Beware the articles of (belated) March.
Mar. 15th, 2010 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
An editorial on obesity and discrimination
For Obese People, Prejudice in Plain Sight
By HARRIET BROWN
As a woman whose height and weight put me in the obese category on the body-mass-index chart, I cringed when Michelle Obama recently spoke of putting her daughters on a diet. While I’m sure the first lady’s intentions are good, I’m also sure that her comments about childhood obesity will add yet another layer to the stigma of being overweight in America.
Last August, Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a cardiac surgeon and chief executive of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, told a columnist for The New York Times that if he could get away with it legally, he would refuse to hire anyone who is obese. He probably could get away with it, actually, because no federal legislation protects the civil rights of fat workers, and only one state, Michigan, bans discrimination on the basis of weight.
Dr. Cosgrove may be unusually blunt, but he is far from alone. Public attitudes about fat have never been more judgmental; stigmatizing fat people has become not just acceptable but, in some circles, de rigueur. I’ve sat in meetings with colleagues who wouldn’t dream of disparaging anyone’s color, sex, economic status or general attractiveness, yet feel free to comment witheringly on a person’s weight.
Over the last few years, fat people have become scapegoats for all manner of cultural ills. “There’s an atmosphere now where it’s O.K. to blame everything on weight,” said Dr. Linda Bacon, a nutrition researcher and the author of “Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight” (Benbella, 2008). “If we’re worried about climate change, someone comes out with an article about how heavier people weigh more, so they require more fuel, and they blame the climate change crisis on fatter people. We have this strong belief system that it’s their fault, that it’s all about gluttony or lack of exercise.”
It’s no secret that being fat is rarely good for your career. Heather Brown (no relation) has experienced this firsthand. A few years ago, she applied for a grant-writing job with a small nonprofit in the Boston area. After a successful phone interview, she was invited to the office.
“As soon as I shook the interviewer’s hand, I knew she would not hire me,” Ms. Brown said. “She gave me a look of utter disdain, and made a big deal about whether we should take the stairs or ride the elevator to the room where we were going to talk. During the actual interview, she would not even look at me and kept looking to the side.” Ms. Brown, 36, who now works as an assistant dean at a college near Chicago, said she never even got a “No thank you” letter after the interview.
That story is all too familiar to people like Bill Fabrey, an advocate who in 1969 founded the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. The organization’s archives, he says, are full of stories from people who say they lost jobs or promotions because of their weight, or were not hired in the first place.
Some of the most blatant fat discrimination comes from medical professionals. Rebecca Puhl, a clinical psychologist and director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, has been studying the stigma of obesity for more than a decade. More than half of the 620 primary care doctors questioned for one study described obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and unlikely to comply with treatment.” (This last is significant, because doctors who think patients won’t follow their instructions treat and prescribe for them differently.)
Dr. Puhl said she was especially disturbed at how openly the doctors expressed their biases. “If I was trying to study gender or racial bias, I couldn’t use the assessment tools I’m using, because people wouldn’t be truthful,” she said. “They’d want to be more politically correct.”
Despite the abundance of research showing that most people are unable to make significant long-term changes in their weight, it’s clear that doctors tend to view obesity as a matter of personal responsibility. Perhaps they see shame and stigma as a health care strategy.
If so, is it working? Not very well. Many fat people sidestep such judgments by simply avoiding doctor visits, whether for routine checkups, preventive screenings or urgent health problems.
Indeed, Dr. Peter A. Muennig, an assistant professor of health policy at Columbia, says stigma can do more than keep fat people from the doctor: it can actually make them sick. “Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.”
Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity. In studies, Dr. Muennig has found that women who say they feel they are too heavy suffer more mental and physical illness than women who say they feel fine about their size — no matter what they weigh.
Even if doctors don’t directly express weight-based judgments, their biases can hurt patients. One recent study shows that the higher a patient’s body mass, the less respect doctors express for that patient. And the less respect a doctor has for a patient, says Dr. Mary Huizinga, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the less time the doctor spends with the patient and the less information he or she offers.
Fat stigma affects everyone’s health — fat, thin or in between. Last fall, Lincoln University in southern Pennsylvania announced that it would weigh and measure all freshmen, and require those with a B.M.I. over 30 to enroll in a special fitness class. Fat rights advocates protested it as discrimination: If the fitness class was that important to student health, shouldn’t everyone take it?
