around compared with white birds, the more the pigmented birds suffer. The work may help in devising ways to control or eliminate the behavior.
Their Astronomical Due
The ancient Mayas and Aztecs were justly famous for their astronomical skills. But the Pueblo people who inhabited Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico 1,000 years ago were no slouches either.
Their astronomical accomplishments -- including sites thought to be observatories and human-made markers that align with the sun on certain days -- are documented on a Web site by the Exploratorium, the science museum in San Francisco, at www.exploratorium.edu/chaco.
They Always Fly Separately
Each spring in parts of Iceland, breeding pairs of black-tailed godwits return to their nesting grounds after a winter spent farther south in Europe.
There's nothing unusual about that; it's what migratory birds all over the world do.
But what is extraordinary, a team of Icelandic and British scientists report, is that the males and females in breeding pairs actually spend their winters far apart.
Yet, they manage to time their migration to arrive in Iceland within a few days of each other.
''They achieve this quite remarkable arrival synchrony,'' said Tomas Gunnarsson, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The males and females do not have any contact along the way, he added. ''It's only at the breeding territory that they finally meet up.''
The black-tailed godwit, a large shorebird, has been extensively monitored by European bird watchers.
Thousands have been tagged, their travels have been recorded and their winter destinations (from Britain to the Iberian peninsula) have been identified.
Mr. Gunnarsson and his colleagues made use of this information for their study, which is published in the current issue of the journal Nature. At nesting sites in Iceland in April and May, they noted the arrival of males and females that had mated in previous years.
They found that the birds in a pair arrived within three days of each other on average, even though, from the bird-watchers' data, the pairs wintered hundreds of miles apart -- one on the English coast, for instance, the other in southern Portugal.
While arrival synchrony has been observed in a few other birds, Mr. Gunnarsson said that in those cases little was known about the actual migration. ''The big chunk we've added,'' he said, ''is that we can show these birds managed to arrive in sync without knowing what the other is doing at any step along the way.''
Mr. Gunnarsson said tension over reproduction might play a role in the behavior. Once they reach the nesting site, birds are under pressure to reproduce as soon as possible, when food and other resources are most abundant. So it pays for the other bird to arrive at the same time. ''If your mate isn't there, you have to find a new mate,'' he said.
Such a ''divorce'' is costly because it delays reproduction. But sometimes it's the only choice. Mr. Gunnarsson said they observed two birds that, tired of waiting for their mates to arrive after more than eight days, gave up and found others.
Drawing (Drawing by Felipe Galindo)
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By Henry Fountain
Published: October 12, 2004
How're you going to keep the birds and insects down on the farm? Not easily, if it's one that produces cotton. Cotton fields, where herbicides and insecticides are heavily used and the soil is frequently tilled, are dead zones when it comes to birds and bugs.
But there are other ways to grow cotton that are more ecologically friendly. Conservation tilling techniques, for example, can leave a large amount of the crop residue on the soil surface. Strip-cover planting, in which clover or another winter cover crop is s
|
own between rows of cotton plants, achieves the same goal of creating habitat for insects and birds.
Now a study in the current issue of the journal Conservation Biology shows how well these techniques can work.
Scientists at the University of Georgia surveyed bird density and insect abundance in cotton fields in the east-central part of the state.
They found that fields where both strip-cover and conservation tilling methods were used had up to 20 times as many meadowlarks, blackbirds, sparrows and other birds as those farmed with conventional methods, and up to six times as many as in fields where only conservation tilling was used.
The strip-cover and conservation tilling fields also had a greater abundance of insects like ants and beetles, although the differences were not as pronounced.
The two ecologically friendly techniques are good not just for birds and insects. They are potentially valuable to the farmer as well.
With more birds and nonpest bugs around to prey on insect pests, there is less need for chemical treatment of the cotton plants.
The clover or other strip-cover crop also helps nourish the soil when it dies, reducing the need for fertilizer. The researchers suggest that the techniques can lower costs by $100 or more per acre.
Elsewhere on the farm, bad things are happening in the henhouse. The bullies are on the loose.
Particularly when overcrowding or feeding problems exist, some birds peck mercilessly at others, removing patches of feathers. The pecking offers no benefit to the chicken doing it, but it can kill the victim.
Now scientists in Sweden have identified a genetic factor that makes some chickens vulnerable to this behavior but spares others. Birds suffer more severe pecking, the scientists report in Nature, when the pigmentation of their feathers is controlled by a wild recessive variant gene.
The researchers studied chickens that were a cross between a white leghorn domestic fowl and a wild relative, the red jungle fowl. Through genetic analysis, they identified a chromosomal region associated with feather-pecking damage. This is the same region, it turns out, where feather pigmentation is controlled.
In the domestic white chicken, a dominant gene at this site inhibits pigmentation, keeping the feathers white. But crossbred birds that get a recessive gene from both parents develop a lot of nonwhite plumage. These birds were much more prone to being pecked than the white ones. Birds with one dominant and one recessive gene and only small amounts of pigmentation were generally left alone as well.
The researchers found that among a group of chickens, pecking tended to spread when birds with the recessive gene were more common. In other words, the more pigmented birds around compared with white birds, the more the pigmented birds suffer. The work may help in devising ways to control or eliminate the behavior.
Their Astronomical Due
The ancient Mayas and Aztecs were justly famous for their astronomical skills. But the Pueblo people who inhabited Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico 1,000 years ago were no slouches either.
Their astronomical accomplishments -- including sites thought to be observatories and human-made markers that align with the sun on certain days -- are documented on a Web site by the Exploratorium, the science museum in San Francisco, at www.exploratorium.edu/chaco.
They Always Fly Separately
Each spring in parts of Iceland, breeding pairs of black-tailed godwits return to their nesting grounds after a winter spent farther south in Europe.
There's nothing unusual about that; it's what migratory birds all over the world do.
But what is extraordinary, a team of Icelandic and British scientists report, is that the males and females in breeding pairs actually spend their winters far apart.
Yet, they manage to time their migration to arrive in Iceland within a few days of each other.
''They achieve this quite remarkable arrival synchrony,'' said Tomas Gunnarsson, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The males and females do not have any contact along the way, he added. ''It's only at the breeding territory that they finally meet up.''
The black-tailed godwit, a large shorebird, has been extensively monitored by European bird watchers.
Thousands have been tagged, their travels have been recorded and their winter destinations (from Britain to the Iberian peninsula) have been identified.
Mr. Gunnarsson and his colleagues made use of this information for their study, which is published in the current issue of the journal Nature. At nesting sites in Iceland in April and May, they noted the arrival of males and females that had mated in previous years.
They found that the birds in a pair arrived within three days of each other on average, even though, from the bird-watchers' data, the pairs wintered hundreds of miles apart -- one on the English coast, for instance, the other in southern Portugal.
While arrival synchrony has been observed in a few other birds, Mr. Gunnarsson said that in those cases little was known about the actual migration. ''The big chunk we've added,'' he said, ''is that we can show these birds managed to arrive in sync without knowing what the other is doing at any step along the way.''
Mr. Gunnarsson said tension over reproduction might play a role in the behavior. Once they reach the nesting site, birds are under pressure to reproduce as soon as possible, when food and other resources are most abundant. So it pays for the other bird to arrive at the same time. ''If your mate isn't there, you have to find a new mate,'' he said.
Such a ''divorce'' is costly because it delays reproduction. But sometimes it's the only choice. Mr. Gunnarsson said they observed two birds that, tired of waiting for their mates to arrive after more than eight days, gave up and found others.
Drawing (Drawing by Felipe Galindo)
|
There is no better way to learn a second language than hearing it from birth. Yet when parents set out to pass two languages on to their children, many find it more complicated than they had assumed. Children exposed to two languages often start to speak later, which can worry their parents. Children fluent in two languages will often refuse to speak one of them, because they realize it makes them different from others in their world.
Melissa Campos-Hernandez is just getting her first glimpse of what it takes to raise a bilingual child, and she has asked me to ask Motherlode readers for guidance. She writes:
My husband and I are both bilingual (Spanish/English) and are trying to raise our daughter to be the same. We’re taking the same approach our parents used: all Spanish at home until she’s two or three and then start teaching English. It worked well when we were growing up, and neither of us (nor our siblings) ever had need for bilingual education in school.
The differences this time around, though, are that we live hundreds of miles away from our families, our bilingual friends are either childless or live too far away to make weekly visits practical, and we live in a predominantly English-speaking suburb. The local playgroups and mommy-and-me classes are all English speaking, so our daughter (10 months old) never hears other children speak in Spanish. On top of that, she hears us speaking to other people in this strange other language.
So my question is, how do we deal with this dilemma? We’re not willing to abandon our plans to teach her Spanish first, especially since she’s already had 10 months of it, but we don’t want her to feel isolated from other kids, especially as she gets a little older. Any suggestions?
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There is no better way to learn a second language than hearing it from birth. Yet when parents set out to pass two languages on to their children, many find it more complicated than they had assumed. Children exposed to two languages often start to speak later, which can worry their parents. Children fluent in two languages will often refuse to speak one of them, because they realize it makes them different from others in their world.
Melissa Campos-Hernandez is just getting her first glimpse of what it takes to raise a bilingual child, and she has asked me to ask Motherlode readers for guidance. She writes:
My husband and I are
|
both bilingual (Spanish/English) and are trying to raise our daughter to be the same. We’re taking the same approach our parents used: all Spanish at home until she’s two or three and then start teaching English. It worked well when we were growing up, and neither of us (nor our siblings) ever had need for bilingual education in school.
The differences this time around, though, are that we live hundreds of miles away from our families, our bilingual friends are either childless or live too far away to make weekly visits practical, and we live in a predominantly English-speaking suburb. The local playgroups and mommy-and-me classes are all English speaking, so our daughter (10 months old) never hears other children speak in Spanish. On top of that, she hears us speaking to other people in this strange other language.
So my question is, how do we deal with this dilemma? We’re not willing to abandon our plans to teach her Spanish first, especially since she’s already had 10 months of it, but we don’t want her to feel isolated from other kids, especially as she gets a little older. Any suggestions?
|
Behind the excitement of the coming spaceflight of Senator John Glenn is quiet apprehension about hidden dangers.
Safety experts agree that the space shuttles, like temperamental hot rods, must run regularly or become balky and their launching crews rusty. But the shuttles have flown little of late. So Senator Glenn's flight is seen, at least in theory, as unusually risky.
In response, the space agency is taking precautions like having ground crews do many more dry runs meant to sharpen their skills. It says these rehearsals will offset any dangers, though some private experts say the odds of disaster still might be unusually high.
''We've been concerned,'' Dr. Seymour C. Himmel, a senior member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said in an interview. ''When you have a hiatus like this you have to keep your skills honed.''
Dr. M. Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, agreed. ''There are concerns whenever an organization that has to perform a high-reliability job stops engaging in continual practice,'' he said.
The thunder of Mr. Glenn's blastoff aboard the shuttle Discovery, set for Oct. 29, is to occur after an unexpected silence of nearly five months at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This is the longest time between shuttle launching attempts since the recovery from the 1986 Challenger disaster, when the spaceships were grounded for more than two years. The first crew to fly thereafter, in 1988, consisted of all shuttle veterans, mostly former military test pilots used to putting their lives on the line.
The current gap in flights was caused by unforeseen delays in building the international space station, a global effort whose payloads are to dominate the shuttle agenda for years. The delays stem from Russia's financial woes and have raised concerns among Federal and private safety experts, especially given the high visibility of Mr. Glenn's flight.
The space agency itself has changed its public stance on the dangers posed by a flight slowdown.
A year ago, before the gap opened up, Wilbur C. Trafton, then head of space flight for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told Congress that inactivity was dangerous. If work on the station is delayed, he warned, then ''the shuttle quickly drops below what we think is a safe flight rate, which is about five flights a year.''
That problem has come to pass in that the five-month gap, if repeated over the course of a year, would amount to an annual rate of fewer than three flights. Even so, NASA officials dismiss it as minor. They say that better analyses show that the shuttle can safely fly fewer times a year and that the rigorous exercise of ground crews and managers is removing any possible peril.
''We normally launch every six to eight weeks,'' said Dave King, a shuttle official at the Kennedy center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. ''But when summer brought a five-month pause between launches, we went to work developing a practice schedule that would keep the team fresh.''
Robert B. Sieck, head of shuttle operations in Florida, said that he had talked with Mr. Glenn about the slowdown and that the Senator, a veteran of the astronaut corps, was unruffled by it.
''We're going to be just as safe as ever because we have the rules and requirements and procedures that protect us,'' Mr. Sieck said in an interview. ''The teams are going to make sure that nothing bad happens.''
Mr. Glenn himself has repeatedly played down shuttle risks.
''Of course there is a small danger,'' he said when his flight was announced in January, but he added, ''NASA's done an outstanding job'' of keeping the risks as low as possible.
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Behind the excitement of the coming spaceflight of Senator John Glenn is quiet apprehension about hidden dangers.
Safety experts agree that the space shuttles, like temperamental hot rods, must run regularly or become balky and their launching crews rusty. But the shuttles have flown little of late. So Senator Glenn's flight is seen, at least in theory, as unusually risky.
In response, the space agency is taking precautions like having ground crews do many more dry runs meant to sharpen their skills. It says these rehearsals will offset any dangers, though some private experts say the odds of disaster still might be unusually high.
|
''We've been concerned,'' Dr. Seymour C. Himmel, a senior member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said in an interview. ''When you have a hiatus like this you have to keep your skills honed.''
Dr. M. Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, agreed. ''There are concerns whenever an organization that has to perform a high-reliability job stops engaging in continual practice,'' he said.
The thunder of Mr. Glenn's blastoff aboard the shuttle Discovery, set for Oct. 29, is to occur after an unexpected silence of nearly five months at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This is the longest time between shuttle launching attempts since the recovery from the 1986 Challenger disaster, when the spaceships were grounded for more than two years. The first crew to fly thereafter, in 1988, consisted of all shuttle veterans, mostly former military test pilots used to putting their lives on the line.
The current gap in flights was caused by unforeseen delays in building the international space station, a global effort whose payloads are to dominate the shuttle agenda for years. The delays stem from Russia's financial woes and have raised concerns among Federal and private safety experts, especially given the high visibility of Mr. Glenn's flight.
The space agency itself has changed its public stance on the dangers posed by a flight slowdown.
A year ago, before the gap opened up, Wilbur C. Trafton, then head of space flight for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told Congress that inactivity was dangerous. If work on the station is delayed, he warned, then ''the shuttle quickly drops below what we think is a safe flight rate, which is about five flights a year.''
That problem has come to pass in that the five-month gap, if repeated over the course of a year, would amount to an annual rate of fewer than three flights. Even so, NASA officials dismiss it as minor. They say that better analyses show that the shuttle can safely fly fewer times a year and that the rigorous exercise of ground crews and managers is removing any possible peril.
''We normally launch every six to eight weeks,'' said Dave King, a shuttle official at the Kennedy center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. ''But when summer brought a five-month pause between launches, we went to work developing a practice schedule that would keep the team fresh.''
Robert B. Sieck, head of shuttle operations in Florida, said that he had talked with Mr. Glenn about the slowdown and that the Senator, a veteran of the astronaut corps, was unruffled by it.
''We're going to be just as safe as ever because we have the rules and requirements and procedures that protect us,'' Mr. Sieck said in an interview. ''The teams are going to make sure that nothing bad happens.''
Mr. Glenn himself has repeatedly played down shuttle risks.
''Of course there is a small danger,'' he said when his flight was announced in January, but he added, ''NASA's done an outstanding job'' of keeping the risks as low as possible.
|
The most notable attempt to detect such a hidden chamber was carried out in an electrical resistivity survey in 1977 and 1978 by the Stanford Research Institute, now known as S.R.I., and it found evidence of nothing more than small anomalies in the rock around the Sphinx, which is some 66 feet tall and 240 feet long.
Scholars including Dr. Hawass, who have spent decades scrutinizing the pottery, tombs, hieroglyphics and other ruins from the Giza plateau, have said that not a single object found there can be interpreted as coming from an advanced civilization any older than about 3200 B.C.
But that has not silenced people like Mr. West, who said his own seismographical research, conducted in the early 1990's before being halted by the Egyptian Government, found evidence of a substantial underground chamber, and who still hopes to win permission to conduct further tests.
In his film, narrated by Charlton Heston, Mr. West argued that the Sphinx was built about 10,500 B.C., long before the ancient Egyptian civilization took root.
Increasingly, the pushing and prodding of the Egyptian Government to permit new research has turned highly personal.
In the United States, Britain and Australia, people who turn out to hear lectures by Mr. Hancock have signed thousands of petitions accusing the Egyptian Government of maintaining an atmosphere of secrecy that might well be ''hiding possible findings that could be of great importance to all members of the human race.''
And on Web sites devoted to ancient Egypt, the mood has turned even more venomous, with Dr. Hawass, 50, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, denounced bitterly.
Egyptian officials say they remain open to further archeological research on the Giza plateau -- as long as it is supported by accredited academic institutions, as required by Egyptian law.
''Anyone is free to believe anything he wants -- that the Pyramids and Sphinx were built in space, by aliens, by whatever,'' Dr. Hawass said in an interview in his office near the base of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. ''And you can work here if you are a scholar. But when it comes to amateurs, we say no, no and no.''
|
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The most notable attempt to detect such a hidden chamber was carried out in an electrical resistivity survey in 1977 and 1978 by the Stanford Research Institute, now known as S.R.I., and it found evidence of nothing more than small anomalies in the rock around the Sphinx, which is some 66 feet tall and 240 feet long.
Scholars including Dr. Hawass, who have spent decades scrutinizing the pottery, tombs, hieroglyphics and other ruins from the Giza plateau, have said that not a single object found there can be interpreted as coming from an advanced
|
civilization any older than about 3200 B.C.
But that has not silenced people like Mr. West, who said his own seismographical research, conducted in the early 1990's before being halted by the Egyptian Government, found evidence of a substantial underground chamber, and who still hopes to win permission to conduct further tests.
In his film, narrated by Charlton Heston, Mr. West argued that the Sphinx was built about 10,500 B.C., long before the ancient Egyptian civilization took root.
Increasingly, the pushing and prodding of the Egyptian Government to permit new research has turned highly personal.
In the United States, Britain and Australia, people who turn out to hear lectures by Mr. Hancock have signed thousands of petitions accusing the Egyptian Government of maintaining an atmosphere of secrecy that might well be ''hiding possible findings that could be of great importance to all members of the human race.''
And on Web sites devoted to ancient Egypt, the mood has turned even more venomous, with Dr. Hawass, 50, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, denounced bitterly.
Egyptian officials say they remain open to further archeological research on the Giza plateau -- as long as it is supported by accredited academic institutions, as required by Egyptian law.
''Anyone is free to believe anything he wants -- that the Pyramids and Sphinx were built in space, by aliens, by whatever,'' Dr. Hawass said in an interview in his office near the base of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. ''And you can work here if you are a scholar. But when it comes to amateurs, we say no, no and no.''
|
June 16, 2013
News & Features
Over six frightening months, a deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics spread in the nation's leading research hospital. Pretty soon, a patient a week was catching the bug. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health locked down patients, cleaned with bleach, even ripped out plumbing — and still the germ persisted.
Real-time genome sequencing helped a federal research hospital understand and end an outbreak of a drug-resistant bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, that killed six patients.
A study found that the avian flu virus reproduces so quickly that if not suppressed within 48 hours, it pushes victims toward death.
A hospital in Livingston, N.J., has stopped admitting premature babies to its special-care nursery, after four babies who died in the first week of April were all found to have had intestinal-tract bacteria in their blood. The hospital, St. Barnabas Medical Center, announced its action yesterday amid an investigation by the New Jersey Health Department into how the infants might have come into contact with the bacteria and what role it might have played in their deaths. While saying that it was more likely that the babies died from other complications stemming from their premature births, hospital officials said that it was necessary to quarantine the nursery to safeguard other infants.
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June 16, 2013
News & Features
Over six frightening months, a deadly germ untreatable by most antibiotics spread in the nation's leading research hospital. Pretty soon, a patient a week was catching the bug. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health locked down patients, cleaned with bleach, even ripped out plumbing — and still the germ persisted.
Real-time genome sequencing helped a federal research hospital understand and end an outbreak of a drug-resistant bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, that killed six patients.
A study found that the avian flu virus reproduces so quickly that if not suppressed within 4
|
8 hours, it pushes victims toward death.
A hospital in Livingston, N.J., has stopped admitting premature babies to its special-care nursery, after four babies who died in the first week of April were all found to have had intestinal-tract bacteria in their blood. The hospital, St. Barnabas Medical Center, announced its action yesterday amid an investigation by the New Jersey Health Department into how the infants might have come into contact with the bacteria and what role it might have played in their deaths. While saying that it was more likely that the babies died from other complications stemming from their premature births, hospital officials said that it was necessary to quarantine the nursery to safeguard other infants.
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- Books: Saying Less and Doing More
- Books: Doctor Feelbad
- Well: Breast Milk Is Good for the Brain, Scans Show
- The New Old Age: Death Be Not Decaffeinated: Over Cup, Groups Face Taboo
- Recipes for Health: Lentil Salad With Fresh Favas
|
Farmers and Conservationists Form a Rare Alliance
By JESSICA KOWAL
Published: December 27, 2006
The standoff here between farmers and environmentalists was familiar in the modern West.
With salmon and wildlife dwindling in the Skagit River Delta, some environmentalists had argued since the 1980s that local farms should be turned back into wetlands. Farmers here feared that preachy outsiders would strip them of their land and heritage.
This year, though, the standoff ended -- at least for three longtime farmers in this fertile valley, who began collaborating with their former enemies to preserve wildlife and their livelihoods.
The Nature Conservancy, which usually buys land to shield it from development, is renting land from the three farmers on behalf of migrating Western sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, marbled godwits and other shorebirds.
From private and public funds, including a grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the farmers, David Hedlin, Gail Thulen and Alan Mesman, will together receive up to $350,000 for three years of labor, expenses and the use of 210 acres, said Kevin Morse, the Skagit Delta project manager for the conservancy.
Each man has committed about 70 acres to this project, which is called Farming for Wildlife. A third of that land will be flooded with a few inches of fresh water in the spring, fall and winter. This will create shallow ponds to entice thousands of birds, some of them on their way to and from the Arctic, to stop and snack on tiny invertebrates and worms as they travel along the Pacific flyway.
More than a dozen shorebird species have declined primarily because of the loss of local wetlands, said Gary Slater, research director at the Ecostudies Institute here and a consultant for the Nature Conservancy.
The farmers see the Nature Conservancy's willingness to pay them as an acknowledgment that they should not be expected to sacrifice their land or their living for wildlife. This approach effectively turns shorebirds into another crop to manage, instead of grounds for a lawsuit.
''The stewardship ethic in this valley is incredibly strong, but it doesn't trump the bank,'' said Mr. Hedlin, 56, who, with his wife, Serena Campbell, grows farmer's market produce, vegetable seeds, pumpkins, winter wheat and pickling cucumbers on their 400-acre farm.
Mr. Hedlin's 70-acre Farming for Wildlife parcel has been under water since a heavy November rain breached a dike and flooded the field, in a preview of what environmentalists hope will happen. Edged with wild roses and blackberry bushes, this accidental lake quickly attracted wintering waterfowl like trumpeter swans, coots, and mallard, teal and wigeon ducks.
An hour north of Seattle and an hour south of Vancouver, British Columbia, this region's glorious tulip farms attract hundreds of thousands of tourists each April. Skagit farmers also produce about 80 crops of commercial significance, including seeds used to grow beets, spinach and cabbage around the world, many of the red potatoes eaten in the United States, and vegetables and dairy products sent to farmer's markets and restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.
Thousands of years of flooding on the Skagit River deposited a rich layer of topsoil in the ''magic Skagit,'' as Mr. Hedlin calls the valley. European immigrants flocked here starting in the 1860s and built Victorian houses for their families on the board-flat green fields.
They also constructed an elaborate network of earthen dikes to capture land from the saltwater delta and prevent the rivers from flooding their farms. On this managed agricultural landscape, tens of thousand of acres of farmland were once tidal wetlands, Mr. Hedlin said.
Since the mid-1990s, residents have tried to slow development as strip malls and housing subdivisions marched northward from Seattle. Skagit County residents pay extra taxes to buy development rights from farmers, and a charitable group, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, warns that ''Pavement is forever.''
Many conservationists have also decided that farms are better than pavement, and say they are willing to balance preservation with profitable land use.
Mr. Morse lives here and even volunteered to spend two days last spring selling Mr. Hedlin's produce at a farmer's market.
''We don't know anything about farming,'' Mr. Morse told the farmers recently over coffee and sandwiches at the Rexville Grocery. ''You guys are the stewards of the land. You tell me what to do.''
For this experiment, each farmer's 70-acre parcel has been planted with a mixture of clover and grass to enrich the soil. While a third of the land will be periodically flooded for birds, a third will be fenced as pasture for dairy cows, and the rest will be mowed and otherwise left alone.
Farms here are gradually shifting toward organic production because consumers willingly pay much more for organic food. As another incentive to join Farming for Wildlife, the 210 acres will be available for organic use after three years.
Mr. Mesman will start producing organic milk with his 225 Holstein cows next spring. Mr. Thulen sees a big market for organic potatoes.
''In my time, I can see our little valley was farmed very hard,'' said Mr. Thulen, whose 2,000-acre farm was begun by his grandfather in 1867. ''That pendulum has swung to get the ground healthy again.''
In an ideal world, the Nature Conservancy would love to persuade farmers to add wetlands to their regular crop rotation. To that end, the group's scientists will analyze soil samples to assess whether shallow flooding might improve soil fertility as much as cow manure and mowed grass do.
In a similar project on the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, farmers reported better potato yields and fewer nematodes, a harmful worm, on land that had been purposefully flooded. But scientists say this may not apply in the Skagit Valley, where the soil has a higher clay content.
Whether or not they end up with more productive land, the three farmers seem pleased to try something new without financial risk.
''If 100 years from now,'' Mr. Hedlin said, ''there are healthy viable family farms in this valley and waterfowl and wildlife and salmon in the river, then everyone wins.''
Photos: Lisa Bellefond of the Nature Conservancy and David Hedlin, a farmer, on farmland set to become wetlands.; Shorebirds on flooded land in Skagit County, Wash., a sight that could become more common as a result of a ''Farming for Wildlife'' program. (Photographs by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times)
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Farmers and Conservationists Form a Rare Alliance
By JESSICA KOWAL
Published: December 27, 2006
The standoff here between farmers and environmentalists was familiar in the modern West.
With salmon and wildlife dwindling in the Skagit River Delta, some environmentalists had argued since the 1980s that local farms should be turned back into wetlands. Farmers here feared that preachy outsiders would strip them of their land and heritage.
This year, though, the standoff ended -- at least for three longtime farmers in this fertile valley, who
|
began collaborating with their former enemies to preserve wildlife and their livelihoods.
The Nature Conservancy, which usually buys land to shield it from development, is renting land from the three farmers on behalf of migrating Western sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, marbled godwits and other shorebirds.
From private and public funds, including a grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the farmers, David Hedlin, Gail Thulen and Alan Mesman, will together receive up to $350,000 for three years of labor, expenses and the use of 210 acres, said Kevin Morse, the Skagit Delta project manager for the conservancy.
Each man has committed about 70 acres to this project, which is called Farming for Wildlife. A third of that land will be flooded with a few inches of fresh water in the spring, fall and winter. This will create shallow ponds to entice thousands of birds, some of them on their way to and from the Arctic, to stop and snack on tiny invertebrates and worms as they travel along the Pacific flyway.
More than a dozen shorebird species have declined primarily because of the loss of local wetlands, said Gary Slater, research director at the Ecostudies Institute here and a consultant for the Nature Conservancy.
The farmers see the Nature Conservancy's willingness to pay them as an acknowledgment that they should not be expected to sacrifice their land or their living for wildlife. This approach effectively turns shorebirds into another crop to manage, instead of grounds for a lawsuit.
''The stewardship ethic in this valley is incredibly strong, but it doesn't trump the bank,'' said Mr. Hedlin, 56, who, with his wife, Serena Campbell, grows farmer's market produce, vegetable seeds, pumpkins, winter wheat and pickling cucumbers on their 400-acre farm.
Mr. Hedlin's 70-acre Farming for Wildlife parcel has been under water since a heavy November rain breached a dike and flooded the field, in a preview of what environmentalists hope will happen. Edged with wild roses and blackberry bushes, this accidental lake quickly attracted wintering waterfowl like trumpeter swans, coots, and mallard, teal and wigeon ducks.
An hour north of Seattle and an hour south of Vancouver, British Columbia, this region's glorious tulip farms attract hundreds of thousands of tourists each April. Skagit farmers also produce about 80 crops of commercial significance, including seeds used to grow beets, spinach and cabbage around the world, many of the red potatoes eaten in the United States, and vegetables and dairy products sent to farmer's markets and restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.
Thousands of years of flooding on the Skagit River deposited a rich layer of topsoil in the ''magic Skagit,'' as Mr. Hedlin calls the valley. European immigrants flocked here starting in the 1860s and built Victorian houses for their families on the board-flat green fields.
They also constructed an elaborate network of earthen dikes to capture land from the saltwater delta and prevent the rivers from flooding their farms. On this managed agricultural landscape, tens of thousand of acres of farmland were once tidal wetlands, Mr. Hedlin said.
Since the mid-1990s, residents have tried to slow development as strip malls and housing subdivisions marched northward from Seattle. Skagit County residents pay extra taxes to buy development rights from farmers, and a charitable group, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, warns that ''Pavement is forever.''
Many conservationists have also decided that farms are better than pavement, and say they are willing to balance preservation with profitable land use.
Mr. Morse lives here and even volunteered to spend two days last spring selling Mr. Hedlin's produce at a farmer's market.
''We don't know anything about farming,'' Mr. Morse told the farmers recently over coffee and sandwiches at the Rexville Grocery. ''You guys are the stewards of the land. You tell me what to do.''
For this experiment, each farmer's 70-acre parcel has been planted with a mixture of clover and grass to enrich the soil. While a third of the land will be periodically flooded for birds, a third will be fenced as pasture for dairy cows, and the rest will be mowed and otherwise left alone.
Farms here are gradually shifting toward organic production because consumers willingly pay much more for organic food. As another incentive to join Farming for Wildlife, the 210 acres will be available for organic use after three years.
Mr. Mesman will start producing organic milk with his 225 Holstein cows next spring. Mr. Thulen sees a big market for organic potatoes.
''In my time, I can see our little valley was farmed very hard,'' said Mr. Thulen, whose 2,000-acre farm was begun by his grandfather in 1867. ''That pendulum has swung to get the ground healthy again.''
In an ideal world, the Nature Conservancy would love to persuade farmers to add wetlands to their regular crop rotation. To that end, the group's scientists will analyze soil samples to assess whether shallow flooding might improve soil fertility as much as cow manure and mowed grass do.
In a similar project on the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, farmers reported better potato yields and fewer nematodes, a harmful worm, on land that had been purposefully flooded. But scientists say this may not apply in the Skagit Valley, where the soil has a higher clay content.
Whether or not they end up with more productive land, the three farmers seem pleased to try something new without financial risk.
''If 100 years from now,'' Mr. Hedlin said, ''there are healthy viable family farms in this valley and waterfowl and wildlife and salmon in the river, then everyone wins.''
