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conuly
A Lives article on a woman who lived in Haiti
The Country Between Us
By KATHIE KLARREICH
There was no earthly explanation, when I first went to Haiti as a tourist in 1986, why it felt like home. The maze of market women and the taxis, like mobile artwork that moved through piles of rotting garbage — it was nothing like the tree-lined, manicured streets of the Cleveland suburb where I grew up. But I smiled back at the people who smiled at me, a white woman walking and sweating just like them.
Two years later, I returned to buy handicrafts to sell at my store in San Francisco, but instead of wooden trays and papier-mâché, the Haitians were dealing in bullets and machine guns. I had inadvertently arrived during a coup d'état, and my plans changed. Instead of staying for three months, I ended up staying for 10 years, eventually becoming a journalist.
My Haitian community began with the street kids, skinny, intrepid boys with unusual names: Wawa, Fatil, Eril, Ayiti, Ti David. I didn't have children, and they didn't have parents, so we became a family of sorts. I bought them mattresses and shoes, and they taught me Haitian street smarts and Creole. On the days that I felt homesick, they made me laugh, though I was the one with a roof over my head. They were living in the charred courtyard of St. Jean Bosco Church, best known for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the bespectacled priest who embodied the hope that one day they could know a life better than the leftovers they survived on. But the priest let them down, and the kids scattered.
Soon I fell in love with a Haitian musician and Vodou drummer, Jean Raymond. We married and had a son, although not in that order. Kadja, who is named for a Vodou chant, considers himself black. When he was young, his Haitian grandmother made him breakfasts of fried spaghetti with ketchup or bread dunked in a syrupy coffee diluted with milk and sugar. When he wanted to get my attention, he said, "Mom-mom-mom-mom," like the rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire that I was worried would wake him in the middle of the night, or worse. Now, when he has something important to say, he just calls me Kati, the way the Haitians do.
The year that Kadja turned 7 and that I had a gun held to my head for the third time, we moved to safety in Miami. But Kadja, now 14, respects his roots. On Haitian Flag Day, he wears a Haitian bandanna to remind people that he is not as white as he appears. He speaks Creole when he wants to say something private in front of his Hispanic friends and French if he must. If he doesn't do his homework, he says, "Se pa fot mwen," a Creole expression for "It's not my fault," as if this has been done to him rather than something he should take responsibility for. He unconsciously taps out Vodou rhythms at the dinner table, an inherent gift from his father.
We still maintain a home in Port-au-Prince, where Jean Raymond's band and music school are based. Jean Raymond comes and goes; I go and come — I've been there three times in the last 12 weeks to cover the unstable political scene. But Kadja hasn't been there, hasn't seen his Haitian grandmother in more than a year and a half. Before a trip last month, Kadja wrapped his strong arms around me and said, "It's O.K. that you go, Kati, because you love Haiti, and it's your job, but if you don't mind, I want to wait for the kidnappings to stop before I go back."
I nodded, afraid that I would start to cry. It breaks my heart to agree with him, but he knows how volatile Port-au-Prince continues to be. And I am thankful that he doesn't face the challenges — the poverty, drugs and political violence — that young men his age in Haiti have to face.
I had a very difficult reminder of this on another recent trip: I ran into Wawa, one of the boys I helped and who helped me nearly 18 years ago. He is now a strapping man with a son of his own. When he saw me, his beefy arms lifted me up and twirled me around. "Kati, Kati," he smiled. He is making his living as a pickpocket; his deft hands defy his bulk. "Se pa fot mwen," he said. The news about the other boys wasn't good. Eril was dying of tuberculosis. Ti David, Fatil and Ayiti were already dead.
I don't know what will happen in Haiti. I don't know when Kadja will go back or exactly how his connection to his roots will grow. It's better for now to protect him from the potential danger in the country that is his birthright, but I dream about returning with him to the place I love. It's beyond my control, se pa fot mwen, but I have to hope.
An article on how dangerous the world actually is
Wonderful World?
By JAMES TRAUB
We live in a world that is objectively more dangerous than the one we knew at the outset of the millennium; whatever our disagreements, since 9/11 both our foreign policy and our domestic politics have pivoted around this ineluctable fact. And because the terrorists who struck us represent a global phenomenon, we assume that the world is objectively more dangerous for everyone. But is it?
The answer, it seems, is no. In recent years, scholars have been gathering data in an attempt to measure global trends in conflict and violence. The emerging view is that conflict worldwide is in fact diminishing, not growing. According to "Human Security Report 2005," a study that relies on this recent scholarship, the number of armed conflicts has been dropping steadily since the end of the cold war. Major civil wars, which exploded around the world between 1946 and 1991, declined sharply in the ensuing decade. Indeed, the trend holds true for virtually every category of conflict — coups, interstate wars and even genocides and so-called politicides, in which political belief rather than ethnicity is the criterion for killing. The only exception is international terrorism — as we know all too well.
The study, issued by the Human Security Center, a policy institute at the University of British Columbia, is not entirely convincing. Because, for example, no sound metric exists for tallying them, the "indirect deaths" caused by conflicts that uproot vast numbers of people, disrupt agriculture and shatter health-care systems have not been counted.
Nevertheless, once we get past our initial disbelief, the notion that we live in an era of comparative peace shouldn't be so surprising. Colonial struggles largely ended by the mid-70's. Cold-war proxy battles also ended. And over the last decade or so, the international community has developed a set of mechanisms to put the brakes on incipient warfare. In fact, the authors of the study argue that "the single most compelling explanation" for the decrease in conflict is that preventive diplomacy and peacemaking missions, as well as U.N. peacekeeping operations, which had been almost impossible to mount during the cold war, now accompany almost every major crisis. As a result, outright warfare is now concentrated, albeit to an extraordinary degree, in one area — sub-Saharan Africa. Entire regions that were strife-torn 20 or 30 years ago, including East and Southeast Asia, are largely peaceful today. North Africa is quiet; Latin America suffers from political instability but not warfare.
This is certainly good news, especially for the beleaguered United Nations. But it does nothing to relieve our own sense of vulnerability, since terrorists are not amenable to negotiation or peacekeeping. You can, therefore, draw a troubling inference from the data, which is that for all the talk of "globalized" threats, the American experience of the world is becoming less, not more, similar to that of our allies and trading partners. Our world has become more dangerous; theirs, with some important exceptions, less so.
Why is it so hard for Americans to recognize how very different the world appears when seen from beyond our borders? The authors of "Human Security Report" hypothesize that myths about a rising tide of violence propagated by the media or international organizations "reinforce popular assumptions." O.K., but why the popular assumptions? Why are our intuitions about both the past and the present so far from the reality?
The answer has to do with fundamental differences between the cold war and the Age of Terror. In the cold war, the chief combatants never fought one another — thus the "coldness" of the war between them. The rest of the world was aflame with proxy combats, but the fear of provoking nuclear war served as a heat shield for the West. The authors of "Human Security Report" note that the scholarly description of the post-World War II era as the "long peace" is "deeply misleading." But psychologically it was accurate.
Now the relationship between threat and actual fatalities has been reversed. International terrorism has killed an average of 1,000 people a year over the last 30 years, according to "Human Security Report." That's not a lot. But the threat of terrorism is out of all proportion to its lethality; that is, in a way, the whole point of terrorism. It is true that since 9/11, nothing has happened in the United States, but anything can happen, anywhere, at any time. And of course something has happened. We all had nuclear nightmares in the depths of the cold war, but we recognized them as nightmares, or as scenes from apocalyptic movies. Yet in the case of terrorism, we had the apocalypse before we even had the nightmare. And so while we may accept the idea that we live in a less-war-torn age, the mind rebels at the thought that we live in a less dangerous age.
But that's us; it's not even "the West." In his famous essay "Of Paradise and Power," Robert Kagan argued that Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy — our world — into their own Kantian world of "perpetual peace." With Islamic terrorism a growing threat in Europe, Kagan's Mars/Venus distinction may not be quite as salient as it seemed. But outside the West, where in general the world really does feel less lethal than it used to, President Bush has had a very hard time enlisting allies in the war on terror. Many developing nations would rather talk about development and trade than about sleeper cells. Yet we need their help in the fight against terrorism.
The Bush administration has discovered the hard way that diplomacy is more difficult today — and arguably more important — than it was during the cold war. You can only hope that this discovery points toward a wiser and more supple view of the world we have been forced to inhabit.
On the Cold War stash hidden in the Brooklyn Bridge
Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, a Whiff of the Cold War
By SEWELL CHAN
For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
"Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950's and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.
"Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact — one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The Department of Transportation, which controls the bridge, has moved to secure the site while figuring out to do with the trove of supplies.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been contacted to handle the drugs, which include bottles of Dextran, used to treat or prevent shock.
City workers commonly find coins or bottles when repaving streets, fixing water mains or probing sewer drains, said the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall. "We find stuff all the time, but what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day," she said. "They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there."
The room is within one of the arched masonry structures under the main entrance ramp to the bridge, not far from the Manhattan anchorage. Three city officials gave a brief tour of the room yesterday — taking care to step gingerly over broken glass and fallen wooden boards — on the condition that the precise location not be disclosed, for security reasons.
The most numerous items are the boxes of Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers. Printed in block letters, on each canister, was information about the number of pounds (6.75), the number of crackers per pound (62) and the minimum number of crackers per can (419).
Joseph M. Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor at the Transportation Department, estimated that there were 140 boxes of crackers — each with six cans, for a total of some 352,000 crackers.
The officials would not open any of the supplies because of safety concerns over germs, but Mr. Vaccaro said that one of the canisters had broken open, and inside it, workers found the crackers intact in wax-paper wrapping.
Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for "reuse as a commode." They are now empty.
For the officials who gave the tour, the discovery set off some strong memories. Judith E. Bergtraum, the department's first deputy commissioner, recalled air-raid drills — "first it was under the desk and then it was in the hall" — at Public School 165 in Queens. Russell Holcomb, a deputy chief bridge engineer, remembered watching Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations in 1960 on television.
Several of the boxes in the room have labels from the Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960's. State and local governments often appointed their own civil-defense coordinators, said Graham T. Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Dr. Allison acknowledged that fallout shelters would probably have been ineffective in the event of nuclear war but that the precautions were comforting.
"At least people would think they were doing something, even if it didn't have any effect," he said.
