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conuly
Here's one on the intelligence of fishies
Now, we all hear a lot about goldfish. People get goldfish for their kids because "they're easy to take care of, and die soon anyway". They put them in bare bowls because "well, they don't need more, and they die soon anyway, and they're not that bright". They don't do anything about stimulation because "well, they're not that bright, and they die soon anyway". These statements would be troubling, except that the premises are totally flawed to begin with! When properly cared for, goldfish live decades - so all those fish that "died soon anyway" did so because they were killed by incompetent owners. And given that you can teach a goldfish to do a variety of tricks, I'm not so sure they're as unintelligent as all that. It's cruelty to have an animal and not give it any form of stimulation at all, it's like locking them in solitary for their whole life!
For Fish in Coral Reefs, It’s Useful to Be Smart
By SEAN B. CARROLL
I have long suspected that fish are smarter than we give them credit for.
As a child, I had an aquarium with several pet goldfish. They certainly knew it was feeding time when my hand appeared over their tank, and they excitedly awaited their delicious fish flakes.
They also exhibited a darker, disturbing behavior. Evidently, a safe life with abundant food was not fulfilling. From time to time, either sheer ennui or the long gray Toledo winter got to one of the fish and it ended its torment with a leap to my bedroom floor.
Maybe my anthropomorphizing is a bit over the top. But, really, just how smart are fish? Can they learn?
A 10-gallon tank with a plastic sunken pirate ship is certainly not the most stimulating habitat. But in the colorful, diverse and dangerous world of coral reefs, fish must be able to recognize not only food, but also to discriminate friends from foes, and mates from rivals, and to take the best action. In such a complex and dynamic environment, it would pay to be flexible and able to learn.
A series of studies has recently revealed that reef fish are surprisingly adaptable. Freshly caught wild fish quickly learn new tasks and can learn to discriminate among colors, patterns and shapes, including those they have never encountered. These studies suggest that learning and interpreting new stimuli play important roles in the lives of reef fish.
To test the ability of fish to learn to discriminate shapes, a research team led by Ulrike E. Siebeck at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, trained damselfish to feed from a feeding tube to which they attached a variety of visual stimuli. The latter included a three-dimensional latex disc, a two-dimensional blue disc painted on a plastic board, or black circles or propeller patterns on white boards. The fish were rewarded with food when they repeatedly tapped the stimulus — not the tube — with their snout or mouth.
The fish rapidly learned this task. The researchers then presented the fish with the original stimulus and one alternative distracting shape — bars versus discs, squares versus discs, or circles versus propellers, and the fish had to nose the shape they had been trained to tap in order to receive a reward. The fish tapped the correct shape about 70 percent of the time in the first trial; this improved to 80 percent to 90 percent in subsequent trials.
Remarkably, the fish also learned when the food reward was delayed and delivered far from the stimulus. The damselfish exhibited what is called anticipatory behavior, in that they would tap the image and then swim quickly to the other end of their tank in anticipation of their food reward. This response is much like Pavlov’s dogs who learned to anticipate food at the sound of a bell.
In another set of experiments, Dr. Siebeck trained damselfish on different color stimuli. She selected blue and yellow because these are highly contrasting colors that are found on many reef fish. After the fish quickly learned to repeatedly tap colored latex targets to gain a food reward, they were presented with a choice between the training target and the alternative color target. The fish were even better at color discrimination, tapping the correct target more than 90 percent of the time.
Perhaps it is less surprising that the fish learned to discriminate colors. After all, they live in a colorful environment. But the question of why reef fish are typically so colorful has challenged biologists for a very long time. It seems obvious that bright color patterns would be effective communication signals in the shallow, well-lighted water around coral reefs. But in that fish-eat-fish world, bright colors would also make fish conspicuous to predators. So how are these advantages and disadvantages balanced?
It turns out that some brightly colored fish make a living by providing a valuable service to what may otherwise be their predators: they clean them. In fact, cleaner fish like the cleaner wrasse form an important part of coral reef communities. They establish small territories as “cleaning stations,” which are visited by all sorts of “client” fish that have their parasites removed.
The cleaners’ work ethic is astounding. Alexandra Grutter of the University of Queensland found that individual cleaner wrasse inspected as many as 2,300 fish and consumed up to 1,200 parasites a day, which amounted to about 7 percent of their body weight. Furthermore, Dr. Grutter found that fish on reefs without cleaner fish had about five times the number of parasites compared with fish on reefs with cleaners.
It would seem, then, that it would benefit potential clients to visit cleaning stations, and for carnivorous clients not to eat their cleaners. So, how do clients find and recognize cleaners? It appears that certain body colors, particularly blue and yellow, signal cleaning behavior to potential clients.
To investigate the role of color in the cleaner-client relationship, another research team from the University of Queensland — including Dr. Grutter, Karen Cheney, Simon Blomberg and N. Justin Marshall — first looked at the distribution of body colors among cleaner and noncleaner fish from the same families. They found cleaner fish were significantly more likely to have a blue or yellow coloration.
Furthermore, they showed that these colors were the most contrasting ones on coral backgrounds to clients like barracuda or surgeonfish and that the contrast was enhanced against black backgrounds. In fact, all species they examined that make their living solely from cleaning also had a contrast-enhancing black lateral body stripe adjacent to these colors, whereas none of the 31 noncleaner species were so marked.
To test whether potential clients paid attention to these color schemes, the researchers painted models with various permutations of cleaner colors in which they omitted the blue pattern or replaced it with red, or altered the pattern, orientation and width of body stripes. They then placed these models around reefs fringing Lizard Island, at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, and observed the frequency with which client fish visited the models. They found that the model that most closely represented the natural blue-streak cleaner wrasse pattern was visited more frequently than any other model color scheme.
In a similar study performed off Sulawesi, Indonesia, the length of the model’s black body stripe also affected the frequency of client visits. On coral reefs, it pays to advertise, even when potential enemies abound.
With their attention to colors, patterns and shapes and their ability to learn about new forms, one wonders how much these creatures can learn and what limitations they might have. They couldn’t read Dr. Seuss, of course, but they might enjoy looking at the pictures.
Two articles on two different kindergartens.
One on a charter school that "justifies" its trip to the farm by calling it "test prep".
Some of the comments are disgusting, blaming parents for kids not going "to the zoo". When are they supposed to go to the zoo? On a weekday, when it closes at 5? On the weekend, when it costs $12 per person and is crowded besides and you have to do your shopping and your cleaning and visit family and go to church? Uncool, guys.
A Moo-Moo Here, and Better Test Scores Later
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
On the bus ride to the farm, the children sang rounds of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and a boy yelled, “I love pumpkin pie!”
But it soon became clear that this was a field “study”— as the teachers called it — not a field “trip,” and the 75 Harlem kindergartners were going not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.
“I want to get smarter,” 5-year-old Brandon Neal said.
