Some random linkage
Sep. 9th, 2007 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
"Are We Teaching Our Kids to Fear Men?"
An article on (humorous) errors in translating diplomatic speeches and whatnot.
Neurotypicalism Every Day.
A post on abuse in institutions
Pretend to be a Time Traveler day is coming.
On an eye disorder that causes people to see double - and which is often misdiagnosed.
Not Autistic or Hyperactive. Just Seeing Double at Times
By LAURA NOVAK
As an infant, Raea Gragg was withdrawn and could not make eye contact. By preschool she needed to smell and squeeze every object she saw.
“She touched faces and would bring everything to mouth,” said her mother, Kara Gragg, of Lafayette, Calif. “She would go up to people, sniff them and touch their cheeks.”
Specialists conducted a battery of tests. The possible diagnoses mounted: autism spectrum disorder, neurofibromatosis, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorder.
A behavioral pediatrician prescribed three drugs for attention deficit and depression. The only constant was that Raea, now 9, did anything she could to avoid reading and writing.
Though she had already had two eye exams, finding her vision was 20/20, this year a school reading specialist suggested another. And this time the ophthalmologist did what no one else had: he put his finger on Raea’s nose and moved it in and out. Her eyes jumped all over the place.
Within minutes he had the diagnosis: convergence insufficiency, in which the patient sees double because the eyes cannot work together at close range.
Experts estimate that 5 percent of school-age children have convergence insufficiency. They can suffer headaches, dizziness and nausea, which can lead to irritability, low self-esteem and inability to concentrate.
Doctors and teachers often attribute the behavior to attention disorders or seek other medical explanations. Mrs. Gragg said her pediatrician had never heard of convergence insufficiency.
Dr. David Granet, a professor of ophthalmology and pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, said: “Everyone is familiar with A.D.H.D. and A.D.D., but not with eye problems, especially not with convergence insufficiency. But we don’t want to send kids for remedial reading and education efforts if they have an eye problem. This should be part of the protocol for eye doctors.”
In 2005, Dr. Granet studied 266 patients with convergence insufficiency. Nearly 10 percent also had diagnoses of attention deficit or hyperactivity — three times that of the general population. The reverse also proved true: examining the hospital records of 1,700 children with A.D.H.D., Dr. Granet and colleagues found that 16 percent also had convergence insufficiency, three times the normal rate.
“When five of the symptoms of A.D.H.D. overlap with C.I.,” he said, “how can you not step back and say, Wait a minute?”
Dr. Eric Borsting, an optometrist and professor at the Southern California College of Optometry who has also studied the links between vision and attention problems, agreed. “We know that kids with C.I. are more likely to have problems like loss of concentration when reading and trouble remembering what they read,” he said. “Doctors should look at it when there’s a history of poor school performance.”
Dr. Stuart Dankner, a pediatric ophthalmologist in Baltimore and an assistant clinical professor at Johns Hopkins, said that children should be tested for convergence difficulty, but cautioned that it was not the cause of most attention and reading problems.
Dr. Dankner recommended an overall assessment by a psychologist or education specialist. “An eye exam should be done as an adjunct,” he said, “because even if the child has convergence difficulty, they will usually also have other problems that need to be addressed.”
Doctors recommend a dilated eye exam and a check of eye teaming and focusing skills. Testing includes using a pen or finger to test for the “near point of convergence,” as well as a phoropter, which uses lenses and prisms to test the eyes’ ability to work together.
There is no consensus on how to treat convergence insufficiency. Next spring, the National Eye Institute will announce the results of a $6 million randomized clinical trial measuring the benefits of vision therapy in a doctor’s office versus home-based therapy.
For Raea Gragg, the treatment was relatively simple. For nine months she wore special glasses that use prisms to help the eyes converge inward. She then had three months of vision therapy. She has just entered fourth grade and is reading at grade level.
“Raea didn’t know how to describe it because that’s all she’s ever known,” her mother said. “She felt like she had been telling us all along that she couldn’t see, but nobody listened.”
On easing/elimating signs of ADHD and bipolar with supplements of Omega-3 fatty acids.