In 1950, the city's Office of Civil Defense, the predecessor to today's Office of Emergency Management, was formed to prepare for a possible atomic attack. In 1951, during the Korean War, floodlights and barbed-wire barriers were set up on and around the city's bridges, and bridge operators were organized into defense batteries, as part of an overall civil-defense strategy aimed at deterring sabotage.
Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who served from 1954 to 1965, appointed several civil-defense advisers. In 1959, a federal report concluded that two hydrogen bombs dropped near the Brooklyn Bridge would kill at least 6.1 million people.
Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society, said he was curious about how the stockpile got there. "Is this a secret cache of supplies the city was trying to put together, without warning the community of a serious threat?" he asked.
"What surprises me," he added, "is that we have all these little nooks — that in this huge city with people crawling everywhere, we can find rooms still filled with stuff, 50 years after the fact."
Are drugs necessary for schizophrenics?
Revisiting Schizophrenia: Are Drugs Always Needed?
By BENEDICT CAREY
The only responsible way to manage schizophrenia, most psychiatrists have long insisted, is to treat its symptoms when they first surface with antipsychotic drugs, which help dissolve hallucinations and quiet imaginary voices.
Delaying treatment, some researchers say, may damage the brain.
But a report appearing next month in one of the field's premier journals suggests that when some people first develop psychosis they can function without medication — or with far less than is typically prescribed — as well as they can with the drugs. And the long-term advantage of treating first psychotic episodes with antipsychotics, the report found, was not clear.
The analysis, based on a review of six studies carried out from 1959 to 2003, exposes deep divisions in the field that are rarely discussed in public.
In the last two decades, psychiatrists have been treating people with antipsychotic drugs earlier and more aggressively than ever before, even testing the medications to prevent psychosis in high-risk adolescents.
The studies demonstrate that the drugs are the most effective way to stabilize people suffering a psychosis. Millions of people rely on them, and the new report is not likely to alter the way psychiatrists practice anytime soon.
But some doctors suspect that the wholesale push to early drug treatment has gone overboard and may be harming patients who could manage with significantly less medication, perhaps because they have mild forms of the disorder.
About three million Americans suffer from schizophrenia, and a vast majority of them take antipsychotic drugs continually or periodically.
"My personal view is that the pendulum has swung too far, and there's this knee-jerk reaction out there that says that any period off medication, even for research, is on the face of it unethical," said Dr. William Carpenter, director of the University of Maryland's Psychiatric Research Center and the editor of the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, which will publish the article on April 1, along with several invited commentaries.
Dr. Carpenter said that while antipsychotics are central to treatment in most cases the field's aggressive use of the drugs leaves "little maneuvering room" to try different options, like drug-free periods under close observation after a person's first episode of psychosis. "It's a very controversial issue, and I thought it was important to get it out there," he said.
Other experts warned that the new report's conclusions were dangerous, and represented only one interpretation of the evidence.
"I am usually a pretty moderate person," said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "But on this I am 110 percent emphatic: If the diagnosis is clear, not treating with medication is a huge mistake that risks the person's best chance at recovery. It's just flat-out nuts."
In the report, John Bola, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California, reviewed six long-term studies involving 623 people who had symptoms of psychosis.
All of these men and women entered the studies soon after their psychosis was diagnosed, after a first or second break from reality.
In the studies, roughly half of the patients were promptly treated with antipsychotic drugs while the other half went without the medication for periods ranging from three weeks to more than six months.
Those who functioned well without medication remained drug free in several of the studies. Those who relapsed received drug treatment.
Two studies found that after a year or more the patients on a full course of medication performed better on measures of social interaction, work success and the risk of rehospitalization than those who were initially drug-free.
The other four studies found the opposite: that the less-medicated group did slightly better. Over all, the findings of the studies were a wash, showing no significant advantage for either group.
The patients on full medication were taking older antipsychotics, like Haldol; similar studies have not been carried out with newer drugs, like Risperdal.
"The most striking observation in this review," Dr. Bola wrote in the paper, "is the dearth of evidence that addresses the long-term effects of initial treatment."
Previous reviews concluding that drugs provided significant benefits included many studies that did not have a comparison group of people who were not on medication, he found.
"My hypothesis is that there is a subgroup of patients who are drug-free responders, probably because they have a mild form the disorder," Dr. Bola, who has argued against aggressive drug treatment in the past, said in an interview. "I think the implications of this are that we need to be additionally careful about medicating people after their first psychotic episode if there's reason to think they could" function without medication.
Studies suggest that 10 percent to 40 percent of people with symptoms of psychosis can manage without medication. But there is no test to identify these people, and psychiatrists say that withholding drugs after a full-blown psychotic episode is highly risky. Psychotic episodes tend to become worse over time when untreated, they say, and the effect of the experience on the brain is still unknown.
"The psychotic state is a crisis, an emergency; people do irrational things, dangerous things, and the initial treatment has to be with what works best — medication — along with an attempt to get them into a talking relationship," said Dr. Thomas McGlashan, a professor of psychiatry at Yale.
The issue is most important to patients and their families. First episodes of psychosis, which often strike in high school or college, can derail young people at a crucial point in their lives and even lead to suicide. John Caswell, 50, a writer and an artist living in Lebanon, N.H., said he tried to kill himself twice after going off medication.
"Once I was driving around and having hallucinations, listening to a gospel station, and I had this strong feeling that I should die and would wake up after that and start life anew," he said in an interview. He purposely drove his car off the road and into a guardrail, he said.
Since then, Mr. Caswell has managed his symptoms with Risperdal, an antipsychotic he takes daily. He says he relies on the drug, "like a diabetic needs insulin."
Yet a large, study in 2005 comparing the schizophrenia drugs found that over 18 months, about three-quarters of people stopped taking the medications they were on because they were dissatisfied.
The drugs have significant side effects: older medications can induce Parkinson's disease-like tremors and the movement disorder known as tardive dyskinesia; some of the newer drugs also induce weight gain and increase the risk of diabetes; and in elderly people, both classes of drugs have been linked to higher rates of premature death.
Antipsychotic medication also induces significant changes in brain function that are not well understood. The drugs numb brain cell receptors to the activity of dopamine, a neural messenger that appears to circulate at high levels when people are in the grip of psychosis.
Ever adaptable, the body responds by manufacturing more dopamine receptors, which could make the brain more sensitive to future dopamine onslaughts that are untreated, experts say.
"Medication can be lifesaving in a crisis, but it may render the patient more psychosis-prone should it be stopped and more deficit-ridden should it be maintained," Dr. McGlashan of Yale wrote in a commentary that accompanied Dr. Bola's report.
For these reasons, many former psychiatric patients have challenged the wisdom of treating psychosis aggressively and early, especially for high-risk patients who have not yet shown full-blown psychotic symptoms.
"If I had stayed on medication, I don't think there's any way my life would be as together as it is now," said Will Hall, 40, a mental health advocate in Northampton, Mass., who was hospitalized 14 years ago and put on antipsychotics for about four months after a suicide attempt.
Mr. Hall said that he still heard voices, machine sounds and imaginary conversations but that the hallucinations had become less threatening over time.
"I am very careful about the early warning signs, the noises, the sounds, and I make sure to talk to people and resist the urge to isolate myself," he said in a telephone interview. "People can learn tricks, ways of dealing with symptoms so they don't get overwhelmed."
Several programs have helped people manage psychotic symptoms with minimal use of medication. In one, researchers in Finland found that intensive family therapy helped more than 40 percent of patients with early symptoms of psychosis recover significantly without antipsychotics — and they have remained off the drugs, for more than two years.
Another program, in Sweden, also has found that many people do well when treated with low doses of antipsychotic medications, or none at all, after their first psychotic break.
But both countries have health care systems in which psychotherapy and in-hospital care are readily accessible. In the United States, psychiatrists say, taking patients off medication would leave them vulnerable to life-altering relapses without sufficient support. Only in research settings, with carefully informed consent, are doctors likely to allow people suffering from a first psychosis to go drug free, they say.
"My bottom line is that this is a very challenging illness, every patient is different, and we need more research to inform decisions about how to individualize care," said Dr. John Kane, chairman of the psychiatry department at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.
With certain patients, he added, "We have to be very careful about making blanket statements about which treatment is best."
How the "new" Sauropod held its head up
Ungainly Sauropod Had a Secret for Holding Its Head Up and Its Neck Out
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Another previously unknown dinosaur has emerged from fossilized obscurity. It was not as huge as some others, though big enough. Nor was it as fierce. But it must have cut an odd figure in its time, more than 100 million years ago in what is now the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.
Take its unbelievably long, cumbersome neck. Many dinosaurs had necks to give a giraffe an inferiority complex. But this four-legged plant-eating dinosaur had a neck 24 feet long, constituting more than half the creature's entire length to the tip of its tail.
Paleontologists who made the discovery report that the species, a member of the sauropod group of large herbivores, took the family penchant for long necks to an improbable extreme.
The neck, they said, appeared to be longer in proportion to the rest of its body than in any other known sauropod.
Even scientists, examining drawings of what the ungainly animal may have looked like, wondered how it had been able to move about without falling flat on its face.
The discovery of the dinosaur's partial skeleton was made in 2002 by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Daniel T. Ksepka, who is also a graduate student at Columbia, and Mark A. Norell, curator of paleontology, described the research last week in an article in Novitates, the museum's scientific journal.
They gave the new sauropod the generic name of Erketu, a god of might in pre-Buddhist tradition. The species name honors Mick Ellison, a dinosaur artist at the museum.
The researchers said Erketu ellisoni was actually modest-sized for a sauropod, smaller in body than Diplodocus, but longer in the neck. The species, they said, appeared to be closely related to the advanced sauropod group Titanosauria, which spread throughout the world and survived until the end of the Cretaceous Period, when all dinosaurs became extinct.
Dr. Norell said in an interview that the animal's secret of managing with such an elongated neck was found in its neck vertebrae. Each was nearly two feet long, but full of cavities and air sacs.
"The bones look massive," he said, "and they are strong, but very, very light."
The risk of hand sanitizers
Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?
By DEBORAH FRANKLIN
What started out as an informal classroom experiment at East Tennessee State University has turned up disturbing evidence about some alcohol-based instant hand sanitizers — the antiseptic gels and foams that have become popular as a quick way to disinfect hands when soap and water aren't available.