Photos: Lisa Bellefond of the Nature Conservancy and David Hedlin, a farmer, on farmland set to become wetlands.; Shorebirds on flooded land in Skagit County, Wash., a sight that could become more common as a result of a ''Farming for Wildlife'' program. (Photographs by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times)
|
As I report today in The Times, the South Asian monsoon is critical to sustaining plants, animals and 1.6 billion people on the subcontinent. When it brings too little rain between June and October, shortages of food and drinking water can develop. When its bounty is too great, floods can displace millions and cause hundreds of deaths.
Scientists who have devoted their careers to studying the monsoon and predicting its dimensions say that the prognostications can be incredibly difficult. Adding to the complexity is global warming, which could potentially cause monsoon patterns to change.
But in a recent paper in Nature Climate Change, researchers write that they are beginning to understand more about the systems driving the monsoon and that they hope to improve their projections in years to come. We discussed the challenges recently with Andrew Turner, a researcher in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading in England who was a co-author of the article with H. Annamalai. Following are excerpts from the e-mail conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
In recent years, has global warming had a discernible impact on the monsoon and on median temperatures? Can the below-average rainfall seen in the last decade be attributed partly to climate change?
Certainly, as with many dry-land regions in the tropics (e.g. northern India prior to the monsoon), the daily mean temperatures have increased in the late 20th century, consistent with climate warming.
It is more difficult to say whether the below-average rainfall in the last decade can be attributed in part to climate change. What we do know is that in this period there were several central El Niño events in the Pacific (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, commencing during summer), which are known to be related to monsoon drought. These occurred in 2002 (when the monsoon brought only 81 percent of the normal rainfall), 2004 (87 percent) and 2009 (77 percent).
The current year is already facing a deficit in the monsoon of around 14.4 percent (85.6 percent of normal rainfall), with one month to run, and again, a central Pacific El Niño may be the cause. However, this is not to say that global warming could not be involved.
What we do know from future model projections is that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations alone generally cause increases in the seasonal average monsoon rainfall over the South Asia region. This is mainly related to an increase in the supply of moisture to India as the monsoon winds pass over the now-warmer Indian Ocean.
What I haven’t mentioned yet, and which we discussed in the Nature Climate Change paper, is the possible role of anthropogenic aerosol emissions. We know that with increases in population, there has been increased industrialization of the region (leading mainly to emissions of sulfates) and increased used of cooking fires (emitting black carbon).
We know that sulfates can have a negative impact on monsoon rainfall, although to what magnitude we are not sure. Certainly, in future climate change experiments the positive impacts on mean rainfall of increased greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) concentrations tend to outweigh the negative impacts of sulfates. The effects of black carbon on the monsoon are much more uncertain, and we not even sure of the sign of their impact on monsoon rainfall!
Is there reason to think that greater climate variability would result in a greater incidence of high-intensity rainfall and longer dry spells?
It is generally accepted that climate warming brings about an intensification of the hydrological cycle and the so-called ” rich get richer” mechanism. Because a warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture, the result is heavier bursts when it does rain. There are also longer dry spells between these events. (Such results have been shown in theory, in observations and in future projections of the monsoon using computer modeling.)
Some studies have shown that the Indian monsoon may become harder to predict in the future because of climate change. What is the consensus on this? Has there been enough research on this issue?
Since the rain may be coming in heavier bursts less often, one could suggest that monsoon rainfall will become more difficult to predict at the short “weather” time scale. At the seasonal scale (i.e., predicting total seasonal rainfall for June to September), we are not sure. We need to know what will happen to large-scale drivers like the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and what will happen to the mechanism that connects El Niño warming with the monsoon.
At present there is no reason to suggest this mechanism will change in the future, and our model projections of what will happen to ENSO are uncertain. Much more research could be undertaken on these aspects of how the monsoon may change and has changed.
Would certain parts of India be more severely affected than others? If so, which?
In model projections of future monsoon rainfall, there is general agreement that in an area-average sense, it will increase in the future. However, looking at individual models, the picture is hugely uncertain, so it is not currently possible to say which areas will be affected most.
What impact will the average rise in surface temperatures in coming decades have on India?
Rising surface temperatures (particularly just prior to the monsoon onset, and in the north of the country) will exacerbate existing problems — health-related, water shortages (problematic every year near the capital), agriculture, etc.
What kind of mitigation efforts should Indian policymakers pursue to prepare for these climatic changes?
Due to the large uncertainties, it is difficult to suggest options other than to choose ones that are “win-win” — those that will bring benefits no matter how the climate changes in India. These could include better water storage and management practices, better controls on anthropogenic aerosol pollution. Certainly there needs to be an effort to better communicate climate changes and the uncertainties to the end-user level — farmers etc. — so they do not expend effort or capital on trying to adapt to a change that is unlikely.
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As I report today in The Times, the South Asian monsoon is critical to sustaining plants, animals and 1.6 billion people on the subcontinent. When it brings too little rain between June and October, shortages of food and drinking water can develop. When its bounty is too great, floods can displace millions and cause hundreds of deaths.
Scientists who have devoted their careers to studying the monsoon and predicting its dimensions say that the prognostications can be incredibly difficult. Adding to the complexity is global warming, which could potentially cause monsoon patterns to change.
But in a recent paper in Nature Climate Change, researchers write that
|
they are beginning to understand more about the systems driving the monsoon and that they hope to improve their projections in years to come. We discussed the challenges recently with Andrew Turner, a researcher in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading in England who was a co-author of the article with H. Annamalai. Following are excerpts from the e-mail conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
In recent years, has global warming had a discernible impact on the monsoon and on median temperatures? Can the below-average rainfall seen in the last decade be attributed partly to climate change?
Certainly, as with many dry-land regions in the tropics (e.g. northern India prior to the monsoon), the daily mean temperatures have increased in the late 20th century, consistent with climate warming.
It is more difficult to say whether the below-average rainfall in the last decade can be attributed in part to climate change. What we do know is that in this period there were several central El Niño events in the Pacific (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures, commencing during summer), which are known to be related to monsoon drought. These occurred in 2002 (when the monsoon brought only 81 percent of the normal rainfall), 2004 (87 percent) and 2009 (77 percent).
The current year is already facing a deficit in the monsoon of around 14.4 percent (85.6 percent of normal rainfall), with one month to run, and again, a central Pacific El Niño may be the cause. However, this is not to say that global warming could not be involved.
What we do know from future model projections is that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations alone generally cause increases in the seasonal average monsoon rainfall over the South Asia region. This is mainly related to an increase in the supply of moisture to India as the monsoon winds pass over the now-warmer Indian Ocean.
What I haven’t mentioned yet, and which we discussed in the Nature Climate Change paper, is the possible role of anthropogenic aerosol emissions. We know that with increases in population, there has been increased industrialization of the region (leading mainly to emissions of sulfates) and increased used of cooking fires (emitting black carbon).
We know that sulfates can have a negative impact on monsoon rainfall, although to what magnitude we are not sure. Certainly, in future climate change experiments the positive impacts on mean rainfall of increased greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) concentrations tend to outweigh the negative impacts of sulfates. The effects of black carbon on the monsoon are much more uncertain, and we not even sure of the sign of their impact on monsoon rainfall!
Is there reason to think that greater climate variability would result in a greater incidence of high-intensity rainfall and longer dry spells?
It is generally accepted that climate warming brings about an intensification of the hydrological cycle and the so-called ” rich get richer” mechanism. Because a warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture, the result is heavier bursts when it does rain. There are also longer dry spells between these events. (Such results have been shown in theory, in observations and in future projections of the monsoon using computer modeling.)
Some studies have shown that the Indian monsoon may become harder to predict in the future because of climate change. What is the consensus on this? Has there been enough research on this issue?
Since the rain may be coming in heavier bursts less often, one could suggest that monsoon rainfall will become more difficult to predict at the short “weather” time scale. At the seasonal scale (i.e., predicting total seasonal rainfall for June to September), we are not sure. We need to know what will happen to large-scale drivers like the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and what will happen to the mechanism that connects El Niño warming with the monsoon.
At present there is no reason to suggest this mechanism will change in the future, and our model projections of what will happen to ENSO are uncertain. Much more research could be undertaken on these aspects of how the monsoon may change and has changed.
Would certain parts of India be more severely affected than others? If so, which?
In model projections of future monsoon rainfall, there is general agreement that in an area-average sense, it will increase in the future. However, looking at individual models, the picture is hugely uncertain, so it is not currently possible to say which areas will be affected most.
What impact will the average rise in surface temperatures in coming decades have on India?
Rising surface temperatures (particularly just prior to the monsoon onset, and in the north of the country) will exacerbate existing problems — health-related, water shortages (problematic every year near the capital), agriculture, etc.
What kind of mitigation efforts should Indian policymakers pursue to prepare for these climatic changes?
Due to the large uncertainties, it is difficult to suggest options other than to choose ones that are “win-win” — those that will bring benefits no matter how the climate changes in India. These could include better water storage and management practices, better controls on anthropogenic aerosol pollution. Certainly there needs to be an effort to better communicate climate changes and the uncertainties to the end-user level — farmers etc. — so they do not expend effort or capital on trying to adapt to a change that is unlikely.
|
Is heart disease in the eyes? For some people, it just might be.
Studies have shown that higher levels of lipids, or fats, in the blood can cause some people to develop raised yellow patches of skin around the eyelids, known as xanthelasma. Generally the spots are considered a benign cosmetic issue. Though they affect people of all ages, they are most common in middle age and later. Last year an Italian researcher reported that he spotted clear signs of xanthelasma around Mona Lisa’s left eye.
But in a study this year in the journal BMJ, Danish scientists decided to look at whether these yellow patches could be an indication of underlying cardiovascular disease, tied to high cholesterol. In the study, the researchers followed nearly 13,000 adults over age 30 who were taking part in the Copenhagen City Heart Study.
People who developed the spots, it turned out, were more likely to have a heart attack or die of heart disease, regardless of other risk factors, like obesity and cholesterol levels. Over all, men who had xanthelasma had a 12 percent higher risk of heart disease, compared with those who did not, and women who developed the condition had an 8 percent rise in risk.
The nature of the link is not entirely clear. But an editorial with the study suggested that in people with no other overt signs of heart disease, an examination that includes a close inspection of the eyes could help identify those at greater risk.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Research suggests that in some people, small yellow patches around the eyes could be a harbinger of heart disease.
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|
Is heart disease in the eyes? For some people, it just might be.
Studies have shown that higher levels of lipids, or fats, in the blood can cause some people to develop raised yellow patches of skin around the eyelids, known as xanthelasma. Generally the spots are considered a benign cosmetic issue. Though they affect people of all ages, they are most common in middle age and later. Last year an Italian researcher reported that he spotted clear signs of xanthelasma around Mona Lisa’s left eye.
But in a study this year in the journal BMJ, Danish scientists decided to look at whether these yellow patches could
|
be an indication of underlying cardiovascular disease, tied to high cholesterol. In the study, the researchers followed nearly 13,000 adults over age 30 who were taking part in the Copenhagen City Heart Study.
People who developed the spots, it turned out, were more likely to have a heart attack or die of heart disease, regardless of other risk factors, like obesity and cholesterol levels. Over all, men who had xanthelasma had a 12 percent higher risk of heart disease, compared with those who did not, and women who developed the condition had an 8 percent rise in risk.
The nature of the link is not entirely clear. But an editorial with the study suggested that in people with no other overt signs of heart disease, an examination that includes a close inspection of the eyes could help identify those at greater risk.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Research suggests that in some people, small yellow patches around the eyes could be a harbinger of heart disease.
|
The 12 years of Republican reign seem, looking back, like a constant political war over taxes, a war that will almost certainly continue next year after Bill Clinton becomes President.
Year after year, ignoring the counsel of economists and business executives that the wisest tax code is a stable and predictable one, the laws were changed in important ways. It happened in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1990, more frequent and detailed changes in taxes than ever before in American history, and another new law would have been adopted this year if President Bush had not cast a veto. Change and More Change
Income tax rates were slashed, cut again and then increased slightly. Tax breaks to encourage business investment and personal savings were widened, then repealed. A surtax on the elderly to pay the cost of catastrophic illnesses was approved in 1987 and retracted in 1988. Social Security, Medicare and gasoline taxes went up. Corporate taxes fell.
Hundreds of billions of dollars of tax liability was shifted around among individuals and companies. Over these years, tax policy was a pervasive issue in every Presidential election.
Except for the very rich and the very poor, the overall tax burden of Americans is about the same as it was a dozen years ago.
A family of three at the center of the income spectrum paid 19.8 percent of its earnings in Federal taxes in 1980, the year before Ronald Reagan became President. Next year, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office, such a family (with an income between about $29,000 and $42,000) will owe, on average, 19.5 percent.
Put another way, as a fraction of the economy, the amount of Federal, state and local taxes collected has remained almost constant. It was 27.8 percent of gross domestic product in 1980 and 28 percent last year.
But the fact that overall tax burdens remained rather stable masks the extent to which constant changes in the law forced people and companies to alter the way they saved and spent and invested their money. First, for instance, people were induced to invest in commercial real estate; then that carrot was withdrawn. One year savings accounts were tax free; the next year they were not. Deductions for medical expenses and sales taxes went by the boards. Affecting Daily Life
Tax policy, in short, became not only a driving force in the nation's politics, but in the way people ran their lives day to day.
And despite all the turmoil, politicians seem to feel just as strongly today that the tax system needs to be revamped as they did in 1980.
In this year's election, President Bush stressed the Republican dogma that Americans in general and rich people in particular are taxed too much for the good of the economy. President-elect Clinton campaigned on the familiar Democratic theme that the tax system is unfair -- too generous to the wealthy and too burdensome to the middle class.
Since Mr. Clinton won and since his Democratic allies in Congress seem disposed to give him the tax-policy changes he wants, in general if not in every particular, shots of Gucci Gulch -- the corridors of Capitol Hill so known because that is where the tax lobbyists lurk in their tasseled loafers -- will doubtless be staples on television news programs once again.
Mr. Clinton says he wants to raise income taxes on the wealthy, revive tax breaks for businesses to induce them to invest in machinery and equipment, crack down on tax avoidance by foreign companies doing business in the United States and give a modest tax cut to middle-class taxpayers.
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The 12 years of Republican reign seem, looking back, like a constant political war over taxes, a war that will almost certainly continue next year after Bill Clinton becomes President.
Year after year, ignoring the counsel of economists and business executives that the wisest tax code is a stable and predictable one, the laws were changed in important ways. It happened in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1990, more frequent and detailed changes in taxes than
|
ever before in American history, and another new law would have been adopted this year if President Bush had not cast a veto. Change and More Change
Income tax rates were slashed, cut again and then increased slightly. Tax breaks to encourage business investment and personal savings were widened, then repealed. A surtax on the elderly to pay the cost of catastrophic illnesses was approved in 1987 and retracted in 1988. Social Security, Medicare and gasoline taxes went up. Corporate taxes fell.
Hundreds of billions of dollars of tax liability was shifted around among individuals and companies. Over these years, tax policy was a pervasive issue in every Presidential election.
Except for the very rich and the very poor, the overall tax burden of Americans is about the same as it was a dozen years ago.
A family of three at the center of the income spectrum paid 19.8 percent of its earnings in Federal taxes in 1980, the year before Ronald Reagan became President. Next year, according to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office, such a family (with an income between about $29,000 and $42,000) will owe, on average, 19.5 percent.
Put another way, as a fraction of the economy, the amount of Federal, state and local taxes collected has remained almost constant. It was 27.8 percent of gross domestic product in 1980 and 28 percent last year.
But the fact that overall tax burdens remained rather stable masks the extent to which constant changes in the law forced people and companies to alter the way they saved and spent and invested their money. First, for instance, people were induced to invest in commercial real estate; then that carrot was withdrawn. One year savings accounts were tax free; the next year they were not. Deductions for medical expenses and sales taxes went by the boards. Affecting Daily Life
Tax policy, in short, became not only a driving force in the nation's politics, but in the way people ran their lives day to day.
And despite all the turmoil, politicians seem to feel just as strongly today that the tax system needs to be revamped as they did in 1980.
In this year's election, President Bush stressed the Republican dogma that Americans in general and rich people in particular are taxed too much for the good of the economy. President-elect Clinton campaigned on the familiar Democratic theme that the tax system is unfair -- too generous to the wealthy and too burdensome to the middle class.
Since Mr. Clinton won and since his Democratic allies in Congress seem disposed to give him the tax-policy changes he wants, in general if not in every particular, shots of Gucci Gulch -- the corridors of Capitol Hill so known because that is where the tax lobbyists lurk in their tasseled loafers -- will doubtless be staples on television news programs once again.
Mr. Clinton says he wants to raise income taxes on the wealthy, revive tax breaks for businesses to induce them to invest in machinery and equipment, crack down on tax avoidance by foreign companies doing business in the United States and give a modest tax cut to middle-class taxpayers.
|
Too much time in front of the television has long been linked to childhood obesity. Now, new research suggests it’s not the TV but the commercials that are making kids fat.
In a study of more than 2,000 children, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, compared the time the kids spent viewing television and video. They asked caregivers to track children’s media use during one weekday and one weekend day during 1997, then again in 2002.
The findings showed that the amount of television a child watched wasn’t a predictor of obesity risk. Instead, risk for being overweight increased the more television commercials a child was exposed to. There was no association with television viewing and obesity for those who watched videos or commercial-free programming.
Although the effect was seen among all children studied, it was strongest for children younger than 7, according to the report in The American Journal of Public Health.
Because people with more education and better eating habits might also insist their children watch videos or PBS rather than commercial television, the study authors controlled for a number of other factors that might influence the findings. They looked at such variables as the mother’s weight and education level, the child’s starting weight and overall physical activity, time spent eating in front of the television and even the amount of sleep children were getting. Even after controlling for these factors, the link between commercials and weight gain remained.
Fred Zimmerman, the study’s lead author and chairman of U.C.L.A.’s Department of Health Services, said television commercials for sweetened cereals, junk food and fast food chains probably had an insidious influence over a child’s food preferences. The more television commercials a child is exposed to, the more likely he or she will be to try those foods and want to continue eating them, which then increases risk for weight gain.
Although it’s long been speculated that television viewing is associated with a lack of physical activity, that’s often not the case. Young children often stand, jump and wiggle while watching television, and children who play sports also may be watching more sports programming.
“There’s been a fair amount of work showing TV viewing is associated with obesity,’’ Dr. Zimmerman said. “What’s new about this research is that it suggests there’s no evidence of a couch potato effect. It’s highly suggestive that it’s the effect of watching TV commercials.’’
The study wasn’t able to document how much food advertising children were exposed to. But research shows that young children are exposed to about 30 hours of food-related advertising annually. During Saturday cartoons, children see an average of one food ad every five minutes, most of which are for junk food, the researchers noted.
“Advertisers have been clever about building brand loyalty, making these foods seem attractive,’’ Dr. Zimmerman said. “I was talking with one of my graduate students who was saying, ‘When I was a kid, it was just a dorky rabbit talking about Trix.’ Now it’s about being cool, and what’s fun and exciting. It really grabs your emotions much more powerfully than it used to.’’
For more information on obesity, see the Times Topics Obesity Page.
|
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Too much time in front of the television has long been linked to childhood obesity. Now, new research suggests it’s not the TV but the commercials that are making kids fat.
In a study of more than 2,000 children, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, compared the time the kids spent viewing television and video. They asked caregivers to track children’s media use during one weekday and one weekend day during 1997, then again in 2002.
The findings showed that the amount of television a child watched wasn’t a predictor of obesity risk. Instead, risk for being overweight
|
increased the more television commercials a child was exposed to. There was no association with television viewing and obesity for those who watched videos or commercial-free programming.
Although the effect was seen among all children studied, it was strongest for children younger than 7, according to the report in The American Journal of Public Health.
Because people with more education and better eating habits might also insist their children watch videos or PBS rather than commercial television, the study authors controlled for a number of other factors that might influence the findings. They looked at such variables as the mother’s weight and education level, the child’s starting weight and overall physical activity, time spent eating in front of the television and even the amount of sleep children were getting. Even after controlling for these factors, the link between commercials and weight gain remained.
Fred Zimmerman, the study’s lead author and chairman of U.C.L.A.’s Department of Health Services, said television commercials for sweetened cereals, junk food and fast food chains probably had an insidious influence over a child’s food preferences. The more television commercials a child is exposed to, the more likely he or she will be to try those foods and want to continue eating them, which then increases risk for weight gain.
Although it’s long been speculated that television viewing is associated with a lack of physical activity, that’s often not the case. Young children often stand, jump and wiggle while watching television, and children who play sports also may be watching more sports programming.
“There’s been a fair amount of work showing TV viewing is associated with obesity,’’ Dr. Zimmerman said. “What’s new about this research is that it suggests there’s no evidence of a couch potato effect. It’s highly suggestive that it’s the effect of watching TV commercials.’’
The study wasn’t able to document how much food advertising children were exposed to. But research shows that young children are exposed to about 30 hours of food-related advertising annually. During Saturday cartoons, children see an average of one food ad every five minutes, most of which are for junk food, the researchers noted.
“Advertisers have been clever about building brand loyalty, making these foods seem attractive,’’ Dr. Zimmerman said. “I was talking with one of my graduate students who was saying, ‘When I was a kid, it was just a dorky rabbit talking about Trix.’ Now it’s about being cool, and what’s fun and exciting. It really grabs your emotions much more powerfully than it used to.’’
For more information on obesity, see the Times Topics Obesity Page.
|
"Smart" phones offer the intelligence of a computer, with the convenience of a phone. "Smart" meters let homeowners choose between using cheap and expensive electricity.
More News From ClimateWire
- Obama Aides Meet With Senate Dems to Map April Strategy for Climate Bill
- The Quest for Cheap, Clean Power -- Science Tries to Mimic Plants
- Sen. Graham Peeved on Health Care but Will Stick With Climate Bill
- Providing Life Support for Bright Ideas
- Accelerating Arctic Changes Pose Long-Term Risks for the U.S. Navy
The next frontier: "smart" trash?
A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are.
The signals go to MIT's SENSEable City Lab for analysis. Last year, they also went to art exhibits in both cities, where live maps revealed the many paths garbage takes.
For example, a plastic soap bottle tossed in a Manhattan recycling bin took several twists and turns around the city before crossing the river to Kearny, N.J.
Carlo Ratti, who directs the City Lab, said each city he's lived in -- Turin, Italy; Paris; Cambridge, England; Boston -- has suffered from congestion, pollution and inefficiency problems.
He believes new technologies, like iPhones, social networking and wireless communication, can inform city dwellers and make cities "smarter." "The only way we can actually solve some of the big problems, like climate change, is if we really coordinate and act together," Ratti said. "What, for the first time, is really bringing us together is the power of networks in general and the Internet."
One product was the "Copenhagen Wheel," a device that attaches to a bicycle and offers information on how much people are riding and where -- in addition to giving a little boost on the uphill. The lab has also designed interactive screens for bus stops that can communicate with an iPhone, tailoring advertisements to riders or serving as a larger screen for hand-held diversions.
What your garbageman can't tell you
The aim of project "Trash Track": to study where recyclables go. Dietmar Offenhuber, a doctoral student in the lab, said there's plenty of research on how things are made, but little is known about how they degrade and finally disappear. Among the questions here -- especially for cities paying millions for recycling programs -- are how much greenhouse gas is created and how much energy is wasted in the process. Another might be whether recycling really happens.
"Even the people working in waste removal don't really have a clear knowledge or picture of where the stuff goes," he said.
That's partly because trash goes through so many handoffs en route to its final destination, Offenhuber said. Trash companies follow their own haul, for example. But once they separate the aluminum and sell it to a collector, their records end. No single database tracks a soda can through its cycle.
Environmental groups and sustainability-minded cities have taken interest in the technology, since it could add credibility to the recycling system. There's been cause for doubt, particularly with electronic waste.
Last November, the CBS program "60 Minutes" followed a suspicious crate leaving a Denver-area company that claimed to recycle its e-waste in the United States. The crate ended up in Hong Kong -- illegally, since the United States prohibits export of e-waste containing hazardous materials like lead.
Some very long trails to follow
The investigation also found gruesome health conditions in a Chinese town whose economy was devoted to scrapping e-waste. The story said a mass underground industry transfers electronics from wealthier nations to poor, less-regulated countries.
In the United States, tracking trash can also reveal whether recycling benefits the climate. Recycling is supposed to recover energy-intensive materials and thrust them back into the production chain. But early returns from Seattle, Offenhuber said, show that telephones and printer cartridges get shipped across the country -- to Chicago, Miami and New York.
"Because the recycling process itself generates, of course, an environmental burden, this burden is also depending on the transportation distance," he said. "So if you have an object that yields very little energy in the recycling process, and you have to carry it through the whole country, then you have probably a higher environmental burden than gain."
Will Trash Track draw commercial interest? The tracking devices, roughly the size of a pager, were built by Qualcomm, a major wireless communications firm. Those devices were tracked by Sprint, whose networks of towers triangulate individual pieces of trash.
Waste Management, which provides trash and recycling hauling for about half of Seattle, also participated. A spokeswoman for the company said it has no future plans to use the devices, however.
The follow-it-yourself tracker
Sprint spokesman John Taylor said, "It's not something that Sprint is prepared to market right now," but that if someone proposed a Trash Track-like program, the company might consider it. Sprint currently collects phones for recycling, but it has no way of tracking where the phones go once its partner, UPS, takes them.
That doesn't upset Ratti, who thinks of his research projects as enlightening the public.
"Usually we consider them successful not only if they get published in top scientific journals, like Nature or Science, but also if they go to the MoMA," he said, referring to New York's Museum of Modern Art. "We think that it's important, the vision, and the vision for a possible future is what usually we got into the museum."
But according to Offenhuber, telecom companies are watching Trash Track to see if it can be scaled up. By the end of this year, he said, the SENSEable City Lab wants to deploy thousands more trackers, and it wants to focus on e-waste.
That will help the companies develop a tracker that's cheaper and easier to use. Ultimately, the device may even come in a tracking "kit" that lets someone attach it to an item, then log on to a Web site that tells its whereabouts.
Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
|
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|
"Smart" phones offer the intelligence of a computer, with the convenience of a phone. "Smart" meters let homeowners choose between using cheap and expensive electricity.
More News From ClimateWire
- Obama Aides Meet With Senate Dems to Map April Strategy for Climate Bill
- The Quest for Cheap, Clean Power -- Science Tries to Mimic Plants
- Sen. Graham Peeved on Health Care but Will Stick With Climate Bill
- Providing Life Support for Bright Ideas
- Accelerating Arctic Changes Pose Long-Term Risks for the U.S. Navy
The next frontier: "smart" trash
|
?
A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are.
The signals go to MIT's SENSEable City Lab for analysis. Last year, they also went to art exhibits in both cities, where live maps revealed the many paths garbage takes.
For example, a plastic soap bottle tossed in a Manhattan recycling bin took several twists and turns around the city before crossing the river to Kearny, N.J.
Carlo Ratti, who directs the City Lab, said each city he's lived in -- Turin, Italy; Paris; Cambridge, England; Boston -- has suffered from congestion, pollution and inefficiency problems.
He believes new technologies, like iPhones, social networking and wireless communication, can inform city dwellers and make cities "smarter." "The only way we can actually solve some of the big problems, like climate change, is if we really coordinate and act together," Ratti said. "What, for the first time, is really bringing us together is the power of networks in general and the Internet."
One product was the "Copenhagen Wheel," a device that attaches to a bicycle and offers information on how much people are riding and where -- in addition to giving a little boost on the uphill. The lab has also designed interactive screens for bus stops that can communicate with an iPhone, tailoring advertisements to riders or serving as a larger screen for hand-held diversions.
What your garbageman can't tell you
The aim of project "Trash Track": to study where recyclables go. Dietmar Offenhuber, a doctoral student in the lab, said there's plenty of research on how things are made, but little is known about how they degrade and finally disappear. Among the questions here -- especially for cities paying millions for recycling programs -- are how much greenhouse gas is created and how much energy is wasted in the process. Another might be whether recycling really happens.
"Even the people working in waste removal don't really have a clear knowledge or picture of where the stuff goes," he said.
That's partly because trash goes through so many handoffs en route to its final destination, Offenhuber said. Trash companies follow their own haul, for example. But once they separate the aluminum and sell it to a collector, their records end. No single database tracks a soda can through its cycle.
Environmental groups and sustainability-minded cities have taken interest in the technology, since it could add credibility to the recycling system. There's been cause for doubt, particularly with electronic waste.
Last November, the CBS program "60 Minutes" followed a suspicious crate leaving a Denver-area company that claimed to recycle its e-waste in the United States. The crate ended up in Hong Kong -- illegally, since the United States prohibits export of e-waste containing hazardous materials like lead.
Some very long trails to follow
The investigation also found gruesome health conditions in a Chinese town whose economy was devoted to scrapping e-waste. The story said a mass underground industry transfers electronics from wealthier nations to poor, less-regulated countries.
In the United States, tracking trash can also reveal whether recycling benefits the climate. Recycling is supposed to recover energy-intensive materials and thrust them back into the production chain. But early returns from Seattle, Offenhuber said, show that telephones and printer cartridges get shipped across the country -- to Chicago, Miami and New York.
"Because the recycling process itself generates, of course, an environmental burden, this burden is also depending on the transportation distance," he said. "So if you have an object that yields very little energy in the recycling process, and you have to carry it through the whole country, then you have probably a higher environmental burden than gain."
Will Trash Track draw commercial interest? The tracking devices, roughly the size of a pager, were built by Qualcomm, a major wireless communications firm. Those devices were tracked by Sprint, whose networks of towers triangulate individual pieces of trash.
Waste Management, which provides trash and recycling hauling for about half of Seattle, also participated. A spokeswoman for the company said it has no future plans to use the devices, however.
The follow-it-yourself tracker
Sprint spokesman John Taylor said, "It's not something that Sprint is prepared to market right now," but that if someone proposed a Trash Track-like program, the company might consider it. Sprint currently collects phones for recycling, but it has no way of tracking where the phones go once its partner, UPS, takes them.
That doesn't upset Ratti, who thinks of his research projects as enlightening the public.
"Usually we consider them successful not only if they get published in top scientific journals, like Nature or Science, but also if they go to the MoMA," he said, referring to New York's Museum of Modern Art. "We think that it's important, the vision, and the vision for a possible future is what usually we got into the museum."
But according to Offenhuber, telecom companies are watching Trash Track to see if it can be scaled up. By the end of this year, he said, the SENSEable City Lab wants to deploy thousands more trackers, and it wants to focus on e-waste.
That will help the companies develop a tracker that's cheaper and easier to use. Ultimately, the device may even come in a tracking "kit" that lets someone attach it to an item, then log on to a Web site that tells its whereabouts.
Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
|
Next November more than 5 million Americans will not be allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction in their past. Nearly 4 million of these people are not in prison, yet they remain disenfranchised for years, often for decades and sometimes for life.
States vary widely on when they restore voting rights after a conviction. Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise people with convictions; even prisoners may vote there. People with felony convictions in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia are disenfranchised for life, unless they are granted clemency by the governor. The rest of the country falls somewhere in between.