“I want to do better on homework and tests,” added Julliana Jimenez, one of his classmates.
New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.
So leaving no possible test point unexplored, the educators at the Harlem Success Academy, a fast-growing chain of four charter schools known for a relentless emphasis on data, have invented a form of test preparation. The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.
On a chilly morning last week, the kindergartners, in blue-and-orange school scarves, crowded around a corral at the Queens County Farm Museum to gaze at an elderly cow named Daisy and a sheep standing nearby. In the background, children from other schools giggled and played as the Harlem students huddled quietly.
“Turn on your listening ears!” a teacher said. She talked about how a sheep’s coat could be turned into sweaters, and repeated the words yarn and wool until the children nodded in understanding.
Abigail Johnson, a teacher at Harlem Success Academy 3, said she had asked her students a few days before how many had ever held a pumpkin. Two of the 25 raised their hands.
“They are good at reciting and remembering things,” she said, “but they can’t make the connection unless you show it to them.”
Educators have long known that prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child’s performance on tests. If parents have read medieval tales to their children every night, they are likely to glide through questions about King Arthur.
At many urban schools across the country, field trips to unfamiliar locales are standard events in the academic year. But education experts said they knew of no other schools that organized trips with test preparation in mind.
In Jemez Pueblo, N.M., about 40 miles north of Albuquerque, students at Walatowa Charter High School have the opposite problem on state tests: ignorance of urban and suburban terminology. As a result, educators there have started taking the school’s 59 students on trips to major cities, like Calcutta and Washington. “They don’t know what a lawn is or an escalator,” said Tony Archuleta, the principal. “It turns their world upside down.”
The New York State Education Department runs statistical analyses of its tests to look for gender, racial or socioeconomic bias, but it does not compare the performance of rural and urban students, partly because it is hard to isolate whether a disparity is the result of a lack of familiarity with an environment or is caused by other factors like socioeconomic status or quality of classroom instruction. Still, city and state education officials said they had not received complaints about the tests being biased against city children.
Howard T. Everson, chairman of a committee that advises the state on testing, said New York’s exam procedures adequately shielded against bias. However, after reviewing a question on a recent fifth-grade math exam, Mr. Everson, who grew up in Brooklyn, said he could see how a student from the city could be at a disadvantage.
The question asked students to calculate how many cornstalks were in a field that had 46 rows of 32 stalks each. “Most kids in New York City would know corn, but they wouldn’t know stalk,” he said. “You have to know the unit you are working in to do the mathematical manipulation.”
To be sure, the state tests include questions that could stump rural students, like one that asks students to calculate how long it takes to run around a city block. And some passages that introduce questions might be set on a farm but are so imaginary that the setting is irrelevant, like a question from the fourth-grade English test this year about a cow chatting with a swan and a fox at a bus stop. Others, like one asking third graders to add 59 sheep and 161 horses to figure out the combined number of both, seem to require no particular rural sensibilities.
Eva S. Moskowitz, who leads the Harlem Success Academy chain, said the state should do more to include questions that ring true with students from the city, though she cautioned that the larger problem was not “agricultural bias” but that the tests were too easy. She said she organized the first trip three years ago after looking through the tests and hearing from teachers that students were stumped by references to farms.
“There were passages, literally, about milking, plowing — things that were pretty foreign to Harlem kids,” she said. “It’s a little bit annoying that there are no passages about the subway, or how crowded the streets are.”
She rejected criticism that her efforts at preparing children for the tests are at the expense of other learning opportunities.
“I see nothing mutually exclusive about having fun and having a rich, well-planned, rigorous learning experience,” she said. “It’s important for kids to know where butter comes from, that corn does not just arrive in the supermarket.”
Only the prekindergarten and kindergarten classes at Harlem Success schools — about 450 students — attend the farm trips, though the state exams do not begin until third grade. Students in other grades go on nature-related field trips, like camping, that help acquaint them with unfamiliar settings, Ms. Moskowitz said.
At noon, the kindergartners gathered by the picnic tables to feast on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk, and they shared what they had learned.
“Pumpkins have seeds inside them,” said Omari Eagan, 6.
Ivan Ramirez, 5, said he had learned that bacon comes from pigs, but that chicken does not.
“Chickens make eggs,” said Paige Garcia, 5. “I didn’t know that before.”
And one about an absurdly expensive private school for gifted kids
School for the Gifted, and Only the Gifted
By WINNIE HU
He was 5 months old when he said his first words, and at a year and a half, he knew the alphabet, colors and numbers from 1 to 10.
None of which earned Christopher Yang, now 5, a seat this fall in New York City’s coveted gifted and talented programs at Hunter College Elementary School on the Upper East Side, the Anderson School and Public School 9 on the Upper West Side, or New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math School (NEST + m) on the Lower East Side. So his parents enrolled him in a new private school for precocious children, the Speyer Legacy School, at 211 West 61st Street, where annual tuition is $28,500.
In a city where the public school gifted programs have long provided an enviable free education, and there are many expensive private schools that emphasize rigorous academics, the Speyer Legacy School, which caters to advanced learners, is a rare breed: a private school with an all-gifted student body. It opened last month with 26 children in kindergarten through second grade in a leased space in the Gateway School.
Named after one of the city’s earliest public schools for gifted students from the 1930s, Speyer Legacy is attracting interest (74 children applied for this fall) at a time when New York’s top public gifted programs and private schools have far more applicants than they have seats. The competition is driven by a boom in the school-age population as more families have multiple children and choose the city over the suburbs, as well as by the city’s own efforts to expand access to gifted classes.
Last year, 14,822 4-year-olds tested for admission to the city’s gifted kindergarten programs, up from 12,410 the year before. About 1 in 5 (3,231) scored in the 90th percentile or higher, qualifying them for neighborhood-based gifted programs, and 9 percent (1,345) made the 97th percentile cutoff for the three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan and two new ones in Brooklyn and Queens.
But those programs have a total of 325 seats — fewer than half the number of 4-year-olds who scored in the 99th percentile, the highest possible score. The city filled the classes, with the highest scorers having the best chance of getting their first-choice schools. (Exceptions were made for siblings.) While children who scored in the 90th percentile or above were guaranteed placement in a gifted program in their district, they were not guaranteed a specific school or location.
Rebecca Daniels, former president of the Community Education Council for School District 2, said that some families on the Upper East Side decided they were better off at their neighborhood school than at, say, a gifted program on Roosevelt Island. Others quit the system for private schools.
The new Speyer Legacy School was started by a group of high-powered mothers — including Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, and Malena Belafonte, the daughter-in-law of the singer Harry Belafonte — who had sent their children to Hollingworth Preschool, at Teachers College at Columbia University, though there is no official connection between Hollingworth and Speyer.
Jennifer M. Selendy, a litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis who is also one of the founders, said that her oldest son’s experience at Hollingworth — where he studied architecture, meteorology and the scientific method — convinced her of the need for more specialized programs to challenge young children. He is now 7, and a second grader at Hunter College Elementary, a gifted school run separately from the city’s system; her younger son, 4, is applying to Speyer.