Many such sanitizers — whether a brand name or a generic version — work well, and are increasingly found in hallway dispensers in hospitals, schools, day care centers and even atop the gangways of cruise ships as one more safeguard against the hand-to-mouth spread of disease. Several studies from such settings have shown that use of the alcohol-based rubs on hands that aren't visibly soiled seems particularly helpful in curbing the spread of bad stomach and intestinal bugs.
But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that at least one brand of sanitizer found on store shelves, as well as some recipes for homemade versions circulating on Web sites about crafts or directed at parents, contain significantly less than the 60 percent minimum alcohol concentration that health officials deem necessary to kill most harmful bacteria and viruses.
"What this should say to the consumer is that they need to look carefully at the label before they buy any of these products," said Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia's nursing school. "Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other variation, and those are all fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 percent. Less than that isn't enough."
Scott Reynolds, a specialist in infection control at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn., discovered the problem inadvertently, in the course of giving a simple demonstration on the merits of hand washing to a friend's class of biology students at nearby East Tennessee State.
Mr. Reynolds had the students place their hands on agar plates of growth medium before and after one of several experimental conditions: rubbing their hands briskly under tap water; sudsing with hospital-grade soap and then rinsing with water; or rubbing their hands with a dollop of one of two types of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The sanitizers used were a foam version from the hospital that contained 62 percent ethanol, and a gel version Mr. Reynolds's wife bought at a local discount store.
The next day, much to Mr. Reynolds's surprise, the culture plates from hands doused and rubbed with the store-bought gel were covered with clumps of bacteria that had, in some cases, formed a visible outline of the student's handprint on the plate.
Only when he flipped the bottle around to read the label on the back did Mr. Reynolds see that the gel's active ingredient was "40 percent ethyl alcohol."
"Otherwise, it looked like all the rest you see in the store," he said. "Same price. Same claims. Same pump bottle."
In a more formal follow-up study, Mr. Reynolds and two colleagues replicated the results, and confirmed that the lack of sufficient alcohol was to blame. If anything, he said, the faulty gel seemed to mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them.
Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the use and relative effectiveness of alcohol-based gels and antibacterial soaps by consumers as well as hospital workers, said she wasn't surprised by Mr. Reynolds's results from the low-alcohol sanitizer, but she was concerned to read that such a product was on the market.
"I used to work in a virology lab," Dr. Aiello said, "and we knew — it has been known for decades — that an alcohol concentration under 60 percent won't kill the microbes. It's really frightening to think that there are products out there that contain levels lower than that."
Sometimes much lower. One recipe Mr. Reynolds and his colleagues discovered on the Internet for a bubble gum-scented sanitizer aimed at children called for half a -cup of aloe vera gel and a quarter cup of 99 percent rubbing alcohol, with a bit of fragrance. That translates to a concentration of roughly 33 percent alcohol, Dr. Aiello said.
Since 2002, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that health care workers routinely use high quality alcohol-based gels instead of soap and water on their hands when moving from patient to patient — as long the worker's hands aren't visibly soiled.
Alcohol doesn't cut through grime well, so dirt, blood, feces or other body fluids or soil must be wiped or washed away first, if the alcohol in the sanitizer is to be effective. In such cases, hand washing with soap and water is advised.
In October 2005, a committee appointed by the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss, among other things, whether consumers should also be encouraged to use the alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, representing the nonprofit Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, argued that they should. The committee's decision is expected this month.
"About 60 percent of surgery these days is outpatient," Dr. Lundstrom said last week in a phone interview. "We have so many people caring for ill family members at home. Maybe you're without running water because of a hurricane or blackout, or you've got a bad hip and can't move easily to get to the sink as often as you should to wash your hands. What about after you sneeze in the car, or stop to put in contact lenses?"
In all those cases, she said, alcohol-based hand sanitizers — of the correct formulation — could be a godsend, not to replace soap and water, but as an important supplement.
Dr. Aiello sees even more potential uses in the office. "Studies show that the computer keyboard, the phone receiver, and the desk are worse than the bathroom in terms of micro-organisms," she said. "Washing with plain old soap and water should be your first choice. But if you're stuck between meetings and about to grab lunch at your desk, or just use somebody else's keyboard, using a hand sanitizer before and after could be a really good idea."
How much goop should you use? Vigorously rub all sides of your hands with enough gel or foam to get them wet, and rub them together until they are dry. If your hands are dry within 10 or 15 seconds, according to the C.D.C. guidelines for health care workers, you haven't used enough.
Many schools are cutting their curriculum to focus on reading and math. This is progress, ladies and gentlemen.
Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
By SAM DILLON
SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.
The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.
The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.
"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.
About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call you've got to make," Mr. Harris said.
The increasing focus on two basic subjects has divided the nation's educational establishment. Some authorities, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, say the federal law's focus on basic skills is raising achievement in thousands of low-performing schools. Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.
"Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."
But officials in Cuero, Tex., have adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them meet the federal requirements. They have doubled the time that all sixth graders and some seventh and eighth graders devote to reading and math, and have reduced it for other subjects.
"When you only have so many hours per day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on, you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make layups, then you've got to work on layups."
Chad Colby, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education, said the department neither endorsed nor criticized schools that concentrated instructional time on math and reading as they sought to meet the test benchmarks laid out in the federal law's accountability system, known as adequate yearly progress.
"We don't choose the curriculum," Mr. Colby said. "That's a decision that local leaders have to make. But for every school you point to, I can show you five other schools across the country where students are still taking a well-rounded curriculum and are still making adequate yearly progress. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our schools to get kids proficient at grade level in reading and math."
Since America's public schools began taking shape in the early 1800's, shifting fashions have repeatedly reworked the curriculum. Courses like woodworking and sewing joined the three R's. After World War I, vocational courses, languages and other subjects broadened the instructional menu into a smorgasbord.
A federal law passed after the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred a renewed emphasis on science and math, and a 1975 law that guaranteed educational rights for the disabled also provoked sweeping change, said William Reese, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of "America's Public Schools: From the Common School to No Child Left Behind." But the education law has leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts, he said.
"Because of its emphasis on testing and accountability in particular subjects, it apparently forces some school districts down narrow intellectual paths," Dr. Reese said. "If a subject is not tested, why teach it?"
The shift has been felt in the labor market, heightening demand for math teachers and forcing educators in subjects like art and foreign languages to search longer for work, leaders of teachers groups said.
The survey coming out this week looks at 299 school districts in 50 states. It was conducted as part of a four-year study of No Child Left Behind and appears to be the most systematic effort to track the law's footprints through the classroom, although other authorities had warned of its effect on teaching practices.
The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading."
The report says that at districts in Colorado, Texas, Vermont, California, Nebraska and elsewhere, math and reading are squeezing other subjects. At one district cited, the Bayonne City Schools in New Jersey, low-performing ninth graders will be barred from taking Spanish, music or any other elective next fall so they can take extra periods of math and reading, said Ellen O'Connor, an assistant superintendent.
"We're using that as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."
At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running. That has helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be selected by an administrators' group as California's 2005 superintendent of the year.
But in spite of the progress, the school's scores on California state exams, used for compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring, for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only 14.9 percent.
With scores still so low, Mr. Harris, the school's principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for the lower-achieving among the school's nearly 900 students.
The students are the sons and daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate lessons to students' needs.
Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.
Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.
"I don't like history or science anyway," Rubén said. But a moment later, perhaps recalling something exciting he had heard about lab science, he sounded ambivalent.
"It'd be fun to dissect something," he said.
Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills were solidifying. Rubén said math had become his favorite subject.
But other students, like Paris Smith, an eighth grader, were less enthusiastic. Last semester, Paris failed one of the two math classes he takes, back to back, each morning.
"I hate having two math classes in a row," Paris said. "Two hours of math is too much. I can't concentrate that long."
Donna Simmons, his mother, said Mr. Lara seemed to be working hard to help Paris understand math.
"The school cares," Ms. Simmons said. "The faculty cares. I want him to keep trying."
Sydney Smith, a vice principal who oversees instruction at the school, said she had heard only minimal grumbling from students excluded from electives.
"I've only had about two students come to my office and say: 'What in the world? I'm just taking two courses?' " Ms. Smith said. "So most students are not complaining about being miserable."
But Lorie Turner, who teaches English to some pupils for three consecutive periods and to others for two periods each day, said she used some students' frustration to persuade them to try for higher scores on the annual exams administered under California's Standardized Testing and Reporting program, known as Star.
"I have some little girls who are dying to get out of this class and get into a mainstream class," Ms. Turner said. "But I tell them the only way out is to do better on that Star test."
On changes in the city's gifted classes.
Lightning Rod for Fury Over Schools' Gifted Programs
By SUSAN SAULNY
Anna Commitante's office chair at the city Department of Education's headquarters is positioned next to an arched window with a view of yellow daffodils in bloom and Broadway just beyond. Her work space is a cramped cubicle, but this being the Tweed Courthouse — an ornate gem with landmark status — it is also rather pleasant.
Nothing about the space hints that at this moment Ms. Commitante sits amid a maelstrom in public education. But as the official in charge of citywide gifted programs, which have just undergone significant change to the annoyance of many parents who preferred things the old way, she is on the receiving end of countless angry e-mail messages, letters and phone calls.
With a steady tone and the no-nonsense approach of a former principal, which she is, Ms. Commitante said she tries to answer every one, even if it's "to just listen."
"I fully understand how it's difficult for parents to get used to a new system," she said. "I do my best to be very clear about why we made the changes. The system is fairer now."
The upset over the perpetually controversial gifted programs started in November, when education officials announced a new admissions policy for hundreds of classes across the city, with a standard application process to replace the hodgepodge of methods that had been used to select children.
Instead of being subjected to a single I.Q. test, children would now be screened using multiple measures, like creativity and inquisitiveness, to give a more comprehensive reading of which children exhibited "gifted behaviors," officials said.
The move was intended to cast a wider net and open the admissions process in a system in which educators in some pockets of the city had traditionally done whatever they wanted in selecting children for the special classes.
And officials found that they were hard pressed to describe what happened in many of these classes to make them gifted and talented. To critics, the classes were nothing more than an easy way to separate children by social or economic status or race.
"Now if we identify a child for a gifted and talented class, hopefully we're doing it for the right reasons — we're providing curriculum modifications," Ms. Commitante said this week over coffee near her downtown office. "I don't know to what degree that was happening. The classes were in place. Whether there was real work going on in terms of meeting children's needs, I don't know. Half the time we couldn't figure out what the admissions process was."