On encouraging walking to school
Turning the Ride to School Into a Walk
By JANE E. BRODY
The signs say “School Is Open, Drive Safely.” Of course, one should always drive safely, school or no school, and not only “when children are present,” as speed limit signs near schools often state. If only these signs reflected what health and safety experts hope will become a major change in how children get to and from school and after-school activities.
Forty years ago, half of all students walked or bicycled to school. Today, fewer than 15 percent travel on their own steam. One-quarter take buses, and about 60 percent are transported in private automobiles, usually driven by a parent or, sometimes, a teenager.
The change was primarily motivated by parents’ safety concerns — a desire to protect their children from traffic hazards and predators. But it has had several unfortunate consequences. Children’s lives have become far more sedentary. They are fatter than ever and at greater risk of developing hypertension, diabetes and heart disease at young ages.
The sedentary life also affects their behavior and the ability to learn. Studies have shown that children who engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity show improvement in concentration, memory, learning, creativity and problem solving, as well as mood, for up to two hours after exercise.
With more children being driven to school, traffic congestion has mushroomed. That has increased stress to drivers and risks to pedestrians and cyclists, as well as air pollution, especially in and around schools. Parents who drive their children to school make up about a quarter of morning commuters. More traffic also means more vehicular accidents, endangering the lives of children and the adults who drive them. It has become a vicious cycle that must be broken, and soon.
Safely moving children to and from school and after-school activities is a matter of great concern, not only to parents, but also to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which in July issued a policy statement on school transportation safety.
School Buses Versus Cars
The academy’s statistics on injuries and fatalities suggest that being driven to school in a passenger vehicle is by far the most dangerous way to get there, and riding in a school bus is the safest. Seventy-five percent of the fatalities and 84 percent of the injuries occur in passenger vehicles, but just 2 percent of student deaths and 4 percent of injuries result from travel by school bus.
The numbers might not tell a complete story. The academy’s Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention and the Council on School Health pointed out that “school bus crash data are incomplete, and that injuries cannot be reliably estimated.
“The first emergency-department-based study of nonfatal school-bus-related injuries found that the number of injuries, 17,000 annually to children 0 to 19 years of age, greatly exceeded previously published estimates.”
When the Minneapolis highway bridge collapsed this summer and a school bus filled with children plunged toward the Mississippi River, witnesses described children “flying” around in the bus. There are just two ways that could have occurred. Either the bus was not equipped with safety restraints or the children, all of whom escaped safely, were not buckled in.
Before child-restraint systems and safety belts came along, large school buses relied on “compartmentalization” to protect their occupants. This meant closely spaced seats with high energy-absorbing backs, which we now know to be inadequate, especially in rollovers and side impacts with other large vehicles. As of this summer, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York, as well as many local school districts, had passed laws requiring seat belts in school buses. California requires them in newly made buses.
Children should be secured in age-appropriate restraints in all motor vehicles. On a school bus, someone other than the driver should be responsible for assuring this.
There are potential side benefits, too: better student behavior, a more consistent seat belt habit among children and fewer distractions for the driver.
The academy urged that all school buses built before 1977 be retired from use “because they are deficient in several significant safety standards.” Old buses also spew undue emissions of pollution that children inhale, increasing respiratory symptoms and hospitalization for asthma.
Safer Routes
Cities and communities throughout the country are trying to encourage more children to walk or bike to school. The only way this can occur is if children can travel there safely. That means more sidewalks and clearly marked bike lanes or paths separated from roadways, lower traffic speed on school routes, safer crosswalks, well-trained crossing guards at all corners near schools and adult supervision.
Also helpful are traffic-calming measures — changes in the design of streets and intersections to slow traffic automatically to acceptable speeds. In 2005, Congress allocated $612 million over five years to help communities create such safer routes to school.
Seattle has reported a 77 percent to 91 percent reduction in traffic accidents after installing a citywide traffic-calming program that included 700 new residential traffic circles. Just last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that New York would spend $32 million in federal money on a Safe Routes to School initiative that includes transportation and public education projects across the state. More information on traffic calming is available from the Local Government Commission at www.lgc.org or by calling (800) 290-8202.