These laws trace their roots through the troubled history of American race relations. In the late 1800s criminal disenfranchisement laws spread as part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – that ended slavery, granted equal citizenship to freed slaves and prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Criminal disenfranchisement laws followed in their wake. They were employed right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests as part of an organized effort to design supposedly race neutral laws that were in fact intentional barriers to African-American voting. According to historian Alexander Keyssar’s “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, between 1865 and 1900,” 27 states enacted laws restricting the voting rights of people with criminal convictions.
It’s a simple equation: communities with high incarceration rates have fewer votes to cast. The whole community suffers the result.
Historical records memorializing state constitutional conventions reveal some astounding rhetoric in support of these laws. During the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901, delegate Carter Glass (later a prominent senator, the Glass of the Glass-Steagall Act) described the suffrage proposal which included felony disenfranchisement as a plan that would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.” The strategy was not limited to southern states. In New York, African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, New York delegate Samuel Young implored: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom it is now proposed to clothe with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
When states enacted criminal disenfranchisement laws, they also expanded their criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed targeted recently freed slaves. In an 1896 decision, Ratliff v. Beale, the Mississippi Supreme Court confirmed that the new state constitution narrowed the disenfranchisement provision to target certain crimes such as theft, perjury, forgery and bigamy of which blacks were then more often convicted. The court explained:
Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. . . This race had acquired certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites . . . and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
Today, Mississippi’s constitution still denies the right to vote based on the same “furtive offenses.”
Nationwide, 13 percent of black men have lost the right to vote, a rate that is seven times the national average. But the ripple effects of large-scale incarceration now extend well beyond the individuals who are imprisoned, and as a result minority communities throughout the country have lost political influence. It’s a simple equation: communities with high incarceration rates have fewer votes to cast. The whole community suffers the result.
The first in a series about the complexities of voters and voting.
Despite this history and continuing impact, legal challenges to criminal disenfranchisement laws have largely failed. In 1974 the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Richardson v. Ramirez, a challenge to California’s disenfranchisement law. Writing for the majority, the late William Rehnquist relied on an obscure clause of the 14th Amendment itself to sanction criminal disenfranchisement laws. The Court ruled that Section 2 of the amendment, which reduces a state’s representation in Congress if the state has denied the right to vote for any reason “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” distinguishes felony disenfranchisement from other forms of voting restrictions (which must be narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests in order to be constitutional).
But state legislatures have stepped up where court challenges have failed. Since 1997, 23 states have either restored voting rights or eased the restoration process. However, this year two states key to the electoral map – Florida and Iowa – rolled back recent reforms. (More on that in future posts.)
Representative John Conyers Jr. recently reintroduced into the House the Democracy Restoration Act (which I worked on), a bill that would go a long way toward ending disenfranchisement. A broad coalition of law enforcement, religious leaders and civil rights groups support the measure, which would restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who are out of prison.
For all of the history and all of the politics, the right to vote is a very personal piece of empowerment. If as a society we want those who have done wrong to do right, then this one act can signify a life change. As one New York resident, reflecting on voting for the first time in 2008 after having her rights restored, put it: “I felt like I was finally a productive member of society. I’ve never before felt like I could make a difference in terms of what happens around me. But I walked out of the polling place on Election Day feeling like I mattered.”
Erika L. Wood is an associate professor of law at New York Law School. This is the first in a series of articles —Who Votes?— that will appear occasionally as part of Campaign Stops.
|
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Next November more than 5 million Americans will not be allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction in their past. Nearly 4 million of these people are not in prison, yet they remain disenfranchised for years, often for decades and sometimes for life.
States vary widely on when they restore voting rights after a conviction. Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise people with convictions; even prisoners may vote there. People with felony convictions in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia are disenfranchised for life, unless they are granted clemency by the governor. The rest of the country falls somewhere in
|
between.
These laws trace their roots through the troubled history of American race relations. In the late 1800s criminal disenfranchisement laws spread as part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – that ended slavery, granted equal citizenship to freed slaves and prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Criminal disenfranchisement laws followed in their wake. They were employed right alongside poll taxes and literacy tests as part of an organized effort to design supposedly race neutral laws that were in fact intentional barriers to African-American voting. According to historian Alexander Keyssar’s “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, between 1865 and 1900,” 27 states enacted laws restricting the voting rights of people with criminal convictions.
It’s a simple equation: communities with high incarceration rates have fewer votes to cast. The whole community suffers the result.
Historical records memorializing state constitutional conventions reveal some astounding rhetoric in support of these laws. During the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901, delegate Carter Glass (later a prominent senator, the Glass of the Glass-Steagall Act) described the suffrage proposal which included felony disenfranchisement as a plan that would “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years.” The strategy was not limited to southern states. In New York, African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, New York delegate Samuel Young implored: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom it is now proposed to clothe with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
When states enacted criminal disenfranchisement laws, they also expanded their criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed targeted recently freed slaves. In an 1896 decision, Ratliff v. Beale, the Mississippi Supreme Court confirmed that the new state constitution narrowed the disenfranchisement provision to target certain crimes such as theft, perjury, forgery and bigamy of which blacks were then more often convicted. The court explained:
Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. . . This race had acquired certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites . . . and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.
Today, Mississippi’s constitution still denies the right to vote based on the same “furtive offenses.”
Nationwide, 13 percent of black men have lost the right to vote, a rate that is seven times the national average. But the ripple effects of large-scale incarceration now extend well beyond the individuals who are imprisoned, and as a result minority communities throughout the country have lost political influence. It’s a simple equation: communities with high incarceration rates have fewer votes to cast. The whole community suffers the result.
The first in a series about the complexities of voters and voting.
Despite this history and continuing impact, legal challenges to criminal disenfranchisement laws have largely failed. In 1974 the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Richardson v. Ramirez, a challenge to California’s disenfranchisement law. Writing for the majority, the late William Rehnquist relied on an obscure clause of the 14th Amendment itself to sanction criminal disenfranchisement laws. The Court ruled that Section 2 of the amendment, which reduces a state’s representation in Congress if the state has denied the right to vote for any reason “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” distinguishes felony disenfranchisement from other forms of voting restrictions (which must be narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests in order to be constitutional).
But state legislatures have stepped up where court challenges have failed. Since 1997, 23 states have either restored voting rights or eased the restoration process. However, this year two states key to the electoral map – Florida and Iowa – rolled back recent reforms. (More on that in future posts.)
Representative John Conyers Jr. recently reintroduced into the House the Democracy Restoration Act (which I worked on), a bill that would go a long way toward ending disenfranchisement. A broad coalition of law enforcement, religious leaders and civil rights groups support the measure, which would restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who are out of prison.
For all of the history and all of the politics, the right to vote is a very personal piece of empowerment. If as a society we want those who have done wrong to do right, then this one act can signify a life change. As one New York resident, reflecting on voting for the first time in 2008 after having her rights restored, put it: “I felt like I was finally a productive member of society. I’ve never before felt like I could make a difference in terms of what happens around me. But I walked out of the polling place on Election Day feeling like I mattered.”
Erika L. Wood is an associate professor of law at New York Law School. This is the first in a series of articles —Who Votes?— that will appear occasionally as part of Campaign Stops.
|
Unusually cold water in the Gulf of Mexico combined with damage to the food web from the BP oil spill probably caused the premature deaths of hundreds of dolphins in the region, a new report concludes.
The study, published in the journal PLoS One, suggests that a perfect storm of events led to the deaths. The researchers cited three specific stresses: an unusually cold winter in 2010, the oil spill from April to July of 2010 and an unusually large and rapid flow of very cold freshwater from melting snows in January 2011. Such cold water would have been tolerable to healthy dolphins, they suggested, but many of the dolphins in the northern Gulf were unhealthy and had thin blubber layers.
Graham A.J. Worthy, a biologist and contributing author from the University of Central Florida, said the study was not definitively linking the deaths to the oil spill but seeking to assemble the various pieces of the puzzle. “Everything ultimately seems to be linked back to poor body condition,” he said. “So what would cause poor body condition?”
“What we do know was that there was a cold winter in 2010 which might have affected dolphin food resources, and the BP oil spill occurred in 2010, and there is increasing evidence of spill materials entering coastal ecosystems and negatively impacting the food web,” he said.
The report was produced by a team of scientists from half a dozen Southern universities and research institutes, including the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the University of Central Florida, that have been studying the dolphin deaths for two years.
Whether the oil spill from the Macondo well is related to the unusually high number of dolphin deaths in the northern gulf has been an enduring mystery.
At least 754 dolphins have been reported stranded there since February 2010. The dolphin deaths have mostly ceased in Florida, which was further from the spill site, but have continued in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. In January 2011, there was also a spike in the deaths of baby dolphins.
So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has stopped short of linking the dolphin deaths directly to the spill. But in March the agency released a report on autopsies on 32 dolphins from Barataria Bay off Louisiana, which was hit hard by the spill.
The necropsies showed that the dolphins had low amounts of a stress hormone, indicating adrenal insufficiency, which has been associated with oil contamination among mammals in other studies.
Teri Rowles, the coordinator of the National Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program at NOAA’s Fisheries Service, said the agency would review the paper but had yet to come to any conclusion about the role of the oil spill in dolphin deaths. “We are still evaluating contributing factors and causes of this event,” she said.
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|
Unusually cold water in the Gulf of Mexico combined with damage to the food web from the BP oil spill probably caused the premature deaths of hundreds of dolphins in the region, a new report concludes.
The study, published in the journal PLoS One, suggests that a perfect storm of events led to the deaths. The researchers cited three specific stresses: an unusually cold winter in 2010, the oil spill from April to July of 2010 and an unusually large and rapid flow of very cold freshwater from melting snows in January 2011. Such cold water would have been tolerable to healthy
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dolphins, they suggested, but many of the dolphins in the northern Gulf were unhealthy and had thin blubber layers.
Graham A.J. Worthy, a biologist and contributing author from the University of Central Florida, said the study was not definitively linking the deaths to the oil spill but seeking to assemble the various pieces of the puzzle. “Everything ultimately seems to be linked back to poor body condition,” he said. “So what would cause poor body condition?”
“What we do know was that there was a cold winter in 2010 which might have affected dolphin food resources, and the BP oil spill occurred in 2010, and there is increasing evidence of spill materials entering coastal ecosystems and negatively impacting the food web,” he said.
The report was produced by a team of scientists from half a dozen Southern universities and research institutes, including the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and the University of Central Florida, that have been studying the dolphin deaths for two years.
Whether the oil spill from the Macondo well is related to the unusually high number of dolphin deaths in the northern gulf has been an enduring mystery.
At least 754 dolphins have been reported stranded there since February 2010. The dolphin deaths have mostly ceased in Florida, which was further from the spill site, but have continued in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. In January 2011, there was also a spike in the deaths of baby dolphins.
So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has stopped short of linking the dolphin deaths directly to the spill. But in March the agency released a report on autopsies on 32 dolphins from Barataria Bay off Louisiana, which was hit hard by the spill.
The necropsies showed that the dolphins had low amounts of a stress hormone, indicating adrenal insufficiency, which has been associated with oil contamination among mammals in other studies.
Teri Rowles, the coordinator of the National Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program at NOAA’s Fisheries Service, said the agency would review the paper but had yet to come to any conclusion about the role of the oil spill in dolphin deaths. “We are still evaluating contributing factors and causes of this event,” she said.
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Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Teenagers and others – including some members of Congress – are petitioning to have the rating lowered from R on the movie “Bully,” a documentary that tells the stories of five young people subjected to harsh treatment by their peers. Do they have a case? Are movie ratings important? Should the MPAA reevaluate the movie’s rating? Does a film like this have the potential to help more people talk about bullying and bring about change?
On the Motherlode blog, KJ Dell’Antonia describes two new documentaries about bullying, the Cartoon Network movie “Speak Up” and “Bully.” (After the MPAA gave it an R rating, Katy Butler, a Michigan high school student, started a petition to lower the rating given to “Bully.) Ms. Dell’Antonia writes:
“Bully,” the documentary, no matter how it’s ultimately rated, is far more raw. It follows three victims of bullying, and two families of children (Tyler Long, 17, and Ty Smalley, 11) who committed suicide after abuse at the hands of their peers. The bullying it documents (and its aftermath) is hard to watch, even in the trailer, and the frustration of everyone involved (except the bullying children) is palpable. “Bully” reduces many adults to tears (including me), and although I haven’t watched it with an older child or a teenager, I have to believe that it would leave them shaken. Where “Speak Up” believes that change is possible, and even imminent, “Bully” is far less sure.
“Bully,” though, won’t be in theaters until March 30. You can watch “Speak Up” with your children on Sunday night (commercial-free) at 5:30 p.m. on the Cartoon Network, and online. President Obama will deliver an opening message, and Rosalind Wiseman, a bullying prevention expert and author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” will be available online before, during and after the showing to answer questions. Its proactive stance, delivered by a television network that many children know and love, is a great place to start or continue a conversation about bullying. And while it may be optimistic, “Speak Up” doesn’t shy away from the complexity of bullying.
“One of the things I like about this,” Ms. Wiseman, who has been closely involved with “Speak Up,” told me, “is that it includes kids talking about telling their parents, and their parents not really knowing what to say. Admitting that, and being able to talk about that, is extremely important. If you bring up the messiness, you actually get at the truth.”
Would you know what to say? I wouldn’t, and I don’t, no matter how much unwanted experience with bullying I’ve had. Bullying is simply a difficult topic. I’ll watch “Speak Up” with my family to give us a point of reference, and a place to start talking. I’ll use “Bully” to remind me that it’s important to recognize all of that “messiness,” particularly as my own children get older. Even the part that involves language, and violence, that “Speak Up” may leave out.
Students: Tell us what you think about the petition to lower the rating of “Bully.” Do you think students under 17 should be able to see a documentary that contains strong language and difficult content? Would you have signed Katy’s petition? Do you think seeing a film like this can stimulate productive conversation? Would you like to watch it, and discuss it, with your family? Do you think a movie like “Bully” can even help bring about change?
|
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Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Teenagers and others – including some members of Congress – are petitioning to have the rating lowered from R on the movie “Bully,” a documentary that tells the stories of five young people subjected to harsh treatment by their peers. Do they have a case? Are movie ratings important? Should the MPAA reevaluate the movie’s rating? Does a film like this have the potential to help more people talk about bullying and bring about change?
On the Motherlode blog, KJ Dell’Antonia describes two new documentaries about bullying, the Cartoon Network movie
|
“Speak Up” and “Bully.” (After the MPAA gave it an R rating, Katy Butler, a Michigan high school student, started a petition to lower the rating given to “Bully.) Ms. Dell’Antonia writes:
“Bully,” the documentary, no matter how it’s ultimately rated, is far more raw. It follows three victims of bullying, and two families of children (Tyler Long, 17, and Ty Smalley, 11) who committed suicide after abuse at the hands of their peers. The bullying it documents (and its aftermath) is hard to watch, even in the trailer, and the frustration of everyone involved (except the bullying children) is palpable. “Bully” reduces many adults to tears (including me), and although I haven’t watched it with an older child or a teenager, I have to believe that it would leave them shaken. Where “Speak Up” believes that change is possible, and even imminent, “Bully” is far less sure.
“Bully,” though, won’t be in theaters until March 30. You can watch “Speak Up” with your children on Sunday night (commercial-free) at 5:30 p.m. on the Cartoon Network, and online. President Obama will deliver an opening message, and Rosalind Wiseman, a bullying prevention expert and author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” will be available online before, during and after the showing to answer questions. Its proactive stance, delivered by a television network that many children know and love, is a great place to start or continue a conversation about bullying. And while it may be optimistic, “Speak Up” doesn’t shy away from the complexity of bullying.
“One of the things I like about this,” Ms. Wiseman, who has been closely involved with “Speak Up,” told me, “is that it includes kids talking about telling their parents, and their parents not really knowing what to say. Admitting that, and being able to talk about that, is extremely important. If you bring up the messiness, you actually get at the truth.”
Would you know what to say? I wouldn’t, and I don’t, no matter how much unwanted experience with bullying I’ve had. Bullying is simply a difficult topic. I’ll watch “Speak Up” with my family to give us a point of reference, and a place to start talking. I’ll use “Bully” to remind me that it’s important to recognize all of that “messiness,” particularly as my own children get older. Even the part that involves language, and violence, that “Speak Up” may leave out.
Students: Tell us what you think about the petition to lower the rating of “Bully.” Do you think students under 17 should be able to see a documentary that contains strong language and difficult content? Would you have signed Katy’s petition? Do you think seeing a film like this can stimulate productive conversation? Would you like to watch it, and discuss it, with your family? Do you think a movie like “Bully” can even help bring about change?
|
June 16, 2013
Renal Papillary Necrosis
Renal papillary necrosis is a disorder of the kidneys in which all or part renal papillae die. The renal papillae is the area where the openings of the collecting ducts enter the kidney.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Necrosis - renal papillae; Renal medullary necrosis
Back to TopCauses
Renal papillary necrosis is most commonly associated with analgesic nephropathy. However, a number of conditions can cause this condition, including:
- Diabetic nephropathy
- Kidney infection
- Kidney transplant rejection
- Urinary tract obstruction
- Sickle cell anemia
Sickle cell anemia is a common cause of renal papillary necrosis in children.
Back to TopSymptoms
Necrosis (tissue death) of the renal papillae may make the kidney unable to concentrate the urine. Symptoms may include:
- Back pain or flank pain
- Bloody urine
- Cloudy urine
- Dark, rust-colored, or brown urine
- Tissue in the urine
Additional symptoms that may be associated with this disease:
Back to TopExams and Tests
An examination may reveal tenderness when touching the body over the affected kidney. There may be a history of chronic or recurrent urinary tract infections. There may be signs of obstructive uropathy or renal failure.
A urinalysis may show dead tissue in the urine.
An IVP may show obstruction or tissue in the renal pelvis or ureter.
Back to TopTreatment
There is no specific treatment for renal papillary necrosis. Treatment depends on the underlying cause. For example, if analgesic nephropathy is suspected as the cause, your doctor will recommend that you stop using the suspected medications. This may allow healing over time.
Back to TopOutlook (Prognosis)
How well a person does depends on the underlying condition. If the underlying disorder can be controlled, the condition may go away on its own. In some cases, persons with this condition develop kidney failure.
Back to TopPossible Complications
Back to TopPrevention
Control of diabetes or sickle cell anemia may reduce risk. Prevention of renal papillary necrosis from analgesic nephropathy includes careful moderation in the use of medications, including over-the-counter analgesics.
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH
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- Recipes for Health: Bean Salads for Summer
- Books: Saying Less and Doing More
- Books: Doctor Feelbad
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- Well: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
|
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|
June 16, 2013
Renal Papillary Necrosis
Renal papillary necrosis is a disorder of the kidneys in which all or part renal papillae die. The renal papillae is the area where the openings of the collecting ducts enter the kidney.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Necrosis - renal papillae; Renal medullary necrosis
Back to TopCauses
Renal papillary necrosis is most commonly associated with analgesic nephropathy. However, a number of conditions can cause this condition, including:
- Diabetic nephropathy
- Kidney infection
- Kidney transplant
|
rejection
- Urinary tract obstruction
- Sickle cell anemia
Sickle cell anemia is a common cause of renal papillary necrosis in children.
Back to TopSymptoms
Necrosis (tissue death) of the renal papillae may make the kidney unable to concentrate the urine. Symptoms may include:
- Back pain or flank pain
- Bloody urine
- Cloudy urine
- Dark, rust-colored, or brown urine
- Tissue in the urine
Additional symptoms that may be associated with this disease:
Back to TopExams and Tests
An examination may reveal tenderness when touching the body over the affected kidney. There may be a history of chronic or recurrent urinary tract infections. There may be signs of obstructive uropathy or renal failure.
A urinalysis may show dead tissue in the urine.
An IVP may show obstruction or tissue in the renal pelvis or ureter.
Back to TopTreatment
There is no specific treatment for renal papillary necrosis. Treatment depends on the underlying cause. For example, if analgesic nephropathy is suspected as the cause, your doctor will recommend that you stop using the suspected medications. This may allow healing over time.
Back to TopOutlook (Prognosis)
How well a person does depends on the underlying condition. If the underlying disorder can be controlled, the condition may go away on its own. In some cases, persons with this condition develop kidney failure.
Back to TopPossible Complications
Back to TopPrevention
Control of diabetes or sickle cell anemia may reduce risk. Prevention of renal papillary necrosis from analgesic nephropathy includes careful moderation in the use of medications, including over-the-counter analgesics.
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH
- Well: Cheating Ourselves of Sleep
- Well: When the Bully Is a Sibling
- Well: The Heart Perils of Pain Relievers
- Well: The 4-Minute Workout
- Well: In Bullies' Hands, Nuts or Milk May Be a Weapon
- Recipes for Health: Bean Salads for Summer
- Books: Saying Less and Doing More
- Books: Doctor Feelbad
- Well: Breast Milk Is Good for the Brain, Scans Show
- Well: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
|
The war has long put Iraq’s ancient historic and religious sites off limits to all but the most daring of scholars, archeologists, tourists and ordinary Iraqis. Slowly, if unevenly, that may be changing.
A conservation project at the ancient ruins of Babylon — funded by the United States and overseen by the World Monuments Fund — is merely the most ambitious of numerous projects to begin restoration of sites across the country that have increasingly become accessible with improved security in recent years.
In a place still recovering from years of conflict, the projects promise to open Iraq’s rich, deeply layered history to study and to tourism — not just for foreigners but also for Iraqis, whose engagement with the ancient past has been obliterated by the more recent past.
“We could not even come to visit before out of fear,” said Israa Fayadth, who joined her family the other day at the grounds of an ancient ziggurat called Aqar Quf, a ruin of the Kassite dynasty that replaced the first Babylonian empire of Hammurabi some 3,500 years ago.
Aqar Quf, only a short drive from Baghdad, is located near Abu Ghraib, a place made notorious by the American prison there and a simmering insurgency that abated only recently. (A guard house at the entrance is pocked with bullet holes.)
It was once – and may again be – a regular stop on the tourist trail, the Iraqi equivalent of an American state park, only with remnants of one of the world’s early civilizations as a backdrop.
For anyone whose interests include ancient history, as mine now do, being in Iraq is like a daily immersion in a history course on Mesopotamia (which, coincidentally, my daughter Maddie is now studying in the 7th grade back home).
As you drive today along highways punctuated by checkpoints, barbed wire and blast walls, through the bleak, sun-baked deserts or the lush palm groves of the “land between two rivers,” ancient names emerge from the landscape like chapters in the course’s textbook: Ur, Babylon, Hatra, Nimrud, Nineveh.
Chapters of the Bible itself are attributed to prophets believed to have been entombed here – including Ezekiel in Kifl, the site of which can be seen in this video filmed during a visit by The New York Times in October:
Farther north are the prophets Ezra in Azair, Daniel in Kirkuk and Jonah in what is today Mosul, still one of Iraq’s most dangerous places.
Most are revered in Islam, too. Their tombs are reasonably well maintained and lively places of worship, pilgrimage and tourism, even if still subject to disputes over their preservation and provenance.
On the other hand, the tomb of Nahum, located in Qosh in northern Iraq, fell into disrepair after the last of Iraq’s Jews left in the 1950’s, and is in dire need of preservation.
Daniel’s blue-tiled, double-domed shrine sits atop an ancient citadel in Kirkuk, dating to the Sumerian period nearly five millennia ago, even before Daniel saw the writing on the wall.
The citadel looms over Kirkuk, a city deeply divided by Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds and Christians, though fewer and fewer.
Believers seeking answers to their prayers – marriage, pregnancy, a cure for illness – tie strips of cloth to the iron grate that surround Daniel’s tomb or toss money or trinkets inside.
The busiest day, even now, is Saturday, a lingering echo of the Jews who used to visit on the Sabbath, the tomb’s Muslim caretaker, told me. Iraq’s central place in the history of all three faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is palpable at more than one site around the country.
Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was never kind to antiquities, cleared Kirkuk’s citadel of most of its inhabitants in the 1980’s and destroyed their homes as part of a reclamation project.
Local officials managed to save some of them, mostly from the Ottoman era, as well as a 19th century Chaldean Catholic church, though it too has crumbled to ruins. From the city below echoes the cacophonic hammering of a copper market.
Now the local governor and officials from the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage plan to restore the place.
Work has begun on a few homes, as well as an ancient bazaar, though sufficient funds are lacking. Kirkuk may be a potential flashpoint in Iraq’s unfinished transition from dictatorship and war, but it is possible to at least envision a better future. Outside the citadel’s mosque, once an ancient Christian church, two soldiers improbably whipped cotton candy from a crude machine and offered it to visitors.
“People from all the world,” the local antiquities director, Ayad Tariq Hussein, said, “they have to see this place.”
In the relative security of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region farther north, a more advanced, more ambitious project is under way.
This is at Erbil’s citadel, with the support of the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO and restoration experts from Italy, France, the Czech Republic and other countries.
“This heritage is new to us,” said Pewist Lajlani, an engineer working to shore up the first 4 of 10 Ottoman-era houses, perched on the citadel’s precipice, “so we do it step by step.”
All of Iraq’s ancient sites have suffered from time and weather, from dictatorial abuse, neglect and war. The existential threats facing them persist today. Looting remains a scourge, pillaging ancient sites before archeologists even have a chance to find and record the treasures buried within them.
The palace at Ctesiphon in Salman Pak, southwest of Baghdad, includes the world’s largest, single-span mud-brick arch in the world.
It is part of a Parthian palace erected in the 6th century, and it could very well collapse. Its grounds are now fenced off, unvisited.
Like Aqar Quf, Ctesiphon attracted tourists in a more peaceful time. A squad of soldiers has taken up residence in a part reconstructed in the 1970’s. Its modern museum (with a diorama of the battle of Qadissiya in 637, when the followers of a nascent Islamic faith defeated the Persians) was looted following the American invasion and remains shuttered.
Not long ago, Americans from the Embassy and the provincial reconstruction team in Baghdad to consider the feasibility of a project to preserve and restore the site. “The ongoing maintenance is primitive,” the director of antiquities for the area, Abdul Hadi Hassan, said. “We need drastic measures.”
Such projects have long been a focus of the American efforts to win hearts and minds and rebuild Iraq. The American military has spent $220,000 to spruce up the grounds at Aqar Quf, including a museum that might one day again house ancient Kassite relics, evacuated to the National Museum during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The provincial reconstruction team in Babel province did the same for the museum in Babylon.
Iraq’s problems are abundant and persistent, unlikely to be resolved by simply renovating its ancient sites. But local and federal officials are beginning to see their revival as part of the process of making the country whole again, economically and psychologically.
St. Matthew’s Monastery, Nineveh
Consider St. Matthew’s Monastery, which lies just off the road east from Mosul to Erbil, in northern Iraq. It is one of the oldest Christian sites in the world, erected in the 4th Century A.D. on the side of a rugged mountain. After the American invasion in 2003 and the relative opening of the Kurdish region, it underwent a thorough, modern reconstruction.
When my colleagues and I visited recently, the monks’ rooms were filled with Christian families who had fled a wave of violence in Baghdad and Mosul, one sad indicator of Iraq’s ongoing troubles.
As we left, though, descending a stairway with a spectacular view of the Nineveh plains below, we encountered a happier indicator: Four Italian tourists had just arrived to have a look around.
Videos filmed and edited by Stephen Farrell
– See also ‘Preserving Heritage, and the Fabric of Life, in Syria’, part of the ‘Blueprints for the Mideast’ series exploring how large-scale urban projects are transforming parts of the Arab world:
ALEPPO, Syria — At first glance it seems an unremarkable scene: a quiet plaza shaded by date palms in the shadow of this city’s immense medieval Citadel, newly restored to its looming power. Foreign tourists sit side by side with people whose families have lived here for generations; women, both veiled and unveiled, walk arm in arm [read full story].
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The war has long put Iraq’s ancient historic and religious sites off limits to all but the most daring of scholars, archeologists, tourists and ordinary Iraqis. Slowly, if unevenly, that may be changing.
A conservation project at the ancient ruins of Babylon — funded by the United States and overseen by the World Monuments Fund — is merely the most ambitious of numerous projects to begin restoration of sites across the country that have increasingly become accessible with improved security in recent years.
In a place still recovering from years of conflict, the projects promise to open Iraq’s rich, deeply layered history to study and to tourism — not just for foreigners
|
but also for Iraqis, whose engagement with the ancient past has been obliterated by the more recent past.
“We could not even come to visit before out of fear,” said Israa Fayadth, who joined her family the other day at the grounds of an ancient ziggurat called Aqar Quf, a ruin of the Kassite dynasty that replaced the first Babylonian empire of Hammurabi some 3,500 years ago.
Aqar Quf, only a short drive from Baghdad, is located near Abu Ghraib, a place made notorious by the American prison there and a simmering insurgency that abated only recently. (A guard house at the entrance is pocked with bullet holes.)
It was once – and may again be – a regular stop on the tourist trail, the Iraqi equivalent of an American state park, only with remnants of one of the world’s early civilizations as a backdrop.
For anyone whose interests include ancient history, as mine now do, being in Iraq is like a daily immersion in a history course on Mesopotamia (which, coincidentally, my daughter Maddie is now studying in the 7th grade back home).
As you drive today along highways punctuated by checkpoints, barbed wire and blast walls, through the bleak, sun-baked deserts or the lush palm groves of the “land between two rivers,” ancient names emerge from the landscape like chapters in the course’s textbook: Ur, Babylon, Hatra, Nimrud, Nineveh.
Chapters of the Bible itself are attributed to prophets believed to have been entombed here – including Ezekiel in Kifl, the site of which can be seen in this video filmed during a visit by The New York Times in October:
Farther north are the prophets Ezra in Azair, Daniel in Kirkuk and Jonah in what is today Mosul, still one of Iraq’s most dangerous places.
Most are revered in Islam, too. Their tombs are reasonably well maintained and lively places of worship, pilgrimage and tourism, even if still subject to disputes over their preservation and provenance.
On the other hand, the tomb of Nahum, located in Qosh in northern Iraq, fell into disrepair after the last of Iraq’s Jews left in the 1950’s, and is in dire need of preservation.
Daniel’s blue-tiled, double-domed shrine sits atop an ancient citadel in Kirkuk, dating to the Sumerian period nearly five millennia ago, even before Daniel saw the writing on the wall.
The citadel looms over Kirkuk, a city deeply divided by Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds and Christians, though fewer and fewer.
Believers seeking answers to their prayers – marriage, pregnancy, a cure for illness – tie strips of cloth to the iron grate that surround Daniel’s tomb or toss money or trinkets inside.
The busiest day, even now, is Saturday, a lingering echo of the Jews who used to visit on the Sabbath, the tomb’s Muslim caretaker, told me. Iraq’s central place in the history of all three faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – is palpable at more than one site around the country.
Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was never kind to antiquities, cleared Kirkuk’s citadel of most of its inhabitants in the 1980’s and destroyed their homes as part of a reclamation project.
Local officials managed to save some of them, mostly from the Ottoman era, as well as a 19th century Chaldean Catholic church, though it too has crumbled to ruins. From the city below echoes the cacophonic hammering of a copper market.
Now the local governor and officials from the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage plan to restore the place.
Work has begun on a few homes, as well as an ancient bazaar, though sufficient funds are lacking. Kirkuk may be a potential flashpoint in Iraq’s unfinished transition from dictatorship and war, but it is possible to at least envision a better future. Outside the citadel’s mosque, once an ancient Christian church, two soldiers improbably whipped cotton candy from a crude machine and offered it to visitors.