Before the recent changes, some schools with gifted programs, particularly on the Upper West Side, gave preferences to families who lived nearby and to siblings of children already enrolled.
Parents there have complained bitterly that they did not have enough of a voice in the new decision-making, that the new policies risk splitting families among schools, and that simply put, there are not enough decent options for public education outside of the gifted classes, which do not receive extra financing, but often have the most qualified teachers.
Some of the most biting comments have been reserved for Ms. Commitante, who says she occasionally gets thank-you notes, too.
Ms. Commitante, who is 53 and an Italian immigrant, may have a soft spot for children at risk of being overlooked. She was only 6 years old when her family left a small island, Ischia, in the Bay of Naples for Brooklyn. No one in the family knew a word of English and, in fact, her parents never learned, she said. But the Commitante children, after initially being placed in classes for slow learners in public schools in Carroll Gardens, eventually excelled.
"For the first year of school, that was the class I was in, the very bottom, because I couldn't speak English," she said. "Even at that young age I figured out that that was not the place to be."
After college and graduate school at Hunter College, where she studied fine arts, Ms. Commitante began working as a substitute public school teacher, earned the credits she needed to work full-time in the field of gifted education, and then took over a classroom at Public School 29 in Cobble Hill. She also married and had two sons, who attended public schools.
After teaching for about 13 years, Ms. Commitante became a staff development coach focusing on English and reading, and then, in 2000 — achieving one of her dreams — principal of Middle School 443, the New Voices School, in Brooklyn.
But by October 2004, she had been asked to join the administrators at Tweed as the principal of the new City Hall Academy and head of citywide gifted and enrichment programs. One of the first big initiatives she took part in was a committee to dissect what was going on in the myriad gifted programs around the city, where white students were predominant even though they were a minority in the school system.
"Let's face it, giftedness exists in all ethnic groups across all economic strata — I refuse to believe anything different," she said.
As a mother, Ms. Commitante said, she understands the singular drive to secure the best opportunity for one's child, at whatever cost.
"But the Department of Education can't think that way," she said. "We have to think systemwide, broadly, about what is the best thing for all the children. And I think we did that."
On springtime celebrations in Iran, despite the Ayatollahs.
It comes with a slideshow
Ayatollahs Aside, Iranians Jump for Joy at Spring
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ISFAHAN, Iran, March 19 — All day and all night, the main street of this city was packed over the weekend with shoppers jockeying to buy last-minute gifts and sweets as they hurried to get ready for the celebration of the Iranian New Year, called Nowruz. Behind his cluttered desk inside an antique shop, Sayed Ali Zargabashi watched with great satisfaction as the crowds spilled off the sidewalks.
"People are not listening to the regime," said Mr. Zargabashi, 63. "They are emphasizing and embracing the traditional celebrations. People want the best they can get. Their eyes are open now."
After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the ruling ayatollahs sought to stamp out many traditions, like Nowruz, a celebration with some Zoroastrian links that stretches back thousands of years to the pre-Islamic era, to mark the arrival of spring. The celebration is considered by many here the most Iranian of holidays.
The ayatollahs tried, and failed.
Now, nearly three decades later, some people say the increasingly enthusiastic embrace of Nowruz and other ancient traditions represents a resistance against the country's more conservative religious rulers.
A few days before Nowruz, for example, Iranians poured out of their homes to celebrate Chahar Shanbeh Suri, igniting fireworks and jumping over small fires set in the streets, a traditional practice intended to bring good health in the new year. Several years ago, the government decided it could not stop the practice, and set up special parks where the fires could be set.
This year's celebration — a time for family gatherings — has proved especially vexing for the religious leadership as it occurs on Monday, the same day the faithful are expected to mourn the death of Imam Hussein, a figure whose defeat in battle centuries ago became a defining moment in Shiism, the dominant Islamic sect in Iran.
Some clerics said in interviews that it was acceptable to observe the new year, but because the celebration was occurring on the 40th day after the anniversary of Imam Hussein's death, people should not show joy — which in itself prompted giggles from some as they hurried to get ready.
"I think these days, there is a silent resistance in Iran, especially among the middle class," said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a sociologist. "They are resisting not politically, but socially and culturally."
Like most conflicts in a society as complex and layered as this one, the contemporary story of Nowruz is not one-sided or exclusively about resistance. It is also about accommodation. While Iran's religious leaders have followed a policy of confrontation with the West over their nation's nuclear program, they have, however grudgingly, ceded to the public's insistence on retaining, even bolstering, traditions not founded in Shiism.
While it was the reformist government of former President Mohammad Khatami that decided to establish parks to hold the fire-jumping festivities, for example, the practice was continued this year after the election of the ideologically conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
That Iran's religious leaders have accepted Nowruz, and other prerevolution traditions like Chahar Shanbeh Suri, also demonstrates a growing degree of stability, as the country's leadership has tried to reconcile the bookends of Iranian national identity — faith and culture, experts here said.
At last week's Friday Prayer service, held in the sprawling open-air arena at Tehran University and broadcast nationwide, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, among Iran's chief enforcers of strict Islamic doctrine as head of the Guardian Council, did not mention Chahar Shanbeh Suri. He also did not mention Nowruz, though he acknowledged that recreation was good, as long as people continued to observe the laws of the Islamic republic.
"In this new year," Ayatollah Jannati said from a podium high above the crowd, "God's kindness and affection should be on you. We should always observe piety and all laws decided by God. You can neither commit sin in happiness or sadness."
There still exists a battlefield between those on the extremes of the debate, the ultrareligious who would like to erase elements of Iranian identity not explicitly Islamic, and others, including many in the expatriate community, who try to undermine the credibility of the Islamic government by appealing to Iranian nationalism through such traditions as Char Shanbeh Suri.
"What is interesting is that it is not clear why the opposition is trying to benefit from setting fire to little thorn bushes and firecrackers, which has mistakenly turned into a tradition, and interpret it as opposition to the Islamic republic," Hussein Shariatmadari, editor in chief of the conservative daily newspaper Kayhan, wrote on Thursday.
The exact beginning of Nowruz — the name means "New Day" — is unclear, although its origin has been traced back thousands of years. In Iran, it is closely associated with the Zoroastrian faith, a monotheistic religion in which worshipers perform prayers and rituals in the presence of fire — a symbol of order, truth and righteousness. Zoroastrians are said to have made the Nowruz tradition formal.
Tooran Shahriari, a senior member of the Zoroastrian community in Tehran, said that the ancient calendar was divided in 12 months of 30 days each. At the end of the year, she said, the five days left over became "special days" and the basis for the celebration.
In practical terms, the holiday signifies the end of winter and the start of the new growing season, and resembles a blend of New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving. In advance of the holiday, Iranians conduct an intense spring cleaning.
The holiday begins at the exact moment of spring, and so on Monday Iranian families will gather in their homes at about 10 p.m. around tables set with seven symbolic dishes, each beginning with the letter S in Persian, including items like vinegar, dried fruit, garlic and sprouting seeds, which represent renewal. The holiday ends on the 13th day with an event called Sizdah Bedar, when everyone is supposed to go out into nature, hold picnics and enjoy the early spring.
In Isfahan, there was a rush to get ready for the holiday. One tradition is to buy new clothing, and tailors were busy trying to meet holiday orders. In one shop, a tailor named Akbar said that nearly half his annual business was conducted in the month before the holiday. He said he was certain Nowruz was so popular because people were rebelling against the government and its strict social codes of behavior.
"They really tried to take away Nowruz from people," Akbar said as he fitted a customer with a new suit. "People are turning away from religion altogether. They are not listening to what the government is saying." He is not being completely identified to protect him from possible reprisal over his comments about religion, which is often considered a red line in this country.
Not everyone shared the tailor's view. Instead, some people who identified themselves as religious said they saw no conflict with Iran's culture.
"Iranians have both tradition and religion, and they both get respected in return," said Jaafar Hemmassian, 40, a baker in the center of the city as he sold piles of cream puffs and cases of confections. "All of the traditions of Nowruz are accepted by Islam."
A few days earlier, as people gathered in a small park in Tehran to set fires and celebrate Chahar Shanbeh Suri, held on the last Wednesday of the year, many people said they were pleased that the government had finally relented — and even helped to organize the occasion.
"This is an important night for us, especially because this regime has finally realized that it should respect peoples' demand and let them celebrate it," said Manijeh Emadi, 54, a high-school teacher. "They wanted to take away Nowruz and its traditions for 27 years. Finally they learned that this tradition has survived for hundreds of years, and it will survive them as well."
The Country Between Us
By KATHIE KLARREICH
There was no earthly explanation, when I first went to Haiti as a tourist in 1986, why it felt like home. The maze of market women and the taxis, like mobile artwork that moved through piles of rotting garbage — it was nothing like the tree-lined, manicured streets of the Cleveland suburb where I grew up. But I smiled back at the people who smiled at me, a white woman walking and sweating just like them.
Two years later, I returned to buy handicrafts to sell at my store in San Francisco, but instead of wooden trays and papier-mâché, the Haitians were dealing in bullets and machine guns. I had inadvertently arrived during a coup d'état, and my plans changed. Instead of staying for three months, I ended up staying for 10 years, eventually becoming a journalist.
My Haitian community began with the street kids, skinny, intrepid boys with unusual names: Wawa, Fatil, Eril, Ayiti, Ti David. I didn't have children, and they didn't have parents, so we became a family of sorts. I bought them mattresses and shoes, and they taught me Haitian street smarts and Creole. On the days that I felt homesick, they made me laugh, though I was the one with a roof over my head. They were living in the charred courtyard of St. Jean Bosco Church, best known for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the bespectacled priest who embodied the hope that one day they could know a life better than the leftovers they survived on. But the priest let them down, and the kids scattered.
Soon I fell in love with a Haitian musician and Vodou drummer, Jean Raymond. We married and had a son, although not in that order. Kadja, who is named for a Vodou chant, considers himself black. When he was young, his Haitian grandmother made him breakfasts of fried spaghetti with ketchup or bread dunked in a syrupy coffee diluted with milk and sugar. When he wanted to get my attention, he said, "Mom-mom-mom-mom," like the rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire that I was worried would wake him in the middle of the night, or worse. Now, when he has something important to say, he just calls me Kati, the way the Haitians do.