Lincoln’s administrators backpedaled after a storm of bad press. But the controversy underscores the fact that fat stigma isn’t about improving people’s health, as doctors like Delos Cosgrove contend. If it were, the conversation would be about health rather than numbers on the scale and the B.M.I. chart.
Dr. Bacon tells the story of an overweight teenage girl whose high school was going through a “wellness campaign.” Hallways were plastered with posters saying “Prevent teenage obesity.” After the posters went up, the girl said, schoolmates began taunting her in the halls, pointing at the obese girl on the posters and saying, “Look at the fat chick.”
She said heavier students were now made to feel guilty about their lunch choices, but the thin ones could eat anything they wanted without comment — even if it was exactly what the fat kids were eating.
“Stigmatization gives the thinner kids permission to think there’s something wrong with the larger kids,” Dr. Bacon, the nutrition researcher, said. “And it doesn’t help them look at their own health habits. There’s got to be a way to do this more respectfully and more effectively.”
One about 4000 year old Chinese mummies
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
By NICHOLAS WADE
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.
Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.
In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.
The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.
The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.
All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.
The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.
As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.
At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.
Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.
In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.
The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.
Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said.
Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.
Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.
Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe.
There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site.
The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.
The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).
The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.
An exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. — the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia.
On saving the water and sewage systems of the US
Saving U.S. Water and Sewer Systems Would Be Costly
By CHARLES DUHIGG
WASHINGTON — One recent morning, George S. Hawkins, a long-haired environmentalist who now leads one of the largest and most prominent water and sewer systems, trudged to a street corner here where water was gushing into the air.
A cold snap had ruptured a major pipe installed the same year the light bulb was invented. Homes near the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood were quickly going dry, and Mr. Hawkins, who had recently taken over the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority despite having no experience running a major utility, was responsible for fixing the problem.
As city employees searched for underground valves, a growing crowd started asking angry questions. Pipes were breaking across town, and fire hydrants weren’t working, they complained. Why couldn’t the city deliver water, one man yelled at Mr. Hawkins.
Such questions are becoming common across the nation as water and sewer systems break down. Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.
Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.
“People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water,” said Mr. Hawkins, who before taking over Washington’s water system ran environmental groups and attended Princeton and Harvard, where he never thought he would end up running a sewer system.
“You can go a day without a phone or TV,” he added. “You can’t go a day without water.”
But in many cities, residents have protested loudly when asked to pay more for water and sewer services. In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento — and before Mr. Hawkins arrived, Washington — proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent.
So when Mr. Hawkins confronted the upset crowd near Dupont Circle, he sensed an opportunity to explain why things needed to change. It was a snowy day, and while water from the broken pipe mixed with slush, he began cheerily explaining that the rupture was a symptom of a nationwide disease, according to people present.
Mr. Hawkins — who at 49 has the bubbling energy of a toddler and the physique of an aging professor — told the crowd that the average age of the city’s water pipes was 76, nearly four times that of the oldest city bus. With a smile, he described how old pipes have spilled untreated sewage into rivers near homes.
“I don’t care why these pipes aren’t working!” one of the residents yelled. “I pay $60 a month for water! I just want my toilet to flush! Why do I need to know how it works?”
Mr. Hawkins smiled, quit the lecture, and retreated back to watching his crew.
On Capitol Hill, the plight of Mr. Hawkins and other utility managers has become a hot topic. In the last year, federal lawmakers have allocated more than $10 billion for water infrastructure programs, one of the largest such commitments in history.
But Mr. Hawkins and others say that even those outlays are almost insignificant compared with the problems they are supposed to fix. An E.P.A. study last year estimated that $335 billion would be needed simply to maintain the nation’s tap water systems in coming decades. In states like New York, officials estimate that $36 billion is needed in the next 20 years just for municipal wastewater systems.
As these discussions unfold, particular attention is being paid to Mr. Hawkins. Washington’s water and sewer system serves the White House, many members of Congress, and two million other residents, and so it surprised some when Mr. Hawkins was hired to head the agency last September, since he did not have an engineering background or the résumé of a utility chief.