Hunter had 1,832 4-year-olds apply last year for 50 kindergarten seats; the 200 children with the highest test scores were invited for an on-site visit. “Because of the limited resources of Hunter, they can’t even begin to see all the kids who need this type of education,” Ms. Selendy said.
Speyer does not set a minimum test score for admission, though Connie Williams Coulianos, the head of school, said that all of the current students scored in the high 90s on the tests used for Hunter and the private schools (different tests than the ones for the city gifted system). Speyer also considers reports from preschool teachers, and has applicants participate in a sample class to identify children who are advanced in vocabulary, spatial reasoning, mathematical ability and creative expression.
“We do not want to be dictated to by tests,” said Ms. Coulianos, who was previously the director of Hollingworth Preschool. “It’s our belief that not all children test well, and the assessments do not pick up all gifted children.”
Ms. Coulianos said that Speyer had already received two dozen applications for next fall, and was searching for a larger space. It plans to admit 32 to 36 kindergarten students, as well as a handful of first- and second-grade students, depending on space, and hopes to expand to a total of 324 students in kindergarten through eighth grade by 2015.
Speyer currently offers financial aid to 11 of the 26 enrolled students. Ten of the students are members of minorities: seven Asian, two Hispanic and one Jamaican.
Victoria Goldman, the author of a guide to Manhattan private schools, said that among families who were willing to pay $28,500 or more for kindergarten, Speyer faced stiff competition from established schools like Trinity, Horace Mann and Collegiate, to name a few, which are known for having bright students as well as state-of-the-art buildings and extensive faculty and alumni networks.
“Why would you go to a small startup school?” she said. “At least they have a hook, but they’re up against the big guns.”
Robin Aronow, the founder of School Search NYC, a for-profit company that advises parents on school choices, said she had recommended Speyer to three of the families who enrolled there. “It was a leap of faith for these families,” she said. “However, I think the administrators behind the school are very experienced and well versed in the subject.”
Ms. Coulianos said that Speyer follows a curriculum developed specifically for advanced learners, with an emphasis on student inquiry. For instance, students are told they are discussing meteorology rather than the daily weather, and that they are studying entomology rather than insects. Classes are limited to 18, and include time for art, music, chess and Spanish.
Public-school gifted programs can have class sizes in the mid-20s. They use the same written curriculum as general education classes, but the teachers are trained in gifted education and usually add more complex themes and content, city education officials said. And while other private schools also have ambitious curriculums, they typically admit students with a wide range of academic ability, which some parents and educators said means they cannot move as quickly through lessons as Speyer.
“Some of the most rigorous independent schools spend the first years of an elementary education catching students up, and the gifted kids sit around and wait a while,” said Gabriella Rowe, director of the Mandell School, a preschool on the Upper West Side that opened an elementary school in 2008.
Ava Roberts, 6, who moved to Speyer this fall from the private Claremont Preparatory School in Lower Manhattan, said that her kindergarten class last year studied shapes that she had already learned at Hollingworth. She said she even showed her teacher a new shape: the nonagon. “I learn more here,” she said of Speyer. “I love to learn, so it’s so fun.”
At Speyer the other morning, 14 kindergartners — addressed as “Speyer scholars” — took turns picking slips of paper from a plastic jar for a research project on indigenous wildlife. Many of the 5-year-olds read the animal names written on the slips unassisted. When one boy drew “striped skunk,” they erupted into “eeewwws.”
Lillian Yang said that she was willing to pay for Speyer so that her son, Christopher, could get the instruction he needed (he got a partial scholarship). Since he already knows addition and subtraction, he is getting advanced math lessons in multiplication.
“With gifted children, if you don’t let them reach their potential, they will feel pressure to be the same as other kids, and that can cause them to shut down,” she said.
An article on zero waste facilities and communities
Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes.
At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.
And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.
Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.
The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.
Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.
“Nobody wants a landfill sited anywhere near them, including in rural areas,” said Jon D. Johnston, a materials management branch chief for the Environmental Protection Agency who is helping to lead the zero-waste movement in the Southeast. “We’ve come to this realization that landfill is valuable and we can’t bury things that don’t need to be buried.”
Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.
But places like the island resort community of Nantucket offer a glimpse of the future. Running out of landfill space and worried about the cost of shipping trash 30 miles to the mainland, it moved to a strict trash policy more than a decade ago, said Jeffrey Willett, director of public works on the island.
The town, with the blessing of residents concerned about tax increases, mandates the recycling not only of commonly reprocessed items like aluminum, glass and paper but also of tires, batteries and household appliances.
Jim Lentowski, executive director of the nonprofit Nantucket Conservation Foundation and a year-round resident since 1971, said that sorting trash and delivering it to the local recycling and disposal complex had become a matter of course for most residents.
The complex also has a garagelike structure where residents can drop off books and clothing and other reusable items for others to take home.
The 100-car parking lot at the landfill is a lively meeting place for locals, Mr. Lentowski added. “Saturday morning during election season, politicians hang out there and hand out campaign buttons,” he said. “If you want to get a pulse on the community, that is a great spot to go.”
Mr. Willett said that while the amount of trash that island residents carted to the dump had remained steady, the proportion going into the landfill had plummeted to 8 percent.
By contrast, Massachusetts residents as a whole send an average of 66 percent of their trash to a landfill or incinerator. Although Mr. Willett has lectured about the Nantucket model around the country, most communities still lack the infrastructure to set a zero-waste target.
Aside from the difficulty of persuading residents and businesses to divide their trash, many towns and municipalities have been unwilling to make the significant capital investments in machines like composters that can process food and yard waste. Yet attitudes are shifting, and cities like San Francisco and Seattle are at the forefront of the changeover. Both of those cities have adopted plans for a shift to zero-waste practices and are collecting organic waste curbside in residential areas for composting.
Food waste, which the E.P.A. says accounts for about 13 percent of total trash nationally — and much more when recyclables are factored out of the total — is viewed as the next big frontier.
When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more, when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no methane by-product.
Green Foodservice Alliance, a division of the Georgia Restaurant Association, has been adding restaurants throughout Atlanta and its suburbs to its so-called zero-waste zones. And companies are springing up to meet the growth in demand from restaurants for recycling and compost haulers.
Steve Simon, a partner in Fifth Group, a company that owns Ecco and four other restaurants in the Atlanta area, said that the hardest part of participating in the alliance’s zero-waste-zone program was not training his staff but finding reliable haulers.
“There are now two in town, and neither is a year old, so it is a very tentative situation,” Mr. Simon said.
Still, he said he had little doubt that the hauling sector would grow and that all five of the restaurants would eventually be waste-free.
Packaging is also quickly evolving as part of the zero-waste movement. Bioplastics like the forks at Yellowstone, made from plant materials like cornstarch that mimic plastic, are used to manufacture a growing number of items that are compostable.
Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a nonprofit organization that certifies such products, said that the number of companies making compostable products for food service providers had doubled since 2006 and that many had moved on to items like shopping bags and food packaging.
The transition to zero waste, however, has its pitfalls.
Josephine Miller, an environmental official for the city of Santa Monica, Calif., which bans the use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with a brown or green stripe.
Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is to prevail, environmental officials say.
“Technology exists, but a lot of education still needs to be done,” said Mr. Johnston of the E.P.A.
He expects private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.
“It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.”
And finally, one on problems faced by African immigrants in the Bronx
For African Immigrants, Bronx Culture Clash Turns Violent
By SAM DOLNICK
The storefronts on a stretch of Webster Avenue in the South Bronx tell the story of local shifts as well as any census: a Senegalese-run 99-cent store, an African video store, an African-run fast-food spot, a mosque, several African restaurants.
The owner of Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., named for the coalition of West African nations, envisioned it as a community hub in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont, where Americans would try his wife’s cassava soup and realize it’s not so foreign after all. But a year in, the owner, Mohammed M. Barrie, said he could count the number of American patrons on one hand.
Meanwhile, he and his customers have been taunted, he said, and his restaurant’s window urinated on. Someone tried to break into a diner’s car. Then there is the bullet hole in the front window, a mark from a gunshot through the window late one night last summer.
“Those people, they don’t respect African people,” said Mr. Barrie, a Sierra Leone native who settled in the United States in 1998. “I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, they still ...” He trailed off.
Down the block, Muhammed Sillah sat in front of the tiny Al Tawba mosque, eyeing the jungle gym across the street and remembering when he used to let his children play outside.
“Spanish kids, American kids — but no African kids,” said Mr. Sillah, a Gambian mechanic raising five children in Claremont. “We’re scared.”
Their fear and frustration are shared by many local West African immigrants, whose fast-growing presence in the neighborhood — and in the city over all — has been accompanied by increasing tensions with the local black American residents.
“They think they’re better than black people,” James Carroll, a retired Army specialist standing in front of a busy convenience store, said of the West African immigrants. “We’re supposed to be one community — we’re supposed to be able to get along — but they don’t give it a chance.”
Some of the tension can be attributed to cultural differences that all immigrants face, though the West Africans in Claremont, as conservative Muslims, have the added challenge of adjusting to a post-9/11 New York. But resentment and mistrust has escalated to actual violence, and, they say, left them feeling under siege.
After reports of nearly two dozen attacks on West African immigrants in the last two years, community leaders reached out to the police, who interviewed 17 Africans in the neighborhood and filed 11 criminal complaints. Two of those were deemed hate crimes, including an attack in June that left a Gambian immigrant hospitalized for eight days. They have made no arrest in either bias case, but a police mobile truck with a video camera now stands outside the mosque.
Claremont straddles the 44th and 42nd Precincts, two of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. This year, there have been 319 robberies in the 44th Precinct and 237 assaults in the 42nd. At the Butler Houses, part of a complex of housing projects that loom over the neighborhood, police sirens provide a background soundtrack, and residents of all colors and nationalities caution against walking around at night.
But the West Africans say the attacks on them are calculated. “It’s prejudice,” said Dembo Fofana, who said a beating in June by 10 to 15 men left him with broken ribs and internal bleeding. “It’s because we’re African, and we’re Muslim.”
Mr. Fofana, who came to this country 21 years ago, has not returned to his job at a bakery since the assault. He stays home, recovering, receiving disability checks and caring for his five children.
“There’s a lot of tension,” he said. “Just yesterday, someone said, ‘What would you think if I came to Africa and tried to take your property?’ I told him, ‘Brother, I’m not taking anything from you. I’m just trying to live my life.’ ”
The African population in the Bronx has grown considerably in recent years: the census reported 12,063 sub-Saharan Africans in 1990, while the most recent census estimate was 61,487.
In the community district that includes Claremont, black Americans made up 44 percent of the population, according to 2000 census figures, with 52.9 percent of the area Hispanic. African immigrants were nearly 10 percent of the population, a number likely to be much higher in the 2010 census.
The Africans in Claremont hail mainly from poor, French-speaking countries: Guinea, Mali, Senegal. Like immigrants across New York, many are here illegally, working long hours for little pay. Many work as taxi drivers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers — jobs that keep them on the street late at night.
But some say the Muslims deliberately hold themselves apart. A 37-year-old American man who gave his name as Dre pointed to the pavement in front of the mosque where the African men, easily identifiable in their beards and skullcaps, gather each afternoon. “If you don’t give praise to Allah, don’t go there,” he said. “It’s just like Afghanistan.”
Kantara Baragi, the imam of the Al Tawba mosque, acknowledges that insularity is part of the problem. “We don’t hang around,” said Mr. Baragi, whose delicate frame nearly disappears inside his long, flowing robes. “We just go to work. We don’t have a relationship with people here. They don’t know us.”
So community leaders organized two meetings this summer with police officials, politicians, community board members and housing association leaders. The goal, Mr. Baragi said, was “to let them know us so they don’t look at us like strangers.”
Zain Abdullah, an assistant professor of religion, race and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia, says it is common for African immigrants to suffer harassment when they settle in traditionally black neighborhoods in big cities, like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia.
“Many African-Americans feel that the influx of Africans coming in represents a kind of invasion,” he said. “Culturally, African-Americans have always imagined themselves as Africans, or at least of African descent, but they might have never encountered Africans from the continent. The actual encounter is shocking.”
Mr. Baragi, the imam, says he tries to accommodate his neighbors. His mosque, which blends in with the other storefronts, does not sound the call to prayer through speakers because “we don’t need to force everyone to hear what we’re doing.”
Instead, five times a day, from the sidewalk or, when it is cold, from behind the front door, a man from Al Tawba sings the call in a voice drowned out by the rumbling traffic.
Down the block at Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., a young man walked in last week wearing a Yankees hat tilted askew, an oversize military-style jacket and baggy pants. He looked like any member of the crowd hanging out in front of the Butler Houses, but Fofana Alhusane’s outfit was calculated, a camouflage to hide his Gambian roots.
“African clothes are dangerous,” he said. “I used to wear them, but I saw a few people get beat up, so now I wear New York clothes.”
Now, we all hear a lot about goldfish. People get goldfish for their kids because "they're easy to take care of, and die soon anyway". They put them in bare bowls because "well, they don't need more, and they die soon anyway, and they're not that bright". They don't do anything about stimulation because "well, they're not that bright, and they die soon anyway". These statements would be troubling, except that the premises are totally flawed to begin with! When properly cared for, goldfish live decades - so all those fish that "died soon anyway" did so because they were killed by incompetent owners. And given that you can teach a goldfish to do a variety of tricks, I'm not so sure they're as unintelligent as all that. It's cruelty to have an animal and not give it any form of stimulation at all, it's like locking them in solitary for their whole life!