The year that Kadja turned 7 and that I had a gun held to my head for the third time, we moved to safety in Miami. But Kadja, now 14, respects his roots. On Haitian Flag Day, he wears a Haitian bandanna to remind people that he is not as white as he appears. He speaks Creole when he wants to say something private in front of his Hispanic friends and French if he must. If he doesn't do his homework, he says, "Se pa fot mwen," a Creole expression for "It's not my fault," as if this has been done to him rather than something he should take responsibility for. He unconsciously taps out Vodou rhythms at the dinner table, an inherent gift from his father.
We still maintain a home in Port-au-Prince, where Jean Raymond's band and music school are based. Jean Raymond comes and goes; I go and come — I've been there three times in the last 12 weeks to cover the unstable political scene. But Kadja hasn't been there, hasn't seen his Haitian grandmother in more than a year and a half. Before a trip last month, Kadja wrapped his strong arms around me and said, "It's O.K. that you go, Kati, because you love Haiti, and it's your job, but if you don't mind, I want to wait for the kidnappings to stop before I go back."
I nodded, afraid that I would start to cry. It breaks my heart to agree with him, but he knows how volatile Port-au-Prince continues to be. And I am thankful that he doesn't face the challenges — the poverty, drugs and political violence — that young men his age in Haiti have to face.
I had a very difficult reminder of this on another recent trip: I ran into Wawa, one of the boys I helped and who helped me nearly 18 years ago. He is now a strapping man with a son of his own. When he saw me, his beefy arms lifted me up and twirled me around. "Kati, Kati," he smiled. He is making his living as a pickpocket; his deft hands defy his bulk. "Se pa fot mwen," he said. The news about the other boys wasn't good. Eril was dying of tuberculosis. Ti David, Fatil and Ayiti were already dead.
I don't know what will happen in Haiti. I don't know when Kadja will go back or exactly how his connection to his roots will grow. It's better for now to protect him from the potential danger in the country that is his birthright, but I dream about returning with him to the place I love. It's beyond my control, se pa fot mwen, but I have to hope.
An article on how dangerous the world actually is
Wonderful World?
By JAMES TRAUB
We live in a world that is objectively more dangerous than the one we knew at the outset of the millennium; whatever our disagreements, since 9/11 both our foreign policy and our domestic politics have pivoted around this ineluctable fact. And because the terrorists who struck us represent a global phenomenon, we assume that the world is objectively more dangerous for everyone. But is it?
The answer, it seems, is no. In recent years, scholars have been gathering data in an attempt to measure global trends in conflict and violence. The emerging view is that conflict worldwide is in fact diminishing, not growing. According to "Human Security Report 2005," a study that relies on this recent scholarship, the number of armed conflicts has been dropping steadily since the end of the cold war. Major civil wars, which exploded around the world between 1946 and 1991, declined sharply in the ensuing decade. Indeed, the trend holds true for virtually every category of conflict — coups, interstate wars and even genocides and so-called politicides, in which political belief rather than ethnicity is the criterion for killing. The only exception is international terrorism — as we know all too well.
The study, issued by the Human Security Center, a policy institute at the University of British Columbia, is not entirely convincing. Because, for example, no sound metric exists for tallying them, the "indirect deaths" caused by conflicts that uproot vast numbers of people, disrupt agriculture and shatter health-care systems have not been counted.
Nevertheless, once we get past our initial disbelief, the notion that we live in an era of comparative peace shouldn't be so surprising. Colonial struggles largely ended by the mid-70's. Cold-war proxy battles also ended. And over the last decade or so, the international community has developed a set of mechanisms to put the brakes on incipient warfare. In fact, the authors of the study argue that "the single most compelling explanation" for the decrease in conflict is that preventive diplomacy and peacemaking missions, as well as U.N. peacekeeping operations, which had been almost impossible to mount during the cold war, now accompany almost every major crisis. As a result, outright warfare is now concentrated, albeit to an extraordinary degree, in one area — sub-Saharan Africa. Entire regions that were strife-torn 20 or 30 years ago, including East and Southeast Asia, are largely peaceful today. North Africa is quiet; Latin America suffers from political instability but not warfare.
This is certainly good news, especially for the beleaguered United Nations. But it does nothing to relieve our own sense of vulnerability, since terrorists are not amenable to negotiation or peacekeeping. You can, therefore, draw a troubling inference from the data, which is that for all the talk of "globalized" threats, the American experience of the world is becoming less, not more, similar to that of our allies and trading partners. Our world has become more dangerous; theirs, with some important exceptions, less so.
Why is it so hard for Americans to recognize how very different the world appears when seen from beyond our borders? The authors of "Human Security Report" hypothesize that myths about a rising tide of violence propagated by the media or international organizations "reinforce popular assumptions." O.K., but why the popular assumptions? Why are our intuitions about both the past and the present so far from the reality?
The answer has to do with fundamental differences between the cold war and the Age of Terror. In the cold war, the chief combatants never fought one another — thus the "coldness" of the war between them. The rest of the world was aflame with proxy combats, but the fear of provoking nuclear war served as a heat shield for the West. The authors of "Human Security Report" note that the scholarly description of the post-World War II era as the "long peace" is "deeply misleading." But psychologically it was accurate.
Now the relationship between threat and actual fatalities has been reversed. International terrorism has killed an average of 1,000 people a year over the last 30 years, according to "Human Security Report." That's not a lot. But the threat of terrorism is out of all proportion to its lethality; that is, in a way, the whole point of terrorism. It is true that since 9/11, nothing has happened in the United States, but anything can happen, anywhere, at any time. And of course something has happened. We all had nuclear nightmares in the depths of the cold war, but we recognized them as nightmares, or as scenes from apocalyptic movies. Yet in the case of terrorism, we had the apocalypse before we even had the nightmare. And so while we may accept the idea that we live in a less-war-torn age, the mind rebels at the thought that we live in a less dangerous age.
But that's us; it's not even "the West." In his famous essay "Of Paradise and Power," Robert Kagan argued that Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy — our world — into their own Kantian world of "perpetual peace." With Islamic terrorism a growing threat in Europe, Kagan's Mars/Venus distinction may not be quite as salient as it seemed. But outside the West, where in general the world really does feel less lethal than it used to, President Bush has had a very hard time enlisting allies in the war on terror. Many developing nations would rather talk about development and trade than about sleeper cells. Yet we need their help in the fight against terrorism.
The Bush administration has discovered the hard way that diplomacy is more difficult today — and arguably more important — than it was during the cold war. You can only hope that this discovery points toward a wiser and more supple view of the world we have been forced to inhabit.
On the Cold War stash hidden in the Brooklyn Bridge
Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, a Whiff of the Cold War
By SEWELL CHAN
For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
"Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950's and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.
"Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact — one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The Department of Transportation, which controls the bridge, has moved to secure the site while figuring out to do with the trove of supplies.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been contacted to handle the drugs, which include bottles of Dextran, used to treat or prevent shock.
City workers commonly find coins or bottles when repaving streets, fixing water mains or probing sewer drains, said the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall. "We find stuff all the time, but what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day," she said. "They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there."
The room is within one of the arched masonry structures under the main entrance ramp to the bridge, not far from the Manhattan anchorage. Three city officials gave a brief tour of the room yesterday — taking care to step gingerly over broken glass and fallen wooden boards — on the condition that the precise location not be disclosed, for security reasons.
The most numerous items are the boxes of Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers. Printed in block letters, on each canister, was information about the number of pounds (6.75), the number of crackers per pound (62) and the minimum number of crackers per can (419).
Joseph M. Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor at the Transportation Department, estimated that there were 140 boxes of crackers — each with six cans, for a total of some 352,000 crackers.
The officials would not open any of the supplies because of safety concerns over germs, but Mr. Vaccaro said that one of the canisters had broken open, and inside it, workers found the crackers intact in wax-paper wrapping.
Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for "reuse as a commode." They are now empty.
For the officials who gave the tour, the discovery set off some strong memories. Judith E. Bergtraum, the department's first deputy commissioner, recalled air-raid drills — "first it was under the desk and then it was in the hall" — at Public School 165 in Queens. Russell Holcomb, a deputy chief bridge engineer, remembered watching Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations in 1960 on television.
Several of the boxes in the room have labels from the Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960's. State and local governments often appointed their own civil-defense coordinators, said Graham T. Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Dr. Allison acknowledged that fallout shelters would probably have been ineffective in the event of nuclear war but that the precautions were comforting.
"At least people would think they were doing something, even if it didn't have any effect," he said.
In 1950, the city's Office of Civil Defense, the predecessor to today's Office of Emergency Management, was formed to prepare for a possible atomic attack. In 1951, during the Korean War, floodlights and barbed-wire barriers were set up on and around the city's bridges, and bridge operators were organized into defense batteries, as part of an overall civil-defense strategy aimed at deterring sabotage.
Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who served from 1954 to 1965, appointed several civil-defense advisers. In 1959, a federal report concluded that two hydrogen bombs dropped near the Brooklyn Bridge would kill at least 6.1 million people.
Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society, said he was curious about how the stockpile got there. "Is this a secret cache of supplies the city was trying to put together, without warning the community of a serious threat?" he asked.
"What surprises me," he added, "is that we have all these little nooks — that in this huge city with people crawling everywhere, we can find rooms still filled with stuff, 50 years after the fact."
Are drugs necessary for schizophrenics?
Revisiting Schizophrenia: Are Drugs Always Needed?
By BENEDICT CAREY
The only responsible way to manage schizophrenia, most psychiatrists have long insisted, is to treat its symptoms when they first surface with antipsychotic drugs, which help dissolve hallucinations and quiet imaginary voices.
Delaying treatment, some researchers say, may damage the brain.
But a report appearing next month in one of the field's premier journals suggests that when some people first develop psychosis they can function without medication — or with far less than is typically prescribed — as well as they can with the drugs. And the long-term advantage of treating first psychotic episodes with antipsychotics, the report found, was not clear.
The analysis, based on a review of six studies carried out from 1959 to 2003, exposes deep divisions in the field that are rarely discussed in public.
In the last two decades, psychiatrists have been treating people with antipsychotic drugs earlier and more aggressively than ever before, even testing the medications to prevent psychosis in high-risk adolescents.
The studies demonstrate that the drugs are the most effective way to stabilize people suffering a psychosis. Millions of people rely on them, and the new report is not likely to alter the way psychiatrists practice anytime soon.