In fact, after he had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1987, he spent a few years helping companies apply for permits to pollute rivers and lakes. (At night — without his firm’s knowledge — he had a second career as a professional break dancer. He met his wife, a nurse, when he fell off a platform at a dance club and landed on his head.)
But he quickly became disenchanted with corporate law. He moved to the E.P.A., where he fought polluters, and then the White House, and eventually relocated his family to a farm in New Jersey where they shoveled the manure of 35 sheep and kept watch over 175 chickens, and Mr. Hawkins began running a series of environmental groups.
The mayor of Washington, Adrian M. Fenty, asked Mr. Hawkins to move to the city in 2007 to lead the Department of the Environment. He quickly became a prominent figure, admired for his ability to communicate with residents and lawmakers. When the Water and Sewer Authority needed a new leader, board members wanted someone familiar with public relations campaigns. Mr. Hawkins’s mandate was to persuade residents to pay for updating the city’s antiquated pipes.
At a meeting with board members last month, Mr. Hawkins pitched his radical solution. Clad in an agency uniform — his name on the breast and creases indicating it had been recently unfolded for the first time — Mr. Hawkins suggested raising water rates for the average resident by almost 17 percent, to about $60 a month per household. Over the coming six years, that rate would rise above $100.
With that additional money, Mr. Hawkins argued, the city could replace all of its pipes in 100 years. The previous budget would have replaced them in three centuries.
The board questioned him for hours. Others have attacked him for playing on false fears.
“This rate hike is outrageous,” said Jim Graham, a member of the city council. “Subway systems need repairs, and so do roads, but you don’t see fares or tolls skyrocketing. Providing inexpensive, reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.”
Similar battles have occurred around the nation. In Philadelphia, officials are set to start collecting $1.6 billion for programs to prevent rain water from overwhelming the sewer system, amid loud complaints. Communities surrounding Cleveland threatened to sue when the regional utility proposed charging homeowners for the water pollution running off their property. In central Florida, a $1.8 billion proposal to build a network of drinking water pipes has drawn organized protests.
“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.
“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”
To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.
It’s an all-consuming job. Mr. Hawkins tries to show up at every major pipe break, no matter the hour. He often works late into the night, and for three years he has not lived with his wife and two teenage children, who remained in New Jersey.
“The kids really miss their father,” said his wife, Tamara. “When we take him to the train station after a visit, my daughter in particular will sometimes cry. He’s missing out on his kids’ childhoods.”
And even if Mr. Hawkins succeeds, the public might not realize it, or particularly care. Last month, the utility’s board approved Mr. Hawkins’s budget and started the process for raising rates. But even if the bigger budget reduces the frequency of water pipe breaks by half — a major accomplishment — many residents probably won’t notice. People tend to pay attention to water and sewer systems only when things go wrong.
“But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Hawkins said recently, in between a meeting with local environmentalists and rushing home to do paperwork in his small, spartan apartment, near a place where he was once mugged at gunpoint.
“This is the fight of our lifetimes,” he added. “Water is tied into everything we should care about. Someday, people are going to talk about our sewers with a real sense of pride.”
On Foursquare and similar services
Telling Friends Where You Are (or Not)
By JENNA WORTHAM
AUSTIN, Tex. — As Jordan Viator roams the conference rooms, dimly lit bars and restaurants here at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, she often pulls out her cellphone and uses the Foursquare service to broadcast her location.
Such a service might sound creepy to the privacy-minded. But it came in handy for Ms. Viator when she arrived Friday at a party in a bar called Speakeasy and could not find anyone she knew. Her friends who also use Foursquare could see where she was, and some joined her a few minutes later.
“I only share my location with people I am comfortable meeting up with, and when I want to be found,” said Ms. Viator, a 26-year-old communications manager at a nonprofit company.
Mobile services like Loopt and Google’s Latitude have promoted the notion of constantly beaming your location to a map that is visible to a network of friends — an idea that is not for everybody.
But now there is a different approach, one that is being popularized by Foursquare.
After firing up the Foursquare application on their phones, users see a list of nearby bars, restaurants and other places, select their location and “check in,” sending an alert to friends using the service.