For Fish in Coral Reefs, It’s Useful to Be Smart
By SEAN B. CARROLL
I have long suspected that fish are smarter than we give them credit for.
As a child, I had an aquarium with several pet goldfish. They certainly knew it was feeding time when my hand appeared over their tank, and they excitedly awaited their delicious fish flakes.
They also exhibited a darker, disturbing behavior. Evidently, a safe life with abundant food was not fulfilling. From time to time, either sheer ennui or the long gray Toledo winter got to one of the fish and it ended its torment with a leap to my bedroom floor.
Maybe my anthropomorphizing is a bit over the top. But, really, just how smart are fish? Can they learn?
A 10-gallon tank with a plastic sunken pirate ship is certainly not the most stimulating habitat. But in the colorful, diverse and dangerous world of coral reefs, fish must be able to recognize not only food, but also to discriminate friends from foes, and mates from rivals, and to take the best action. In such a complex and dynamic environment, it would pay to be flexible and able to learn.
A series of studies has recently revealed that reef fish are surprisingly adaptable. Freshly caught wild fish quickly learn new tasks and can learn to discriminate among colors, patterns and shapes, including those they have never encountered. These studies suggest that learning and interpreting new stimuli play important roles in the lives of reef fish.
To test the ability of fish to learn to discriminate shapes, a research team led by Ulrike E. Siebeck at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, trained damselfish to feed from a feeding tube to which they attached a variety of visual stimuli. The latter included a three-dimensional latex disc, a two-dimensional blue disc painted on a plastic board, or black circles or propeller patterns on white boards. The fish were rewarded with food when they repeatedly tapped the stimulus — not the tube — with their snout or mouth.
The fish rapidly learned this task. The researchers then presented the fish with the original stimulus and one alternative distracting shape — bars versus discs, squares versus discs, or circles versus propellers, and the fish had to nose the shape they had been trained to tap in order to receive a reward. The fish tapped the correct shape about 70 percent of the time in the first trial; this improved to 80 percent to 90 percent in subsequent trials.
Remarkably, the fish also learned when the food reward was delayed and delivered far from the stimulus. The damselfish exhibited what is called anticipatory behavior, in that they would tap the image and then swim quickly to the other end of their tank in anticipation of their food reward. This response is much like Pavlov’s dogs who learned to anticipate food at the sound of a bell.
In another set of experiments, Dr. Siebeck trained damselfish on different color stimuli. She selected blue and yellow because these are highly contrasting colors that are found on many reef fish. After the fish quickly learned to repeatedly tap colored latex targets to gain a food reward, they were presented with a choice between the training target and the alternative color target. The fish were even better at color discrimination, tapping the correct target more than 90 percent of the time.
Perhaps it is less surprising that the fish learned to discriminate colors. After all, they live in a colorful environment. But the question of why reef fish are typically so colorful has challenged biologists for a very long time. It seems obvious that bright color patterns would be effective communication signals in the shallow, well-lighted water around coral reefs. But in that fish-eat-fish world, bright colors would also make fish conspicuous to predators. So how are these advantages and disadvantages balanced?
It turns out that some brightly colored fish make a living by providing a valuable service to what may otherwise be their predators: they clean them. In fact, cleaner fish like the cleaner wrasse form an important part of coral reef communities. They establish small territories as “cleaning stations,” which are visited by all sorts of “client” fish that have their parasites removed.
The cleaners’ work ethic is astounding. Alexandra Grutter of the University of Queensland found that individual cleaner wrasse inspected as many as 2,300 fish and consumed up to 1,200 parasites a day, which amounted to about 7 percent of their body weight. Furthermore, Dr. Grutter found that fish on reefs without cleaner fish had about five times the number of parasites compared with fish on reefs with cleaners.
It would seem, then, that it would benefit potential clients to visit cleaning stations, and for carnivorous clients not to eat their cleaners. So, how do clients find and recognize cleaners? It appears that certain body colors, particularly blue and yellow, signal cleaning behavior to potential clients.
To investigate the role of color in the cleaner-client relationship, another research team from the University of Queensland — including Dr. Grutter, Karen Cheney, Simon Blomberg and N. Justin Marshall — first looked at the distribution of body colors among cleaner and noncleaner fish from the same families. They found cleaner fish were significantly more likely to have a blue or yellow coloration.
Furthermore, they showed that these colors were the most contrasting ones on coral backgrounds to clients like barracuda or surgeonfish and that the contrast was enhanced against black backgrounds. In fact, all species they examined that make their living solely from cleaning also had a contrast-enhancing black lateral body stripe adjacent to these colors, whereas none of the 31 noncleaner species were so marked.
To test whether potential clients paid attention to these color schemes, the researchers painted models with various permutations of cleaner colors in which they omitted the blue pattern or replaced it with red, or altered the pattern, orientation and width of body stripes. They then placed these models around reefs fringing Lizard Island, at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, and observed the frequency with which client fish visited the models. They found that the model that most closely represented the natural blue-streak cleaner wrasse pattern was visited more frequently than any other model color scheme.
In a similar study performed off Sulawesi, Indonesia, the length of the model’s black body stripe also affected the frequency of client visits. On coral reefs, it pays to advertise, even when potential enemies abound.
With their attention to colors, patterns and shapes and their ability to learn about new forms, one wonders how much these creatures can learn and what limitations they might have. They couldn’t read Dr. Seuss, of course, but they might enjoy looking at the pictures.
Two articles on two different kindergartens.
One on a charter school that "justifies" its trip to the farm by calling it "test prep".
Some of the comments are disgusting, blaming parents for kids not going "to the zoo". When are they supposed to go to the zoo? On a weekday, when it closes at 5? On the weekend, when it costs $12 per person and is crowded besides and you have to do your shopping and your cleaning and visit family and go to church? Uncool, guys.
A Moo-Moo Here, and Better Test Scores Later
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
On the bus ride to the farm, the children sang rounds of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and a boy yelled, “I love pumpkin pie!”
But it soon became clear that this was a field “study”— as the teachers called it — not a field “trip,” and the 75 Harlem kindergartners were going not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.
“I want to get smarter,” 5-year-old Brandon Neal said.
“I want to do better on homework and tests,” added Julliana Jimenez, one of his classmates.
New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.
So leaving no possible test point unexplored, the educators at the Harlem Success Academy, a fast-growing chain of four charter schools known for a relentless emphasis on data, have invented a form of test preparation. The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.
On a chilly morning last week, the kindergartners, in blue-and-orange school scarves, crowded around a corral at the Queens County Farm Museum to gaze at an elderly cow named Daisy and a sheep standing nearby. In the background, children from other schools giggled and played as the Harlem students huddled quietly.
“Turn on your listening ears!” a teacher said. She talked about how a sheep’s coat could be turned into sweaters, and repeated the words yarn and wool until the children nodded in understanding.