“People from all the world,” the local antiquities director, Ayad Tariq Hussein, said, “they have to see this place.”
In the relative security of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region farther north, a more advanced, more ambitious project is under way.
This is at Erbil’s citadel, with the support of the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO and restoration experts from Italy, France, the Czech Republic and other countries.
“This heritage is new to us,” said Pewist Lajlani, an engineer working to shore up the first 4 of 10 Ottoman-era houses, perched on the citadel’s precipice, “so we do it step by step.”
All of Iraq’s ancient sites have suffered from time and weather, from dictatorial abuse, neglect and war. The existential threats facing them persist today. Looting remains a scourge, pillaging ancient sites before archeologists even have a chance to find and record the treasures buried within them.
The palace at Ctesiphon in Salman Pak, southwest of Baghdad, includes the world’s largest, single-span mud-brick arch in the world.
It is part of a Parthian palace erected in the 6th century, and it could very well collapse. Its grounds are now fenced off, unvisited.
Like Aqar Quf, Ctesiphon attracted tourists in a more peaceful time. A squad of soldiers has taken up residence in a part reconstructed in the 1970’s. Its modern museum (with a diorama of the battle of Qadissiya in 637, when the followers of a nascent Islamic faith defeated the Persians) was looted following the American invasion and remains shuttered.
Not long ago, Americans from the Embassy and the provincial reconstruction team in Baghdad to consider the feasibility of a project to preserve and restore the site. “The ongoing maintenance is primitive,” the director of antiquities for the area, Abdul Hadi Hassan, said. “We need drastic measures.”
Such projects have long been a focus of the American efforts to win hearts and minds and rebuild Iraq. The American military has spent $220,000 to spruce up the grounds at Aqar Quf, including a museum that might one day again house ancient Kassite relics, evacuated to the National Museum during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
The provincial reconstruction team in Babel province did the same for the museum in Babylon.
Iraq’s problems are abundant and persistent, unlikely to be resolved by simply renovating its ancient sites. But local and federal officials are beginning to see their revival as part of the process of making the country whole again, economically and psychologically.
St. Matthew’s Monastery, Nineveh
Consider St. Matthew’s Monastery, which lies just off the road east from Mosul to Erbil, in northern Iraq. It is one of the oldest Christian sites in the world, erected in the 4th Century A.D. on the side of a rugged mountain. After the American invasion in 2003 and the relative opening of the Kurdish region, it underwent a thorough, modern reconstruction.
When my colleagues and I visited recently, the monks’ rooms were filled with Christian families who had fled a wave of violence in Baghdad and Mosul, one sad indicator of Iraq’s ongoing troubles.
As we left, though, descending a stairway with a spectacular view of the Nineveh plains below, we encountered a happier indicator: Four Italian tourists had just arrived to have a look around.
Videos filmed and edited by Stephen Farrell
– See also ‘Preserving Heritage, and the Fabric of Life, in Syria’, part of the ‘Blueprints for the Mideast’ series exploring how large-scale urban projects are transforming parts of the Arab world:
ALEPPO, Syria — At first glance it seems an unremarkable scene: a quiet plaza shaded by date palms in the shadow of this city’s immense medieval Citadel, newly restored to its looming power. Foreign tourists sit side by side with people whose families have lived here for generations; women, both veiled and unveiled, walk arm in arm [read full story].
|
How long is a piece of string? When talking about how long an LED lamp will last, that certainly seems to be the state of the question.
Manufacturers of LED lamps, which many regard as the next generation of lighting, destined to eventually replace today’s incandescent and compact fluorescent lighting sources, make wild claims as to product life.
Typical incandescent bulbs last 1,000 to 2,000 hours. But in speaking about LED replacements, lamp life is routinely quoted as 25,000 to 50,000 hours. Long lamp life, and the reduced power used to create the same amount of light, is what makes this technology so promising.
But what does a 25,000-hour life mean? As it turns out, no one is quite sure yet. The definitions surrounding LED lamps, a nascent technology, are still being made up as we go along.
One thing we do know: It means something different than when people think about the life of a regular light bulb.
When it’s said that a standard light bulb will last 1,000 hours, that is the mean time to failure: half the bulbs will fail by that point. And because lamp manufacturing has become so routine, most of the rest will fail within 100 hours or so of that point.
But LED lamps don’t “burn out.” Rather, like old generals, they just fade away.
When a manufacturer says that an LED lamp will last 25,000 or 50,000 hours, what the company actually means is that at that point, the light emanating from that product will be at 70 percent the level it was when new.
Why 70 percent? Turns out, it’s fairly arbitrary. Lighting industry engineers believe that at that point, most people can sense that the brightness isn’t what it was when the product was new. So they decided to make that the standard.
Of course, brightness is subject to the old frog in the boiling water syndrome. I’m sure that most people won’t even notice the lower level then, if they’ve lived with the same bulb for its entire life. (How many owners of rear projection DLP TVs only realize that a TV’s image has dimmed once they replace the bulb?)
If nothing else in the lamp fails, like its electronics, the product will continue to work until it becomes really dim. But some engineers are proposing a way to get around even that.
Their idea is that once the LEDs start to emit less light, increase the power to each one to increase its brightness. Unfortunately, that will also diminish the life of the lamp.
Good idea, or bad? “The utilities really don’t like this idea,” Fred Welsh, a Department of Energy consultant, told me on Thursday at a lighting conference sponsored by his federal agency.
Not only would contractors need to use thicker cables, but the utilities would need to create more power, partially negating the appeal of LED lighting in the first place.
But still, it’s in its early days, and no one yet knows how this will be settled, or how the consumer will be educated to think about “bulb life” in a different way than they have for the past 130 years. If consumers are going to switch to this new lighting technology, it’s an issue that needs to be settled.
And if it isn’t? “This is a potential black eye for the industry,” Mr. Welsh said.
|
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How long is a piece of string? When talking about how long an LED lamp will last, that certainly seems to be the state of the question.
Manufacturers of LED lamps, which many regard as the next generation of lighting, destined to eventually replace today’s incandescent and compact fluorescent lighting sources, make wild claims as to product life.
Typical incandescent bulbs last 1,000 to 2,000 hours. But in speaking about LED replacements, lamp life is routinely quoted as 25,000 to 50,000 hours. Long lamp life, and
|
the reduced power used to create the same amount of light, is what makes this technology so promising.
But what does a 25,000-hour life mean? As it turns out, no one is quite sure yet. The definitions surrounding LED lamps, a nascent technology, are still being made up as we go along.
One thing we do know: It means something different than when people think about the life of a regular light bulb.
When it’s said that a standard light bulb will last 1,000 hours, that is the mean time to failure: half the bulbs will fail by that point. And because lamp manufacturing has become so routine, most of the rest will fail within 100 hours or so of that point.
But LED lamps don’t “burn out.” Rather, like old generals, they just fade away.
When a manufacturer says that an LED lamp will last 25,000 or 50,000 hours, what the company actually means is that at that point, the light emanating from that product will be at 70 percent the level it was when new.
Why 70 percent? Turns out, it’s fairly arbitrary. Lighting industry engineers believe that at that point, most people can sense that the brightness isn’t what it was when the product was new. So they decided to make that the standard.
Of course, brightness is subject to the old frog in the boiling water syndrome. I’m sure that most people won’t even notice the lower level then, if they’ve lived with the same bulb for its entire life. (How many owners of rear projection DLP TVs only realize that a TV’s image has dimmed once they replace the bulb?)
If nothing else in the lamp fails, like its electronics, the product will continue to work until it becomes really dim. But some engineers are proposing a way to get around even that.
Their idea is that once the LEDs start to emit less light, increase the power to each one to increase its brightness. Unfortunately, that will also diminish the life of the lamp.
Good idea, or bad? “The utilities really don’t like this idea,” Fred Welsh, a Department of Energy consultant, told me on Thursday at a lighting conference sponsored by his federal agency.
Not only would contractors need to use thicker cables, but the utilities would need to create more power, partially negating the appeal of LED lighting in the first place.
But still, it’s in its early days, and no one yet knows how this will be settled, or how the consumer will be educated to think about “bulb life” in a different way than they have for the past 130 years. If consumers are going to switch to this new lighting technology, it’s an issue that needs to be settled.
And if it isn’t? “This is a potential black eye for the industry,” Mr. Welsh said.
|
One day early in 2004, Robert Noble, an architect specializing in sustainable design, asked himself why parking lots in the United States weren’t covered in solar panels and used to generate clean energy. A few firms had been building carports with solar panels for some time, but none had acquired a major presence or branched out much beyond the residential market.
“Parking lots are this wasteland – they’re the last thing that gets attention,” Mr. Noble said in an interview. “Here’s a market the size of Alpha Centauri that’s never been tapped.”
In 2005, Mr. Noble founded Envision Solar, now the country’s leading developer of solar carports. The company’s signature product is “solar groves,” 1,000-square-foot canopies that shade parking lots while generating clean power from an array of photovoltaic panels.
One early adopter was the Kyocera Corporation of Japan, which tasked Envision Solar with the construction of its first large-scale “solar grove” in 2006 at its United States headquarters in San Diego, where a 235-kilowatt carport harnesses 1,400 of Kyocera’s own solar photovoltaic modules. Other major installations soon followed at Dell Computer’s headquarters in Round Rock, Tex.; at the Horsham, Pa., headquarters of Centocor, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary; and at the University of California at San Diego.
The company is now branching out into electric car generation by outfitting its solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. It has developed a pilot project with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., while also working with Coulomb Technologies, a developer of electric vehicle charging stations.
Solar canopies may be a good fit for electric car manufacturers, which have faced the criticism that even while they reduce the consumption of oil, they require their own large increase in electric power generation. Without a major increase in renewable power infrastructure, that energy will come from conventional emissions-intensive sources like coal. At the same time, large utility-scale solar projects, which tend to be situated in remote desert areas, continue to spawn land-use disputes with conservationists.
Converting the desert of concrete parking lots into small-scale solar power plants effectively sidesteps both problems, Mr. Noble argues.
He concedes that simple inertia and the vast amount of existing infrastructure that would need to be converted means that large-scale deployment of solar parking canopies (with automotive charging stations, of course) is still years or even decades away. Nonetheless, he asserts that eventually – perhaps in 20 years’ time – there will be a “hyperconvergence” of transportation, energy and infrastructure in which distributed solar will play a major role.
“The distance between a new idea and full market acceptance is a very long trip,” he said.
|
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One day early in 2004, Robert Noble, an architect specializing in sustainable design, asked himself why parking lots in the United States weren’t covered in solar panels and used to generate clean energy. A few firms had been building carports with solar panels for some time, but none had acquired a major presence or branched out much beyond the residential market.
“Parking lots are this wasteland – they’re the last thing that gets attention,” Mr. Noble said in an interview. “Here’s a market the size of Alpha Centauri that’s never been tapped.”
In 2005, Mr.
|
Noble founded Envision Solar, now the country’s leading developer of solar carports. The company’s signature product is “solar groves,” 1,000-square-foot canopies that shade parking lots while generating clean power from an array of photovoltaic panels.
One early adopter was the Kyocera Corporation of Japan, which tasked Envision Solar with the construction of its first large-scale “solar grove” in 2006 at its United States headquarters in San Diego, where a 235-kilowatt carport harnesses 1,400 of Kyocera’s own solar photovoltaic modules. Other major installations soon followed at Dell Computer’s headquarters in Round Rock, Tex.; at the Horsham, Pa., headquarters of Centocor, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary; and at the University of California at San Diego.
The company is now branching out into electric car generation by outfitting its solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. It has developed a pilot project with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colo., while also working with Coulomb Technologies, a developer of electric vehicle charging stations.
Solar canopies may be a good fit for electric car manufacturers, which have faced the criticism that even while they reduce the consumption of oil, they require their own large increase in electric power generation. Without a major increase in renewable power infrastructure, that energy will come from conventional emissions-intensive sources like coal. At the same time, large utility-scale solar projects, which tend to be situated in remote desert areas, continue to spawn land-use disputes with conservationists.
Converting the desert of concrete parking lots into small-scale solar power plants effectively sidesteps both problems, Mr. Noble argues.
He concedes that simple inertia and the vast amount of existing infrastructure that would need to be converted means that large-scale deployment of solar parking canopies (with automotive charging stations, of course) is still years or even decades away. Nonetheless, he asserts that eventually – perhaps in 20 years’ time – there will be a “hyperconvergence” of transportation, energy and infrastructure in which distributed solar will play a major role.
“The distance between a new idea and full market acceptance is a very long trip,” he said.
|
Ankles provide a rare opportunity to recreate a seminal medical study in the comfort of your own home. Back in the mid-1960s, a physician, wondering why, after one ankle sprain, his patients so often suffered another, asked the affected patients to stand on their injured leg (after it was no longer sore). Almost invariably, they wobbled badly, flailing out with their arms and having to put their foot down much sooner than people who’d never sprained an ankle. With this simple experiment, the doctor made a critical, if in retrospect, seemingly self-evident discovery. People with bad ankles have bad balance.
Remarkably, that conclusion, published more than 40 years ago, is only now making its way into the treatment of chronically unstable ankles. “I’m not really sure why it’s taken so long,” says Patrick McKeon, an assistant professor in the Division of Athletic Training at the University of Kentucky. “Maybe because ankles don’t get much respect or research money. They’re the neglected stepchild of body parts.”
At the same time, in sports they’re the most commonly injured body part — each year approximately eight million people sprain an ankle. Millions of those will then go on to sprain that same ankle, or their other ankle, in the future. “The recurrence rate for ankle sprains is at least 30 percent,” McKeon says, “and depending on what numbers you use, it may be high as 80 percent.”
A growing body of research suggests that many of those second (and often third and fourth) sprains could be avoided with an easy course of treatment. Stand on one leg. Try not to wobble. Hold for a minute. Repeat.
This is the essence of balance training, a supremely low-tech but increasingly well-documented approach to dealing with unstable ankles. A number of studies published since last year have shown that the treatment, simple as it is, can be quite beneficial.
In one of the best-controlled studies to date, 31 young adults with a history of multiple ankle sprains completed four weeks of supervised balance training. So did a control group with healthy ankles. The injured started out much shakier than the controls during the exercises. But by the end of the month, those with wobbly ankles had improved dramatically on all measures of balance. They also reported, subjectively, that their ankles felt much less likely to give way at any moment. The control group had improved their balance, too, but only slightly. Similarly, a major review published last year found that six weeks of balance training, begun soon after a first ankle sprain, substantially reduced the risk of a recurrence. The training also lessened, at least somewhat, the chances of suffering a first sprain at all.
Why should balance training prevent ankle sprains? The reasons are both obvious and quite subtle. Until recently, clinicians thought that ankle sprains were primarily a matter of overstretched, traumatized ligaments. Tape or brace the joint, relieve pressure on the sore tissue, and a person should heal fully, they thought. But that approach ignored the role of the central nervous system, which is intimately tied in to every joint. “There are neural receptors in ligaments,” says Jay Hertel, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Virginia and an expert on the ankle. When you damage the ligament, “you damage the neuro-receptors as well. Your brain no longer receives reliable signals” from the ankle about how your ankle and foot are positioned in relation to the ground. Your proprioception — your sense of your body’s position in space — is impaired. You’re less stable and more prone to falling over and re-injuring yourself.
For some people, that wobbliness, virtually inevitable for at least a month after an initial ankle sprain, eventually dissipates; for others it’s abiding, perhaps even permanent. Researchers don’t yet know why some people don’t recover. But they do believe that balance training can return the joint and its neuro-receptor function almost to normal.
Best of all, if you don’t mind your spouse sniggering, you can implement state-of-the-art balance training at home. “We have lots of equipment here in our lab” for patients to test, stress, and improve their balance, Hertel says. “But all you really need is some space, a table or wall nearby to steady yourself if needed, and a pillow.” (If you’ve recently sprained your ankle, wait until you comfortably can bear weight on the joint before starting balance training.) Begin by testing the limits of your equilibrium. If you can stand sturdily on one leg for a minute, cross your arms over your chest. If even that’s undemanding, close your eyes. Hop. Or attempt all of these exercises on the pillow, so that the surface beneath you is unstable. “One of the take-home exercises we give people is to stand on one leg while brushing your teeth, and to close your eyes if it’s too easy,” Hertel says. “It may sound ridiculous, but if you do that for two or three minutes a day, you’re working your balance really well.”
|
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Ankles provide a rare opportunity to recreate a seminal medical study in the comfort of your own home. Back in the mid-1960s, a physician, wondering why, after one ankle sprain, his patients so often suffered another, asked the affected patients to stand on their injured leg (after it was no longer sore). Almost invariably, they wobbled badly, flailing out with their arms and having to put their foot down much sooner than people who’d never sprained an ankle. With this simple experiment, the doctor made a critical, if in retrospect, seemingly self-evident discovery. People with bad ankles
|
have bad balance.
Remarkably, that conclusion, published more than 40 years ago, is only now making its way into the treatment of chronically unstable ankles. “I’m not really sure why it’s taken so long,” says Patrick McKeon, an assistant professor in the Division of Athletic Training at the University of Kentucky. “Maybe because ankles don’t get much respect or research money. They’re the neglected stepchild of body parts.”
At the same time, in sports they’re the most commonly injured body part — each year approximately eight million people sprain an ankle. Millions of those will then go on to sprain that same ankle, or their other ankle, in the future. “The recurrence rate for ankle sprains is at least 30 percent,” McKeon says, “and depending on what numbers you use, it may be high as 80 percent.”
A growing body of research suggests that many of those second (and often third and fourth) sprains could be avoided with an easy course of treatment. Stand on one leg. Try not to wobble. Hold for a minute. Repeat.
This is the essence of balance training, a supremely low-tech but increasingly well-documented approach to dealing with unstable ankles. A number of studies published since last year have shown that the treatment, simple as it is, can be quite beneficial.
In one of the best-controlled studies to date, 31 young adults with a history of multiple ankle sprains completed four weeks of supervised balance training. So did a control group with healthy ankles. The injured started out much shakier than the controls during the exercises. But by the end of the month, those with wobbly ankles had improved dramatically on all measures of balance. They also reported, subjectively, that their ankles felt much less likely to give way at any moment. The control group had improved their balance, too, but only slightly. Similarly, a major review published last year found that six weeks of balance training, begun soon after a first ankle sprain, substantially reduced the risk of a recurrence. The training also lessened, at least somewhat, the chances of suffering a first sprain at all.
Why should balance training prevent ankle sprains? The reasons are both obvious and quite subtle. Until recently, clinicians thought that ankle sprains were primarily a matter of overstretched, traumatized ligaments. Tape or brace the joint, relieve pressure on the sore tissue, and a person should heal fully, they thought. But that approach ignored the role of the central nervous system, which is intimately tied in to every joint. “There are neural receptors in ligaments,” says Jay Hertel, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Virginia and an expert on the ankle. When you damage the ligament, “you damage the neuro-receptors as well. Your brain no longer receives reliable signals” from the ankle about how your ankle and foot are positioned in relation to the ground. Your proprioception — your sense of your body’s position in space — is impaired. You’re less stable and more prone to falling over and re-injuring yourself.
For some people, that wobbliness, virtually inevitable for at least a month after an initial ankle sprain, eventually dissipates; for others it’s abiding, perhaps even permanent. Researchers don’t yet know why some people don’t recover. But they do believe that balance training can return the joint and its neuro-receptor function almost to normal.
Best of all, if you don’t mind your spouse sniggering, you can implement state-of-the-art balance training at home. “We have lots of equipment here in our lab” for patients to test, stress, and improve their balance, Hertel says. “But all you really need is some space, a table or wall nearby to steady yourself if needed, and a pillow.” (If you’ve recently sprained your ankle, wait until you comfortably can bear weight on the joint before starting balance training.) Begin by testing the limits of your equilibrium. If you can stand sturdily on one leg for a minute, cross your arms over your chest. If even that’s undemanding, close your eyes. Hop. Or attempt all of these exercises on the pillow, so that the surface beneath you is unstable. “One of the take-home exercises we give people is to stand on one leg while brushing your teeth, and to close your eyes if it’s too easy,” Hertel says. “It may sound ridiculous, but if you do that for two or three minutes a day, you’re working your balance really well.”
|
News that the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, is pregnant spurred headlines and excitement around the world on Monday, but the exuberance was tempered by word that the mother-to-be has been hospitalized with a rare form of severe morning sickness.
Most people have never heard of the condition, called hyperemesis gravidarum or H.G., now getting worldwide attention. To learn more, we spoke with Dr. Marlena Fejzo, an obstetrics researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Fejzo twice experienced H.G. during her own pregnancies and is an adviser and board member for the Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation. We talked about the risks of H.G., why it happens and whether its occurrence can predict the sex of the baby.
What is hyperemesis gravidarum?
It’s severe, debilitating nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that generally leads to more than 5 percent weight loss and requires fluid treatment. Sometimes, in more extreme cases, it requires nutritional supplements.
Are there treatments?
Doctors try to give IV and anti-nausea medication at first. About 20 percent of the women who contact the Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation require tube feeding. It’s very serious. They have to have a tube inserted above their heart. Blood tests have to be done every day, or every other day, and the bag of nutrients has to be monitored to make sure it’s personalized for the woman’s needs. But I don’t think Kate Middleton (based on news reports) has it that bad. She’s just gone in for the IV fluids.
How common is H.G.?
It probably depends on how you define it. It’s generally defined in populations as 0.2 percent. A study from Shanghai, China, said that 10 percent of women get it or are hospitalized for it. Obviously anyone can get it, even a duchess.
What are the main symptoms and how is it different from regular morning sickness?
The main signs are rapid weight loss and rapid dehydration, the inability to tolerate fluids, feeling lightheaded and weak, and persistent nausea and vomiting. It just doesn’t go away.
Are there risks or complications associated with H.G.?
It used to be a major cause of death in women until the 1950s when they introduced IV fluids. There is a serious complication called Wernicke encephalopathy. It’s a serious neurological disorder that happens when you are not able to get enough thiamine (vitamin B-1), a vitamin that is needed for proper brain functioning. When it’s depleted you can get this serious neurological problem.
Wernicke encephalopathy is rare, but it would be preventable with a thiamine shot. If women come in with H.G., they shouldn’t just be treated with fluids, they need to have that thiamine shot. This complication typically leads to fetal death, and it’s serious for the mother too.
Are there long-term risks to the baby or the mother from H.G.?
There is very little research on H.G. One paper that looked at extreme nausea and vomiting found that children had more attention problems and difficulty in task persistence at ages 5 and 12. We found an increased risk of preterm labor and preterm birth due to H.G.
We need to do more studies, and we are following up on these women. We’re running a huge study to identify the genes and risk factors involved. About 30 percent of women had a mother who had it, and 20 percent had a sister who had it. We’re looking for the genes, and hopefully from that we can find the cause. Now it’s treated with medications that are developed to treat the symptoms but not to treat the cause.
Two major studies just came out the past couple years that showed an increased risk of preterm birth in H.G. But the majority of babies are fine.
Does the onset of H.G. predict whether a woman is carrying a boy or girl?
It occurs for both male and female fetuses, but is more common in women carrying female fetuses.
Is a woman at risk for it in a second pregnancy if she gets it in the first?
Yes, the recurrence risk is upwards of 80 percent. There is a study that says it’s more common in first pregnancies, but I think a lot of women don’t have a second pregnancy after having it. It’s bad enough that women decide not to have another baby, or to adopt or find another way.
Why is raising awareness so important given that this is a temporary condition?
It’s not necessarily a temporary condition. There are long-term effects to the fetus possibly, and there are long-term effects to the women. We also have an article on post-traumatic stress following pregnancies. When you’re suffering day after day at a time when you know nutrition is so important for your baby, its very traumatic for women. Even the medicines that help, they don’t cure it.
Also, there are a lot of misconceptions about it. A lot of women are treated really badly. They’re treated like they’re faking it or that they just don’t want their child. We have a lot of women who have lost pregnancy after pregnancy, or who had abortions because they just couldn’t tolerate it. There needs to be more awareness. There needs to be funding for research so women won’t be treated like this is all in their head, and the fact that the duchess has it is going to help.
What was your own experience with H.G.?
That’s why I’m so motivated. I had H.G. in two pregnancies. In my first pregnancy, I had a healthy baby boy. In the second case I lost the baby at 15 weeks. I don’t have it in my family, but I wanted to see if it was genetic since I’m a geneticist. We started on a genetic and epigenetic study we’re doing now. We’re going to find the cause, we’re getting there, but it’s really good to have awareness like this, although I feel terrible for the duchess.
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News that the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, is pregnant spurred headlines and excitement around the world on Monday, but the exuberance was tempered by word that the mother-to-be has been hospitalized with a rare form of severe morning sickness.
Most people have never heard of the condition, called hyperemesis gravidarum or H.G., now getting worldwide attention. To learn more, we spoke with Dr. Marlena Fejzo, an obstetrics researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Fejzo twice experienced H.G. during her own pregnancies and is an adviser and board member for the
|
Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation. We talked about the risks of H.G., why it happens and whether its occurrence can predict the sex of the baby.
What is hyperemesis gravidarum?
It’s severe, debilitating nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that generally leads to more than 5 percent weight loss and requires fluid treatment. Sometimes, in more extreme cases, it requires nutritional supplements.
Are there treatments?
Doctors try to give IV and anti-nausea medication at first. About 20 percent of the women who contact the Hyperemesis Education and Research Foundation require tube feeding. It’s very serious. They have to have a tube inserted above their heart. Blood tests have to be done every day, or every other day, and the bag of nutrients has to be monitored to make sure it’s personalized for the woman’s needs. But I don’t think Kate Middleton (based on news reports) has it that bad. She’s just gone in for the IV fluids.
How common is H.G.?
It probably depends on how you define it. It’s generally defined in populations as 0.2 percent. A study from Shanghai, China, said that 10 percent of women get it or are hospitalized for it. Obviously anyone can get it, even a duchess.
What are the main symptoms and how is it different from regular morning sickness?
The main signs are rapid weight loss and rapid dehydration, the inability to tolerate fluids, feeling lightheaded and weak, and persistent nausea and vomiting. It just doesn’t go away.
Are there risks or complications associated with H.G.?
It used to be a major cause of death in women until the 1950s when they introduced IV fluids. There is a serious complication called Wernicke encephalopathy. It’s a serious neurological disorder that happens when you are not able to get enough thiamine (vitamin B-1), a vitamin that is needed for proper brain functioning. When it’s depleted you can get this serious neurological problem.
Wernicke encephalopathy is rare, but it would be preventable with a thiamine shot. If women come in with H.G., they shouldn’t just be treated with fluids, they need to have that thiamine shot. This complication typically leads to fetal death, and it’s serious for the mother too.
Are there long-term risks to the baby or the mother from H.G.?
There is very little research on H.G. One paper that looked at extreme nausea and vomiting found that children had more attention problems and difficulty in task persistence at ages 5 and 12. We found an increased risk of preterm labor and preterm birth due to H.G.
We need to do more studies, and we are following up on these women. We’re running a huge study to identify the genes and risk factors involved. About 30 percent of women had a mother who had it, and 20 percent had a sister who had it. We’re looking for the genes, and hopefully from that we can find the cause. Now it’s treated with medications that are developed to treat the symptoms but not to treat the cause.
Two major studies just came out the past couple years that showed an increased risk of preterm birth in H.G. But the majority of babies are fine.
Does the onset of H.G. predict whether a woman is carrying a boy or girl?
It occurs for both male and female fetuses, but is more common in women carrying female fetuses.
Is a woman at risk for it in a second pregnancy if she gets it in the first?
Yes, the recurrence risk is upwards of 80 percent. There is a study that says it’s more common in first pregnancies, but I think a lot of women don’t have a second pregnancy after having it. It’s bad enough that women decide not to have another baby, or to adopt or find another way.
Why is raising awareness so important given that this is a temporary condition?
It’s not necessarily a temporary condition. There are long-term effects to the fetus possibly, and there are long-term effects to the women. We also have an article on post-traumatic stress following pregnancies. When you’re suffering day after day at a time when you know nutrition is so important for your baby, its very traumatic for women. Even the medicines that help, they don’t cure it.
Also, there are a lot of misconceptions about it. A lot of women are treated really badly. They’re treated like they’re faking it or that they just don’t want their child. We have a lot of women who have lost pregnancy after pregnancy, or who had abortions because they just couldn’t tolerate it. There needs to be more awareness. There needs to be funding for research so women won’t be treated like this is all in their head, and the fact that the duchess has it is going to help.
What was your own experience with H.G.?
That’s why I’m so motivated. I had H.G. in two pregnancies. In my first pregnancy, I had a healthy baby boy. In the second case I lost the baby at 15 weeks. I don’t have it in my family, but I wanted to see if it was genetic since I’m a geneticist. We started on a genetic and epigenetic study we’re doing now. We’re going to find the cause, we’re getting there, but it’s really good to have awareness like this, although I feel terrible for the duchess.
|
Overview | Fifty years ago this week, the United States and Soviet Union narrowly averted catastrophe over the presence of nuclear missiles in Soviet-backed Cuba. But just how close did we come to an unintended nuclear war, and could a similar incident happen again?
In the activities below, students examine newly uncovered research on what took place during those 13 days in the fall of 1962. They’ll decide whether the crisis stands as an example of cool leadership under pressure or a cascade of error and miscalculation. Extension activities allow them to dig deeper into factors that made the Cuban missile crisis such a turning point, and explore continuing or potential conflicts that might put today’s world at similar risk.
Note: To accompany this lesson plan, we created a slide show from photographs archived in the New York Times picture library. We chose images that we thought might illuminate those tense days in interesting and accessible ways for students, and that might be fertile ground for further analysis and inquiry, especially when paired with the ideas we suggest below. You can also view it in a larger size here.
Materials | Computer with Internet connection and projector to display articles and video, computers with Internet connection for individual students or groups to use online resources, copies of stories or primary documents as needed.
Warm-Up | Tell students:
- In this lesson, we’ll be looking at one of the most studied and perhaps least understood episodes in recent history: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Most people agree that it’s the closest we have ever come to an all-out nuclear war. And if that happened, it’s possible we might not be here today to talk about it.
- Does anyone know which countries were involved in this incident and what the dispute was about? Write brainstorming ideas on the board.
- Today we’re going to figure out what happened, first by gathering some basic facts and then looking at recent research – some of which seems to contradict what people have long thought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Read this overview of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum and watch our slide show above or, in a larger size, here.
- Based on what we’ve just read, what adjectives would you use to describe President John F. Kennedy and his handling of the Cuban missile crisis? Write students’ ideas on the board.
- Now, we’re going to watch a short video about the Cuban missile crisis featuring Professor James G. Blight from Canada’s Balsillie School of International Affairs and the producer of the Armageddon Letters Web site. As we watch, I’d like you to listen carefully to the tone and language that’s being used.
- Based on this video, would you offer any different adjectives to describe Kennedy or his administration’s handling of this crisis? Does this video change our feelings about the Cuban missile crisis or suggest there’s more than one way to look at it? Write students’ ideas on the board.
Activity | What really happened?
In the opening days of the Cuban missile crisis, the American people knew very little about what was actually happening. On Oct. 20, 1962, President Kennedy abandoned a trip to the Midwest and returned to Washington — supposedly due to a bad head cold. Three days later, and a full week after the crisis had actually begun with the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Kennedy addressed the nation.