This model, which may be more attractive than tracking because it gives people more choice in revealing their locations, is gathering speed in the Internet industry. Yelp, the popular site that compiles reviews of restaurants and other businesses, recently added a check-in feature to its cellphone application. And Facebook is expected to take a similar approach when it introduces location features to its 400 million users in coming months.
If checking in goes mainstream, it could give a lift to mobile advertising, which is now just a tiny percentage of overall spending on online ads. If a company was able to pitch offers to people who say they are at a particular spot, it would “allow for the sharpening of mobile advertising,” said Anne Lapkin, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.
The check-in idea got its start in 2004, when Foursquare’s predecessor, a service called Dodgeball, started to let people tell their friends where they were with a text-message blast.
Most cellphones at the time did not have GPS location features, “so using text to check in was a necessity,” said Dennis Crowley, who created the service with a classmate in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.
In 2005, Mr. Crowley sold Dodgeball to Google, which eventually shut it. He decided to expand on the idea with Foursquare.
“Each time you check in, you’re giving permission to share your location and get pinged with information about interesting things nearby,” Mr. Crowley said.
Since it was introduced at South by Southwest a year ago, Foursquare has swelled to more than 500,000 users. It now has 1.6 million check-ins a week. This year, Foursquare and other location services are the talk of the conference, which has become a launching pad and testing ground for Internet start-up companies.
One of the drawbacks to the check-in model, as opposed to constant tracking, is that people have to remember to use a service, said Josh Williams, co-founder of Gowalla, a location game. Gowalla revolves around finding virtual objects in real-world locations, something like a scavenger hunt.
“Just as people had to get into the habit of tweeting, they’ll have to learn the habit of checking in,” Mr. Williams said.
Many of these services are building in incentives to encourage regular use, often in the form of points and virtual badges.
Gowalla, which says about 100,000 people are using its application, is working with several companies to spread the word about its service at South by Southwest. Users who find a virtual drink coaster can redeem it at a participating bar for a free beverage. And the company teamed up with Palm to offer free cellphones to conference attendees who find a phone icon.
Other services are trying the check-in approach. Hot Potato allows users to create instant chat rooms around locations or events, like a concert. Whrrl hopes to lure users by treating check-ins as keys to exclusive virtual “societies.” And a service called MyTown lets people buy virtual property around them, in a twist on Monopoly.
For Yelp, check-ins are a way to make its users’ reviews more authoritative. Yelp users who check into a restaurant or bar can write a short review from the mobile application and earn points.
“If you go to a business often enough, you get a special badge deeming you a regular of a place,” said Eric Singley, a product manager at Yelp. “It adds an extra layer of credibility to a review online.”
Even Loopt, which since 2006 has relied on a live tracking approach, unveiled a new feature in November called Pulse, which allows users to check into locations to receive tips and suggestions on things to do nearby.
One big hurdle for tracking services like Loopt has been that the iPhone does not allow their applications to keep running in the background for continuous monitoring. Many early-adopter types who might try a new location service are iPhone owners.
But Sam Altman, a co-founder of Loopt, said the check-in model opened up some interesting advertising opportunities. Businesses can offer coupons and specials based on where people check in, he said, as they do with Loopt and Foursquare. “For advertisers, the places you go are much more interesting than the Web sites you click on,” he said.
On one school's structured recess using Playworks
Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss
By WINNIE HU
NEWARK — At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.
Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.
They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.
“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.
“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”
Broadway Elementary brought in Ms. Parker in January out of exasperation with students who, left to their own devices, used to run into one another, squabble over balls and jump-ropes or monopolize the blacktop while exiling their classmates to the sidelines. Since she started, disciplinary referrals at recess have dropped by three-quarters, to an average of three a week. And injuries are no longer a daily occurrence.
“Before, I was seeing nosebleeds, busted lips, and students being a danger to themselves and others,” said Alejandro Echevarria, the principal. “Now, Coach Brandi does miracles with 20 cones and three handballs.”
The school is one of a growing number across the country that are reining in recess to curb bullying and behavior problems, foster social skills and address concerns over obesity. They also hope to show children that there is good old-fashioned fun to be had without iPods and video games.
Playworks, a California-based nonprofit organization that hired Ms. Parker to run the recess program at Broadway Elementary, began a major expansion in 2008 with an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It has placed recess coaches in 170 schools in low-income areas of nine cities, including Boston, Washington and Los Angeles, and of Silicon Valley.