But some doctors suspect that the wholesale push to early drug treatment has gone overboard and may be harming patients who could manage with significantly less medication, perhaps because they have mild forms of the disorder.
About three million Americans suffer from schizophrenia, and a vast majority of them take antipsychotic drugs continually or periodically.
"My personal view is that the pendulum has swung too far, and there's this knee-jerk reaction out there that says that any period off medication, even for research, is on the face of it unethical," said Dr. William Carpenter, director of the University of Maryland's Psychiatric Research Center and the editor of the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, which will publish the article on April 1, along with several invited commentaries.
Dr. Carpenter said that while antipsychotics are central to treatment in most cases the field's aggressive use of the drugs leaves "little maneuvering room" to try different options, like drug-free periods under close observation after a person's first episode of psychosis. "It's a very controversial issue, and I thought it was important to get it out there," he said.
Other experts warned that the new report's conclusions were dangerous, and represented only one interpretation of the evidence.
"I am usually a pretty moderate person," said Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. "But on this I am 110 percent emphatic: If the diagnosis is clear, not treating with medication is a huge mistake that risks the person's best chance at recovery. It's just flat-out nuts."
In the report, John Bola, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Southern California, reviewed six long-term studies involving 623 people who had symptoms of psychosis.
All of these men and women entered the studies soon after their psychosis was diagnosed, after a first or second break from reality.
In the studies, roughly half of the patients were promptly treated with antipsychotic drugs while the other half went without the medication for periods ranging from three weeks to more than six months.
Those who functioned well without medication remained drug free in several of the studies. Those who relapsed received drug treatment.
Two studies found that after a year or more the patients on a full course of medication performed better on measures of social interaction, work success and the risk of rehospitalization than those who were initially drug-free.
The other four studies found the opposite: that the less-medicated group did slightly better. Over all, the findings of the studies were a wash, showing no significant advantage for either group.
The patients on full medication were taking older antipsychotics, like Haldol; similar studies have not been carried out with newer drugs, like Risperdal.
"The most striking observation in this review," Dr. Bola wrote in the paper, "is the dearth of evidence that addresses the long-term effects of initial treatment."
Previous reviews concluding that drugs provided significant benefits included many studies that did not have a comparison group of people who were not on medication, he found.
"My hypothesis is that there is a subgroup of patients who are drug-free responders, probably because they have a mild form the disorder," Dr. Bola, who has argued against aggressive drug treatment in the past, said in an interview. "I think the implications of this are that we need to be additionally careful about medicating people after their first psychotic episode if there's reason to think they could" function without medication.
Studies suggest that 10 percent to 40 percent of people with symptoms of psychosis can manage without medication. But there is no test to identify these people, and psychiatrists say that withholding drugs after a full-blown psychotic episode is highly risky. Psychotic episodes tend to become worse over time when untreated, they say, and the effect of the experience on the brain is still unknown.
"The psychotic state is a crisis, an emergency; people do irrational things, dangerous things, and the initial treatment has to be with what works best — medication — along with an attempt to get them into a talking relationship," said Dr. Thomas McGlashan, a professor of psychiatry at Yale.
The issue is most important to patients and their families. First episodes of psychosis, which often strike in high school or college, can derail young people at a crucial point in their lives and even lead to suicide. John Caswell, 50, a writer and an artist living in Lebanon, N.H., said he tried to kill himself twice after going off medication.
"Once I was driving around and having hallucinations, listening to a gospel station, and I had this strong feeling that I should die and would wake up after that and start life anew," he said in an interview. He purposely drove his car off the road and into a guardrail, he said.
Since then, Mr. Caswell has managed his symptoms with Risperdal, an antipsychotic he takes daily. He says he relies on the drug, "like a diabetic needs insulin."
Yet a large, study in 2005 comparing the schizophrenia drugs found that over 18 months, about three-quarters of people stopped taking the medications they were on because they were dissatisfied.
The drugs have significant side effects: older medications can induce Parkinson's disease-like tremors and the movement disorder known as tardive dyskinesia; some of the newer drugs also induce weight gain and increase the risk of diabetes; and in elderly people, both classes of drugs have been linked to higher rates of premature death.
Antipsychotic medication also induces significant changes in brain function that are not well understood. The drugs numb brain cell receptors to the activity of dopamine, a neural messenger that appears to circulate at high levels when people are in the grip of psychosis.
Ever adaptable, the body responds by manufacturing more dopamine receptors, which could make the brain more sensitive to future dopamine onslaughts that are untreated, experts say.
"Medication can be lifesaving in a crisis, but it may render the patient more psychosis-prone should it be stopped and more deficit-ridden should it be maintained," Dr. McGlashan of Yale wrote in a commentary that accompanied Dr. Bola's report.
For these reasons, many former psychiatric patients have challenged the wisdom of treating psychosis aggressively and early, especially for high-risk patients who have not yet shown full-blown psychotic symptoms.
"If I had stayed on medication, I don't think there's any way my life would be as together as it is now," said Will Hall, 40, a mental health advocate in Northampton, Mass., who was hospitalized 14 years ago and put on antipsychotics for about four months after a suicide attempt.
Mr. Hall said that he still heard voices, machine sounds and imaginary conversations but that the hallucinations had become less threatening over time.
"I am very careful about the early warning signs, the noises, the sounds, and I make sure to talk to people and resist the urge to isolate myself," he said in a telephone interview. "People can learn tricks, ways of dealing with symptoms so they don't get overwhelmed."
Several programs have helped people manage psychotic symptoms with minimal use of medication. In one, researchers in Finland found that intensive family therapy helped more than 40 percent of patients with early symptoms of psychosis recover significantly without antipsychotics — and they have remained off the drugs, for more than two years.
Another program, in Sweden, also has found that many people do well when treated with low doses of antipsychotic medications, or none at all, after their first psychotic break.
But both countries have health care systems in which psychotherapy and in-hospital care are readily accessible. In the United States, psychiatrists say, taking patients off medication would leave them vulnerable to life-altering relapses without sufficient support. Only in research settings, with carefully informed consent, are doctors likely to allow people suffering from a first psychosis to go drug free, they say.
"My bottom line is that this is a very challenging illness, every patient is different, and we need more research to inform decisions about how to individualize care," said Dr. John Kane, chairman of the psychiatry department at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.
With certain patients, he added, "We have to be very careful about making blanket statements about which treatment is best."
How the "new" Sauropod held its head up
Ungainly Sauropod Had a Secret for Holding Its Head Up and Its Neck Out
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Another previously unknown dinosaur has emerged from fossilized obscurity. It was not as huge as some others, though big enough. Nor was it as fierce. But it must have cut an odd figure in its time, more than 100 million years ago in what is now the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.
Take its unbelievably long, cumbersome neck. Many dinosaurs had necks to give a giraffe an inferiority complex. But this four-legged plant-eating dinosaur had a neck 24 feet long, constituting more than half the creature's entire length to the tip of its tail.
Paleontologists who made the discovery report that the species, a member of the sauropod group of large herbivores, took the family penchant for long necks to an improbable extreme.
The neck, they said, appeared to be longer in proportion to the rest of its body than in any other known sauropod.
Even scientists, examining drawings of what the ungainly animal may have looked like, wondered how it had been able to move about without falling flat on its face.
The discovery of the dinosaur's partial skeleton was made in 2002 by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Daniel T. Ksepka, who is also a graduate student at Columbia, and Mark A. Norell, curator of paleontology, described the research last week in an article in Novitates, the museum's scientific journal.
They gave the new sauropod the generic name of Erketu, a god of might in pre-Buddhist tradition. The species name honors Mick Ellison, a dinosaur artist at the museum.
The researchers said Erketu ellisoni was actually modest-sized for a sauropod, smaller in body than Diplodocus, but longer in the neck. The species, they said, appeared to be closely related to the advanced sauropod group Titanosauria, which spread throughout the world and survived until the end of the Cretaceous Period, when all dinosaurs became extinct.
Dr. Norell said in an interview that the animal's secret of managing with such an elongated neck was found in its neck vertebrae. Each was nearly two feet long, but full of cavities and air sacs.
"The bones look massive," he said, "and they are strong, but very, very light."
The risk of hand sanitizers
Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?
By DEBORAH FRANKLIN
What started out as an informal classroom experiment at East Tennessee State University has turned up disturbing evidence about some alcohol-based instant hand sanitizers — the antiseptic gels and foams that have become popular as a quick way to disinfect hands when soap and water aren't available.
Many such sanitizers — whether a brand name or a generic version — work well, and are increasingly found in hallway dispensers in hospitals, schools, day care centers and even atop the gangways of cruise ships as one more safeguard against the hand-to-mouth spread of disease. Several studies from such settings have shown that use of the alcohol-based rubs on hands that aren't visibly soiled seems particularly helpful in curbing the spread of bad stomach and intestinal bugs.
But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that at least one brand of sanitizer found on store shelves, as well as some recipes for homemade versions circulating on Web sites about crafts or directed at parents, contain significantly less than the 60 percent minimum alcohol concentration that health officials deem necessary to kill most harmful bacteria and viruses.
"What this should say to the consumer is that they need to look carefully at the label before they buy any of these products," said Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia's nursing school. "Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other variation, and those are all fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 percent. Less than that isn't enough."
Scott Reynolds, a specialist in infection control at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn., discovered the problem inadvertently, in the course of giving a simple demonstration on the merits of hand washing to a friend's class of biology students at nearby East Tennessee State.
Mr. Reynolds had the students place their hands on agar plates of growth medium before and after one of several experimental conditions: rubbing their hands briskly under tap water; sudsing with hospital-grade soap and then rinsing with water; or rubbing their hands with a dollop of one of two types of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The sanitizers used were a foam version from the hospital that contained 62 percent ethanol, and a gel version Mr. Reynolds's wife bought at a local discount store.
The next day, much to Mr. Reynolds's surprise, the culture plates from hands doused and rubbed with the store-bought gel were covered with clumps of bacteria that had, in some cases, formed a visible outline of the student's handprint on the plate.
Only when he flipped the bottle around to read the label on the back did Mr. Reynolds see that the gel's active ingredient was "40 percent ethyl alcohol."
"Otherwise, it looked like all the rest you see in the store," he said. "Same price. Same claims. Same pump bottle."
In a more formal follow-up study, Mr. Reynolds and two colleagues replicated the results, and confirmed that the lack of sufficient alcohol was to blame. If anything, he said, the faulty gel seemed to mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them.
Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the use and relative effectiveness of alcohol-based gels and antibacterial soaps by consumers as well as hospital workers, said she wasn't surprised by Mr. Reynolds's results from the low-alcohol sanitizer, but she was concerned to read that such a product was on the market.
"I used to work in a virology lab," Dr. Aiello said, "and we knew — it has been known for decades — that an alcohol concentration under 60 percent won't kill the microbes. It's really frightening to think that there are products out there that contain levels lower than that."
Sometimes much lower. One recipe Mr. Reynolds and his colleagues discovered on the Internet for a bubble gum-scented sanitizer aimed at children called for half a -cup of aloe vera gel and a quarter cup of 99 percent rubbing alcohol, with a bit of fragrance. That translates to a concentration of roughly 33 percent alcohol, Dr. Aiello said.
Since 2002, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that health care workers routinely use high quality alcohol-based gels instead of soap and water on their hands when moving from patient to patient — as long the worker's hands aren't visibly soiled.
Alcohol doesn't cut through grime well, so dirt, blood, feces or other body fluids or soil must be wiped or washed away first, if the alcohol in the sanitizer is to be effective. In such cases, hand washing with soap and water is advised.
In October 2005, a committee appointed by the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss, among other things, whether consumers should also be encouraged to use the alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, representing the nonprofit Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, argued that they should. The committee's decision is expected this month.
"About 60 percent of surgery these days is outpatient," Dr. Lundstrom said last week in a phone interview. "We have so many people caring for ill family members at home. Maybe you're without running water because of a hurricane or blackout, or you've got a bad hip and can't move easily to get to the sink as often as you should to wash your hands. What about after you sneeze in the car, or stop to put in contact lenses?"
In all those cases, she said, alcohol-based hand sanitizers — of the correct formulation — could be a godsend, not to replace soap and water, but as an important supplement.
Dr. Aiello sees even more potential uses in the office. "Studies show that the computer keyboard, the phone receiver, and the desk are worse than the bathroom in terms of micro-organisms," she said. "Washing with plain old soap and water should be your first choice. But if you're stuck between meetings and about to grab lunch at your desk, or just use somebody else's keyboard, using a hand sanitizer before and after could be a really good idea."
How much goop should you use? Vigorously rub all sides of your hands with enough gel or foam to get them wet, and rub them together until they are dry. If your hands are dry within 10 or 15 seconds, according to the C.D.C. guidelines for health care workers, you haven't used enough.
Many schools are cutting their curriculum to focus on reading and math. This is progress, ladies and gentlemen.
Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math
By SAM DILLON
SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.
The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.
The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts.
"Narrowing the curriculum has clearly become a nationwide pattern," said Jack Jennings, the president of the center, which is based in Washington.
At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school's 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.
About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary. "When you look at a kid and you know he can't read, that's a tough call you've got to make," Mr. Harris said.
The increasing focus on two basic subjects has divided the nation's educational establishment. Some authorities, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, say the federal law's focus on basic skills is raising achievement in thousands of low-performing schools. Other experts warn that by reducing the academic menu to steak and potatoes, schools risk giving bored teenagers the message that school means repetition and drilling.
"Only two subjects? What a sadness," said Thomas Sobol, an education professor at Columbia Teachers College and a former New York State education commissioner. "That's like a violin student who's only permitted to play scales, nothing else, day after day, scales, scales, scales. They'd lose their zest for music."
But officials in Cuero, Tex., have adopted an intensive approach and said it was helping them meet the federal requirements. They have doubled the time that all sixth graders and some seventh and eighth graders devote to reading and math, and have reduced it for other subjects.
"When you only have so many hours per day and you're behind in some area that's being hammered on, you have to work on that," said Henry Lind, the schools superintendent. "It's like basketball. If you can't make layups, then you've got to work on layups."
Chad Colby, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education, said the department neither endorsed nor criticized schools that concentrated instructional time on math and reading as they sought to meet the test benchmarks laid out in the federal law's accountability system, known as adequate yearly progress.
"We don't choose the curriculum," Mr. Colby said. "That's a decision that local leaders have to make. But for every school you point to, I can show you five other schools across the country where students are still taking a well-rounded curriculum and are still making adequate yearly progress. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our schools to get kids proficient at grade level in reading and math."
Since America's public schools began taking shape in the early 1800's, shifting fashions have repeatedly reworked the curriculum. Courses like woodworking and sewing joined the three R's. After World War I, vocational courses, languages and other subjects broadened the instructional menu into a smorgasbord.
A federal law passed after the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 spurred a renewed emphasis on science and math, and a 1975 law that guaranteed educational rights for the disabled also provoked sweeping change, said William Reese, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of "America's Public Schools: From the Common School to No Child Left Behind." But the education law has leveraged one of the most abrupt instructional shifts, he said.
"Because of its emphasis on testing and accountability in particular subjects, it apparently forces some school districts down narrow intellectual paths," Dr. Reese said. "If a subject is not tested, why teach it?"
The shift has been felt in the labor market, heightening demand for math teachers and forcing educators in subjects like art and foreign languages to search longer for work, leaders of teachers groups said.
The survey coming out this week looks at 299 school districts in 50 states. It was conducted as part of a four-year study of No Child Left Behind and appears to be the most systematic effort to track the law's footprints through the classroom, although other authorities had warned of its effect on teaching practices.
The historian David McCullough told a Senate Committee last June that because of the law, "history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools, in favor of math and reading."
The report says that at districts in Colorado, Texas, Vermont, California, Nebraska and elsewhere, math and reading are squeezing other subjects. At one district cited, the Bayonne City Schools in New Jersey, low-performing ninth graders will be barred from taking Spanish, music or any other elective next fall so they can take extra periods of math and reading, said Ellen O'Connor, an assistant superintendent.
"We're using that as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."
At King Junior High, in a poor neighborhood in Sacramento a few miles from a decommissioned Air Force base, the intensive reading and math classes have raised test scores for several years running. That has helped Larry Buchanan, the superintendent of the Grant Joint Union High School District, which oversees the school, to be selected by an administrators' group as California's 2005 superintendent of the year.
But in spite of the progress, the school's scores on California state exams, used for compliance with the federal law, are increasing not nearly fast enough to allow the school to keep up with the rising test benchmarks. On the math exams administered last spring, for instance, 17.4 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above, and on the reading exams, only 14.9 percent.
With scores still so low, Mr. Harris, the school's principal, and Mr. Buchanan said they had little alternative but to continue remedial instruction for the lower-achieving among the school's nearly 900 students.
The students are the sons and daughters of mostly Hispanic, black and Laotian Hmong parents, many of whom work as gardeners, welders and hotel maids or are unemployed. The district administers frequent diagnostic tests so that teachers can carefully calibrate lessons to students' needs.
Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch.
Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. How does he enjoy taking only reading and math, a recent visitor asked.
"I don't like history or science anyway," Rubén said. But a moment later, perhaps recalling something exciting he had heard about lab science, he sounded ambivalent.
"It'd be fun to dissect something," he said.
Martín Lara, Rubén's teacher, said the intense focus on math was paying off because his math skills were solidifying. Rubén said math had become his favorite subject.
But other students, like Paris Smith, an eighth grader, were less enthusiastic. Last semester, Paris failed one of the two math classes he takes, back to back, each morning.
"I hate having two math classes in a row," Paris said. "Two hours of math is too much. I can't concentrate that long."
Donna Simmons, his mother, said Mr. Lara seemed to be working hard to help Paris understand math.
"The school cares," Ms. Simmons said. "The faculty cares. I want him to keep trying."
Sydney Smith, a vice principal who oversees instruction at the school, said she had heard only minimal grumbling from students excluded from electives.
"I've only had about two students come to my office and say: 'What in the world? I'm just taking two courses?' " Ms. Smith said. "So most students are not complaining about being miserable."
But Lorie Turner, who teaches English to some pupils for three consecutive periods and to others for two periods each day, said she used some students' frustration to persuade them to try for higher scores on the annual exams administered under California's Standardized Testing and Reporting program, known as Star.
"I have some little girls who are dying to get out of this class and get into a mainstream class," Ms. Turner said. "But I tell them the only way out is to do better on that Star test."
On changes in the city's gifted classes.
Lightning Rod for Fury Over Schools' Gifted Programs
By SUSAN SAULNY
Anna Commitante's office chair at the city Department of Education's headquarters is positioned next to an arched window with a view of yellow daffodils in bloom and Broadway just beyond. Her work space is a cramped cubicle, but this being the Tweed Courthouse — an ornate gem with landmark status — it is also rather pleasant.
Nothing about the space hints that at this moment Ms. Commitante sits amid a maelstrom in public education. But as the official in charge of citywide gifted programs, which have just undergone significant change to the annoyance of many parents who preferred things the old way, she is on the receiving end of countless angry e-mail messages, letters and phone calls.
With a steady tone and the no-nonsense approach of a former principal, which she is, Ms. Commitante said she tries to answer every one, even if it's "to just listen."
"I fully understand how it's difficult for parents to get used to a new system," she said. "I do my best to be very clear about why we made the changes. The system is fairer now."
The upset over the perpetually controversial gifted programs started in November, when education officials announced a new admissions policy for hundreds of classes across the city, with a standard application process to replace the hodgepodge of methods that had been used to select children.
Instead of being subjected to a single I.Q. test, children would now be screened using multiple measures, like creativity and inquisitiveness, to give a more comprehensive reading of which children exhibited "gifted behaviors," officials said.
The move was intended to cast a wider net and open the admissions process in a system in which educators in some pockets of the city had traditionally done whatever they wanted in selecting children for the special classes.
And officials found that they were hard pressed to describe what happened in many of these classes to make them gifted and talented. To critics, the classes were nothing more than an easy way to separate children by social or economic status or race.
"Now if we identify a child for a gifted and talented class, hopefully we're doing it for the right reasons — we're providing curriculum modifications," Ms. Commitante said this week over coffee near her downtown office. "I don't know to what degree that was happening. The classes were in place. Whether there was real work going on in terms of meeting children's needs, I don't know. Half the time we couldn't figure out what the admissions process was."
Before the recent changes, some schools with gifted programs, particularly on the Upper West Side, gave preferences to families who lived nearby and to siblings of children already enrolled.