Oct. 3 is the date of national Walk to School Day this year, promoted by the Partnership for a Walkable America (www.walktoschool-usa.org). Children who fail to learn how to walk safely face greater risks whenever they are pedestrians. They have to learn when it is safe to cross and how to judge the speed of oncoming traffic. They must be taught to look both ways for traffic, even on one-way streets. Vehicles do sometimes make mistakes, and bikes can come from any direction.
Parents, who are notoriously pressed for time to exercise, can benefit, too, if they walk or bike with their children to school. Just as parents have managed to organize car pools and play groups, they can organize groups of children who walk or cycle to school accompanied by a different adult each day or week. A walking version of the car pool, the Walking School Bus, has been successful in Canada and England. Parents share the responsibility of escorting children to and from school on foot or bike.
For guidance on setting up a Walking School Bus, a guidebook is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Check the Web site, www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/, or call toll-free, (888) 232-4674.
No need to wait for Walk to School Day. Start today to promote better health and safety for all schoolchildren.
"Feel Good, versus "Do Good" on climate"
Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate
By JOHN TIERNEY
After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.
Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.
The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.
The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg’s new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.”
The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.
The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.
The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland — we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”
Dr. Lomborg, who’s best known (and most reviled in some circles) for an earlier book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which gathers economists to set priorities in tackling global problems. In his new book, he dismisses the Kyoto emissions cuts as a “feel-good” strategy because it sounds virtuous and lets politicians make promises they don’t have to keep. He outlines an alternative “do-good” strategy that would cost less but accomplish more in dealing with climate change as well as more pressing threats like malaria, AIDS, polluted drinking water and malnutrition.
If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.
The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.
But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today — and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.
“No historian would look back at the last two centuries and rank the rising sea level here as one of the city’s major problems,” he said, sitting safely dry and cool inside the Bridge Cafe. “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”
Married with Children - in Russian.
Still Married, With Children, but in Russian
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW, Sept. 9 — Turn on the sitcom that is the hottest television show in Russia, and it all seems so familiar. Moored to his living room couch is a shoe salesman who is more interested in watching sports than conjugal relations. His wife has shocking hair and an even more shocking mouth. A couple of ne’er-do-well teenagers round out this bawdy, bickering bunch.
In fact, the show is an authorized copy of the American sitcom “Married With Children,” with a Russian cast and dialogue but scripts that hew closely to those of the original. This knockoff is such a sensation, especially among younger viewers, that its actors have become household names, and advertisements for its new season are plastered around Moscow.
A drumbeat of anti-Americanism may be coming from the Kremlin these days, but across Russia people are embracing that quintessentially American genre, the television sitcom, not to mention one of its brassiest examples. And curiously enough, it is the Russian government that has effectively brought “Married With Children” to this land, which somehow made it through the latter half of the 20th century without the benefit of the laugh track.
The show’s success says something not only about changing tastes here but also about Russia’s standing. Sitcoms are typically grounded in middle-class life and poke fun at it. The popularity of Russian versions of “Married With Children” and other adaptations of American sitcoms suggests that Russia has gained enough stability and wealth in recent years that these jokes resonate with viewers.
“ ‘Married With Children,’ with its satire on the American middle class, fits the style of our channel well,” said Dmitri Troitsky, a senior executive at the Russian channel TNT, a Gazprom-owned network whose programming bent is roughly similar to that of the Fox network in the United States. “It seemed interesting and topical for us to do a parody on the Russian middle class.”
These days, American visitors in Russia could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled upon some bizarre realm of reruns. Adaptations of two other shows, “Who’s the Boss?” and “The Nanny,” are also popular here.
All three programs are distributed by Sony Pictures Television International, which has created versions of them and other American programs around the world, often in partnership with local producers. “The Nanny,” which was first broadcast here in 2004, was such a hit that after running out of episodes to copy, some of the show’s original American writers were commissioned to create 25 more episodes, said Ron Sato, a Sony spokesman.
“Married With Children,” which ran from 1987 to 1997 in the United States, has been renamed “Schastlivy Vmeste,” or “Happy Together.” Its setting has been moved from the Chicago area to Russia’s heartland metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The sniping couple, Al and Peg Bundy, have become Gena and Dasha Bukin.
The thrust is the same: sending up family life as outrageously — or as vulgarly, depending upon your point of view — as possible.