Playworks schools are not the only ones with organized recess games. In Florida, Broward County’s 140 elementary schools swapped recess for 30 minutes of teacher-supervised physical activities in 2007. Last year in Kearney, Neb., the district had a university professor and five students teach recess games and draw in students who tended to stand against the fence.
Although many school officials and parents like the organized activity, its critics say it takes away the only time that children have to unwind.
In Wyckoff, N.J., an upper-middle-class township in Bergen County with a population of 17,000, hundreds of people signed a petition in protest after the district replaced recess in 2007 with a “midday fitness” program.
“I just can’t imagine going through the entire day without a break, whether you’re an adult or a child,” said Maria Costa, a Wyckoff mother of three who said that every day her daughter came home feeling stress after rushing through lunch to run laps. “It’s just not natural.”
Recess has since been restored in Wyckoff’s middle school, and on alternating days in elementary schools.
Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”
Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.
“You still have to pay attention,” she said. “You still have to follow rules. You don’t have that time for your brain to relax.”
Adeola Whitney, executive director for Playworks in the Newark area, said that the recess coaches used a playbook with hundreds of games and gave students a say in what they do.
“It’s not rigid in any way, and it certainly allows for their creativity,” Ms. Whitney said. “In some cases, we’re teaching children how to play if they can’t go to the park because it’s drug-infested, or their parents can’t afford to send them to activities.”
Each school pays Playworks $23,500 a year to run a recess program — Broadway Elementary is using a grant from Covanta Energy, which owns a waste-to-energy plant in Newark — and the rest of the expenses for training, equipment, after-school activities and field trips are covered through the nonprofit’s grants and donations.
It is not just about fun and games. At University Heights Charter School in Newark, another of New Jersey’s eight Playworks programs, students have learned to settle petty disputes, like who had the ball first or who pushed whom, not with fists but with the tried and true rock-paper-scissors.
“Recess used to end with bad feelings that would continue to play out in the first 20 minutes of class,” said Misha Simmonds, the charter school’s executive director. “Instead of recess being a refreshing time, it took away from readiness to learn.”
Ms. Parker, 28, the coach at Broadway Elementary, had worked as a counselor for troubled teenagers in a group home in Burlington, N.C. Besides her work at recess, she visits each class once a week to play games that teach lessons about cooperation, sportsmanship and respect.
“These are the things that matter in life: who you are as a human being at the core,” she said.
Broadway Elementary, with 367 students in kindergarten to fourth grade, rises above a rough-hewn industrial neighborhood in the North Ward. Nearly all the students are black or Hispanic, and poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
There are three 15-minute recesses, with more than 100 children at a time packed into a fenced-in basketball court equipped with nothing more than a pair of netless hoops.
On a chilly morning, Ms. Parker shoveled snow off the blacktop so that the students could go outside after being cooped up in the cafeteria during recess in the previous week. She drew squares in blue and green chalk for a game called switch, a fast-paced version of musical chairs — without the chairs. (She goes through a box of chalk a week.)
Ms. Parker, who greets students with hugs and a cheerful “hello-hello,” keeps the rules simple so that they can focus on playing rather than on following directions. “We’re trying to get them to exert energy, to get it all out,” she said. “They can be as loud as they want. I never tell them to be quiet unless I’m telling them something.”
Jose Salcedo, a fourth grader, volunteers as a junior coach, though he said that he and his friends sometimes missed the old recess, because “nobody would tell us what to do.”
Others, like Khizeeq Murphy, 10, say they look forward to playing different games every day. Before, Khizeeq said, he used to just run and dribble a basketball.
Kazmir Payne, a second grader, wishes he could have his free time back, but his mother, Kizzy, appreciates the more regimented recess.
“It’s better this way because that’s how other kids get hurt, when you’re horse-playing,” she said. “I think the more supervision, the better.”
One of those mathy links
An alternet piece on birth control
Aaaaaand "Man On Internet Almost Falls Into World Of DIY Mustard Enthusiasts
For Obese People, Prejudice in Plain Sight
By HARRIET BROWN
As a woman whose height and weight put me in the obese category on the body-mass-index chart, I cringed when Michelle Obama recently spoke of putting her daughters on a diet. While I’m sure the first lady’s intentions are good, I’m also sure that her comments about childhood obesity will add yet another layer to the stigma of being overweight in America.