Parents there have complained bitterly that they did not have enough of a voice in the new decision-making, that the new policies risk splitting families among schools, and that simply put, there are not enough decent options for public education outside of the gifted classes, which do not receive extra financing, but often have the most qualified teachers.
Some of the most biting comments have been reserved for Ms. Commitante, who says she occasionally gets thank-you notes, too.
Ms. Commitante, who is 53 and an Italian immigrant, may have a soft spot for children at risk of being overlooked. She was only 6 years old when her family left a small island, Ischia, in the Bay of Naples for Brooklyn. No one in the family knew a word of English and, in fact, her parents never learned, she said. But the Commitante children, after initially being placed in classes for slow learners in public schools in Carroll Gardens, eventually excelled.
"For the first year of school, that was the class I was in, the very bottom, because I couldn't speak English," she said. "Even at that young age I figured out that that was not the place to be."
After college and graduate school at Hunter College, where she studied fine arts, Ms. Commitante began working as a substitute public school teacher, earned the credits she needed to work full-time in the field of gifted education, and then took over a classroom at Public School 29 in Cobble Hill. She also married and had two sons, who attended public schools.
After teaching for about 13 years, Ms. Commitante became a staff development coach focusing on English and reading, and then, in 2000 — achieving one of her dreams — principal of Middle School 443, the New Voices School, in Brooklyn.
But by October 2004, she had been asked to join the administrators at Tweed as the principal of the new City Hall Academy and head of citywide gifted and enrichment programs. One of the first big initiatives she took part in was a committee to dissect what was going on in the myriad gifted programs around the city, where white students were predominant even though they were a minority in the school system.
"Let's face it, giftedness exists in all ethnic groups across all economic strata — I refuse to believe anything different," she said.
As a mother, Ms. Commitante said, she understands the singular drive to secure the best opportunity for one's child, at whatever cost.
"But the Department of Education can't think that way," she said. "We have to think systemwide, broadly, about what is the best thing for all the children. And I think we did that."
On springtime celebrations in Iran, despite the Ayatollahs.
It comes with a slideshow
Ayatollahs Aside, Iranians Jump for Joy at Spring
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ISFAHAN, Iran, March 19 — All day and all night, the main street of this city was packed over the weekend with shoppers jockeying to buy last-minute gifts and sweets as they hurried to get ready for the celebration of the Iranian New Year, called Nowruz. Behind his cluttered desk inside an antique shop, Sayed Ali Zargabashi watched with great satisfaction as the crowds spilled off the sidewalks.
"People are not listening to the regime," said Mr. Zargabashi, 63. "They are emphasizing and embracing the traditional celebrations. People want the best they can get. Their eyes are open now."
After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the ruling ayatollahs sought to stamp out many traditions, like Nowruz, a celebration with some Zoroastrian links that stretches back thousands of years to the pre-Islamic era, to mark the arrival of spring. The celebration is considered by many here the most Iranian of holidays.
The ayatollahs tried, and failed.
Now, nearly three decades later, some people say the increasingly enthusiastic embrace of Nowruz and other ancient traditions represents a resistance against the country's more conservative religious rulers.
A few days before Nowruz, for example, Iranians poured out of their homes to celebrate Chahar Shanbeh Suri, igniting fireworks and jumping over small fires set in the streets, a traditional practice intended to bring good health in the new year. Several years ago, the government decided it could not stop the practice, and set up special parks where the fires could be set.
This year's celebration — a time for family gatherings — has proved especially vexing for the religious leadership as it occurs on Monday, the same day the faithful are expected to mourn the death of Imam Hussein, a figure whose defeat in battle centuries ago became a defining moment in Shiism, the dominant Islamic sect in Iran.
Some clerics said in interviews that it was acceptable to observe the new year, but because the celebration was occurring on the 40th day after the anniversary of Imam Hussein's death, people should not show joy — which in itself prompted giggles from some as they hurried to get ready.
"I think these days, there is a silent resistance in Iran, especially among the middle class," said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a sociologist. "They are resisting not politically, but socially and culturally."
Like most conflicts in a society as complex and layered as this one, the contemporary story of Nowruz is not one-sided or exclusively about resistance. It is also about accommodation. While Iran's religious leaders have followed a policy of confrontation with the West over their nation's nuclear program, they have, however grudgingly, ceded to the public's insistence on retaining, even bolstering, traditions not founded in Shiism.
While it was the reformist government of former President Mohammad Khatami that decided to establish parks to hold the fire-jumping festivities, for example, the practice was continued this year after the election of the ideologically conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
That Iran's religious leaders have accepted Nowruz, and other prerevolution traditions like Chahar Shanbeh Suri, also demonstrates a growing degree of stability, as the country's leadership has tried to reconcile the bookends of Iranian national identity — faith and culture, experts here said.
At last week's Friday Prayer service, held in the sprawling open-air arena at Tehran University and broadcast nationwide, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, among Iran's chief enforcers of strict Islamic doctrine as head of the Guardian Council, did not mention Chahar Shanbeh Suri. He also did not mention Nowruz, though he acknowledged that recreation was good, as long as people continued to observe the laws of the Islamic republic.
"In this new year," Ayatollah Jannati said from a podium high above the crowd, "God's kindness and affection should be on you. We should always observe piety and all laws decided by God. You can neither commit sin in happiness or sadness."
There still exists a battlefield between those on the extremes of the debate, the ultrareligious who would like to erase elements of Iranian identity not explicitly Islamic, and others, including many in the expatriate community, who try to undermine the credibility of the Islamic government by appealing to Iranian nationalism through such traditions as Char Shanbeh Suri.
"What is interesting is that it is not clear why the opposition is trying to benefit from setting fire to little thorn bushes and firecrackers, which has mistakenly turned into a tradition, and interpret it as opposition to the Islamic republic," Hussein Shariatmadari, editor in chief of the conservative daily newspaper Kayhan, wrote on Thursday.
The exact beginning of Nowruz — the name means "New Day" — is unclear, although its origin has been traced back thousands of years. In Iran, it is closely associated with the Zoroastrian faith, a monotheistic religion in which worshipers perform prayers and rituals in the presence of fire — a symbol of order, truth and righteousness. Zoroastrians are said to have made the Nowruz tradition formal.
Tooran Shahriari, a senior member of the Zoroastrian community in Tehran, said that the ancient calendar was divided in 12 months of 30 days each. At the end of the year, she said, the five days left over became "special days" and the basis for the celebration.
In practical terms, the holiday signifies the end of winter and the start of the new growing season, and resembles a blend of New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving. In advance of the holiday, Iranians conduct an intense spring cleaning.
The holiday begins at the exact moment of spring, and so on Monday Iranian families will gather in their homes at about 10 p.m. around tables set with seven symbolic dishes, each beginning with the letter S in Persian, including items like vinegar, dried fruit, garlic and sprouting seeds, which represent renewal. The holiday ends on the 13th day with an event called Sizdah Bedar, when everyone is supposed to go out into nature, hold picnics and enjoy the early spring.
In Isfahan, there was a rush to get ready for the holiday. One tradition is to buy new clothing, and tailors were busy trying to meet holiday orders. In one shop, a tailor named Akbar said that nearly half his annual business was conducted in the month before the holiday. He said he was certain Nowruz was so popular because people were rebelling against the government and its strict social codes of behavior.
"They really tried to take away Nowruz from people," Akbar said as he fitted a customer with a new suit. "People are turning away from religion altogether. They are not listening to what the government is saying." He is not being completely identified to protect him from possible reprisal over his comments about religion, which is often considered a red line in this country.
Not everyone shared the tailor's view. Instead, some people who identified themselves as religious said they saw no conflict with Iran's culture.
"Iranians have both tradition and religion, and they both get respected in return," said Jaafar Hemmassian, 40, a baker in the center of the city as he sold piles of cream puffs and cases of confections. "All of the traditions of Nowruz are accepted by Islam."
A few days earlier, as people gathered in a small park in Tehran to set fires and celebrate Chahar Shanbeh Suri, held on the last Wednesday of the year, many people said they were pleased that the government had finally relented — and even helped to organize the occasion.
"This is an important night for us, especially because this regime has finally realized that it should respect peoples' demand and let them celebrate it," said Manijeh Emadi, 54, a high-school teacher. "They wanted to take away Nowruz and its traditions for 27 years. Finally they learned that this tradition has survived for hundreds of years, and it will survive them as well."
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-26 04:36 am (UTC)ETSU is in my hometown. :-) I currently live a mile away from it.
I've always wondered about antibacterial soaps. Most of them really smell bad (to me), and the claims of "kills 90% of germs" leads me to cynicism regarding possibly encouraging the onset of resistant strains of various pathogens...and possibly other more direct (residually building up) effects of it on our own bodies. The same kinds of things concern me with pesticides and genetically modified organisms.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-26 04:43 am (UTC)What people don't realize is that the vast majority of germs either do nothing to us, or are outright beneficial to us, killing off the bad ones. For example, the only cases of e. coli in cheese have been from cheese made from pasteurized milk. The other cheeses have enough good flora to kill off the bad germs.
Not to mention the fact that antibiotic overuse is a VERY BAD THING. If you don't kill the germs of *entirely*, you just breed stronger germs. And most people don't take the full course of drugs like they're supposed to.
Plus, living in a completely sterile environment has been shown to increase the incidence of autoimmune disorders, starting with simple allergies and moving up.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-26 04:36 am (UTC)ETSU is in my hometown. :-) I currently live a mile away from it.
I've always wondered about antibacterial soaps. Most of them really smell bad (to me), and the claims of "kills 90% of germs" leads me to cynicism regarding possibly encouraging the onset of resistant strains of various pathogens...and possibly other more direct (residually building up) effects of it on our own bodies. The same kinds of things concern me with pesticides and genetically modified organisms.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-26 04:43 am (UTC)What people don't realize is that the vast majority of germs either do nothing to us, or are outright beneficial to us, killing off the bad ones. For example, the only cases of e. coli in cheese have been from cheese made from pasteurized milk. The other cheeses have enough good flora to kill off the bad germs.
Not to mention the fact that antibiotic overuse is a VERY BAD THING. If you don't kill the germs of *entirely*, you just breed stronger germs. And most people don't take the full course of drugs like they're supposed to.
Plus, living in a completely sterile environment has been shown to increase the incidence of autoimmune disorders, starting with simple allergies and moving up.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:28 am (UTC)