Abigail Johnson, a teacher at Harlem Success Academy 3, said she had asked her students a few days before how many had ever held a pumpkin. Two of the 25 raised their hands.
“They are good at reciting and remembering things,” she said, “but they can’t make the connection unless you show it to them.”
Educators have long known that prior knowledge of a subject can significantly improve a child’s performance on tests. If parents have read medieval tales to their children every night, they are likely to glide through questions about King Arthur.
At many urban schools across the country, field trips to unfamiliar locales are standard events in the academic year. But education experts said they knew of no other schools that organized trips with test preparation in mind.
In Jemez Pueblo, N.M., about 40 miles north of Albuquerque, students at Walatowa Charter High School have the opposite problem on state tests: ignorance of urban and suburban terminology. As a result, educators there have started taking the school’s 59 students on trips to major cities, like Calcutta and Washington. “They don’t know what a lawn is or an escalator,” said Tony Archuleta, the principal. “It turns their world upside down.”
The New York State Education Department runs statistical analyses of its tests to look for gender, racial or socioeconomic bias, but it does not compare the performance of rural and urban students, partly because it is hard to isolate whether a disparity is the result of a lack of familiarity with an environment or is caused by other factors like socioeconomic status or quality of classroom instruction. Still, city and state education officials said they had not received complaints about the tests being biased against city children.
Howard T. Everson, chairman of a committee that advises the state on testing, said New York’s exam procedures adequately shielded against bias. However, after reviewing a question on a recent fifth-grade math exam, Mr. Everson, who grew up in Brooklyn, said he could see how a student from the city could be at a disadvantage.
The question asked students to calculate how many cornstalks were in a field that had 46 rows of 32 stalks each. “Most kids in New York City would know corn, but they wouldn’t know stalk,” he said. “You have to know the unit you are working in to do the mathematical manipulation.”
To be sure, the state tests include questions that could stump rural students, like one that asks students to calculate how long it takes to run around a city block. And some passages that introduce questions might be set on a farm but are so imaginary that the setting is irrelevant, like a question from the fourth-grade English test this year about a cow chatting with a swan and a fox at a bus stop. Others, like one asking third graders to add 59 sheep and 161 horses to figure out the combined number of both, seem to require no particular rural sensibilities.
Eva S. Moskowitz, who leads the Harlem Success Academy chain, said the state should do more to include questions that ring true with students from the city, though she cautioned that the larger problem was not “agricultural bias” but that the tests were too easy. She said she organized the first trip three years ago after looking through the tests and hearing from teachers that students were stumped by references to farms.
“There were passages, literally, about milking, plowing — things that were pretty foreign to Harlem kids,” she said. “It’s a little bit annoying that there are no passages about the subway, or how crowded the streets are.”
She rejected criticism that her efforts at preparing children for the tests are at the expense of other learning opportunities.
“I see nothing mutually exclusive about having fun and having a rich, well-planned, rigorous learning experience,” she said. “It’s important for kids to know where butter comes from, that corn does not just arrive in the supermarket.”
Only the prekindergarten and kindergarten classes at Harlem Success schools — about 450 students — attend the farm trips, though the state exams do not begin until third grade. Students in other grades go on nature-related field trips, like camping, that help acquaint them with unfamiliar settings, Ms. Moskowitz said.
At noon, the kindergartners gathered by the picnic tables to feast on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk, and they shared what they had learned.
“Pumpkins have seeds inside them,” said Omari Eagan, 6.
Ivan Ramirez, 5, said he had learned that bacon comes from pigs, but that chicken does not.
“Chickens make eggs,” said Paige Garcia, 5. “I didn’t know that before.”
And one about an absurdly expensive private school for gifted kids
School for the Gifted, and Only the Gifted
By WINNIE HU
He was 5 months old when he said his first words, and at a year and a half, he knew the alphabet, colors and numbers from 1 to 10.
None of which earned Christopher Yang, now 5, a seat this fall in New York City’s coveted gifted and talented programs at Hunter College Elementary School on the Upper East Side, the Anderson School and Public School 9 on the Upper West Side, or New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math School (NEST + m) on the Lower East Side. So his parents enrolled him in a new private school for precocious children, the Speyer Legacy School, at 211 West 61st Street, where annual tuition is $28,500.
In a city where the public school gifted programs have long provided an enviable free education, and there are many expensive private schools that emphasize rigorous academics, the Speyer Legacy School, which caters to advanced learners, is a rare breed: a private school with an all-gifted student body. It opened last month with 26 children in kindergarten through second grade in a leased space in the Gateway School.
Named after one of the city’s earliest public schools for gifted students from the 1930s, Speyer Legacy is attracting interest (74 children applied for this fall) at a time when New York’s top public gifted programs and private schools have far more applicants than they have seats. The competition is driven by a boom in the school-age population as more families have multiple children and choose the city over the suburbs, as well as by the city’s own efforts to expand access to gifted classes.
Last year, 14,822 4-year-olds tested for admission to the city’s gifted kindergarten programs, up from 12,410 the year before. About 1 in 5 (3,231) scored in the 90th percentile or higher, qualifying them for neighborhood-based gifted programs, and 9 percent (1,345) made the 97th percentile cutoff for the three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan and two new ones in Brooklyn and Queens.
But those programs have a total of 325 seats — fewer than half the number of 4-year-olds who scored in the 99th percentile, the highest possible score. The city filled the classes, with the highest scorers having the best chance of getting their first-choice schools. (Exceptions were made for siblings.) While children who scored in the 90th percentile or above were guaranteed placement in a gifted program in their district, they were not guaranteed a specific school or location.
Rebecca Daniels, former president of the Community Education Council for School District 2, said that some families on the Upper East Side decided they were better off at their neighborhood school than at, say, a gifted program on Roosevelt Island. Others quit the system for private schools.
The new Speyer Legacy School was started by a group of high-powered mothers — including Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, and Malena Belafonte, the daughter-in-law of the singer Harry Belafonte — who had sent their children to Hollingworth Preschool, at Teachers College at Columbia University, though there is no official connection between Hollingworth and Speyer.
Jennifer M. Selendy, a litigation partner at Kirkland & Ellis who is also one of the founders, said that her oldest son’s experience at Hollingworth — where he studied architecture, meteorology and the scientific method — convinced her of the need for more specialized programs to challenge young children. He is now 7, and a second grader at Hunter College Elementary, a gifted school run separately from the city’s system; her younger son, 4, is applying to Speyer.
Hunter had 1,832 4-year-olds apply last year for 50 kindergarten seats; the 200 children with the highest test scores were invited for an on-site visit. “Because of the limited resources of Hunter, they can’t even begin to see all the kids who need this type of education,” Ms. Selendy said.