From The Learning Network
- Lesson: March 27, 1958 | Nikita Khrushchev Consolidates Power and Becomes Soviet Premier
- Lesson: Recurring Nightmares
Around the Web
- 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis – from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
- Primary sources on the Cuban Missile Crisis from the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
- The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
- The Armageddon Letters, from the Balsillie School of International Affairs
In this activity, students make a double-sided timeline of the 13 days of the initial crisis, which began on Oct. 16 and ended on Oct. 28. On one side, they should write down what a typical newspaper reader learned on each day of the crisis. On the other side, students will add details about what actually happened according to later research or revelations. (For example, on Oct. 20 they initially thought President Kennedy had a cold, and it was later revealed that he had actually rushed back to the White House in response to the unfolding crisis.)
Divide students into groups and have them scan the original coverage from The New York Times during the Cuban missile crisis, including this overview. They may also use this day-by-day chronology of events from the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum. As students find information, they should record crucial facts in their timelines.
For the next part of the activity, students should scan the following articles from The Times to find revelations — new facts or research that add to our understanding of what happened back in 1962 — and fill in the other side of their timelines. (Students may wish to divide responsibility, with each member of the group reading one or two articles. Please tell students it is O.K. to approximate on dates for this part of the assignment, if they have trouble attaching a revelation to a specific day during the crisis.)
During the last part of the activity, move quickly through the crisis with the class, asking each group to report on central discoveries or surprises from their research. For homework or an extension activity, students could design a poster dramatizing how one discovery by historians has shed new light on our understanding of the Cuban missile crisis. Each poster should make clear what people initially believed about an aspect of the crisis; how research or subsequent revelations changed that understanding; and a lesson or moral of the story for future leaders. As a culminating activity, students could create a poster gallery displaying their ideas.
Going Further: Ways to Teach About the Cuban Missile Crisis
Handbook: How to Avoid World War III. Write a manual for leaders of the modern world — a how-to manual for avoiding unintended armed conflicts — based on the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis. It can be addressed to all world leaders or to one leader in particular. The handbooks should tell leaders what they can do to lessen the chances of armed conflict, referring to incidents or research from the 1962 crisis to explain what sorts of conditions or actions make conflict more likely.
Students should be encouraged to include their own ideas and conclusions based upon their reflections about the Cuban missile crisis; write their handbooks with originality and flair; and give the handbook a unique title and chapter headings. They may consult the following coverage from The Times and Web sites devoted to studying the crisis and its lessons, citing sources when necessary. (Note: teachers may also wish to let students draw from the poster gallery assignment above for inspiration, with students crediting classmates for their ideas.)
2008 — Why We Should Still Study the Cuban Missile Crisis (PDF), from the United States Institute of Peace
2012 — At 50, the Cuban Missile Crisis as Guide, an Op-Ed article from The New York Times
2012 — Learning from History’s Most Dangerous Crisis, from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government
2012 — Cuban Missile Crisis Beliefs Endure After 50 Years, an analysis of conventional wisdom about the crisis by the current Associated Press correspondent in Havana
Flash Points: The Next Crisis? Use your handbooks on the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis to make the case for which current global flash points present the greatest risk of stumbling into a nuclear conflict. Students should be sure to consider both the conditions that make conflict more likely (such as the lack of good communications between the two sides, proximity of military forces, or other factors that make an incident or misunderstanding more likely, etc…) and actions taken by one or both sides that increase tensions. Students may explore recent coverage from The Times’s recent coverage on places such as the Middle East, Iran, East Asia and the India-Pakistan border, as well as stories and web resources on nuclear weapons. (Note: students should bear in mind that regional conflicts sometimes start with nations that do not possess nuclear weapons but hold alliances with nuclear-armed nations.)
Did Hollywood Get It Right? View the Hollywood film “13 Days,” about the Cuban missile crisis, and then write a review in which you rate the film from one to four stars, based upon its adherence to historical evidence and research. Students should cite specific facts and sources to support their conclusions. They may also wish to read the film’s original review
in The Times or this article by a scholar of the Cuban missile crisis and make the case for whether those interpretations of the film are justified or unwarranted.
Creating New Versions of the Story. Visit The Armageddon Letters, a Web site created at Canada’s Balsillie School of International Affairs, to reconsider the meaning of the Cuban missile crisis. Students should explore the site — which includes video, graphic novels, blogs and other innovative ways of exploring this history. Ask them to write a review of the site or one of its elements, explaining whether it aids our understanding of the Cuban missile crisis and makes it relevant for future generations. Alternatively, invite students to emulate the Armageddon Letters project by creating something of their own, such as a blog or graphic retelling of an incident from the crisis.
Time Change? Read this overview of the Doomsday Clock, which The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has used since 1947 to dramatize global security threats and the likelihood of nuclear war. Use your research on global flash points to decide whether the clock, currently set to five minutes before midnight, should be reset in light of recent events.
Make Oral History. Read “In a Time of Hidden Crisis, President Visits Main Street,” one man’s childhood remembrance of President Kennedy’s visit to his hometown during the Cuban missile crisis. Or, read “Leaving Guantánamo With the World on the Nuclear Brink,” a family oral history of the evacuation of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
Then ask students to interview someone in their own family that might remember the crisis. Alternatively, find teachers, grandparents, school staff members or other volunteers, and invite them to class to talk about their memories. Students might interview the guests on a panel, or the visitors could rotate among groups. Students can take notes during the interviews and write an article about how one or more of these stories reveal a different side of the crisis.
Document Study: Submariners Under Pressure. Read the following declassified primary source, “Recollections of Vadim Orlov (USSR Submarine B-59): We will Sink Them All, But We will Not Disgrace Our Navy” (PDF), from the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It describes life aboard Soviet submarines during the Cuban missile crisis.
As part of of its “Secrets of the Dead” series, PBS produced an episode “The Man Who Saved the World” about the same Soviet submarine off the Florida coast, and the commanders’ debate whether to fire a nuclear missile at the United States at the height of the crisis. Ask students to use the sources as a starting point to compose a fictional letter from a member of a submarine’s crew to a family member back in the Soviet Union. Their letter should provide colorful descriptions on life aboard the submarine; detailed recollections and beliefs about the crisis; and the submariner’s personal reflections on the experience.
Document Study: Nuclear Orders. Read the following orders sent by the Soviet leadership in Moscow to Cuba in 1962, which are part of the primary source collection at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Divide students into teams to assess the importance of these two documents, based on their understanding of the Cuban missile crisis. They can make detailed class presentations on how the crisis might have turned out differently if the Central Intelligence Agency had intercepted the orders — and sent them to the White House — on the day they were transmitted.
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
Speaking and Listening
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
2. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.
44. Understands the search for community, stability, and peace in an interdependent world.
46. Understands long-term changes and recurring patterns in world history.
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Overview | Fifty years ago this week, the United States and Soviet Union narrowly averted catastrophe over the presence of nuclear missiles in Soviet-backed Cuba. But just how close did we come to an unintended nuclear war, and could a similar incident happen again?
In the activities below, students examine newly uncovered research on what took place during those 13 days in the fall of 1962. They’ll decide whether the crisis stands as an example of cool leadership under pressure or a cascade of error and miscalculation. Extension activities allow them to dig deeper into factors that made the Cuban missile crisis such a turning point, and explore
|
continuing or potential conflicts that might put today’s world at similar risk.
Note: To accompany this lesson plan, we created a slide show from photographs archived in the New York Times picture library. We chose images that we thought might illuminate those tense days in interesting and accessible ways for students, and that might be fertile ground for further analysis and inquiry, especially when paired with the ideas we suggest below. You can also view it in a larger size here.
Materials | Computer with Internet connection and projector to display articles and video, computers with Internet connection for individual students or groups to use online resources, copies of stories or primary documents as needed.
Warm-Up | Tell students:
- In this lesson, we’ll be looking at one of the most studied and perhaps least understood episodes in recent history: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Most people agree that it’s the closest we have ever come to an all-out nuclear war. And if that happened, it’s possible we might not be here today to talk about it.
- Does anyone know which countries were involved in this incident and what the dispute was about? Write brainstorming ideas on the board.
- Today we’re going to figure out what happened, first by gathering some basic facts and then looking at recent research – some of which seems to contradict what people have long thought about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Read this overview of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum and watch our slide show above or, in a larger size, here.
- Based on what we’ve just read, what adjectives would you use to describe President John F. Kennedy and his handling of the Cuban missile crisis? Write students’ ideas on the board.
- Now, we’re going to watch a short video about the Cuban missile crisis featuring Professor James G. Blight from Canada’s Balsillie School of International Affairs and the producer of the Armageddon Letters Web site. As we watch, I’d like you to listen carefully to the tone and language that’s being used.
- Based on this video, would you offer any different adjectives to describe Kennedy or his administration’s handling of this crisis? Does this video change our feelings about the Cuban missile crisis or suggest there’s more than one way to look at it? Write students’ ideas on the board.
Activity | What really happened?
In the opening days of the Cuban missile crisis, the American people knew very little about what was actually happening. On Oct. 20, 1962, President Kennedy abandoned a trip to the Midwest and returned to Washington — supposedly due to a bad head cold. Three days later, and a full week after the crisis had actually begun with the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Kennedy addressed the nation.
From The Learning Network
- Lesson: March 27, 1958 | Nikita Khrushchev Consolidates Power and Becomes Soviet Premier
- Lesson: Recurring Nightmares
Around the Web
- 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis – from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
- Primary sources on the Cuban Missile Crisis from the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
- The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
- The Armageddon Letters, from the Balsillie School of International Affairs
In this activity, students make a double-sided timeline of the 13 days of the initial crisis, which began on Oct. 16 and ended on Oct. 28. On one side, they should write down what a typical newspaper reader learned on each day of the crisis. On the other side, students will add details about what actually happened according to later research or revelations. (For example, on Oct. 20 they initially thought President Kennedy had a cold, and it was later revealed that he had actually rushed back to the White House in response to the unfolding crisis.)
Divide students into groups and have them scan the original coverage from The New York Times during the Cuban missile crisis, including this overview. They may also use this day-by-day chronology of events from the John F. Kennedy Library and Presidential Museum. As students find information, they should record crucial facts in their timelines.
For the next part of the activity, students should scan the following articles from The Times to find revelations — new facts or research that add to our understanding of what happened back in 1962 — and fill in the other side of their timelines. (Students may wish to divide responsibility, with each member of the group reading one or two articles. Please tell students it is O.K. to approximate on dates for this part of the assignment, if they have trouble attaching a revelation to a specific day during the crisis.)
During the last part of the activity, move quickly through the crisis with the class, asking each group to report on central discoveries or surprises from their research. For homework or an extension activity, students could design a poster dramatizing how one discovery by historians has shed new light on our understanding of the Cuban missile crisis. Each poster should make clear what people initially believed about an aspect of the crisis; how research or subsequent revelations changed that understanding; and a lesson or moral of the story for future leaders. As a culminating activity, students could create a poster gallery displaying their ideas.
Going Further: Ways to Teach About the Cuban Missile Crisis
Handbook: How to Avoid World War III. Write a manual for leaders of the modern world — a how-to manual for avoiding unintended armed conflicts — based on the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis. It can be addressed to all world leaders or to one leader in particular. The handbooks should tell leaders what they can do to lessen the chances of armed conflict, referring to incidents or research from the 1962 crisis to explain what sorts of conditions or actions make conflict more likely.
Students should be encouraged to include their own ideas and conclusions based upon their reflections about the Cuban missile crisis; write their handbooks with originality and flair; and give the handbook a unique title and chapter headings. They may consult the following coverage from The Times and Web sites devoted to studying the crisis and its lessons, citing sources when necessary. (Note: teachers may also wish to let students draw from the poster gallery assignment above for inspiration, with students crediting classmates for their ideas.)
2008 — Why We Should Still Study the Cuban Missile Crisis (PDF), from the United States Institute of Peace
2012 — At 50, the Cuban Missile Crisis as Guide, an Op-Ed article from The New York Times
2012 — Learning from History’s Most Dangerous Crisis, from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government
2012 — Cuban Missile Crisis Beliefs Endure After 50 Years, an analysis of conventional wisdom about the crisis by the current Associated Press correspondent in Havana
Flash Points: The Next Crisis? Use your handbooks on the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis to make the case for which current global flash points present the greatest risk of stumbling into a nuclear conflict. Students should be sure to consider both the conditions that make conflict more likely (such as the lack of good communications between the two sides, proximity of military forces, or other factors that make an incident or misunderstanding more likely, etc…) and actions taken by one or both sides that increase tensions. Students may explore recent coverage from The Times’s recent coverage on places such as the Middle East, Iran, East Asia and the India-Pakistan border, as well as stories and web resources on nuclear weapons. (Note: students should bear in mind that regional conflicts sometimes start with nations that do not possess nuclear weapons but hold alliances with nuclear-armed nations.)
Did Hollywood Get It Right? View the Hollywood film “13 Days,” about the Cuban missile crisis, and then write a review in which you rate the film from one to four stars, based upon its adherence to historical evidence and research. Students should cite specific facts and sources to support their conclusions. They may also wish to read the film’s original review
in The Times or this article by a scholar of the Cuban missile crisis and make the case for whether those interpretations of the film are justified or unwarranted.
Creating New Versions of the Story. Visit The Armageddon Letters, a Web site created at Canada’s Balsillie School of International Affairs, to reconsider the meaning of the Cuban missile crisis. Students should explore the site — which includes video, graphic novels, blogs and other innovative ways of exploring this history. Ask them to write a review of the site or one of its elements, explaining whether it aids our understanding of the Cuban missile crisis and makes it relevant for future generations. Alternatively, invite students to emulate the Armageddon Letters project by creating something of their own, such as a blog or graphic retelling of an incident from the crisis.
Time Change? Read this overview of the Doomsday Clock, which The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has used since 1947 to dramatize global security threats and the likelihood of nuclear war. Use your research on global flash points to decide whether the clock, currently set to five minutes before midnight, should be reset in light of recent events.
Make Oral History. Read “In a Time of Hidden Crisis, President Visits Main Street,” one man’s childhood remembrance of President Kennedy’s visit to his hometown during the Cuban missile crisis. Or, read “Leaving Guantánamo With the World on the Nuclear Brink,” a family oral history of the evacuation of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
Then ask students to interview someone in their own family that might remember the crisis. Alternatively, find teachers, grandparents, school staff members or other volunteers, and invite them to class to talk about their memories. Students might interview the guests on a panel, or the visitors could rotate among groups. Students can take notes during the interviews and write an article about how one or more of these stories reveal a different side of the crisis.
Document Study: Submariners Under Pressure. Read the following declassified primary source, “Recollections of Vadim Orlov (USSR Submarine B-59): We will Sink Them All, But We will Not Disgrace Our Navy” (PDF), from the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It describes life aboard Soviet submarines during the Cuban missile crisis.
As part of of its “Secrets of the Dead” series, PBS produced an episode “The Man Who Saved the World” about the same Soviet submarine off the Florida coast, and the commanders’ debate whether to fire a nuclear missile at the United States at the height of the crisis. Ask students to use the sources as a starting point to compose a fictional letter from a member of a submarine’s crew to a family member back in the Soviet Union. Their letter should provide colorful descriptions on life aboard the submarine; detailed recollections and beliefs about the crisis; and the submariner’s personal reflections on the experience.
Document Study: Nuclear Orders. Read the following orders sent by the Soviet leadership in Moscow to Cuba in 1962, which are part of the primary source collection at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Divide students into teams to assess the importance of these two documents, based on their understanding of the Cuban missile crisis. They can make detailed class presentations on how the crisis might have turned out differently if the Central Intelligence Agency had intercepted the orders — and sent them to the White House — on the day they were transmitted.
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
Speaking and Listening
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
2. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
3. Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.
44. Understands the search for community, stability, and peace in an interdependent world.
46. Understands long-term changes and recurring patterns in world history.
|
Face masks help prevent people from getting the flu. But how much protection do they provide?
You might think the answer to this question would be well established. It’s not.
In fact, there is considerable uncertainty over how well face masks guard against influenza when people use them outside of hospitals and other health care settings. This has been a topic of discussion and debate in infectious disease circles since the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, also known as swine flu.
As the government noted in a document that provides guidance on the issue, “Very little information is available about the effectiveness of facemasks and respirators in controlling the spread of pandemic influenza in community settings.” This is also true of seasonal influenza — the kind that strikes every winter and that we are experiencing now, experts said.
Let’s jump to the bottom line for older people and caregivers before getting into the details. If someone is ill with the flu, coughing and sneezing and living with others, say an older spouse who is a bit frail, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the use of a face mask “if available and tolerable” or a tissue to cover the nose and mouth.
If you are healthy and serving as a caregiver for someone who has the flu — say, an older person who is ill and at home — the C.D.C. recommends using a face mask or a respirator. Read more…
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Face masks help prevent people from getting the flu. But how much protection do they provide?
You might think the answer to this question would be well established. It’s not.
In fact, there is considerable uncertainty over how well face masks guard against influenza when people use them outside of hospitals and other health care settings. This has been a topic of discussion and debate in infectious disease circles since the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, also known as swine flu.
As the government noted in a document that provides guidance on the issue, “Very little information is available about the effectiveness of facemasks and respirators in controlling
|
the spread of pandemic influenza in community settings.” This is also true of seasonal influenza — the kind that strikes every winter and that we are experiencing now, experts said.
Let’s jump to the bottom line for older people and caregivers before getting into the details. If someone is ill with the flu, coughing and sneezing and living with others, say an older spouse who is a bit frail, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the use of a face mask “if available and tolerable” or a tissue to cover the nose and mouth.
If you are healthy and serving as a caregiver for someone who has the flu — say, an older person who is ill and at home — the C.D.C. recommends using a face mask or a respirator. Read more…
|
Biggest Urban Growth Is in South and West
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: June 28, 2007
Newark, for four decades a symbol of America's urban decay, is growing faster than any major city in the Northeast, according to census figures released yesterday.
Newark's population, which had been declining for 50 years, has increased 3.3 percent since 2000, including a 0.5 percent increase from 2005 to 2006. The city's population now stands at 281,402.
According to figures from the Census Bureau, the biggest population growth nationwide occurred in urban hubs in the South and the West -- now home to 7 of the 10 most populous cities -- and especially in the metropolitan suburbs of those regions.
Phoenix, with a population of 1.5 million, officially edged out Philadelphia to become the nation's fifth most-populous city, after New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.
Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and other cities in the Rust Belt and upstate New York recorded population losses of more than 5 percent since 2000. But, except for Cleveland, these older cities recorded smaller losses since 2005, suggesting that their population declines may have been stanched. Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis gained population in the latest one-year period.
New York, the nation's largest city, with more than 8.2 million people, recorded virtually no growth since 2005. But city officials said that the population was undercounted and that they would challenge the census figures, as they have done successfully in recent years.
''The July 1, 2006, number will likely be higher than it is now, indicating continued growth,'' said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the City Planning Department's population division.
Among cities of 100,000 or more, North Las Vegas, a suburb with a population of 197,567, recorded the fastest growth rate. It ballooned by 11.9 percent from 2005 to 2006.
Three cities in metropolitan Dallas -- McKinney (which nearly doubled in population since 2000), Grand Prairie and Denton -- also ranked in the top 10 fastest-growing cities of 100,000 or more. Two cities in metropolitan Phoenix and two cities in Florida were also in the top 10, along with one city in North Carolina and one in California.
While Phoenix grew more than any other city, adding 43,000 residents since 2005, five Texas cities (San Antonio, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and Dallas) were also among the top numerical gainers.
The hurricane-ravaged New Orleans lost 51 percent of its population from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006.
William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, said he had detected a surge of small city growth, especially in the West. Of the 25 cities in the South and the West with populations over 500,000, he said, all but three showed gains this decade.
''Small Western cities, with populations below 250,000, grew by 11 percent in the first six years in this decade, substantially more than larger cities in the region,'' Mr. Frey said.
Boston showed annual population gains from 2002 to 2005 but registered a 1 percent loss since 2005.
Since 2000, only two cities outside the South and the West -- Joliet, Ill., and Olathe, Kan. -- were among the 25 fastest-growing in the nation.
The gains in the West and the South demonstrate how the nation's population has shifted over a century. Only 3 of the 10 most populous cities in 1910 -- New York, Chicago and Philadelphia -- remain on the latest list of the top 10. Three of the latest top 10 -- Phoenix; San Jose, Calif.; and San Diego -- were not even among the 100 most populous in 1910.
Map Map shows population growth in U.S. cities.
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Biggest Urban Growth Is in South and West
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: June 28, 2007
Newark, for four decades a symbol of America's urban decay, is growing faster than any major city in the Northeast, according to census figures released yesterday.
Newark's population, which had been declining for 50 years, has increased 3.3 percent since 2000, including a 0.5 percent increase from 2005 to 2006. The city's population now stands at 281,402.
According
|
to figures from the Census Bureau, the biggest population growth nationwide occurred in urban hubs in the South and the West -- now home to 7 of the 10 most populous cities -- and especially in the metropolitan suburbs of those regions.
Phoenix, with a population of 1.5 million, officially edged out Philadelphia to become the nation's fifth most-populous city, after New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.
Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rochester and other cities in the Rust Belt and upstate New York recorded population losses of more than 5 percent since 2000. But, except for Cleveland, these older cities recorded smaller losses since 2005, suggesting that their population declines may have been stanched. Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis gained population in the latest one-year period.
New York, the nation's largest city, with more than 8.2 million people, recorded virtually no growth since 2005. But city officials said that the population was undercounted and that they would challenge the census figures, as they have done successfully in recent years.
''The July 1, 2006, number will likely be higher than it is now, indicating continued growth,'' said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the City Planning Department's population division.
Among cities of 100,000 or more, North Las Vegas, a suburb with a population of 197,567, recorded the fastest growth rate. It ballooned by 11.9 percent from 2005 to 2006.
Three cities in metropolitan Dallas -- McKinney (which nearly doubled in population since 2000), Grand Prairie and Denton -- also ranked in the top 10 fastest-growing cities of 100,000 or more. Two cities in metropolitan Phoenix and two cities in Florida were also in the top 10, along with one city in North Carolina and one in California.
While Phoenix grew more than any other city, adding 43,000 residents since 2005, five Texas cities (San Antonio, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and Dallas) were also among the top numerical gainers.
The hurricane-ravaged New Orleans lost 51 percent of its population from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006.
William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, said he had detected a surge of small city growth, especially in the West. Of the 25 cities in the South and the West with populations over 500,000, he said, all but three showed gains this decade.
''Small Western cities, with populations below 250,000, grew by 11 percent in the first six years in this decade, substantially more than larger cities in the region,'' Mr. Frey said.
Boston showed annual population gains from 2002 to 2005 but registered a 1 percent loss since 2005.
Since 2000, only two cities outside the South and the West -- Joliet, Ill., and Olathe, Kan. -- were among the 25 fastest-growing in the nation.
The gains in the West and the South demonstrate how the nation's population has shifted over a century. Only 3 of the 10 most populous cities in 1910 -- New York, Chicago and Philadelphia -- remain on the latest list of the top 10. Three of the latest top 10 -- Phoenix; San Jose, Calif.; and San Diego -- were not even among the 100 most populous in 1910.
Map Map shows population growth in U.S. cities.
|
What was the cold war? How did it shape history? How are we still seeing its echoes today?
Below are 13 years of Learning Network lesson plans and other materials to help students answer these questions by going beyond the textbook and working with original Times reporting, photojournalism and essays, any of which can be used to address one or more of the following essential questions:
1. Who was responsible for starting the cold war?
2. Why didn’t the cold war ever turn “hot”?
3. How did the cold war challenge American values, at home and abroad?
4. How did the cold war contribute to the current unrest in the Middle East and Afghanistan?
5. Is the cold war still going on? How?
Click on the categories below to go directly to that section:
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What was the cold war? How did it shape history? How are we still seeing its echoes today?
Below are 13 years of Learning Network lesson plans and other materials to help students answer these questions by going beyond the textbook and working with original Times reporting, photojournalism and essays, any of which can be used to address one or more of the following essential questions:
1. Who was responsible for starting the cold war?
2. Why didn’t the cold war ever turn “hot”?
3. How did the cold war challenge American values, at home and abroad?
4. How did the cold war contribute to the
|
current unrest in the Middle East and Afghanistan?
5. Is the cold war still going on? How?
Click on the categories below to go directly to that section:
|
May 19, 2013
A collapsed lung, or pneumothorax, is the collection of air in the space around the lungs. This buildup of air puts pressure on the lung, so it cannot expand as much as it normally does when you take a breath.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Air around the lung; Air outside the lung; Pneumothorax; Spontaneous pneumothorax
Back to TopCauses
A collapsed lung occurs when air escapes from the lung and fills up the space outside of the lung, inside the chest. It may be caused by a gunshot or knife wound to the chest, rib fracture, or certain medical procedures.
In some cases, a collapsed lung occurs without any cause. This is called a spontaneous pneumothorax. A small area in the lung that is filled with air (bleb) can break open, sending air into the space around the lung.
Tall, thin people and smokers are more likely to have a collapsed lung.
The following lung diseases also increase your risk for a collapsed lung:
Back to TopSymptoms
Common symptoms of a collapsed lung include:
A larger pneumothorax will cause more severe symptoms, including:
Other symptoms that can occur with a collapsed lung include:
Back to TopTreatment
A small pneumothorax may go away on its own. You may only need oxygen and rest.
The health care provider may use a needle to pull the extra air out from around the lung so it can expand more fully. You may be allowed to go home if you live near the hospital.
If you have a large pneumothorax, a chest tube will be placed between the ribs into the space around the lungs to help drain the air and allow the lung to re-expand.
The chest tube can be left in place for several days. You may need to stay in the hospital. However, you may be able to go home if a small chest tube is used.
Some patients with a collapsed lung need extra oxygen.
Lung surgery may be needed to treat your pneumothorax or to prevent future episodes. The area where the leak occurred may be repaired. Sometimes, a special chemical is placed into the area of the collapsed lung. This chemical causes a scar to form. This procedure is called pleurodesis.
Back to TopOutlook (Prognosis)
If you have a collapsed lung, you are more likely to have another one in the future if you:
- Are tall and thin
- Continue to smoke
- Have had two collapsed lungs in the past
How well you do after having a collapsed lung depends on what caused it.
Back to TopWhen to Contact a Medical Professional
Call your health care provider if you have symptoms of a collapsed lung, especially if you have had one before.
Back to TopPrevention
There is no known way to prevent a collapsed lung, but you can decrease your risk by not smoking.
Back to TopReferences
Light RW, Lee GY. Pneumothorax, chylothorax, hemothorax, and fibrothorax. In: Mason RJ, Murray JF, Broaddus VC, Nadel JA, eds. Textbook of Respiratory Medicine . 4th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2005:chap 69.
Maskell N; British Thoracic Society Pleural Disease Guideline Group. British Thoracic Society Pleural Disease Guidelines--2010 update. Thorax . 2010;65:667-669.
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May 19, 2013
A collapsed lung, or pneumothorax, is the collection of air in the space around the lungs. This buildup of air puts pressure on the lung, so it cannot expand as much as it normally does when you take a breath.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Air around the lung; Air outside the lung; Pneumothorax; Spontaneous pneumothorax
Back to TopCauses
A collapsed lung occurs when air escapes from the lung and fills up the space outside of the lung, inside the chest. It may be caused by a gun
|
shot or knife wound to the chest, rib fracture, or certain medical procedures.
In some cases, a collapsed lung occurs without any cause. This is called a spontaneous pneumothorax. A small area in the lung that is filled with air (bleb) can break open, sending air into the space around the lung.
Tall, thin people and smokers are more likely to have a collapsed lung.
The following lung diseases also increase your risk for a collapsed lung:
Back to TopSymptoms
Common symptoms of a collapsed lung include:
A larger pneumothorax will cause more severe symptoms, including:
Other symptoms that can occur with a collapsed lung include:
Back to TopTreatment
A small pneumothorax may go away on its own. You may only need oxygen and rest.
The health care provider may use a needle to pull the extra air out from around the lung so it can expand more fully. You may be allowed to go home if you live near the hospital.
If you have a large pneumothorax, a chest tube will be placed between the ribs into the space around the lungs to help drain the air and allow the lung to re-expand.
The chest tube can be left in place for several days. You may need to stay in the hospital. However, you may be able to go home if a small chest tube is used.
Some patients with a collapsed lung need extra oxygen.
Lung surgery may be needed to treat your pneumothorax or to prevent future episodes. The area where the leak occurred may be repaired. Sometimes, a special chemical is placed into the area of the collapsed lung. This chemical causes a scar to form. This procedure is called pleurodesis.
Back to TopOutlook (Prognosis)
If you have a collapsed lung, you are more likely to have another one in the future if you:
- Are tall and thin
- Continue to smoke
- Have had two collapsed lungs in the past
How well you do after having a collapsed lung depends on what caused it.
Back to TopWhen to Contact a Medical Professional
Call your health care provider if you have symptoms of a collapsed lung, especially if you have had one before.
Back to TopPrevention
There is no known way to prevent a collapsed lung, but you can decrease your risk by not smoking.
Back to TopReferences
Light RW, Lee GY. Pneumothorax, chylothorax, hemothorax, and fibrothorax. In: Mason RJ, Murray JF, Broaddus VC, Nadel JA, eds. Textbook of Respiratory Medicine . 4th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2005:chap 69.
Maskell N; British Thoracic Society Pleural Disease Guideline Group. British Thoracic Society Pleural Disease Guidelines--2010 update. Thorax . 2010;65:667-669.
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH
- The Health Toll of Immigration
- Well: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
- For Gay Men, a Fear That Feels Familiar
- Well: Many Fronts in Fighting Obesity
- The New Old Age: After the Denial Letter Arrives
- Well: Marathon Training, Minus the Long Run
- Well: Focaccia Five Ways
- No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet
- Well: Shaking Off Loneliness
- Recipes for Health: Focaccia With Cauliflower and Sage
|
Allow a laboratory mouse to run as much as it likes, and its brainpower improves. Force it to run harder than it otherwise might, and its thinking improves even more. This is the finding of an experiment led by researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and placed online in May.
In the study, scientists had two groups of mice swim a water maze and in a separate trial had them endure an unpleasant stimulus to see how quickly they would learn to move away from it. For the next four weeks they allowed one group of mice to run inside their rodent wheels, an activity most mice enjoy, while requiring the other group to push harder on minitreadmills at a speed and duration controlled by the scientists. They then tested both groups again to track their learning skills and memory. Both groups of mice performed admirably in the water maze, bettering their performances from the earlier trial. But only the treadmill runners were better in the avoidance task, a skill that, according to brain scientists, demands a more complicated cognitive response.
The mice who raced on the treadmills showed evidence of molecular changes in several portions of their brains when viewed under a microscope, while the voluntary wheel-runners had changes in only one area. “Our results support the notion that different forms of exercise induce neuroplasticity changes in different brain regions,” Chauying J. Jen, a professor of physiology and an author of the study, says.
For some time, researchers have known that exercise changes the structure of the brain and affects thinking. Ten years ago scientists at the Salk Institute in California published the groundbreaking finding that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells. But fundamental questions remain, like whether exercise must be strenuous to be beneficial. Should it be aerobic? What about weight lifting? And are the cognitive improvements permanent or fleeting?