A typical bit: In the living room, Gena suddenly tells Dasha to take off her clothes. Dasha is elated that Gena finally wants to have sex, and then Gena says, “No, Dasha, I’m simply dying of hunger, and hope that that will take away my appetite.”
Natalya Bulgakova, a spokeswoman for TNT, said the show, which had its debut last year, is now the most popular scripted series among Russians ages 18 to 30. (Older Russians typically roll their eyes at mention of “Schastlivy Vmeste,” as if they briefly wonder whether life under Communism was not so bad after all.)
TNT is owned by Gazprom-Media, which is controlled by Gazprom, the Russian national resources behemoth that is controlled by the government. Asked about the show, Gazprom-Media said in a statement that it did not interfere in its stations’ programming decisions.
While even Americans who do not speak Russian could discern the American roots in “Schastlivy Vmeste,” it is fair to say that many Russian viewers might not. But even Russians who do would seem unlikely to be bothered by the show’s origins.
Russian television has come a long way from the staid, politically tinged fare of Communist times, and these days there are many channels offering a steady diet of movies, dramas, game shows, soap operas and reality shows — some locally produced, some imported and dubbed.
News programs, which are tightly overseen by President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration, are another story. As in Soviet days, they rarely divert from the Kremlin’s point of view. Barbed political satire, which thrived after the fall of the Soviet Union, has been suppressed.
Sitcoms were first broadcast in Russia in the 1990s, when the country was on the brink of economic collapse, but both original sitcoms and copies of American ones achieved poor ratings. People were struggling and seemingly not in the mood for breezy jokes about the lives of the comfortable. Unable to identify with the sitcoms’ characters, Russians instead flocked to dubbed Latin American soap operas.
Only recently, with the economic upturn, has the sitcom taken hold.
“This is probably the last television genre to be adopted in Russia,” said Elena Prokhorova, who studies Russian television and is a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia. They did not work before, she said, because “sitcoms require a very stable social life.”
The producers and actors of “Schastlivy Vmeste” said that while the Russian scripts followed the outlines of the American ones, they had made changes for a Russian audience, fashioning plots around Russian holidays and using sets that better resemble interiors in Russia. Viktor Loginov, who plays Gena Bukin, looks younger than Ed O’Neill, who played Al Bundy, in part because the show is geared toward younger audiences.
They also insisted that the humor was more Russian. “We try to capture the so-called Russian soul so that it will be accepted by our Russian audience, so the character becomes a guy from the street,” said Mr. Loginov, a classically trained actor.
Still, the feel of “Schastlivy Vmeste” seems far more American than Russian. Classic Russian humor tends more toward narrative satire than slapstick.
Though “Married With Children” was something of a shock when it first appeared in the United States, provoking advertiser boycotts, two decades later the Russian version has not stirred a similar reaction. Russian television critics note that, as in much of the world, television here has become home for a lot of relatively coarse fare.
Daniil B. Dondurei, editor in chief of Cinema Art magazine, said he saw a darker significance in the success of shows like “Schastlivy Vmeste.”
“Today, people are becoming accustomed to not thinking about life,” he said. “The television is training them to not think about which party is in Parliament, about which laws are being passed, about who will be in charge tomorrow. People have become accustomed to living like children, in the family of a very strong and powerful father. Everything is decided for them.”
An article on (humorous) errors in translating diplomatic speeches and whatnot.
Neurotypicalism Every Day.
A post on abuse in institutions
Pretend to be a Time Traveler day is coming.
On an eye disorder that causes people to see double - and which is often misdiagnosed.
Not Autistic or Hyperactive. Just Seeing Double at Times
By LAURA NOVAK
As an infant, Raea Gragg was withdrawn and could not make eye contact. By preschool she needed to smell and squeeze every object she saw.
“She touched faces and would bring everything to mouth,” said her mother, Kara Gragg, of Lafayette, Calif. “She would go up to people, sniff them and touch their cheeks.”
Specialists conducted a battery of tests. The possible diagnoses mounted: autism spectrum disorder, neurofibromatosis, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorder.
A behavioral pediatrician prescribed three drugs for attention deficit and depression. The only constant was that Raea, now 9, did anything she could to avoid reading and writing.