Speyer does not set a minimum test score for admission, though Connie Williams Coulianos, the head of school, said that all of the current students scored in the high 90s on the tests used for Hunter and the private schools (different tests than the ones for the city gifted system). Speyer also considers reports from preschool teachers, and has applicants participate in a sample class to identify children who are advanced in vocabulary, spatial reasoning, mathematical ability and creative expression.
“We do not want to be dictated to by tests,” said Ms. Coulianos, who was previously the director of Hollingworth Preschool. “It’s our belief that not all children test well, and the assessments do not pick up all gifted children.”
Ms. Coulianos said that Speyer had already received two dozen applications for next fall, and was searching for a larger space. It plans to admit 32 to 36 kindergarten students, as well as a handful of first- and second-grade students, depending on space, and hopes to expand to a total of 324 students in kindergarten through eighth grade by 2015.
Speyer currently offers financial aid to 11 of the 26 enrolled students. Ten of the students are members of minorities: seven Asian, two Hispanic and one Jamaican.
Victoria Goldman, the author of a guide to Manhattan private schools, said that among families who were willing to pay $28,500 or more for kindergarten, Speyer faced stiff competition from established schools like Trinity, Horace Mann and Collegiate, to name a few, which are known for having bright students as well as state-of-the-art buildings and extensive faculty and alumni networks.
“Why would you go to a small startup school?” she said. “At least they have a hook, but they’re up against the big guns.”
Robin Aronow, the founder of School Search NYC, a for-profit company that advises parents on school choices, said she had recommended Speyer to three of the families who enrolled there. “It was a leap of faith for these families,” she said. “However, I think the administrators behind the school are very experienced and well versed in the subject.”
Ms. Coulianos said that Speyer follows a curriculum developed specifically for advanced learners, with an emphasis on student inquiry. For instance, students are told they are discussing meteorology rather than the daily weather, and that they are studying entomology rather than insects. Classes are limited to 18, and include time for art, music, chess and Spanish.
Public-school gifted programs can have class sizes in the mid-20s. They use the same written curriculum as general education classes, but the teachers are trained in gifted education and usually add more complex themes and content, city education officials said. And while other private schools also have ambitious curriculums, they typically admit students with a wide range of academic ability, which some parents and educators said means they cannot move as quickly through lessons as Speyer.
“Some of the most rigorous independent schools spend the first years of an elementary education catching students up, and the gifted kids sit around and wait a while,” said Gabriella Rowe, director of the Mandell School, a preschool on the Upper West Side that opened an elementary school in 2008.
Ava Roberts, 6, who moved to Speyer this fall from the private Claremont Preparatory School in Lower Manhattan, said that her kindergarten class last year studied shapes that she had already learned at Hollingworth. She said she even showed her teacher a new shape: the nonagon. “I learn more here,” she said of Speyer. “I love to learn, so it’s so fun.”
At Speyer the other morning, 14 kindergartners — addressed as “Speyer scholars” — took turns picking slips of paper from a plastic jar for a research project on indigenous wildlife. Many of the 5-year-olds read the animal names written on the slips unassisted. When one boy drew “striped skunk,” they erupted into “eeewwws.”
Lillian Yang said that she was willing to pay for Speyer so that her son, Christopher, could get the instruction he needed (he got a partial scholarship). Since he already knows addition and subtraction, he is getting advanced math lessons in multiplication.
“With gifted children, if you don’t let them reach their potential, they will feel pressure to be the same as other kids, and that can cause them to shut down,” she said.
An article on zero waste facilities and communities
Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve magically when heated for more than a few minutes.
At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken to a compost heap out back.
And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.
Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.
The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.
Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.
“Nobody wants a landfill sited anywhere near them, including in rural areas,” said Jon D. Johnston, a materials management branch chief for the Environmental Protection Agency who is helping to lead the zero-waste movement in the Southeast. “We’ve come to this realization that landfill is valuable and we can’t bury things that don’t need to be buried.”
Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.
But places like the island resort community of Nantucket offer a glimpse of the future. Running out of landfill space and worried about the cost of shipping trash 30 miles to the mainland, it moved to a strict trash policy more than a decade ago, said Jeffrey Willett, director of public works on the island.
The town, with the blessing of residents concerned about tax increases, mandates the recycling not only of commonly reprocessed items like aluminum, glass and paper but also of tires, batteries and household appliances.
Jim Lentowski, executive director of the nonprofit Nantucket Conservation Foundation and a year-round resident since 1971, said that sorting trash and delivering it to the local recycling and disposal complex had become a matter of course for most residents.
The complex also has a garagelike structure where residents can drop off books and clothing and other reusable items for others to take home.
The 100-car parking lot at the landfill is a lively meeting place for locals, Mr. Lentowski added. “Saturday morning during election season, politicians hang out there and hand out campaign buttons,” he said. “If you want to get a pulse on the community, that is a great spot to go.”
Mr. Willett said that while the amount of trash that island residents carted to the dump had remained steady, the proportion going into the landfill had plummeted to 8 percent.
By contrast, Massachusetts residents as a whole send an average of 66 percent of their trash to a landfill or incinerator. Although Mr. Willett has lectured about the Nantucket model around the country, most communities still lack the infrastructure to set a zero-waste target.
Aside from the difficulty of persuading residents and businesses to divide their trash, many towns and municipalities have been unwilling to make the significant capital investments in machines like composters that can process food and yard waste. Yet attitudes are shifting, and cities like San Francisco and Seattle are at the forefront of the changeover. Both of those cities have adopted plans for a shift to zero-waste practices and are collecting organic waste curbside in residential areas for composting.
Food waste, which the E.P.A. says accounts for about 13 percent of total trash nationally — and much more when recyclables are factored out of the total — is viewed as the next big frontier.
When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more, when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no methane by-product.
Green Foodservice Alliance, a division of the Georgia Restaurant Association, has been adding restaurants throughout Atlanta and its suburbs to its so-called zero-waste zones. And companies are springing up to meet the growth in demand from restaurants for recycling and compost haulers.
Steve Simon, a partner in Fifth Group, a company that owns Ecco and four other restaurants in the Atlanta area, said that the hardest part of participating in the alliance’s zero-waste-zone program was not training his staff but finding reliable haulers.
“There are now two in town, and neither is a year old, so it is a very tentative situation,” Mr. Simon said.
Still, he said he had little doubt that the hauling sector would grow and that all five of the restaurants would eventually be waste-free.
Packaging is also quickly evolving as part of the zero-waste movement. Bioplastics like the forks at Yellowstone, made from plant materials like cornstarch that mimic plastic, are used to manufacture a growing number of items that are compostable.
Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a nonprofit organization that certifies such products, said that the number of companies making compostable products for food service providers had doubled since 2006 and that many had moved on to items like shopping bags and food packaging.
The transition to zero waste, however, has its pitfalls.
Josephine Miller, an environmental official for the city of Santa Monica, Calif., which bans the use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with a brown or green stripe.
Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is to prevail, environmental officials say.
“Technology exists, but a lot of education still needs to be done,” said Mr. Johnston of the E.P.A.