Other recent studies provide some preliminary answers. In an experiment published in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, 21 students at the University of Illinois were asked to memorize a string of letters and then pick them out from a list flashed at them. Then they were asked to do one of three things for 30 minutes — sit quietly, run on a treadmill or lift weights — before performing the letter test again. After an additional 30-minute cool down, they were tested once more. On subsequent days, the students returned to try the other two options. The students were noticeably quicker and more accurate on the retest after they ran compared with the other two options, and they continued to perform better when tested after the cool down. “There seems to be something different about aerobic exercise,” Charles Hillman, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and an author of the study, says.
Similarly, in other work by scientists at the University of Illinois, elderly people were assigned a six-month program of either stretching exercises or brisk walking. The stretchers increased their flexibility but did not improve on tests of cognition. The brisk walkers did.
Why should exercise need to be aerobic to affect the brain? “It appears that various growth factors must be carried from the periphery of the body into the brain to start a molecular cascade there,” creating new neurons and brain connections, says Henriette van Praag, an investigator in the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. For that to happen, “you need a fairly dramatic change in blood flow,” like the one that occurs when you run or cycle or swim. Weight lifting, on the other hand, stimulates the production of “growth factors in the muscles that stay in the muscles and aren’t transported to the brain,” van Praag says.
What then of the Taiwanese mice, all of which ran? According to the investigators, mice on a running wheel “usually show little improvements in the conventionally defined” measurements of fitness, like elevated muscle strength and improved aerobic capacity. They enjoy themselves; they don’t strain. Those on the treadmill, meanwhile, are forced to pant and puff. Jen says researchers suspect that treadmill running is more intense and leads to improvements in “muscle aerobic capacity,” and this increased aerobic capacity, in turn, affects the brain more than the wheel jogging.
Does this mean we should relinquish control of our workouts to a demanding coach? Jen cautions against assuming human bodies work exactly like those of rats. But there are lessons from his work. “It would be fair to say that any form of regular exercise,” he says, if it is aerobic, “should be able to maintain or even increase our brain functions.”
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Allow a laboratory mouse to run as much as it likes, and its brainpower improves. Force it to run harder than it otherwise might, and its thinking improves even more. This is the finding of an experiment led by researchers at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and placed online in May.
In the study, scientists had two groups of mice swim a water maze and in a separate trial had them endure an unpleasant stimulus to see how quickly they would learn to move away from it. For the next four weeks they allowed one group of mice to run inside their rodent wheels, an activity most mice enjoy, while requiring the other group to push harder
|
on minitreadmills at a speed and duration controlled by the scientists. They then tested both groups again to track their learning skills and memory. Both groups of mice performed admirably in the water maze, bettering their performances from the earlier trial. But only the treadmill runners were better in the avoidance task, a skill that, according to brain scientists, demands a more complicated cognitive response.
The mice who raced on the treadmills showed evidence of molecular changes in several portions of their brains when viewed under a microscope, while the voluntary wheel-runners had changes in only one area. “Our results support the notion that different forms of exercise induce neuroplasticity changes in different brain regions,” Chauying J. Jen, a professor of physiology and an author of the study, says.
For some time, researchers have known that exercise changes the structure of the brain and affects thinking. Ten years ago scientists at the Salk Institute in California published the groundbreaking finding that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells. But fundamental questions remain, like whether exercise must be strenuous to be beneficial. Should it be aerobic? What about weight lifting? And are the cognitive improvements permanent or fleeting?
Other recent studies provide some preliminary answers. In an experiment published in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, 21 students at the University of Illinois were asked to memorize a string of letters and then pick them out from a list flashed at them. Then they were asked to do one of three things for 30 minutes — sit quietly, run on a treadmill or lift weights — before performing the letter test again. After an additional 30-minute cool down, they were tested once more. On subsequent days, the students returned to try the other two options. The students were noticeably quicker and more accurate on the retest after they ran compared with the other two options, and they continued to perform better when tested after the cool down. “There seems to be something different about aerobic exercise,” Charles Hillman, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Illinois and an author of the study, says.
Similarly, in other work by scientists at the University of Illinois, elderly people were assigned a six-month program of either stretching exercises or brisk walking. The stretchers increased their flexibility but did not improve on tests of cognition. The brisk walkers did.
Why should exercise need to be aerobic to affect the brain? “It appears that various growth factors must be carried from the periphery of the body into the brain to start a molecular cascade there,” creating new neurons and brain connections, says Henriette van Praag, an investigator in the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. For that to happen, “you need a fairly dramatic change in blood flow,” like the one that occurs when you run or cycle or swim. Weight lifting, on the other hand, stimulates the production of “growth factors in the muscles that stay in the muscles and aren’t transported to the brain,” van Praag says.
What then of the Taiwanese mice, all of which ran? According to the investigators, mice on a running wheel “usually show little improvements in the conventionally defined” measurements of fitness, like elevated muscle strength and improved aerobic capacity. They enjoy themselves; they don’t strain. Those on the treadmill, meanwhile, are forced to pant and puff. Jen says researchers suspect that treadmill running is more intense and leads to improvements in “muscle aerobic capacity,” and this increased aerobic capacity, in turn, affects the brain more than the wheel jogging.
Does this mean we should relinquish control of our workouts to a demanding coach? Jen cautions against assuming human bodies work exactly like those of rats. But there are lessons from his work. “It would be fair to say that any form of regular exercise,” he says, if it is aerobic, “should be able to maintain or even increase our brain functions.”
|
Josephson's research has turned up an astounding variety of dead ends. There was, for instance, food irradiation. Starting as early as the 1950's, the Soviets had tried irradiating fruits, fish, meat and potatoes as a means of preservation. They also tried irradiating hens, seeds and barnyard breeding stock to increase productivity. ''The image of the mighty atom joining us at the dinner table was no more a reasonable hope than that of other images promoted during the glory days of atomic energy: the atom and nuclear engines, the atom as excavator and the atom and unlimited electric energy.'' None of it worked well; much of it did not work at all.
There was the attempt to use small nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes, to aid in oil and gas drilling, to put out fires in oil and gas wells, to create underground storage space for hazardous wastes and to dig canals, harbors and reservoirs (''correcting the mistakes of nature,'' the Soviets said). And there was Russian imperialism within the Soviet Union, as Moscow exported reactors for research and power to the other republics.
Much was wasted, but, as Josephson explains, his story is also a tale of heroism. Whatever American physicists accomplished, they did it without having to dodge the destruction brought about by the invasion of the Nazis or the purges carried out by Stalin and the K.G.B. The Russians were world leaders in physics. Not for nothing is our term for the machine that allows fusion a Russian one, the tokamak.
Josephson might have done well to note, though, that ''too cheap to meter'' is a term invented here, to describe a fantasy that flourished in both countries, to the benefit of neither. The Soviets hardly had a monopoly on insular decision-making, unrealistic expectations about cost and reliability and institutional momentum that put bad ideas on artificial life support.
But ''Red Atom'' does not distinguish among causes. How much is Red and how much is atom? One longs for Josephson to isolate the factors, to separate the universal human constants here, like the messianic drive of physicists, from the particular dictates of the Soviet system, with its penchant for standardization and megaprojects and the small role it allowed for public input or market analysis. How does this compare, say, with France, a nation that is highly centralized and has a strong political overlay in the energy sector of its economy, or with China, another Communist nuclear power, but one with less interest in reactors? Even the United States, a country that until recently cherished free enterprise in everything but electricity, would be a good point of reference.
And in spots, Josephson seems to share the confusion of the nuclear engineers themselves. He complains, for example, that the reactors operated at low efficiency. That argument made sense when the uranium fuel was scarce and expensive; in fact, it has not been so for years. Still, ''Red Atom'' is impressive in its sweep, and it provides essential details about an industry that has outlived its creators yet, because rickety reactors are still in use and wastes are still accumulating, can make its presence felt around the world at any time.h
Matthew L. Wald is a Washington correspondent of The Times who writes frequently on nuclear power.
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Josephson's research has turned up an astounding variety of dead ends. There was, for instance, food irradiation. Starting as early as the 1950's, the Soviets had tried irradiating fruits, fish, meat and potatoes as a means of preservation. They also tried irradiating hens, seeds and barnyard breeding stock to increase productivity. ''The image of the mighty atom joining us at the dinner table was no more a reasonable hope than that of other images promoted during the glory days of atomic energy: the atom and nuclear engines, the atom as excavator and the atom and unlimited electric energy.'' None of
|
it worked well; much of it did not work at all.
There was the attempt to use small nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes, to aid in oil and gas drilling, to put out fires in oil and gas wells, to create underground storage space for hazardous wastes and to dig canals, harbors and reservoirs (''correcting the mistakes of nature,'' the Soviets said). And there was Russian imperialism within the Soviet Union, as Moscow exported reactors for research and power to the other republics.
Much was wasted, but, as Josephson explains, his story is also a tale of heroism. Whatever American physicists accomplished, they did it without having to dodge the destruction brought about by the invasion of the Nazis or the purges carried out by Stalin and the K.G.B. The Russians were world leaders in physics. Not for nothing is our term for the machine that allows fusion a Russian one, the tokamak.
Josephson might have done well to note, though, that ''too cheap to meter'' is a term invented here, to describe a fantasy that flourished in both countries, to the benefit of neither. The Soviets hardly had a monopoly on insular decision-making, unrealistic expectations about cost and reliability and institutional momentum that put bad ideas on artificial life support.
But ''Red Atom'' does not distinguish among causes. How much is Red and how much is atom? One longs for Josephson to isolate the factors, to separate the universal human constants here, like the messianic drive of physicists, from the particular dictates of the Soviet system, with its penchant for standardization and megaprojects and the small role it allowed for public input or market analysis. How does this compare, say, with France, a nation that is highly centralized and has a strong political overlay in the energy sector of its economy, or with China, another Communist nuclear power, but one with less interest in reactors? Even the United States, a country that until recently cherished free enterprise in everything but electricity, would be a good point of reference.
And in spots, Josephson seems to share the confusion of the nuclear engineers themselves. He complains, for example, that the reactors operated at low efficiency. That argument made sense when the uranium fuel was scarce and expensive; in fact, it has not been so for years. Still, ''Red Atom'' is impressive in its sweep, and it provides essential details about an industry that has outlived its creators yet, because rickety reactors are still in use and wastes are still accumulating, can make its presence felt around the world at any time.h
Matthew L. Wald is a Washington correspondent of The Times who writes frequently on nuclear power.
|
We have unique data from a 2008 national survey by the Cornell Survey Research Institute that asked Americans whether they had ever taken advantage of any of 21 social policies provided by the federal government, from
The survey asked about people’s policy usage throughout their lives, not just at a moment in time, and it included questions about social policies embedded in the tax code, which are usually overlooked.
What the data reveal is striking: nearly all Americans — 96 percent — have relied on the federal government to assist them. Young adults, who are not yet eligible for many policies, account for most of the remaining 4 percent.
On average, people reported that they had used five social policies at some point in their lives. An individual typically had received two direct social benefits in the form of checks, goods or services paid for by government, like
The use of government social policies cuts across partisan divides. Some policies were used more often by members of one party or the other. Republicans were more likely to have used the G.I. Bill and Social Security retirement and survivors’ benefits, while more Democrats had taken advantage of
The majority of individuals from households at every income level have used at least one direct social policy. Low-income people have used more of the direct policies than have the affluent: the average household with income under $10,000 per year used four of them, compared to only one by the households at $150,000 and above. But the proportions were reversed in the case of the submerged policies: wealthy families had typically used three of them, and the poor just one.
There were also few partisan differences in how long individuals had benefited. Among policies used by similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans, like the Child and Dependent Care Tax
Where Americans actually differ is in how they think about government’s role in their lives. A major driving factor here is ideology: conservatives were less likely than liberals to respond affirmatively when asked if they had ever used a “government social program,” even when both subsequently acknowledged using the same number of specific policies.
These ideological differences were on display at the party conventions. When Gov.
Throughout our lives, almost all of us help sustain government social policies through our tax dollars and, at some point, almost all of us directly benefit from these policies. Because ideology influences how we view our own and others’ use of government, Mr. Romney’s remarks may resonate with those who think of themselves as “producers” rather than “moochers” — to use
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We have unique data from a 2008 national survey by the Cornell Survey Research Institute that asked Americans whether they had ever taken advantage of any of 21 social policies provided by the federal government, from
The survey asked about people’s policy usage throughout their lives, not just at a moment in time, and it included questions about social policies embedded in the tax code, which are usually overlooked.
What the data reveal is striking: nearly all Americans — 96 percent — have relied on the federal government to assist them. Young adults, who are not yet eligible for many policies, account for most of the remaining 4
|
percent.
On average, people reported that they had used five social policies at some point in their lives. An individual typically had received two direct social benefits in the form of checks, goods or services paid for by government, like
The use of government social policies cuts across partisan divides. Some policies were used more often by members of one party or the other. Republicans were more likely to have used the G.I. Bill and Social Security retirement and survivors’ benefits, while more Democrats had taken advantage of
The majority of individuals from households at every income level have used at least one direct social policy. Low-income people have used more of the direct policies than have the affluent: the average household with income under $10,000 per year used four of them, compared to only one by the households at $150,000 and above. But the proportions were reversed in the case of the submerged policies: wealthy families had typically used three of them, and the poor just one.
There were also few partisan differences in how long individuals had benefited. Among policies used by similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans, like the Child and Dependent Care Tax
Where Americans actually differ is in how they think about government’s role in their lives. A major driving factor here is ideology: conservatives were less likely than liberals to respond affirmatively when asked if they had ever used a “government social program,” even when both subsequently acknowledged using the same number of specific policies.
These ideological differences were on display at the party conventions. When Gov.
Throughout our lives, almost all of us help sustain government social policies through our tax dollars and, at some point, almost all of us directly benefit from these policies. Because ideology influences how we view our own and others’ use of government, Mr. Romney’s remarks may resonate with those who think of themselves as “producers” rather than “moochers” — to use
|
May 24, 2013
Celiac Disease - Nutritional Considerations
Celiac disease is an immune disorder passed down through families.
Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, rye, or sometimes oats (including medications). When a person with celiac disease eats or drinks anything containing gluten, the immune system responds by damaging the lining of the intestinal tract. This damage affects the body's ability to absorb nutrients.
For specific information about the disease (including symptoms and treatment), see: Celiac disease.
Carefully following a gluten-free diet helps prevent symptoms of the disease.
Recent findings and perspectives on medical research.
Celiac disease, a digestive condition linked to gluten in foods, remains vastly unrecognized and undertreated.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Gluten-free diet; Gluten sensitive enteropathy - diet; Celiac sprue - diet
Back to TopFood Sources
Staples of the gluten-free diet include:
- Cereals made without wheat or barley malt
- Fruits and vegetables
- Meat, poultry, and fish (not breaded or made with regular gravies)
- Milk-based items
- Oats (may be okay for some people with celiac disease, but work closely with your doctor or dietitian)
You can eat foods such as pasta, bread, pancakes, and pastries made with alternative grains (rice, buckwheat, tapioca, potato, or corn flours and starches).
You can buy these products through local and national food companies, or you can make them from scratch using alternative flours and grains.
Other food items you may use for cooking include:
- Potatoes, rice, flax, millet
- Legumes, nuts, seeds, cassava
- Tapioca sorghum
The gluten-free diet involves removing all foods, drinks, and medications made from gluten. This means not eating anything made with barley, rye, and wheat. All items made with all-purpose, white, or wheat flour are prohibited.
Obvious sources of gluten include:
- Breaded foods
- Breads, bagels, croissants, buns
- Cakes, donuts, and pies
- Cereals (most)
- Cold cuts, hot dogs, salami, or sausage
- Crackers and many snacks bought at the store, such as potato chips and tortilla chips
- Pancakes and waffles
- Pasta and pizza
- Soups (most)
Less obvious foods that must be eliminated include:
- Candies (some)
- Communion breads
- Marinades, sauces, soy and teriyaki sauces
- Salad dressings (some)
- Self-basting turkey
There is a risk of cross-contamination. Items that are naturally gluten-free may become contaminated if they are made on the same production line, or moved together in the same place, as foods containing gluten.
Eating at restaurants, work, school, and social gatherings can be challenging. Call ahead and plan. It is important to read labels before buying or eating, due to the widespread use of wheat and barley in foods.
Despite its challenges, maintaining a healthy, balanced diet is possible with education and planning.
Back to TopRecommendations
Once you have been diagnosed with celiac disease, it is very important that you talk to a registered dietitian who specializes in celiac disease and the gluten-free diet.
Joining a local support group is also recommended. Support groups can help people with celiac disease share practical advice on ingredients, baking, and ways to cope with this life-altering, lifelong disease.
See also: Celiac disease support group
Your doctor might prescribe a multivitamin and mineral or individual nutrient supplement to correct or prevent a deficiency.
Back to TopReferences
Green PH, Cellier C. Celiac disease. N Engl J Med . 2007;357:1731-1743.
Kagnoff MF. AGA Institute medical position statement on the diagnosis and management of celiac disease. Gastroenterology . 2006;131(6):1977-1980.
Semrad CE. Approach to the patient with diarrhea and malabsorption. In: Goldman L, Schafer AI, eds. Cecil Medicine . 24th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 142.
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May 24, 2013
Celiac Disease - Nutritional Considerations
Celiac disease is an immune disorder passed down through families.
Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, rye, or sometimes oats (including medications). When a person with celiac disease eats or drinks anything containing gluten, the immune system responds by damaging the lining of the intestinal tract. This damage affects the body's ability to absorb nutrients.
For specific information about the disease (including symptoms and treatment), see: Celiac disease.
Carefully following a gluten-free diet helps prevent symptoms of the disease
|
.
Recent findings and perspectives on medical research.
Celiac disease, a digestive condition linked to gluten in foods, remains vastly unrecognized and undertreated.
Back to TopAlternative Names
Gluten-free diet; Gluten sensitive enteropathy - diet; Celiac sprue - diet
Back to TopFood Sources
Staples of the gluten-free diet include:
- Cereals made without wheat or barley malt
- Fruits and vegetables
- Meat, poultry, and fish (not breaded or made with regular gravies)
- Milk-based items
- Oats (may be okay for some people with celiac disease, but work closely with your doctor or dietitian)
You can eat foods such as pasta, bread, pancakes, and pastries made with alternative grains (rice, buckwheat, tapioca, potato, or corn flours and starches).
You can buy these products through local and national food companies, or you can make them from scratch using alternative flours and grains.
Other food items you may use for cooking include:
- Potatoes, rice, flax, millet
- Legumes, nuts, seeds, cassava
- Tapioca sorghum
The gluten-free diet involves removing all foods, drinks, and medications made from gluten. This means not eating anything made with barley, rye, and wheat. All items made with all-purpose, white, or wheat flour are prohibited.
Obvious sources of gluten include:
- Breaded foods
- Breads, bagels, croissants, buns
- Cakes, donuts, and pies
- Cereals (most)
- Cold cuts, hot dogs, salami, or sausage
- Crackers and many snacks bought at the store, such as potato chips and tortilla chips
- Pancakes and waffles
- Pasta and pizza
- Soups (most)
Less obvious foods that must be eliminated include:
- Candies (some)
- Communion breads
- Marinades, sauces, soy and teriyaki sauces
- Salad dressings (some)
- Self-basting turkey
There is a risk of cross-contamination. Items that are naturally gluten-free may become contaminated if they are made on the same production line, or moved together in the same place, as foods containing gluten.
Eating at restaurants, work, school, and social gatherings can be challenging. Call ahead and plan. It is important to read labels before buying or eating, due to the widespread use of wheat and barley in foods.
Despite its challenges, maintaining a healthy, balanced diet is possible with education and planning.
Back to TopRecommendations
Once you have been diagnosed with celiac disease, it is very important that you talk to a registered dietitian who specializes in celiac disease and the gluten-free diet.
Joining a local support group is also recommended. Support groups can help people with celiac disease share practical advice on ingredients, baking, and ways to cope with this life-altering, lifelong disease.
See also: Celiac disease support group
Your doctor might prescribe a multivitamin and mineral or individual nutrient supplement to correct or prevent a deficiency.
Back to TopReferences
Green PH, Cellier C. Celiac disease. N Engl J Med . 2007;357:1731-1743.
Kagnoff MF. AGA Institute medical position statement on the diagnosis and management of celiac disease. Gastroenterology . 2006;131(6):1977-1980.
Semrad CE. Approach to the patient with diarrhea and malabsorption. In: Goldman L, Schafer AI, eds. Cecil Medicine . 24th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2011:chap 142.
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH
- Well: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
- Well: Can Statins Cut the Benefits of Exercise?
- Well: For a Better Smoothie, Just Add Chia
- Well: What's in Your Green Tea?
- Well: Disability and Discrimination at the Doctor's Office
- Well: Ask Well: White-Coat Hypertension
- Well: Heartburn Tied to Throat Cancer
- ‘Semi-Invisible’ Sources of Strength
- Recipes for Health: Bulking Up Smoothies With Chia Seeds
- Recipes for Health: Banana Wild Blueberry Smoothie With Chia Seeds
|
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The Lincoln administration may not have gone to war in 1861 to end slavery, but no one bothered to tell that to the slaves. Within six weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, Gen. Benjamin Butler was forced to decide what to do with three slaves who escaped to Fortress Monroe on the north shore of Virginia’s James River. Butler, certainly no abolitionist, nonetheless refused to return the three to their owner, labeling them “contrabands of war.”
The term, suitably ambiguous for an administration that as yet had no policy on how to handle the fugitives, found immediate acceptance. As one Union officer wrote, “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time.” Within weeks hundreds of “contrabands” — men, women and children — flocked to Fortress Monroe and other Union Army positions. Unsure what might greet them, the escaped slaves were yet confident that life under federal control must surely represent an improvement.
It took the federal government more than a year to devise a policy in answer to this thirst for freedom. In August 1861, the First Confiscation Act stripped slaveholders of their claim of ownership, but it failed to clarify whether the slaves were themselves free. The following March Congress prohibited the military from sending escaped slaves back into slavery, and in July the Second Confiscation Act decreed that all slaves that took refuge in Union areas were “captives of war” and would be set free.
These legislative actions took on ever greater significance as Union forces moved deeper and deeper into Confederate territory. The growing number of contrabands reaching federal lines necessitated the establishment of dozens of impromptu contraband camps. A draft map compiled by the National Park Service illustrates how the network of these generally transitory camps mirrored the advance of the Union Army along the Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland River systems. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee spent the summer of 1862 protecting supply lines in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Victories at the Battle of Iuka in September and the Battle of Corinth in early October solidified Union control of the area.
Lincoln’s announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, produced an even greater flood of refugees. How best to use and care for these contrabands proved particularly vexing for military leaders under Grant’s command. “You have no idea of the consternation Old Abe’s Proclamation is making,” wrote Gen. Grenville Dodge to his brother in September. The contrabands “will not even wait until 1st January. I do not know what we shall do with them.”
Many of these fugitives arrived in an appalling condition. “There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escape,” wrote one observer. “Often the slaves met prejudices against their color more bitter than any they had left behind.”
On Nov. 11, 1862, Grant took the first step toward addressing the crisis: he named John Eaton, a former high school principal and chaplain of the 27th Ohio Infantry, as superintendent of contrabands and set him at work “organizing them into suitable companies for working.” A month later he went further. “The negroes will be clothed, and in every way provided for, out of their earnings” — about 12.5 cents for each pound of cotton picked — “so far as practicable,” he ordered. “In no case will negroes be forced into the service of the Government, or be enticed away from their homes except when it becomes a military necessity.”
Grant’s policies lent the contraband camps an official status and began to define what a freedman could and could not do once within the Union lines. Personally, Grant appears to have had no particular sympathy for the refugees. He seems to have recognized that, in the words of one observer, “The soldiers of our army were a good deal opposed to serving the Negro in any manner.” Nevertheless, the Union commander unreservedly supported Eaton’s work and in the process enabled the creation of one of the war’s most successful contraband camps, located at Corinth, Miss.
Although formally organized under the direction of General Dodge in early December 1862 and placed under the command of James M. Alexander, chaplain of the 66th Illinois, the Corinth camp likely came into existence as early as September. Initially housed in army tents no longer considered serviceable for Union troops, the freedmen were soon set to work downing trees and clearing land on which to build cabins and lay out streets, which were named for Union generals. Eventually the freedmen also built a four-room school, a commissary, a hospital, a church and an office. The entire camp was divided into wards, complete with ward masters and a police force.
In late 1862 the American Missionary Association sent its first volunteers to Corinth to help care for, educate and minister to the freedmen. In a memoir written years after the war, one such missionary recalled her experience. “When brought face to face with the slaves,” she wrote, “it was like the discovery of a new race.” The men and women who came to Corinth generally shared a paternalistic optimism and viewed the freedmen as childlike in their enthusiasm for both education and salvation.
The freedmen’s thirst for knowledge was undeniable. “You will find them every hour of daylight, at their books,” observed the Rev. Edward Pierce in March of 1863. “We cannot enter a cabin, or tent, but that we see from one to three with books.” Within no time Pierce and his wife had more than 150 students, and by the end of the summer, the addition of more missionaries enabled the school to accommodate between 300 and 400 children as well as 60 adults at a night school. In August, one of the teachers estimated that as many as 1,000 freedmen had learned to read in the Corinth camp.
Organized religion followed closely on the heels of formal education. Reverend Olds “saw an earnestness in reference to the Christian life that I have seldom seen. And as I saw their deep earnestness & heard their hearty responses,” he said, “I was led to ask where can we find a more impressible people than these?”
The population of the camp fluctuated between 1,500 and 6,000, as large groups undertook assignments for the Union Army or contracted to work on local plantations. In March 1863, for example, the camp was home to 658 men, 1,440 women and 1,559 children. Among the men were 36 blacksmiths, 48 carpenters, 180 teamsters and 200 cooks. The female ranks included 80 seamstresses, 150 laundresses and 600 cooks. Two-thirds of the men and three-quarters of the women were married, and seven in eight women had children. According to John Eaton’s records, the camp had experienced 900 cases of illness, 189 deaths and 45 births.
Life at Corinth changed dramatically after a May 1863 visit by Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, who was intent on recruiting thousands of contrabands for his newly formed black regiments. With the organization of the 1st Alabama Infantry of African Descent, later renamed the 55th United States Colored Troops, the camp lost most of its able-bodied men.
Their departure to fight left only the women, the young, the old and the infirm to carry on Eaton’s ambitious agricultural program, which rested on the cooperative farming of large tracts of abandoned and confiscated land. The program put 400 acres under cultivation, 300 for cotton and 100 for vegetables. Each cabin also had its own subsistence garden. By May 1863, the success of the agricultural program and the presence of a multitude of skilled artisans produced a clear monthly profit of $4,000 to $5,000 for the government, as well as an admirably independent community that Eaton hoped might serve as a model for other camps.
Unfortunately, the success of the Corinth camp proved short-lived. Plans for a winter campaign by Union forces in January 1864 provided a grim reminder that the fate of the freedmen was always secondary to the triumph of the Union cause. The order to relocate the camp’s inhabitants 93 miles westward, to Memphis, “fell like a bomb-shell among our contented people,” lamented one missionary, “but military orders are preemptory,” and they “must be obeyed.” The freedmen left their “well-organized village,” gardens and farms to the rebels.
The move from Corinth destroyed the spirit that had animated the freedmen’s success. Some of the new refugees found work on confiscated plantations or in Memphis, but most lived in one of several camps surrounding the city.
“The destruction of the Corinth camp,” noted one historian, “was one of the tragedies of the Civil War.” Eaton’s plan for large-scale cooperative farming fell victim to a bitter struggle between the War and Treasury departments over the leasing of plantations and was never implemented elsewhere. And no more than one or two other camps were able to replicate the strong civilian leadership, well-planned and policed living environment, and emphasis on education that made Corinth a success.
Had the government learned from the model fashioned in northern Mississippi between the fall of 1862 and early 1864, the newly freed slaves might well have enjoyed a far easier transition to life in postwar America.
Sources: Joseph E. Brent, “Occupied Corinth: The Contraband Camp and the First Alabama Regiment of African Descent, 1862-1864”; John Eaton, “Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen; Adam Goodheart, “How Slavery Really Ended in America” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2011; Timothy B. Smith, “Corinth 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation”; Cam Walker, “Corinth: The Story of a Contraband Camp.”
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Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The Lincoln administration may not have gone to war in 1861 to end slavery, but no one bothered to tell that to the slaves. Within six weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, Gen. Benjamin Butler was forced to decide what to do with three slaves who escaped to Fortress Monroe on the north shore of Virginia’s James River. Butler, certainly no abolitionist, nonetheless refused to return the three to their owner, labeling them “contrabands of war.”
The term, suitably ambiguous for an administration that as yet had no policy on how to handle the fugitives,
|
found immediate acceptance. As one Union officer wrote, “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time.” Within weeks hundreds of “contrabands” — men, women and children — flocked to Fortress Monroe and other Union Army positions. Unsure what might greet them, the escaped slaves were yet confident that life under federal control must surely represent an improvement.
It took the federal government more than a year to devise a policy in answer to this thirst for freedom. In August 1861, the First Confiscation Act stripped slaveholders of their claim of ownership, but it failed to clarify whether the slaves were themselves free. The following March Congress prohibited the military from sending escaped slaves back into slavery, and in July the Second Confiscation Act decreed that all slaves that took refuge in Union areas were “captives of war” and would be set free.
These legislative actions took on ever greater significance as Union forces moved deeper and deeper into Confederate territory. The growing number of contrabands reaching federal lines necessitated the establishment of dozens of impromptu contraband camps. A draft map compiled by the National Park Service illustrates how the network of these generally transitory camps mirrored the advance of the Union Army along the Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland River systems. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee spent the summer of 1862 protecting supply lines in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Victories at the Battle of Iuka in September and the Battle of Corinth in early October solidified Union control of the area.
Lincoln’s announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, produced an even greater flood of refugees. How best to use and care for these contrabands proved particularly vexing for military leaders under Grant’s command. “You have no idea of the consternation Old Abe’s Proclamation is making,” wrote Gen. Grenville Dodge to his brother in September. The contrabands “will not even wait until 1st January. I do not know what we shall do with them.”
Many of these fugitives arrived in an appalling condition. “There were men, women, and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escape,” wrote one observer. “Often the slaves met prejudices against their color more bitter than any they had left behind.”
On Nov. 11, 1862, Grant took the first step toward addressing the crisis: he named John Eaton, a former high school principal and chaplain of the 27th Ohio Infantry, as superintendent of contrabands and set him at work “organizing them into suitable companies for working.” A month later he went further. “The negroes will be clothed, and in every way provided for, out of their earnings” — about 12.5 cents for each pound of cotton picked — “so far as practicable,” he ordered. “In no case will negroes be forced into the service of the Government, or be enticed away from their homes except when it becomes a military necessity.”
Grant’s policies lent the contraband camps an official status and began to define what a freedman could and could not do once within the Union lines. Personally, Grant appears to have had no particular sympathy for the refugees. He seems to have recognized that, in the words of one observer, “The soldiers of our army were a good deal opposed to serving the Negro in any manner.” Nevertheless, the Union commander unreservedly supported Eaton’s work and in the process enabled the creation of one of the war’s most successful contraband camps, located at Corinth, Miss.
Although formally organized under the direction of General Dodge in early December 1862 and placed under the command of James M. Alexander, chaplain of the 66th Illinois, the Corinth camp likely came into existence as early as September. Initially housed in army tents no longer considered serviceable for Union troops, the freedmen were soon set to work downing trees and clearing land on which to build cabins and lay out streets, which were named for Union generals. Eventually the freedmen also built a four-room school, a commissary, a hospital, a church and an office. The entire camp was divided into wards, complete with ward masters and a police force.