Though she had already had two eye exams, finding her vision was 20/20, this year a school reading specialist suggested another. And this time the ophthalmologist did what no one else had: he put his finger on Raea’s nose and moved it in and out. Her eyes jumped all over the place.
Within minutes he had the diagnosis: convergence insufficiency, in which the patient sees double because the eyes cannot work together at close range.
Experts estimate that 5 percent of school-age children have convergence insufficiency. They can suffer headaches, dizziness and nausea, which can lead to irritability, low self-esteem and inability to concentrate.
Doctors and teachers often attribute the behavior to attention disorders or seek other medical explanations. Mrs. Gragg said her pediatrician had never heard of convergence insufficiency.
Dr. David Granet, a professor of ophthalmology and pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, said: “Everyone is familiar with A.D.H.D. and A.D.D., but not with eye problems, especially not with convergence insufficiency. But we don’t want to send kids for remedial reading and education efforts if they have an eye problem. This should be part of the protocol for eye doctors.”
In 2005, Dr. Granet studied 266 patients with convergence insufficiency. Nearly 10 percent also had diagnoses of attention deficit or hyperactivity — three times that of the general population. The reverse also proved true: examining the hospital records of 1,700 children with A.D.H.D., Dr. Granet and colleagues found that 16 percent also had convergence insufficiency, three times the normal rate.
“When five of the symptoms of A.D.H.D. overlap with C.I.,” he said, “how can you not step back and say, Wait a minute?”
Dr. Eric Borsting, an optometrist and professor at the Southern California College of Optometry who has also studied the links between vision and attention problems, agreed. “We know that kids with C.I. are more likely to have problems like loss of concentration when reading and trouble remembering what they read,” he said. “Doctors should look at it when there’s a history of poor school performance.”
Dr. Stuart Dankner, a pediatric ophthalmologist in Baltimore and an assistant clinical professor at Johns Hopkins, said that children should be tested for convergence difficulty, but cautioned that it was not the cause of most attention and reading problems.
Dr. Dankner recommended an overall assessment by a psychologist or education specialist. “An eye exam should be done as an adjunct,” he said, “because even if the child has convergence difficulty, they will usually also have other problems that need to be addressed.”
Doctors recommend a dilated eye exam and a check of eye teaming and focusing skills. Testing includes using a pen or finger to test for the “near point of convergence,” as well as a phoropter, which uses lenses and prisms to test the eyes’ ability to work together.
There is no consensus on how to treat convergence insufficiency. Next spring, the National Eye Institute will announce the results of a $6 million randomized clinical trial measuring the benefits of vision therapy in a doctor’s office versus home-based therapy.
For Raea Gragg, the treatment was relatively simple. For nine months she wore special glasses that use prisms to help the eyes converge inward. She then had three months of vision therapy. She has just entered fourth grade and is reading at grade level.
“Raea didn’t know how to describe it because that’s all she’s ever known,” her mother said. “She felt like she had been telling us all along that she couldn’t see, but nobody listened.”
On easing/elimating signs of ADHD and bipolar with supplements of Omega-3 fatty acids.
On encouraging walking to school
Turning the Ride to School Into a Walk
By JANE E. BRODY
The signs say “School Is Open, Drive Safely.” Of course, one should always drive safely, school or no school, and not only “when children are present,” as speed limit signs near schools often state. If only these signs reflected what health and safety experts hope will become a major change in how children get to and from school and after-school activities.
Forty years ago, half of all students walked or bicycled to school. Today, fewer than 15 percent travel on their own steam. One-quarter take buses, and about 60 percent are transported in private automobiles, usually driven by a parent or, sometimes, a teenager.
The change was primarily motivated by parents’ safety concerns — a desire to protect their children from traffic hazards and predators. But it has had several unfortunate consequences. Children’s lives have become far more sedentary. They are fatter than ever and at greater risk of developing hypertension, diabetes and heart disease at young ages.
The sedentary life also affects their behavior and the ability to learn. Studies have shown that children who engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity show improvement in concentration, memory, learning, creativity and problem solving, as well as mood, for up to two hours after exercise.