Last August, Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a cardiac surgeon and chief executive of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, told a columnist for The New York Times that if he could get away with it legally, he would refuse to hire anyone who is obese. He probably could get away with it, actually, because no federal legislation protects the civil rights of fat workers, and only one state, Michigan, bans discrimination on the basis of weight.
Dr. Cosgrove may be unusually blunt, but he is far from alone. Public attitudes about fat have never been more judgmental; stigmatizing fat people has become not just acceptable but, in some circles, de rigueur. I’ve sat in meetings with colleagues who wouldn’t dream of disparaging anyone’s color, sex, economic status or general attractiveness, yet feel free to comment witheringly on a person’s weight.
Over the last few years, fat people have become scapegoats for all manner of cultural ills. “There’s an atmosphere now where it’s O.K. to blame everything on weight,” said Dr. Linda Bacon, a nutrition researcher and the author of “Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight” (Benbella, 2008). “If we’re worried about climate change, someone comes out with an article about how heavier people weigh more, so they require more fuel, and they blame the climate change crisis on fatter people. We have this strong belief system that it’s their fault, that it’s all about gluttony or lack of exercise.”
It’s no secret that being fat is rarely good for your career. Heather Brown (no relation) has experienced this firsthand. A few years ago, she applied for a grant-writing job with a small nonprofit in the Boston area. After a successful phone interview, she was invited to the office.
“As soon as I shook the interviewer’s hand, I knew she would not hire me,” Ms. Brown said. “She gave me a look of utter disdain, and made a big deal about whether we should take the stairs or ride the elevator to the room where we were going to talk. During the actual interview, she would not even look at me and kept looking to the side.” Ms. Brown, 36, who now works as an assistant dean at a college near Chicago, said she never even got a “No thank you” letter after the interview.
That story is all too familiar to people like Bill Fabrey, an advocate who in 1969 founded the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. The organization’s archives, he says, are full of stories from people who say they lost jobs or promotions because of their weight, or were not hired in the first place.
Some of the most blatant fat discrimination comes from medical professionals. Rebecca Puhl, a clinical psychologist and director of research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, has been studying the stigma of obesity for more than a decade. More than half of the 620 primary care doctors questioned for one study described obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and unlikely to comply with treatment.” (This last is significant, because doctors who think patients won’t follow their instructions treat and prescribe for them differently.)
Dr. Puhl said she was especially disturbed at how openly the doctors expressed their biases. “If I was trying to study gender or racial bias, I couldn’t use the assessment tools I’m using, because people wouldn’t be truthful,” she said. “They’d want to be more politically correct.”
Despite the abundance of research showing that most people are unable to make significant long-term changes in their weight, it’s clear that doctors tend to view obesity as a matter of personal responsibility. Perhaps they see shame and stigma as a health care strategy.
If so, is it working? Not very well. Many fat people sidestep such judgments by simply avoiding doctor visits, whether for routine checkups, preventive screenings or urgent health problems.
Indeed, Dr. Peter A. Muennig, an assistant professor of health policy at Columbia, says stigma can do more than keep fat people from the doctor: it can actually make them sick. “Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.”
Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity. In studies, Dr. Muennig has found that women who say they feel they are too heavy suffer more mental and physical illness than women who say they feel fine about their size — no matter what they weigh.
Even if doctors don’t directly express weight-based judgments, their biases can hurt patients. One recent study shows that the higher a patient’s body mass, the less respect doctors express for that patient. And the less respect a doctor has for a patient, says Dr. Mary Huizinga, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the less time the doctor spends with the patient and the less information he or she offers.
Fat stigma affects everyone’s health — fat, thin or in between. Last fall, Lincoln University in southern Pennsylvania announced that it would weigh and measure all freshmen, and require those with a B.M.I. over 30 to enroll in a special fitness class. Fat rights advocates protested it as discrimination: If the fitness class was that important to student health, shouldn’t everyone take it?