In late 1862 the American Missionary Association sent its first volunteers to Corinth to help care for, educate and minister to the freedmen. In a memoir written years after the war, one such missionary recalled her experience. “When brought face to face with the slaves,” she wrote, “it was like the discovery of a new race.” The men and women who came to Corinth generally shared a paternalistic optimism and viewed the freedmen as childlike in their enthusiasm for both education and salvation.
The freedmen’s thirst for knowledge was undeniable. “You will find them every hour of daylight, at their books,” observed the Rev. Edward Pierce in March of 1863. “We cannot enter a cabin, or tent, but that we see from one to three with books.” Within no time Pierce and his wife had more than 150 students, and by the end of the summer, the addition of more missionaries enabled the school to accommodate between 300 and 400 children as well as 60 adults at a night school. In August, one of the teachers estimated that as many as 1,000 freedmen had learned to read in the Corinth camp.
Organized religion followed closely on the heels of formal education. Reverend Olds “saw an earnestness in reference to the Christian life that I have seldom seen. And as I saw their deep earnestness & heard their hearty responses,” he said, “I was led to ask where can we find a more impressible people than these?”
The population of the camp fluctuated between 1,500 and 6,000, as large groups undertook assignments for the Union Army or contracted to work on local plantations. In March 1863, for example, the camp was home to 658 men, 1,440 women and 1,559 children. Among the men were 36 blacksmiths, 48 carpenters, 180 teamsters and 200 cooks. The female ranks included 80 seamstresses, 150 laundresses and 600 cooks. Two-thirds of the men and three-quarters of the women were married, and seven in eight women had children. According to John Eaton’s records, the camp had experienced 900 cases of illness, 189 deaths and 45 births.
Life at Corinth changed dramatically after a May 1863 visit by Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, who was intent on recruiting thousands of contrabands for his newly formed black regiments. With the organization of the 1st Alabama Infantry of African Descent, later renamed the 55th United States Colored Troops, the camp lost most of its able-bodied men.
Their departure to fight left only the women, the young, the old and the infirm to carry on Eaton’s ambitious agricultural program, which rested on the cooperative farming of large tracts of abandoned and confiscated land. The program put 400 acres under cultivation, 300 for cotton and 100 for vegetables. Each cabin also had its own subsistence garden. By May 1863, the success of the agricultural program and the presence of a multitude of skilled artisans produced a clear monthly profit of $4,000 to $5,000 for the government, as well as an admirably independent community that Eaton hoped might serve as a model for other camps.
Unfortunately, the success of the Corinth camp proved short-lived. Plans for a winter campaign by Union forces in January 1864 provided a grim reminder that the fate of the freedmen was always secondary to the triumph of the Union cause. The order to relocate the camp’s inhabitants 93 miles westward, to Memphis, “fell like a bomb-shell among our contented people,” lamented one missionary, “but military orders are preemptory,” and they “must be obeyed.” The freedmen left their “well-organized village,” gardens and farms to the rebels.
The move from Corinth destroyed the spirit that had animated the freedmen’s success. Some of the new refugees found work on confiscated plantations or in Memphis, but most lived in one of several camps surrounding the city.
“The destruction of the Corinth camp,” noted one historian, “was one of the tragedies of the Civil War.” Eaton’s plan for large-scale cooperative farming fell victim to a bitter struggle between the War and Treasury departments over the leasing of plantations and was never implemented elsewhere. And no more than one or two other camps were able to replicate the strong civilian leadership, well-planned and policed living environment, and emphasis on education that made Corinth a success.
Had the government learned from the model fashioned in northern Mississippi between the fall of 1862 and early 1864, the newly freed slaves might well have enjoyed a far easier transition to life in postwar America.
Sources: Joseph E. Brent, “Occupied Corinth: The Contraband Camp and the First Alabama Regiment of African Descent, 1862-1864”; John Eaton, “Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen; Adam Goodheart, “How Slavery Really Ended in America” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2011; Timothy B. Smith, “Corinth 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation”; Cam Walker, “Corinth: The Story of a Contraband Camp.”
|
Until recently, the population of pronghorn — a small antelope-like mammal endemic to North America — outnumbered people in its native Wyoming. The Cowboy State may be the nation’s least populous, but the two groups still manage to come into conflict. Pronghorns numbering in the tens of thousands cross Highway 191 each year during their annual migration, and collisions between animals and cars are costly for all involved.
Now conservationists are celebrating the apparent success of an experiment involving a series of new wildlife overpasses that allow the pronghorns to cross to safety while freeing up the roads.
“This really is a win-win situation for people and for wildlife,” said Jon Beckmann, the pronghorn project coordinator at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The overpasses enhance connectivity for wildlife species and at the same time increase safety for the traveling public who don’t want to hit large wildlife going 65 to 75 miles per hour.”
In the days of Lewis and Clark, millions of pronghorn populated the western frontier. But even by then, only one species, Antilocapra americana, had managed to avoid extinction. Today, A. americana’s population hovers around 700,000. And of those remaining pronghorns, more than 50 percent are found in Wyoming.
“It’s a pretty spectacular animal, and with Wyoming being the last stronghold of pronghorns, its important to protect their long distance migrations,” Dr. Beckmann said.
|
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Until recently, the population of pronghorn — a small antelope-like mammal endemic to North America — outnumbered people in its native Wyoming. The Cowboy State may be the nation’s least populous, but the two groups still manage to come into conflict. Pronghorns numbering in the tens of thousands cross Highway 191 each year during their annual migration, and collisions between animals and cars are costly for all involved.
Now conservationists are celebrating the apparent success of an experiment involving a series of new wildlife overpasses that allow the pronghorns to cross to safety while freeing up the roads.
|
“This really is a win-win situation for people and for wildlife,” said Jon Beckmann, the pronghorn project coordinator at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The overpasses enhance connectivity for wildlife species and at the same time increase safety for the traveling public who don’t want to hit large wildlife going 65 to 75 miles per hour.”
In the days of Lewis and Clark, millions of pronghorn populated the western frontier. But even by then, only one species, Antilocapra americana, had managed to avoid extinction. Today, A. americana’s population hovers around 700,000. And of those remaining pronghorns, more than 50 percent are found in Wyoming.
“It’s a pretty spectacular animal, and with Wyoming being the last stronghold of pronghorns, its important to protect their long distance migrations,” Dr. Beckmann said.
|
Monica Almeida/The New York TimesHow does a bad economy affect businesses like Phoenix Decorating in Pasadena? We’re using this and other articles as models of writing about cause and effect. Go to related article »
Update | Sept. 2012: We’ll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, in the lesson plan category “Common Core.”
Last summer we took our first stab at thinking about how the Common Core Standards might apply to what we do on The Learning Network.
In that post, we offered suggestions for literacy strategies that we know work well with “informational text” — a category that includes pretty much everything The Times publishes every day.
Now we’d like to elaborate on that with more ideas for helping students understand common expository “text structures” like cause and effect, compare and contrast and problem-solution. These three, especially, are such staples of journalism that you can find multiple examples in every day’s paper.
Below, we’ve pulled out recent, student-friendly Times examples — in both print and multimedia — that illustrate each. We’ve also included a list of “signal words” commonly used in each. (A list borrowed, in part, from the work of Stephanie Harvey.)
Of course, the Times examples we include here are sophisticated pieces of writing. Just as it is impossible to find real-world, professional versions of that schoolroom classic, the five-paragraph-essay (the one with the thesis as the final line of the first paragraph, and topic sentences neatly heading each of the three body paragraphs), these pieces similarly resist a lockstep outline. Some may even cross categories. But each can illustrate for students how well a basic structure can work to lay out complex information.
After you’ve read a few from each category, try finding your own. We invite students and teachers to post more Times examples for each in the comment section below.
|
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Monica Almeida/The New York TimesHow does a bad economy affect businesses like Phoenix Decorating in Pasadena? We’re using this and other articles as models of writing about cause and effect. Go to related article »
Update | Sept. 2012: We’ll be exploring the new Common Core State Standards, and how teaching with The Times can address them, through a series of blog posts. You can find them all here, in the lesson plan category “Common Core.”
Last summer we took our first stab at thinking about how the Common Core Standards might apply to what we do on The Learning Network.
In that post,
|
we offered suggestions for literacy strategies that we know work well with “informational text” — a category that includes pretty much everything The Times publishes every day.
Now we’d like to elaborate on that with more ideas for helping students understand common expository “text structures” like cause and effect, compare and contrast and problem-solution. These three, especially, are such staples of journalism that you can find multiple examples in every day’s paper.
Below, we’ve pulled out recent, student-friendly Times examples — in both print and multimedia — that illustrate each. We’ve also included a list of “signal words” commonly used in each. (A list borrowed, in part, from the work of Stephanie Harvey.)
Of course, the Times examples we include here are sophisticated pieces of writing. Just as it is impossible to find real-world, professional versions of that schoolroom classic, the five-paragraph-essay (the one with the thesis as the final line of the first paragraph, and topic sentences neatly heading each of the three body paragraphs), these pieces similarly resist a lockstep outline. Some may even cross categories. But each can illustrate for students how well a basic structure can work to lay out complex information.
After you’ve read a few from each category, try finding your own. We invite students and teachers to post more Times examples for each in the comment section below.
|
There are now fewer Americans with jobs than a year ago, providing one more indication that a recession has been under way for months.
The ones who are suffering the most are the young. Unemployment rates are not rising much for older workers, but they are soaring for the youngest ones, who are often the least skilled.
The recovery that preceded this recession will also go down as having been the first one (or at least the first one since they started keeping statistics) in which there was never a 12-month period that saw manufacturing jobs increase. Manufacturing jobs peaked way back in 1979 but until now they managed to mount at least a brief rebound during every economic recovery.
Those are the highlights of the employment numbers today. Much of the analysis elsewhere is focusing on one-month changes, but it is the longer-term numbers that are most telling.
Overall, the establishment survey showed a seasonally adjusted 137,615,000 jobs in July, down less than a tenth of a percentage point from a year earlier. Private sector jobs are down four-tenths of one percent.
Any decline is unusual, given that the population keeps growing. But there are always declines after recessions begin.
It is the figures from the government’s other survey — the household survey — that stand out this month. The overall unemployment rate leaped to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent, largely because of big problems for young would-be workers.
The rate for teenage men, always high, leaped from 19.9 percent to 24.4 percent, the highest since 1992. And the younger the would-be worker is, the harder it is to get work.
The rate for 16- and 17-year old men rose from 26.2 percent to 29.4 percent. That is the highest rate since the government started counting in 1948. The old high was 28.9 percent in September 1982, during a long recession.
For men 20 to 24 years old, the rate rose to 11.6 percent from 11.2 percent. A year ago, it was 9.2 percent.
There were also increases in the unemployment rate for men between 25 and 44 years old, but the rate for men 45-54 stayed level at 3.8 percent.
Women did not fare as badly. The overall unemployment rate for women who are 20 and older actually ticked down, from 4.7 percent to 4.6 percent. The teenage rate for women rose to 17.1 percent from 16.3 percent, but it was higher as recently as 2004.
Unemployment rates are based on the number of people who say they are looking for work but cannot find it. This surge may reflect an unusual level of difficulty in finding summer jobs for young people. But that does not explain the rise in unemployment for men from 25 to 44.
|
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There are now fewer Americans with jobs than a year ago, providing one more indication that a recession has been under way for months.
The ones who are suffering the most are the young. Unemployment rates are not rising much for older workers, but they are soaring for the youngest ones, who are often the least skilled.
The recovery that preceded this recession will also go down as having been the first one (or at least the first one since they started keeping statistics) in which there was never a 12-month period that saw manufacturing jobs increase. Manufacturing jobs peaked way back in 1979 but until now they managed
|
to mount at least a brief rebound during every economic recovery.
Those are the highlights of the employment numbers today. Much of the analysis elsewhere is focusing on one-month changes, but it is the longer-term numbers that are most telling.
Overall, the establishment survey showed a seasonally adjusted 137,615,000 jobs in July, down less than a tenth of a percentage point from a year earlier. Private sector jobs are down four-tenths of one percent.
Any decline is unusual, given that the population keeps growing. But there are always declines after recessions begin.
It is the figures from the government’s other survey — the household survey — that stand out this month. The overall unemployment rate leaped to 5.7 percent from 5.5 percent, largely because of big problems for young would-be workers.
The rate for teenage men, always high, leaped from 19.9 percent to 24.4 percent, the highest since 1992. And the younger the would-be worker is, the harder it is to get work.
The rate for 16- and 17-year old men rose from 26.2 percent to 29.4 percent. That is the highest rate since the government started counting in 1948. The old high was 28.9 percent in September 1982, during a long recession.
For men 20 to 24 years old, the rate rose to 11.6 percent from 11.2 percent. A year ago, it was 9.2 percent.
There were also increases in the unemployment rate for men between 25 and 44 years old, but the rate for men 45-54 stayed level at 3.8 percent.
Women did not fare as badly. The overall unemployment rate for women who are 20 and older actually ticked down, from 4.7 percent to 4.6 percent. The teenage rate for women rose to 17.1 percent from 16.3 percent, but it was higher as recently as 2004.
Unemployment rates are based on the number of people who say they are looking for work but cannot find it. This surge may reflect an unusual level of difficulty in finding summer jobs for young people. But that does not explain the rise in unemployment for men from 25 to 44.
|
Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Adults often say that young people “should have known better” than to act in a way they characterize as disrespectful, immature or rude, especially at formal events.
In a recent article on this topic, for instance, one woman describes many of the unchaperoned children and teenagers at bar and bat mitzvahs she attends as talking or texting during the services and “playing tag football in the social hall and sneaking brownies from under the plastic wrap.” This woman further admits that her own children are among those who misbehave.
Why do you think situations like this happen? How could they be prevented?
In “Teaching Respect to the Faithful,” Bruce Feiler writes about efforts to change situations like this:
Last year, after a deluge of rabbis asked if they could visit the classes to warn students about their behavior, Mr. Jasgur introduced a one-hour course called Mitzvah Circuit 101, which he offers free to synagogues and Jewish community centers. The course includes a questionnaire about the proper way to respond to an invitation and what to do during the video montage. The following question addresses what Mr. Jasgur says is a common sore point for parents — students dismantling the centerpieces:
On your table you discover the following: ketchup, sugar, water, a movie-themed centerpiece and a bowl of mini chocolate Academy Awards. Do you a) quickly remove the two DVDs from the centerpiece and claim them as your own; b) take the glass of water, add two parts ketchup, three spoonfuls of sugar, four Academy Awards, and see if Mickey will drink it; c) arm yourself with the mini chocolates and see if you can hit Jason at Table 5 without his knowing where it’s coming from; or d) none of the above?
Why the need for the new course after so many years? “Should we blame it on society? Should we blame it on parents? I’m not sure,” Mr. Jasgur said. “Today’s kids are just overprogrammed. Their focus isn’t there. Many of their parents are also part of this younger generation, so it’s not their fault. It’s the way they were raised.”
Rabbi Adam Englander, a principal at the Hillel Day School of Boca Raton in Florida, lectures students three or four times a year about their behavior at bar and bat mitzvahs. He believes the new interest in decorum represents a larger shift in society.
“In my opinion, I don’t see it as a function of kids being poorly mannered,” he said. “I see it more as a function of schools being involved in much more than education. Schools are increasingly being asked to take on roles that years ago would have been considered the realm of parents.”
Stressed-out parents have less time to raise their children, he said. And with synagogues and day schools competing for customers, the misconduct of students often reflects poorly on the institutions they attend. “If one or two of my kids misbehave, even though it’s a weekend, I’m going to hear about it on Monday,” Rabbi Englander said. “That wouldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago. The inclination would have been to call the parents.”
Students: Do you think kids need more training when it comes to appropriate behavior?
- If so, when should the training take place: on the eve of a formal event, at a certain age, after inappropriate behavior is observed, or another time?
- If kids really do “know better” than to behave poorly, why do you think it happens anyway?
- What do you think about Mr. Jasgur’s explanation that bad behavior is the result of “overprogrammed” kids not being able to focus on what is expected of them?
- Do you agree with Rabbi Englander that schools now must do the kinds of behavior training that parents used to do? Why or why not?
- How would you change this situation if you could? Or if you think no change is needed, explain your stance.
Teachers: We ask a new Student Opinion question each weekday, and leave most open to comment indefinitely. Here is a list of the 163 questions we asked during the 2011-12 school year.
|
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|
Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
Adults often say that young people “should have known better” than to act in a way they characterize as disrespectful, immature or rude, especially at formal events.
In a recent article on this topic, for instance, one woman describes many of the unchaperoned children and teenagers at bar and bat mitzvahs she attends as talking or texting during the services and “playing tag football in the social hall and sneaking brownies from under the plastic wrap.” This woman further admits that her own children are among those who misbehave
|
.
Why do you think situations like this happen? How could they be prevented?
In “Teaching Respect to the Faithful,” Bruce Feiler writes about efforts to change situations like this:
Last year, after a deluge of rabbis asked if they could visit the classes to warn students about their behavior, Mr. Jasgur introduced a one-hour course called Mitzvah Circuit 101, which he offers free to synagogues and Jewish community centers. The course includes a questionnaire about the proper way to respond to an invitation and what to do during the video montage. The following question addresses what Mr. Jasgur says is a common sore point for parents — students dismantling the centerpieces:
On your table you discover the following: ketchup, sugar, water, a movie-themed centerpiece and a bowl of mini chocolate Academy Awards. Do you a) quickly remove the two DVDs from the centerpiece and claim them as your own; b) take the glass of water, add two parts ketchup, three spoonfuls of sugar, four Academy Awards, and see if Mickey will drink it; c) arm yourself with the mini chocolates and see if you can hit Jason at Table 5 without his knowing where it’s coming from; or d) none of the above?
Why the need for the new course after so many years? “Should we blame it on society? Should we blame it on parents? I’m not sure,” Mr. Jasgur said. “Today’s kids are just overprogrammed. Their focus isn’t there. Many of their parents are also part of this younger generation, so it’s not their fault. It’s the way they were raised.”
Rabbi Adam Englander, a principal at the Hillel Day School of Boca Raton in Florida, lectures students three or four times a year about their behavior at bar and bat mitzvahs. He believes the new interest in decorum represents a larger shift in society.
“In my opinion, I don’t see it as a function of kids being poorly mannered,” he said. “I see it more as a function of schools being involved in much more than education. Schools are increasingly being asked to take on roles that years ago would have been considered the realm of parents.”
Stressed-out parents have less time to raise their children, he said. And with synagogues and day schools competing for customers, the misconduct of students often reflects poorly on the institutions they attend. “If one or two of my kids misbehave, even though it’s a weekend, I’m going to hear about it on Monday,” Rabbi Englander said. “That wouldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago. The inclination would have been to call the parents.”
Students: Do you think kids need more training when it comes to appropriate behavior?
- If so, when should the training take place: on the eve of a formal event, at a certain age, after inappropriate behavior is observed, or another time?
- If kids really do “know better” than to behave poorly, why do you think it happens anyway?
- What do you think about Mr. Jasgur’s explanation that bad behavior is the result of “overprogrammed” kids not being able to focus on what is expected of them?
- Do you agree with Rabbi Englander that schools now must do the kinds of behavior training that parents used to do? Why or why not?
- How would you change this situation if you could? Or if you think no change is needed, explain your stance.
Teachers: We ask a new Student Opinion question each weekday, and leave most open to comment indefinitely. Here is a list of the 163 questions we asked during the 2011-12 school year.
|
AROUND THE WORLD
AROUND THE WORLD; Liechtenstein Women Win Right to Vote
Published: July 2, 1984
VADUZ, Liechtenstein, July 1— In a referendum today, the men of this constitutional monarchy narrowly granted women the right to vote.
With about 85 percent of the electorate voting, 2,370 men, or 51.3 percent, voted in favor of womens' suffrage, with 2,251, or 48.7 percent, voting against.
The vote ended majority opposition that in referendums in 1971 and 1973 blocked women from getting the right to vote. It was a victory for Prince Hans Adam, the de facto ruler of the principality, which is the size of Washington, D.C., and has a population of 26,000.
Prince Adam has been in charge of the country since his father, Franz Josef II, 77 years old, Europe's longest- reigning ruler, relinquished his responsibilities but not his title to the throne earlier this year.
|
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|
AROUND THE WORLD
AROUND THE WORLD; Liechtenstein Women Win Right to Vote
Published: July 2, 1984
VADUZ, Liechtenstein, July 1— In a referendum today, the men of this constitutional monarchy narrowly granted women the right to vote.
With about 85 percent of the electorate voting, 2,370 men, or 51.3 percent, voted in favor of womens' suffrage, with 2,251, or 48.7 percent, voting against.
The vote ended majority opposition that in referendums in
|
1971 and 1973 blocked women from getting the right to vote. It was a victory for Prince Hans Adam, the de facto ruler of the principality, which is the size of Washington, D.C., and has a population of 26,000.
Prince Adam has been in charge of the country since his father, Franz Josef II, 77 years old, Europe's longest- reigning ruler, relinquished his responsibilities but not his title to the throne earlier this year.
|
Scientists have come up with theories in the shower, on barren mountains, while driving to work and even in their sleep. But what all theories have in common is that their predictions are eventually tested in experiments, where nature determines which inspirations are right and which are wrong.
Then there is string theory, the ambitious, profoundly mathematical attempt to knit together all of physics -- from gravity to quantum mechanics to subatomic forces -- into a single sublime formalism. Though string theorists first suspected they might be onto a ''theory of everything'' in the mid-1980's, and the field is the hottest area in theoretical physics, string theorists have yet to devise a make-or-break laboratory test for their ideas.
In part, that is because the theorized strings cannot be observed directly; they are thought to be vibrating entities smaller than a trillionth of a trillionth the size of an atom. Different string vibrations somehow correspond to different particles in nature, but scientists have yet to develop more than fragments of what they presume will ultimately be a complete theory.
Nevertheless, string theorists are already collecting the spoils that ordinarily go to the experimental victors, including federal grants, prestigious awards and tenured faculty positions. Less than a decade ago, there were hardly any jobs for string theorists, said Dr. David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
''Nowadays,'' Dr. Gross said, ''if you're a hotshot young string theorist you've got it made.''
Dr. Gross has no problems with that success; he was one of string theory's early developers. But some physicists are dismayed by the dominance of a theory that has yet to prove itself experimentally.
''I think the whole theory is a long shot,'' said Sir Roger Penrose, a physicist at Oxford University. He said he had nothing against an interesting long shot but that string theory had ''taken over at the expense of all other areas.''
Dr. John Baez, a scientist in the mathematics department at the University of California in Riverside, who studies a different approach to unification based more directly on relativity theory, said, ''String theorists keep saying that they're succeeding.''
''The rest of us can wonder whether they are walking along the road to triumph,'' Dr. Baez said, ''or whether in 20 years they'll realize that they were walking into this enormous, beautiful, mathematically elegant cul-de-sac.''
A number of physicists discussed the question at a conference in Santa Barbara this month to honor Dr. Gross on his 60th birthday.
Their thoughts revealed how in lean experimental times physicists rely on their aesthetic senses, purely mathematical clues, suggestive connections with established theories, and a Houdini-like taste for escaping roadblocks. While physics has always called these tricks into play, researchers are relying on them as never before in the case of string theory, simply because it attempts to reach so far into the unknown.
Still, said Dr. Jeffrey Harvey of the University of Chicago, scientists in the field are confident their ideas are based in reality; they have, as he put it, ''the feeling that string theory is something we discover rather than invent.''
|
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Scientists have come up with theories in the shower, on barren mountains, while driving to work and even in their sleep. But what all theories have in common is that their predictions are eventually tested in experiments, where nature determines which inspirations are right and which are wrong.
Then there is string theory, the ambitious, profoundly mathematical attempt to knit together all of physics -- from gravity to quantum mechanics to subatomic forces -- into a single sublime formalism. Though string theorists first suspected they might be onto a ''theory of everything'' in the mid-1980's, and the field is the hottest
|
area in theoretical physics, string theorists have yet to devise a make-or-break laboratory test for their ideas.
In part, that is because the theorized strings cannot be observed directly; they are thought to be vibrating entities smaller than a trillionth of a trillionth the size of an atom. Different string vibrations somehow correspond to different particles in nature, but scientists have yet to develop more than fragments of what they presume will ultimately be a complete theory.
Nevertheless, string theorists are already collecting the spoils that ordinarily go to the experimental victors, including federal grants, prestigious awards and tenured faculty positions. Less than a decade ago, there were hardly any jobs for string theorists, said Dr. David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
''Nowadays,'' Dr. Gross said, ''if you're a hotshot young string theorist you've got it made.''
Dr. Gross has no problems with that success; he was one of string theory's early developers. But some physicists are dismayed by the dominance of a theory that has yet to prove itself experimentally.
''I think the whole theory is a long shot,'' said Sir Roger Penrose, a physicist at Oxford University. He said he had nothing against an interesting long shot but that string theory had ''taken over at the expense of all other areas.''
Dr. John Baez, a scientist in the mathematics department at the University of California in Riverside, who studies a different approach to unification based more directly on relativity theory, said, ''String theorists keep saying that they're succeeding.''
''The rest of us can wonder whether they are walking along the road to triumph,'' Dr. Baez said, ''or whether in 20 years they'll realize that they were walking into this enormous, beautiful, mathematically elegant cul-de-sac.''
A number of physicists discussed the question at a conference in Santa Barbara this month to honor Dr. Gross on his 60th birthday.
Their thoughts revealed how in lean experimental times physicists rely on their aesthetic senses, purely mathematical clues, suggestive connections with established theories, and a Houdini-like taste for escaping roadblocks. While physics has always called these tricks into play, researchers are relying on them as never before in the case of string theory, simply because it attempts to reach so far into the unknown.
Still, said Dr. Jeffrey Harvey of the University of Chicago, scientists in the field are confident their ideas are based in reality; they have, as he put it, ''the feeling that string theory is something we discover rather than invent.''
|
In March, the Environmental Protection Agency, acting under court order, proposed the first national standard for emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
The standards, which have yet to be made final, are expected to lead to the closings of dozens of aging coal plants and require expensive clean-up technology to be installed at newer plants; industry groups and Republicans in Congress have vowed to fight them.
One of those leading the charge against the rules is Representative Joe Barton of Texas, who found himself under fire on Tuesday by public health advocates for comments sharply questioning the public health benefit of controlling mercury, particulate matter and other emissions from power plants.
At a Congressional hearing in April, Mr. Barton suggested that an E.P.A. estimate that the pollution control rules would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year had been “pulled out of thin air.”
The numbers must be exaggerated, Mr. Barton said, because “to cause poisoning or a premature death, you have to get a large concentration of mercury into the body.”
“I am not a medical doctor, but my hypothesis is that is not going to happen,” he said.
“You are not going to get enough mercury exposure or SO2 exposure or even particulate matter exposure,” Mr. Barton continued.
In a letter to Mr. Barton on Tuesday, the physician leaders of the American Lung Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and other health groups pointed to a broad range of peer-reviewed studies that “establish a clear link between air pollution and a range of serious adverse human health effects.”
The doctors’ letter noted that mercury is particularly hazardous to fetuses and young children, in whom high concentrations can impede brain and nervous system development.
In an interview, Georges C. Benjamin, a former emergency room physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association, said that Mr. Barton’s focus on poisoning deaths revealed a lack of understanding of the dangers of ambient air pollution.
“That isn’t how these things affect human health,” Dr. Benjamin said.
Rather, he said, high levels of particulate matter, ozone and other pollutants contribute to cardiopulmonary and respiratory disease, triggering heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks.
The E.P.A.’s estimate that the new pollution controls would prevent 17,000 premature deaths was based on an in-depth analysis of life expectancy, mortality and pollution exposure data, he said.
“These numbers are based on the best science that we have,” he said.
Dr. Benjamin suggested that if Mr. Barton had further doubts about the health threat from air pollution, he could observe the effects in person at hospitals in his district, on days when air quality was poor.
In 2008, the Fort Worth-Arlington area, where one of the congressman’s district offices is located, experienced 27 days when air quality was rated unhealthy for the elderly, children or those with chronic illnesses, according to E.P.A. data.
“Just stand there and watch, and see who comes in,” he said. “This is not a hard test to prove.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 11, 2011
In an earlier version of this article, Representative Joe Barton was inadvertently referred to as Mr. Upton in a second reference.
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In March, the Environmental Protection Agency, acting under court order, proposed the first national standard for emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
The standards, which have yet to be made final, are expected to lead to the closings of dozens of aging coal plants and require expensive clean-up technology to be installed at newer plants; industry groups and Republicans in Congress have vowed to fight them.
One of those leading the charge against the rules is Representative Joe Barton of Texas, who found himself under fire on Tuesday by public health advocates for comments sharply questioning the public health benefit of controlling mercury, particulate matter and
|
other emissions from power plants.
At a Congressional hearing in April, Mr. Barton suggested that an E.P.A. estimate that the pollution control rules would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year had been “pulled out of thin air.”
The numbers must be exaggerated, Mr. Barton said, because “to cause poisoning or a premature death, you have to get a large concentration of mercury into the body.”
“I am not a medical doctor, but my hypothesis is that is not going to happen,” he said.
“You are not going to get enough mercury exposure or SO2 exposure or even particulate matter exposure,” Mr. Barton continued.
In a letter to Mr. Barton on Tuesday, the physician leaders of the American Lung Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association and other health groups pointed to a broad range of peer-reviewed studies that “establish a clear link between air pollution and a range of serious adverse human health effects.”
The doctors’ letter noted that mercury is particularly hazardous to fetuses and young children, in whom high concentrations can impede brain and nervous system development.
In an interview, Georges C. Benjamin, a former emergency room physician and executive director of the American Public Health Association, said that Mr. Barton’s focus on poisoning deaths revealed a lack of understanding of the dangers of ambient air pollution.
“That isn’t how these things affect human health,” Dr. Benjamin said.
Rather, he said, high levels of particulate matter, ozone and other pollutants contribute to cardiopulmonary and respiratory disease, triggering heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks.
The E.P.A.’s estimate that the new pollution controls would prevent 17,000 premature deaths was based on an in-depth analysis of life expectancy, mortality and pollution exposure data, he said.
“These numbers are based on the best science that we have,” he said.
Dr. Benjamin suggested that if Mr. Barton had further doubts about the health threat from air pollution, he could observe the effects in person at hospitals in his district, on days when air quality was poor.
In 2008, the Fort Worth-Arlington area, where one of the congressman’s district offices is located, experienced 27 days when air quality was rated unhealthy for the elderly, children or those with chronic illnesses, according to E.P.A. data.
“Just stand there and watch, and see who comes in,” he said. “This is not a hard test to prove.”
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 11, 2011
In an earlier version of this article, Representative Joe Barton was inadvertently referred to as Mr. Upton in a second reference.
|
Most of the victims were unglorified, but the Triangle fire a century ago propelled other individuals to greater prominence. Among them were Frances Perkins, Alfred E. Smith, Robert F. Wagner, Rose Schneiderman, Anne Morgan and Max D. Steuer.
Frances Perkins, a 30-year-old Boston-born social worker, was visiting a friend on the opposite side of the park that Saturday, March 25, 1911, when they heard sirens and screams and rushed to the scene.