With more children being driven to school, traffic congestion has mushroomed. That has increased stress to drivers and risks to pedestrians and cyclists, as well as air pollution, especially in and around schools. Parents who drive their children to school make up about a quarter of morning commuters. More traffic also means more vehicular accidents, endangering the lives of children and the adults who drive them. It has become a vicious cycle that must be broken, and soon.
Safely moving children to and from school and after-school activities is a matter of great concern, not only to parents, but also to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which in July issued a policy statement on school transportation safety.
School Buses Versus Cars
The academy’s statistics on injuries and fatalities suggest that being driven to school in a passenger vehicle is by far the most dangerous way to get there, and riding in a school bus is the safest. Seventy-five percent of the fatalities and 84 percent of the injuries occur in passenger vehicles, but just 2 percent of student deaths and 4 percent of injuries result from travel by school bus.
The numbers might not tell a complete story. The academy’s Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention and the Council on School Health pointed out that “school bus crash data are incomplete, and that injuries cannot be reliably estimated.
“The first emergency-department-based study of nonfatal school-bus-related injuries found that the number of injuries, 17,000 annually to children 0 to 19 years of age, greatly exceeded previously published estimates.”
When the Minneapolis highway bridge collapsed this summer and a school bus filled with children plunged toward the Mississippi River, witnesses described children “flying” around in the bus. There are just two ways that could have occurred. Either the bus was not equipped with safety restraints or the children, all of whom escaped safely, were not buckled in.
Before child-restraint systems and safety belts came along, large school buses relied on “compartmentalization” to protect their occupants. This meant closely spaced seats with high energy-absorbing backs, which we now know to be inadequate, especially in rollovers and side impacts with other large vehicles. As of this summer, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York, as well as many local school districts, had passed laws requiring seat belts in school buses. California requires them in newly made buses.
Children should be secured in age-appropriate restraints in all motor vehicles. On a school bus, someone other than the driver should be responsible for assuring this.
There are potential side benefits, too: better student behavior, a more consistent seat belt habit among children and fewer distractions for the driver.
The academy urged that all school buses built before 1977 be retired from use “because they are deficient in several significant safety standards.” Old buses also spew undue emissions of pollution that children inhale, increasing respiratory symptoms and hospitalization for asthma.
Safer Routes
Cities and communities throughout the country are trying to encourage more children to walk or bike to school. The only way this can occur is if children can travel there safely. That means more sidewalks and clearly marked bike lanes or paths separated from roadways, lower traffic speed on school routes, safer crosswalks, well-trained crossing guards at all corners near schools and adult supervision.
Also helpful are traffic-calming measures — changes in the design of streets and intersections to slow traffic automatically to acceptable speeds. In 2005, Congress allocated $612 million over five years to help communities create such safer routes to school.
Seattle has reported a 77 percent to 91 percent reduction in traffic accidents after installing a citywide traffic-calming program that included 700 new residential traffic circles. Just last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that New York would spend $32 million in federal money on a Safe Routes to School initiative that includes transportation and public education projects across the state. More information on traffic calming is available from the Local Government Commission at www.lgc.org or by calling (800) 290-8202.
Oct. 3 is the date of national Walk to School Day this year, promoted by the Partnership for a Walkable America (www.walktoschool-usa.org). Children who fail to learn how to walk safely face greater risks whenever they are pedestrians. They have to learn when it is safe to cross and how to judge the speed of oncoming traffic. They must be taught to look both ways for traffic, even on one-way streets. Vehicles do sometimes make mistakes, and bikes can come from any direction.
Parents, who are notoriously pressed for time to exercise, can benefit, too, if they walk or bike with their children to school. Just as parents have managed to organize car pools and play groups, they can organize groups of children who walk or cycle to school accompanied by a different adult each day or week. A walking version of the car pool, the Walking School Bus, has been successful in Canada and England. Parents share the responsibility of escorting children to and from school on foot or bike.
For guidance on setting up a Walking School Bus, a guidebook is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Check the Web site, www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/, or call toll-free, (888) 232-4674.
No need to wait for Walk to School Day. Start today to promote better health and safety for all schoolchildren.
"Feel Good, versus "Do Good" on climate"
Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate
By JOHN TIERNEY
After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
It was not an arduous expedition. We went to an old wooden building near the Brooklyn Bridge that is home to the Bridge Cafe, which bills itself as “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” There’s been drinking in the building since the late 18th century, when it was erected on Water Street along the shore of Lower Manhattan.
Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The temperature has also risen as New York has been covered with asphalt and concrete, creating an “urban heat island” that’s estimated to have raised nighttime temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. The warming that has already occurred locally is on the same scale as what’s expected globally in the next century.
The impact of these changes on Lower Manhattan isn’t quite as striking as the computer graphics. We couldn’t see any evidence of the higher sea level near the Bridge Cafe, mainly because Water Street isn’t next to the water anymore. Dr. Lomborg and I had to walk over two-and-a-half blocks of landfill to reach the current shoreline.
The effect of the rising temperatures is more complicated to gauge. Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe. But there are a couple of confounding factors explained in Dr. Lomborg’s new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.”
The first is that winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.
The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn’t mean that more people die — in fact, just the reverse has occurred. Researchers led by Robert Davis, a climatologist at the University of Virginia, concluded that the number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.
The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies.
But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.
“We could spend all that money to cut emissions and end up with more land flooded next century because people would be poorer,” Dr. Lomborg said as we surveyed Manhattan’s expanded shoreline. “Wealth is a more important factor than sea-level rise in protecting you from the sea. You can draw maps showing 100 million people flooded out of their homes from global warming, but look at what’s happened here in New York. It’s the same story in Denmark and Holland — we’ve been gaining land as the sea rises.”
Dr. Lomborg, who’s best known (and most reviled in some circles) for an earlier book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” runs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which gathers economists to set priorities in tackling global problems. In his new book, he dismisses the Kyoto emissions cuts as a “feel-good” strategy because it sounds virtuous and lets politicians make promises they don’t have to keep. He outlines an alternative “do-good” strategy that would cost less but accomplish more in dealing with climate change as well as more pressing threats like malaria, AIDS, polluted drinking water and malnutrition.
If you’re worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.
The biggest limitation to his cost-benefit analyses is that no one knows exactly what global warming will produce. It may not be worth taking expensive steps to forestall a one-foot rise in the sea level, but what if the seas rise much higher? Dr. Lomborg’s critics argue that we owe it to future generations to prepare for the worst-case projections.
But preparing for the worst in future climate is expensive, which means less money for the most serious threats today — and later this century. You can imagine plenty of worst-case projections that have nothing to do with climate change, as Dr. Lomborg reminded me at the end of our expedition.
“No historian would look back at the last two centuries and rank the rising sea level here as one of the city’s major problems,” he said, sitting safely dry and cool inside the Bridge Cafe. “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.”
Married with Children - in Russian.
Still Married, With Children, but in Russian
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
MOSCOW, Sept. 9 — Turn on the sitcom that is the hottest television show in Russia, and it all seems so familiar. Moored to his living room couch is a shoe salesman who is more interested in watching sports than conjugal relations. His wife has shocking hair and an even more shocking mouth. A couple of ne’er-do-well teenagers round out this bawdy, bickering bunch.
In fact, the show is an authorized copy of the American sitcom “Married With Children,” with a Russian cast and dialogue but scripts that hew closely to those of the original. This knockoff is such a sensation, especially among younger viewers, that its actors have become household names, and advertisements for its new season are plastered around Moscow.
A drumbeat of anti-Americanism may be coming from the Kremlin these days, but across Russia people are embracing that quintessentially American genre, the television sitcom, not to mention one of its brassiest examples. And curiously enough, it is the Russian government that has effectively brought “Married With Children” to this land, which somehow made it through the latter half of the 20th century without the benefit of the laugh track.
The show’s success says something not only about changing tastes here but also about Russia’s standing. Sitcoms are typically grounded in middle-class life and poke fun at it. The popularity of Russian versions of “Married With Children” and other adaptations of American sitcoms suggests that Russia has gained enough stability and wealth in recent years that these jokes resonate with viewers.
“ ‘Married With Children,’ with its satire on the American middle class, fits the style of our channel well,” said Dmitri Troitsky, a senior executive at the Russian channel TNT, a Gazprom-owned network whose programming bent is roughly similar to that of the Fox network in the United States. “It seemed interesting and topical for us to do a parody on the Russian middle class.”