He expects private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.
“It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.”
And finally, one on problems faced by African immigrants in the Bronx
For African Immigrants, Bronx Culture Clash Turns Violent
By SAM DOLNICK
The storefronts on a stretch of Webster Avenue in the South Bronx tell the story of local shifts as well as any census: a Senegalese-run 99-cent store, an African video store, an African-run fast-food spot, a mosque, several African restaurants.
The owner of Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., named for the coalition of West African nations, envisioned it as a community hub in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont, where Americans would try his wife’s cassava soup and realize it’s not so foreign after all. But a year in, the owner, Mohammed M. Barrie, said he could count the number of American patrons on one hand.
Meanwhile, he and his customers have been taunted, he said, and his restaurant’s window urinated on. Someone tried to break into a diner’s car. Then there is the bullet hole in the front window, a mark from a gunshot through the window late one night last summer.
“Those people, they don’t respect African people,” said Mr. Barrie, a Sierra Leone native who settled in the United States in 1998. “I pay my bills, I pay my taxes, they still ...” He trailed off.
Down the block, Muhammed Sillah sat in front of the tiny Al Tawba mosque, eyeing the jungle gym across the street and remembering when he used to let his children play outside.
“Spanish kids, American kids — but no African kids,” said Mr. Sillah, a Gambian mechanic raising five children in Claremont. “We’re scared.”
Their fear and frustration are shared by many local West African immigrants, whose fast-growing presence in the neighborhood — and in the city over all — has been accompanied by increasing tensions with the local black American residents.
“They think they’re better than black people,” James Carroll, a retired Army specialist standing in front of a busy convenience store, said of the West African immigrants. “We’re supposed to be one community — we’re supposed to be able to get along — but they don’t give it a chance.”
Some of the tension can be attributed to cultural differences that all immigrants face, though the West Africans in Claremont, as conservative Muslims, have the added challenge of adjusting to a post-9/11 New York. But resentment and mistrust has escalated to actual violence, and, they say, left them feeling under siege.
After reports of nearly two dozen attacks on West African immigrants in the last two years, community leaders reached out to the police, who interviewed 17 Africans in the neighborhood and filed 11 criminal complaints. Two of those were deemed hate crimes, including an attack in June that left a Gambian immigrant hospitalized for eight days. They have made no arrest in either bias case, but a police mobile truck with a video camera now stands outside the mosque.
Claremont straddles the 44th and 42nd Precincts, two of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. This year, there have been 319 robberies in the 44th Precinct and 237 assaults in the 42nd. At the Butler Houses, part of a complex of housing projects that loom over the neighborhood, police sirens provide a background soundtrack, and residents of all colors and nationalities caution against walking around at night.
But the West Africans say the attacks on them are calculated. “It’s prejudice,” said Dembo Fofana, who said a beating in June by 10 to 15 men left him with broken ribs and internal bleeding. “It’s because we’re African, and we’re Muslim.”
Mr. Fofana, who came to this country 21 years ago, has not returned to his job at a bakery since the assault. He stays home, recovering, receiving disability checks and caring for his five children.
“There’s a lot of tension,” he said. “Just yesterday, someone said, ‘What would you think if I came to Africa and tried to take your property?’ I told him, ‘Brother, I’m not taking anything from you. I’m just trying to live my life.’ ”
The African population in the Bronx has grown considerably in recent years: the census reported 12,063 sub-Saharan Africans in 1990, while the most recent census estimate was 61,487.
In the community district that includes Claremont, black Americans made up 44 percent of the population, according to 2000 census figures, with 52.9 percent of the area Hispanic. African immigrants were nearly 10 percent of the population, a number likely to be much higher in the 2010 census.
The Africans in Claremont hail mainly from poor, French-speaking countries: Guinea, Mali, Senegal. Like immigrants across New York, many are here illegally, working long hours for little pay. Many work as taxi drivers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers — jobs that keep them on the street late at night.
But some say the Muslims deliberately hold themselves apart. A 37-year-old American man who gave his name as Dre pointed to the pavement in front of the mosque where the African men, easily identifiable in their beards and skullcaps, gather each afternoon. “If you don’t give praise to Allah, don’t go there,” he said. “It’s just like Afghanistan.”
Kantara Baragi, the imam of the Al Tawba mosque, acknowledges that insularity is part of the problem. “We don’t hang around,” said Mr. Baragi, whose delicate frame nearly disappears inside his long, flowing robes. “We just go to work. We don’t have a relationship with people here. They don’t know us.”
So community leaders organized two meetings this summer with police officials, politicians, community board members and housing association leaders. The goal, Mr. Baragi said, was “to let them know us so they don’t look at us like strangers.”
Zain Abdullah, an assistant professor of religion, race and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia, says it is common for African immigrants to suffer harassment when they settle in traditionally black neighborhoods in big cities, like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia.
“Many African-Americans feel that the influx of Africans coming in represents a kind of invasion,” he said. “Culturally, African-Americans have always imagined themselves as Africans, or at least of African descent, but they might have never encountered Africans from the continent. The actual encounter is shocking.”
Mr. Baragi, the imam, says he tries to accommodate his neighbors. His mosque, which blends in with the other storefronts, does not sound the call to prayer through speakers because “we don’t need to force everyone to hear what we’re doing.”
Instead, five times a day, from the sidewalk or, when it is cold, from behind the front door, a man from Al Tawba sings the call in a voice drowned out by the rumbling traffic.
Down the block at Café de C.E.D.E.A.O., a young man walked in last week wearing a Yankees hat tilted askew, an oversize military-style jacket and baggy pants. He looked like any member of the crowd hanging out in front of the Butler Houses, but Fofana Alhusane’s outfit was calculated, a camouflage to hide his Gambian roots.
“African clothes are dangerous,” he said. “I used to wear them, but I saw a few people get beat up, so now I wear New York clothes.”
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Date: 2009-10-20 10:09 pm (UTC)They're not a good kind of fish to have in a bowl, even though, being pond carp, they've got a high tolerance for stale mucky water. If one must have a single pretty fish in a bowl, go with a male betta, but even he would be happier and live longer in a proper aquarium.
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Date: 2009-11-03 08:39 pm (UTC)Yay for zero-waste! Apparently, Americans are capable of thinking after all. One measure that I'd propose, though, that no one seems to think of, is that styrofoam just plain shouldn't be allowed in the trash, like other hazardous materials. Instead, we should require that it be collected in separate containers, where it would be taken away, washed, and reused as packing material and house insulation.
The second article, too, is sad, but I'm also a bit suspicious about how these kids know so little-- it can't be just a matter of where they live. I'm wondering how I learned about things like subways, and that bacon comes from pigs. A lot from my mom, I think... probably even more from books. Ah-- there's the problem-- these kids don't read! Doesn't TV show this stuff, though? I'm sure every rural kid has seen an escalator on TV.