“We could see this building from Washington Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there,” she recalled years later. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.”
Miss Perkins, the executive secretary of the National Consumers League and a lobbyist for the fire-inspired Committee on Safety, galvanized New York’s officials. “The Triangle fire was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene,” she said.
With two Democratic clubhouse politicians from Manhattan, Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, the majority leader, she worked on a legislative Factory Investigation Commission (Mr. Wagner was chairman; Mr. Smith, vice chairman).
During its four years the commission would expand its mandate to include child labor, minimum wages and sanitary conditions (Miss Perkins herself drafted the report on fire hazards) and to recommend reforms, including creation of an Industrial Commission.
In 1918, Governor Smith named Miss Perkins to the commission. But when his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, tapped her as industrial commissioner, Mr. Smith cautioned, “Men will take advice from a woman, but it is hard for them to take orders from a woman.”
Roosevelt appointed her nonetheless. Later, as president, he enlisted her as secretary of labor, the first woman in the cabinet. She would describe the Triangle fire as “the day the New Deal began.”
Alfred E. Smith represented the Lower East Side, where many Triangle victims lived. He liked to boast that he had earned an F.F.M. degree — from the Fulton Fish Market.
Mr. Smith was a Tammany Hall stalwart and, to give credit where it is due, elevating worker safety to the state agenda would have required the approval of the local Democratic leader, Timothy D. Sullivan, known as Big Tim, and Charles F. Murphy, the visionary boss of Tammany Hall, who valued the lives of their constituents as well as their votes.
Mr. Smith went on to become Assembly speaker, city sheriff and president of the Board of Aldermen. He was elected governor in 1918 and was re-elected to three two-year terms. He was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for president in 1928.
Robert F. Wagner emigrated from Prussia with his parents when he was 8 years old. The son of a Yorkville janitor, he was elected to the Assembly in 1904 and later to the State Senate. He was Mr. Murphy’s hand-picked chairman of the factory commission.
After serving as a State Supreme Court justice, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1926.
Mr. Wagner was instrumental in advancing President Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal agenda, and was author of the Wagner Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board. He served four terms and was the first of three generations of New York statesmen, including Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was mayor from 1954 through 1965.
Kheel Center, Cornell University
Rose Schneiderman, the eldest daughter of a tailor, was the conscience of the labor movement. Born in Russian Poland in 1884, she immigrated to New York six years later. Her passion for workers’ rights was ignited when, newly hired, she discovered that after 14 years fellow employees in a department store were making the same $2.75 a week that she earned. She became a cap maker and, when she was 20, joined the National Women’s Trade Union League, a group that crossed class lines to lobby for better working conditions and embraced a socialist agenda.
Miss Schneiderman was instrumental in helping to organize garment workers for a strike in 1909, but it was at a memorial service for the Triangle fire victims, on April 2, 1911, at the Metropolitan Opera House, that her message riveted the public, including Frances Perkins.
“I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship,” she declared. “Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”
She later served in Roosevelt’s brain trust, and as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor under Gov. Herbert H. Lehman. She was an ardent feminist and champion of women’s suffrage and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,” Miss Schneiderman said in an influential speech. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.”
Anne Morgan, who was born in 1873, was the youngest daughter of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan. She was one of the world’s richest women at the time and a philanthropist. Publicity-shy, she nevertheless led worker reform and women’s rights efforts as a member of Miss Schneiderman’s “mink brigade.”
She was instrumental in recruiting other socialites — Harrimans, Stokes, Whitneys, Kahns, Pulitzers, Delafields, Dodges, Belmonts — to the cause of working women. In 1909. she invited 150 friends to the Colony Club on Madison Avenue, which she helped found, to hear firsthand from garment workers.
She later sponsored the Opera House memorial and served on Miss Perkins’s Committee on Safety as a city sanitary inspector to personally observe social conditions. But she, like many of the socialites, became less enthusiastic about the labor movement as more of the post-Triangle talk turned to socialism.
Max D. Steuer, who defended the Triangle owners against negligence charges, was the premier defense lawyer of his day. Born in Austria in 1871, he came to America by way of Australia, worked as a newsboy and in a tailor shop, and graduated with honors from Columbia Law School.
Mr. Steuer, another Tammany loyalist, was famous for relentlessly challenging hostile witnesses, peppering one with questions in French and algebraic. In the Triangle case, he gingerly asked a young garment worker to repeat her word-for-word eyewitness testimony, suggesting that it might have been rehearsed and memorized. On the fourth account, he interrupted her:
“Katie, have you not forgotten a word?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied smiling. “I left out one word.”
“Well, tell the story again and put the word in,” Steuer asked.
She did. The two defendants were acquitted.
He was considered so valuable that in 1937, a court awarded him a $75,000 fee for representing two clients who won a $45,000 judgment. The court said his fee was reasonable.
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Most of the victims were unglorified, but the Triangle fire a century ago propelled other individuals to greater prominence. Among them were Frances Perkins, Alfred E. Smith, Robert F. Wagner, Rose Schneiderman, Anne Morgan and Max D. Steuer.
Frances Perkins, a 30-year-old Boston-born social worker, was visiting a friend on the opposite side of the park that Saturday, March 25, 1911, when they heard sirens and screams and rushed to the scene.
“We could see this building from Washington Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there,” she
|
recalled years later. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer.”
Miss Perkins, the executive secretary of the National Consumers League and a lobbyist for the fire-inspired Committee on Safety, galvanized New York’s officials. “The Triangle fire was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene,” she said.
With two Democratic clubhouse politicians from Manhattan, Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, the majority leader, she worked on a legislative Factory Investigation Commission (Mr. Wagner was chairman; Mr. Smith, vice chairman).
During its four years the commission would expand its mandate to include child labor, minimum wages and sanitary conditions (Miss Perkins herself drafted the report on fire hazards) and to recommend reforms, including creation of an Industrial Commission.
In 1918, Governor Smith named Miss Perkins to the commission. But when his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, tapped her as industrial commissioner, Mr. Smith cautioned, “Men will take advice from a woman, but it is hard for them to take orders from a woman.”
Roosevelt appointed her nonetheless. Later, as president, he enlisted her as secretary of labor, the first woman in the cabinet. She would describe the Triangle fire as “the day the New Deal began.”
Alfred E. Smith represented the Lower East Side, where many Triangle victims lived. He liked to boast that he had earned an F.F.M. degree — from the Fulton Fish Market.
Mr. Smith was a Tammany Hall stalwart and, to give credit where it is due, elevating worker safety to the state agenda would have required the approval of the local Democratic leader, Timothy D. Sullivan, known as Big Tim, and Charles F. Murphy, the visionary boss of Tammany Hall, who valued the lives of their constituents as well as their votes.
Mr. Smith went on to become Assembly speaker, city sheriff and president of the Board of Aldermen. He was elected governor in 1918 and was re-elected to three two-year terms. He was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for president in 1928.
Robert F. Wagner emigrated from Prussia with his parents when he was 8 years old. The son of a Yorkville janitor, he was elected to the Assembly in 1904 and later to the State Senate. He was Mr. Murphy’s hand-picked chairman of the factory commission.
After serving as a State Supreme Court justice, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1926.
Mr. Wagner was instrumental in advancing President Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal agenda, and was author of the Wagner Act, which established the National Labor Relations Board. He served four terms and was the first of three generations of New York statesmen, including Robert F. Wagner Jr., who was mayor from 1954 through 1965.
Kheel Center, Cornell University
Rose Schneiderman, the eldest daughter of a tailor, was the conscience of the labor movement. Born in Russian Poland in 1884, she immigrated to New York six years later. Her passion for workers’ rights was ignited when, newly hired, she discovered that after 14 years fellow employees in a department store were making the same $2.75 a week that she earned. She became a cap maker and, when she was 20, joined the National Women’s Trade Union League, a group that crossed class lines to lobby for better working conditions and embraced a socialist agenda.
Miss Schneiderman was instrumental in helping to organize garment workers for a strike in 1909, but it was at a memorial service for the Triangle fire victims, on April 2, 1911, at the Metropolitan Opera House, that her message riveted the public, including Frances Perkins.
“I would be a traitor to those poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship,” she declared. “Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”
She later served in Roosevelt’s brain trust, and as secretary of the New York State Department of Labor under Gov. Herbert H. Lehman. She was an ardent feminist and champion of women’s suffrage and was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,” Miss Schneiderman said in an influential speech. “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.”
Anne Morgan, who was born in 1873, was the youngest daughter of the financier J. Pierpont Morgan. She was one of the world’s richest women at the time and a philanthropist. Publicity-shy, she nevertheless led worker reform and women’s rights efforts as a member of Miss Schneiderman’s “mink brigade.”
She was instrumental in recruiting other socialites — Harrimans, Stokes, Whitneys, Kahns, Pulitzers, Delafields, Dodges, Belmonts — to the cause of working women. In 1909. she invited 150 friends to the Colony Club on Madison Avenue, which she helped found, to hear firsthand from garment workers.
She later sponsored the Opera House memorial and served on Miss Perkins’s Committee on Safety as a city sanitary inspector to personally observe social conditions. But she, like many of the socialites, became less enthusiastic about the labor movement as more of the post-Triangle talk turned to socialism.
Max D. Steuer, who defended the Triangle owners against negligence charges, was the premier defense lawyer of his day. Born in Austria in 1871, he came to America by way of Australia, worked as a newsboy and in a tailor shop, and graduated with honors from Columbia Law School.
Mr. Steuer, another Tammany loyalist, was famous for relentlessly challenging hostile witnesses, peppering one with questions in French and algebraic. In the Triangle case, he gingerly asked a young garment worker to repeat her word-for-word eyewitness testimony, suggesting that it might have been rehearsed and memorized. On the fourth account, he interrupted her:
“Katie, have you not forgotten a word?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied smiling. “I left out one word.”
“Well, tell the story again and put the word in,” Steuer asked.
She did. The two defendants were acquitted.
He was considered so valuable that in 1937, a court awarded him a $75,000 fee for representing two clients who won a $45,000 judgment. The court said his fee was reasonable.
|
An innovative use of radio collars has allowed researchers to gauge the long-distance swimming skills of polar bears in the Arctic Ocean waters north of Alaska. The research, by United States Geological Survey biologists, shows that the predator has a truly formidable ability to routinely cover extraordinary distances in the water. The bear clearly earns its designation under federal law as a marine mammal.
The researchers tracked 52 females from 2004 to 2009 (I was told that the necks of male bears are too thick to accommodate radio collars), then compared the recorded tracks of the bears with maps of sea ice through the same period. The biologists documented 50 swims with an average length of 96 miles. The paper, “Long-distance swimming by polar bears (Ursus maritimus) of the southern Beaufort Sea during years of extensive open water,” is published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
The study was too limited to clarify whether the warming Arctic climate and related summer expansion of open water in the Arctic Ocean is necessitating more long swims — or whether that is reducing the bear’s survival rate or reproductive success. The paper notes that cubs accompanied mothers on a number of the marathon swims. In a phone interview this morning, the lead author, Anthony Pagano, noted that the bear population in the study region, the southern Beaufort Sea, appears to be stable at about 1,500 animals. I asked him to consider these findings in relation to the much-discussed reports of drowned polar bears a few years ago. He said that mortality appeared linked to a powerful storm, but said “generally speaking, polar bears seem capable of swimming amazing distances.” Pagano said there is concern that the stresses from continuing ice retreats could threaten the bears’ prospects in the long run. Still, this is quite a different picture of the issue than that painted by some climate campaigners in years past.
An agency news release has more details on the work. Here’s an excerpt:
Scientists have no way of knowing if long-distance swims are a new feature of polar bear life. “We did not have the GPS technology on collars to document this type of swimming behavior in polar bears in prior decades,” explains Karen Oakley, of the USGS Alaska Science Center . “However, summer sea ice conditions in the southern Beaufort Sea have changed considerably over the last 20 to 30 years, such that there is much more open water during summer and fall. Historically, there had not been enough open water for polar bears in this region to swim the long distances we observed in these recent summers of extreme sea ice retreat.”
While it is encouraging that polar bears can swim so far, it is also a potential risk for the bears, the researchers noted. The energy and physical costs of such long-distance swimming are unknown, but scientists did note polar bears moved, on average, 2.3 times more than when the same individuals were on sea ice. The movement data also suggest the bears were not pausing to rest or feed during long-distance swims. Twelve of the twenty documented swimming bears were adult females that had yearlings or cubs-of-the-year at the time they were outfitted with the GPS collar.
“We were able to recapture or observe 10 of these females within a year of collaring, and 6 of these females still had their cubs,” said Anthony Pagano, a USGS scientist and lead author of the study. “These observations suggest that some cubs are also capable of swimming long distances. For the other four females with cubs, we don’t know if they lost their cubs before, during, or at some point after their long swims.”
Here’s the rest of the release: “Polar Bears, Long-Distance Swimming, and the Changing Arctic.”
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An innovative use of radio collars has allowed researchers to gauge the long-distance swimming skills of polar bears in the Arctic Ocean waters north of Alaska. The research, by United States Geological Survey biologists, shows that the predator has a truly formidable ability to routinely cover extraordinary distances in the water. The bear clearly earns its designation under federal law as a marine mammal.
The researchers tracked 52 females from 2004 to 2009 (I was told that the necks of male bears are too thick to accommodate radio collars), then compared the recorded tracks of the bears with maps of sea ice through
|
the same period. The biologists documented 50 swims with an average length of 96 miles. The paper, “Long-distance swimming by polar bears (Ursus maritimus) of the southern Beaufort Sea during years of extensive open water,” is published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
The study was too limited to clarify whether the warming Arctic climate and related summer expansion of open water in the Arctic Ocean is necessitating more long swims — or whether that is reducing the bear’s survival rate or reproductive success. The paper notes that cubs accompanied mothers on a number of the marathon swims. In a phone interview this morning, the lead author, Anthony Pagano, noted that the bear population in the study region, the southern Beaufort Sea, appears to be stable at about 1,500 animals. I asked him to consider these findings in relation to the much-discussed reports of drowned polar bears a few years ago. He said that mortality appeared linked to a powerful storm, but said “generally speaking, polar bears seem capable of swimming amazing distances.” Pagano said there is concern that the stresses from continuing ice retreats could threaten the bears’ prospects in the long run. Still, this is quite a different picture of the issue than that painted by some climate campaigners in years past.
An agency news release has more details on the work. Here’s an excerpt:
Scientists have no way of knowing if long-distance swims are a new feature of polar bear life. “We did not have the GPS technology on collars to document this type of swimming behavior in polar bears in prior decades,” explains Karen Oakley, of the USGS Alaska Science Center . “However, summer sea ice conditions in the southern Beaufort Sea have changed considerably over the last 20 to 30 years, such that there is much more open water during summer and fall. Historically, there had not been enough open water for polar bears in this region to swim the long distances we observed in these recent summers of extreme sea ice retreat.”
While it is encouraging that polar bears can swim so far, it is also a potential risk for the bears, the researchers noted. The energy and physical costs of such long-distance swimming are unknown, but scientists did note polar bears moved, on average, 2.3 times more than when the same individuals were on sea ice. The movement data also suggest the bears were not pausing to rest or feed during long-distance swims. Twelve of the twenty documented swimming bears were adult females that had yearlings or cubs-of-the-year at the time they were outfitted with the GPS collar.
“We were able to recapture or observe 10 of these females within a year of collaring, and 6 of these females still had their cubs,” said Anthony Pagano, a USGS scientist and lead author of the study. “These observations suggest that some cubs are also capable of swimming long distances. For the other four females with cubs, we don’t know if they lost their cubs before, during, or at some point after their long swims.”
Here’s the rest of the release: “Polar Bears, Long-Distance Swimming, and the Changing Arctic.”
|
May 20, 2013
The goal of hormone therapy is to prevent estrogen from stimulating breast cancer cells. It is recommended for women whose breast cancers are hormone-receptor positive (either estrogen or progesterone), regardless of the size of the tumor and whether or not it has spread to the lymph nodes. Like chemotherapy, hormone therapy works systemically.
Hormone therapy works by blocking estrogen that causes cell proliferation. It is used only for patients with hormone receptor-positive ("hormone sensitive") tumors. Different types of hormone therapy work in different ways by:
- Blocking estrogen receptors in cancer cells (Tamoxifen)
- Suppressing estrogen production in the body (Aromatase inhibitors)
- Destroying ovaries, which produce estrogen (Ovarian ablation)
Tamoxifen was the first widely used hormonal therapy drug, but today it is mainly used as adjuvant therapy for premenopausal women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer. Postmenopausal women are now generally prescribed aromatase inhibitors.
Tamoxifen and Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs)
Tamoxifen (Nolvadex) has been the standard hormonal drug used for breast cancer. It belongs to a class of compounds called selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs). SERMs chemically resemble estrogen and trick the breast cancer cells into accepting it in place of estrogen. Unlike estrogen, however, they do not stimulate breast cancer cell growth. Because SERMs block estrogen’s effects on cancer cells, they are sometimes referred to as "anti-estrogen" drugs.
Tamoxifen is used for all cancer stages in (mainly premenopausal) women with hormone receptor-positive cancers. In addition, it is used to prevent breast cancer in high-risk women. Another SERM drug, toremifene (Fareston), is an option for women with advanced cancer, but this drug is rarely used in the United States. A third drug, fulvestrant (Faslodex), works in a similar anti-estrogen way to tamoxifen but belongs to a different drug class. Fulvestrant is approved only for postmenopausal women with hormone-sensitive advanced breast cancer in which tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors no longer work.
To prevent cancer recurrence, women should take tamoxifen for 5 years following surgery and radiation. Tamoxifen is an effective cancer treatment, but it can cause unpleasant side effects and has small (less than 1%) but serious risks for blood clots and uterine (endometrial) cancer. Immediately report any signs of vaginal bleeding to the doctor, as this may be a symptom of uterine cancer.
Less serious, but discomforting, side effects include hot flashes and mood swings. According to one study, nearly 25% of women stop taking tamoxifen within 1 year because of these symptoms. By 3.5 years, over 33% stop treatment. Taking tamoxifen for fewer than 5 years, however, increases the risk for cancer recurrence and death. Talk with your doctor about antidepressants or other therapies that may help you cope with tamoxifen’s side effects.
Many doctors now recommend that postmenopausal women switch to an aromatase inhibitor after 2 - 3 years of tamoxifen therapy. Several recent studies have indicated that switching from tamoxifen to an aromatase inhibitor significantly improves survival rates and reduces the risk of death from breast cancer as well as other causes.
Aromatase inhibitors block aromatase, an enzyme that is a major source of estrogen in many major body tissues, including the breast, muscle, liver, and fat. Aromatase inhibitors work differently than tamoxifen. Tamoxifen interferes with tumors’ ability to use estrogen by blocking their estrogen receptors. Aromatase inhibitors reduce the overall amount of estrogen in the body.
Because these drugs cannot stop the ovaries of premenopausal women from producing estrogen, they are recommended only for postmenopausal women.
There are currently three aromatase inhibitors approved for treating early-stage, hormone receptor-positive breast cancer in postmenopausal women:
- Anastrazole (Armidex) for treatment after surgery
- Exemestane (Aromasin) for women who have taken tamoxifen for 2 - 3 years
- Letrozole (Femara) for treatment after surgery or for women who have completed 5 years of tamoxifen therapy
All of these drugs are also approved for women with advanced (metastatic) hormone-sensitive breast cancer. Studies indicate that the introduction of aromatase inhibitors has helped greatly in prolonging survival for women with advanced cancer.
Compared to tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors are less likely to cause blood clots and uterine cancer. However, these drugs are more likely to cause osteoporosis, which can lead to bone loss and fractures. In general, recent studies indicate that aromatase inhibitors are better than tamoxifen in improving survival and reducing the risk of cancer recurrence. Unfortunately, like tamoxifen, they can cause hot flashes, as well as joint pain.
Ovarian ablation is a treatment that stops estrogen production from the ovaries. Medications can accomplish ovarian ablation. Destroying the ovaries with surgery or radiation can also shut down estrogen production. (Osteoporosis is one serious side effect of this approach, but several therapies are available to help prevent bone loss.)
Chemical Ovarian Ablation . Drug treatment to block ovarian production of estrogen is called chemical ovarian ablation. It is often reversible. The primary drugs used are luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists, such as goserelin (Zoladex). (They are also sometimes called GnRH agonists). These drugs block the release of the reproductive hormones LH-RH, therefore stopping ovulation and estrogen production.
Bilateral Oophorectomy . Bilateral oophorectomy, the surgical removal of both ovaries, is a surgical method of ovarian ablation. It may modestly improve breast cancer survival rates in some premenopausal women whose tumors are hormone receptor-positive. In these women, combining this procedure with tamoxifen may improve results beyond those of standard chemotherapies. Oophorectomy does not benefit women after menopause, and its advantages can be blunted in women who have received adjuvant chemotherapy. The procedure causes sterility.
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May 20, 2013
The goal of hormone therapy is to prevent estrogen from stimulating breast cancer cells. It is recommended for women whose breast cancers are hormone-receptor positive (either estrogen or progesterone), regardless of the size of the tumor and whether or not it has spread to the lymph nodes. Like chemotherapy, hormone therapy works systemically.
Hormone therapy works by blocking estrogen that causes cell proliferation. It is used only for patients with hormone receptor-positive ("hormone sensitive") tumors. Different types of hormone therapy work in different ways by:
- Blocking estrogen receptors in cancer cells (Tamoxifen)
|
- Suppressing estrogen production in the body (Aromatase inhibitors)
- Destroying ovaries, which produce estrogen (Ovarian ablation)
Tamoxifen was the first widely used hormonal therapy drug, but today it is mainly used as adjuvant therapy for premenopausal women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer. Postmenopausal women are now generally prescribed aromatase inhibitors.
Tamoxifen and Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs)
Tamoxifen (Nolvadex) has been the standard hormonal drug used for breast cancer. It belongs to a class of compounds called selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs). SERMs chemically resemble estrogen and trick the breast cancer cells into accepting it in place of estrogen. Unlike estrogen, however, they do not stimulate breast cancer cell growth. Because SERMs block estrogen’s effects on cancer cells, they are sometimes referred to as "anti-estrogen" drugs.
Tamoxifen is used for all cancer stages in (mainly premenopausal) women with hormone receptor-positive cancers. In addition, it is used to prevent breast cancer in high-risk women. Another SERM drug, toremifene (Fareston), is an option for women with advanced cancer, but this drug is rarely used in the United States. A third drug, fulvestrant (Faslodex), works in a similar anti-estrogen way to tamoxifen but belongs to a different drug class. Fulvestrant is approved only for postmenopausal women with hormone-sensitive advanced breast cancer in which tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors no longer work.
To prevent cancer recurrence, women should take tamoxifen for 5 years following surgery and radiation. Tamoxifen is an effective cancer treatment, but it can cause unpleasant side effects and has small (less than 1%) but serious risks for blood clots and uterine (endometrial) cancer. Immediately report any signs of vaginal bleeding to the doctor, as this may be a symptom of uterine cancer.
Less serious, but discomforting, side effects include hot flashes and mood swings. According to one study, nearly 25% of women stop taking tamoxifen within 1 year because of these symptoms. By 3.5 years, over 33% stop treatment. Taking tamoxifen for fewer than 5 years, however, increases the risk for cancer recurrence and death. Talk with your doctor about antidepressants or other therapies that may help you cope with tamoxifen’s side effects.
Many doctors now recommend that postmenopausal women switch to an aromatase inhibitor after 2 - 3 years of tamoxifen therapy. Several recent studies have indicated that switching from tamoxifen to an aromatase inhibitor significantly improves survival rates and reduces the risk of death from breast cancer as well as other causes.
Aromatase inhibitors block aromatase, an enzyme that is a major source of estrogen in many major body tissues, including the breast, muscle, liver, and fat. Aromatase inhibitors work differently than tamoxifen. Tamoxifen interferes with tumors’ ability to use estrogen by blocking their estrogen receptors. Aromatase inhibitors reduce the overall amount of estrogen in the body.
Because these drugs cannot stop the ovaries of premenopausal women from producing estrogen, they are recommended only for postmenopausal women.
There are currently three aromatase inhibitors approved for treating early-stage, hormone receptor-positive breast cancer in postmenopausal women:
- Anastrazole (Armidex) for treatment after surgery
- Exemestane (Aromasin) for women who have taken tamoxifen for 2 - 3 years
- Letrozole (Femara) for treatment after surgery or for women who have completed 5 years of tamoxifen therapy
All of these drugs are also approved for women with advanced (metastatic) hormone-sensitive breast cancer. Studies indicate that the introduction of aromatase inhibitors has helped greatly in prolonging survival for women with advanced cancer.
Compared to tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors are less likely to cause blood clots and uterine cancer. However, these drugs are more likely to cause osteoporosis, which can lead to bone loss and fractures. In general, recent studies indicate that aromatase inhibitors are better than tamoxifen in improving survival and reducing the risk of cancer recurrence. Unfortunately, like tamoxifen, they can cause hot flashes, as well as joint pain.
Ovarian ablation is a treatment that stops estrogen production from the ovaries. Medications can accomplish ovarian ablation. Destroying the ovaries with surgery or radiation can also shut down estrogen production. (Osteoporosis is one serious side effect of this approach, but several therapies are available to help prevent bone loss.)
Chemical Ovarian Ablation . Drug treatment to block ovarian production of estrogen is called chemical ovarian ablation. It is often reversible. The primary drugs used are luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) agonists, such as goserelin (Zoladex). (They are also sometimes called GnRH agonists). These drugs block the release of the reproductive hormones LH-RH, therefore stopping ovulation and estrogen production.
Bilateral Oophorectomy . Bilateral oophorectomy, the surgical removal of both ovaries, is a surgical method of ovarian ablation. It may modestly improve breast cancer survival rates in some premenopausal women whose tumors are hormone receptor-positive. In these women, combining this procedure with tamoxifen may improve results beyond those of standard chemotherapies. Oophorectomy does not benefit women after menopause, and its advantages can be blunted in women who have received adjuvant chemotherapy. The procedure causes sterility.
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Alphonse Chapanis, a Founder of Ergonomics, Dies at 85
By STUART LAVIETES
Published: October 15, 2002
Alphonse Chapanis, a founder of ergonomics, a branch of engineering that considers product and workplace design from the physical point of view of the actual user, died on Oct. 4 in Baltimore. He was 85.
Dr. Chapanis, a Johns Hopkins University professor who received a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1943, began his career in the Army, where he was assigned to investigate a string of mysterious runway crashes of B-17 bombers.
He discovered that the accidents were the result of poor cockpit design: the bomber's instrument panel had identical side-by-side toggles, one to control the flaps and the other to operate the landing gear. Weary pilots sometimes flipped the wrong toggle during landing, retracting the wheels and causing a crash.
Later in the war, he studied the effects of high altitude on psychology and physiology.
Dr. Chapanis joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1946. Three years later, he and two colleagues at the university, Wendell Garner and Clifford Morgan, published the first ergonomics textbook, "Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design."
As a professor of psychology and industrial engineering, and during the years after his retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1982, Dr. Chapanis worked with industry to make new technologies simpler to use and work environments and systems safer and more efficient.
One of his most notable projects was his work as a consultant on the development of the keypad for push-button telephones. He tested six configurations of buttons, one with two vertical rows of five keys, one with two horizontal rows of five keys, and four three-by-three arrangements with the 10th key placed either above, below or to either side of the square. The configuration that was chosen has remained the standard, even with the miniaturization of phones brought on by mobile technology.
Dr. Chapanis was also a consultant on the development of teleconferencing and voice mail, and helped improve oil exploration techniques and commercial shipping operations.
Alphonse Chapanis was born in Meriden, Conn., on March 17, 1917. He is survived by his wife, Vivian, of Towson, Md.; two children, Roger, of Seattle, and Linda Chapanis Fox of Honolulu; four stepchildren; and seven grandchildren.
In his 1999 autobiography, "The Chapanis Chronicles," he reviewed his career and provided a history of his field, which has been known as psychophysical systems research, engineering psychology, human factors, human engineering and, finally, ergonomics. He also revealed his cold war intelligence-gathering on government-sponsored trips to Europe, where he reported on the Soviet space program.
He also shed light on the attitudes of some corporate executives in the years before huge product-liability judgments. He described a meeting in a private showroom with Lynn A. Townsend, the chairman of Chrysler.
"I was looking at a sporty model that had a steering column with a sharply pointed tip extending an inch or two beyond the steering wheel," he wrote. "Townsend asked me what I thought about it. My exact, or very nearly exact, words were: `Mr. Townsend, do you know what you've designed here? You've designed a spear aimed at the driver's heart.' I also remember distinctly his cynical reply, `Doc, it'll sell.' "
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|
Alphonse Chapanis, a Founder of Ergonomics, Dies at 85
By STUART LAVIETES
Published: October 15, 2002
Alphonse Chapanis, a founder of ergonomics, a branch of engineering that considers product and workplace design from the physical point of view of the actual user, died on Oct. 4 in Baltimore. He was 85.
Dr. Chapanis, a Johns Hopkins University professor who received a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1943, began his career in the Army, where
|
he was assigned to investigate a string of mysterious runway crashes of B-17 bombers.
He discovered that the accidents were the result of poor cockpit design: the bomber's instrument panel had identical side-by-side toggles, one to control the flaps and the other to operate the landing gear. Weary pilots sometimes flipped the wrong toggle during landing, retracting the wheels and causing a crash.
Later in the war, he studied the effects of high altitude on psychology and physiology.
Dr. Chapanis joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 1946. Three years later, he and two colleagues at the university, Wendell Garner and Clifford Morgan, published the first ergonomics textbook, "Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design."
As a professor of psychology and industrial engineering, and during the years after his retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1982, Dr. Chapanis worked with industry to make new technologies simpler to use and work environments and systems safer and more efficient.
One of his most notable projects was his work as a consultant on the development of the keypad for push-button telephones. He tested six configurations of buttons, one with two vertical rows of five keys, one with two horizontal rows of five keys, and four three-by-three arrangements with the 10th key placed either above, below or to either side of the square. The configuration that was chosen has remained the standard, even with the miniaturization of phones brought on by mobile technology.
Dr. Chapanis was also a consultant on the development of teleconferencing and voice mail, and helped improve oil exploration techniques and commercial shipping operations.
Alphonse Chapanis was born in Meriden, Conn., on March 17, 1917. He is survived by his wife, Vivian, of Towson, Md.; two children, Roger, of Seattle, and Linda Chapanis Fox of Honolulu; four stepchildren; and seven grandchildren.
In his 1999 autobiography, "The Chapanis Chronicles," he reviewed his career and provided a history of his field, which has been known as psychophysical systems research, engineering psychology, human factors, human engineering and, finally, ergonomics. He also revealed his cold war intelligence-gathering on government-sponsored trips to Europe, where he reported on the Soviet space program.
He also shed light on the attitudes of some corporate executives in the years before huge product-liability judgments. He described a meeting in a private showroom with Lynn A. Townsend, the chairman of Chrysler.
"I was looking at a sporty model that had a steering column with a sharply pointed tip extending an inch or two beyond the steering wheel," he wrote. "Townsend asked me what I thought about it. My exact, or very nearly exact, words were: `Mr. Townsend, do you know what you've designed here? You've designed a spear aimed at the driver's heart.' I also remember distinctly his cynical reply, `Doc, it'll sell.' "
|
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