These days, American visitors in Russia could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled upon some bizarre realm of reruns. Adaptations of two other shows, “Who’s the Boss?” and “The Nanny,” are also popular here.
All three programs are distributed by Sony Pictures Television International, which has created versions of them and other American programs around the world, often in partnership with local producers. “The Nanny,” which was first broadcast here in 2004, was such a hit that after running out of episodes to copy, some of the show’s original American writers were commissioned to create 25 more episodes, said Ron Sato, a Sony spokesman.
“Married With Children,” which ran from 1987 to 1997 in the United States, has been renamed “Schastlivy Vmeste,” or “Happy Together.” Its setting has been moved from the Chicago area to Russia’s heartland metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The sniping couple, Al and Peg Bundy, have become Gena and Dasha Bukin.
The thrust is the same: sending up family life as outrageously — or as vulgarly, depending upon your point of view — as possible.
A typical bit: In the living room, Gena suddenly tells Dasha to take off her clothes. Dasha is elated that Gena finally wants to have sex, and then Gena says, “No, Dasha, I’m simply dying of hunger, and hope that that will take away my appetite.”
Natalya Bulgakova, a spokeswoman for TNT, said the show, which had its debut last year, is now the most popular scripted series among Russians ages 18 to 30. (Older Russians typically roll their eyes at mention of “Schastlivy Vmeste,” as if they briefly wonder whether life under Communism was not so bad after all.)
TNT is owned by Gazprom-Media, which is controlled by Gazprom, the Russian national resources behemoth that is controlled by the government. Asked about the show, Gazprom-Media said in a statement that it did not interfere in its stations’ programming decisions.
While even Americans who do not speak Russian could discern the American roots in “Schastlivy Vmeste,” it is fair to say that many Russian viewers might not. But even Russians who do would seem unlikely to be bothered by the show’s origins.
Russian television has come a long way from the staid, politically tinged fare of Communist times, and these days there are many channels offering a steady diet of movies, dramas, game shows, soap operas and reality shows — some locally produced, some imported and dubbed.
News programs, which are tightly overseen by President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration, are another story. As in Soviet days, they rarely divert from the Kremlin’s point of view. Barbed political satire, which thrived after the fall of the Soviet Union, has been suppressed.
Sitcoms were first broadcast in Russia in the 1990s, when the country was on the brink of economic collapse, but both original sitcoms and copies of American ones achieved poor ratings. People were struggling and seemingly not in the mood for breezy jokes about the lives of the comfortable. Unable to identify with the sitcoms’ characters, Russians instead flocked to dubbed Latin American soap operas.
Only recently, with the economic upturn, has the sitcom taken hold.
“This is probably the last television genre to be adopted in Russia,” said Elena Prokhorova, who studies Russian television and is a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia. They did not work before, she said, because “sitcoms require a very stable social life.”
The producers and actors of “Schastlivy Vmeste” said that while the Russian scripts followed the outlines of the American ones, they had made changes for a Russian audience, fashioning plots around Russian holidays and using sets that better resemble interiors in Russia. Viktor Loginov, who plays Gena Bukin, looks younger than Ed O’Neill, who played Al Bundy, in part because the show is geared toward younger audiences.
They also insisted that the humor was more Russian. “We try to capture the so-called Russian soul so that it will be accepted by our Russian audience, so the character becomes a guy from the street,” said Mr. Loginov, a classically trained actor.
Still, the feel of “Schastlivy Vmeste” seems far more American than Russian. Classic Russian humor tends more toward narrative satire than slapstick.
Though “Married With Children” was something of a shock when it first appeared in the United States, provoking advertiser boycotts, two decades later the Russian version has not stirred a similar reaction. Russian television critics note that, as in much of the world, television here has become home for a lot of relatively coarse fare.
Daniil B. Dondurei, editor in chief of Cinema Art magazine, said he saw a darker significance in the success of shows like “Schastlivy Vmeste.”
“Today, people are becoming accustomed to not thinking about life,” he said. “The television is training them to not think about which party is in Parliament, about which laws are being passed, about who will be in charge tomorrow. People have become accustomed to living like children, in the family of a very strong and powerful father. Everything is decided for them.”
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