Lincoln’s administrators backpedaled after a storm of bad press. But the controversy underscores the fact that fat stigma isn’t about improving people’s health, as doctors like Delos Cosgrove contend. If it were, the conversation would be about health rather than numbers on the scale and the B.M.I. chart.
Dr. Bacon tells the story of an overweight teenage girl whose high school was going through a “wellness campaign.” Hallways were plastered with posters saying “Prevent teenage obesity.” After the posters went up, the girl said, schoolmates began taunting her in the halls, pointing at the obese girl on the posters and saying, “Look at the fat chick.”
She said heavier students were now made to feel guilty about their lunch choices, but the thin ones could eat anything they wanted without comment — even if it was exactly what the fat kids were eating.
“Stigmatization gives the thinner kids permission to think there’s something wrong with the larger kids,” Dr. Bacon, the nutrition researcher, said. “And it doesn’t help them look at their own health habits. There’s got to be a way to do this more respectfully and more effectively.”
One about 4000 year old Chinese mummies
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
By NICHOLAS WADE
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
The long-vanished people have no name, because their origin and identity are still unknown. But many clues are now emerging about their ancestry, their way of life and even the language they spoke.
Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.
In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.
The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.
The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.
All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.
The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.
As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.
At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.
Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.
In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.
The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.
Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said.
Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.
Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.
Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe.
There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site.
The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.
The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).
The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.
An exhibition of the Tarim Basin mummies opens March 27 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif. — the first time that the mummies will be seen outside Asia.
On saving the water and sewage systems of the US
Saving U.S. Water and Sewer Systems Would Be Costly
By CHARLES DUHIGG
WASHINGTON — One recent morning, George S. Hawkins, a long-haired environmentalist who now leads one of the largest and most prominent water and sewer systems, trudged to a street corner here where water was gushing into the air.
A cold snap had ruptured a major pipe installed the same year the light bulb was invented. Homes near the fashionable Dupont Circle neighborhood were quickly going dry, and Mr. Hawkins, who had recently taken over the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority despite having no experience running a major utility, was responsible for fixing the problem.
As city employees searched for underground valves, a growing crowd started asking angry questions. Pipes were breaking across town, and fire hydrants weren’t working, they complained. Why couldn’t the city deliver water, one man yelled at Mr. Hawkins.
Such questions are becoming common across the nation as water and sewer systems break down. Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.
Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.
“People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water,” said Mr. Hawkins, who before taking over Washington’s water system ran environmental groups and attended Princeton and Harvard, where he never thought he would end up running a sewer system.
“You can go a day without a phone or TV,” he added. “You can’t go a day without water.”
But in many cities, residents have protested loudly when asked to pay more for water and sewer services. In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento — and before Mr. Hawkins arrived, Washington — proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent.
So when Mr. Hawkins confronted the upset crowd near Dupont Circle, he sensed an opportunity to explain why things needed to change. It was a snowy day, and while water from the broken pipe mixed with slush, he began cheerily explaining that the rupture was a symptom of a nationwide disease, according to people present.
Mr. Hawkins — who at 49 has the bubbling energy of a toddler and the physique of an aging professor — told the crowd that the average age of the city’s water pipes was 76, nearly four times that of the oldest city bus. With a smile, he described how old pipes have spilled untreated sewage into rivers near homes.
“I don’t care why these pipes aren’t working!” one of the residents yelled. “I pay $60 a month for water! I just want my toilet to flush! Why do I need to know how it works?”
Mr. Hawkins smiled, quit the lecture, and retreated back to watching his crew.
On Capitol Hill, the plight of Mr. Hawkins and other utility managers has become a hot topic. In the last year, federal lawmakers have allocated more than $10 billion for water infrastructure programs, one of the largest such commitments in history.
But Mr. Hawkins and others say that even those outlays are almost insignificant compared with the problems they are supposed to fix. An E.P.A. study last year estimated that $335 billion would be needed simply to maintain the nation’s tap water systems in coming decades. In states like New York, officials estimate that $36 billion is needed in the next 20 years just for municipal wastewater systems.
As these discussions unfold, particular attention is being paid to Mr. Hawkins. Washington’s water and sewer system serves the White House, many members of Congress, and two million other residents, and so it surprised some when Mr. Hawkins was hired to head the agency last September, since he did not have an engineering background or the résumé of a utility chief.
In fact, after he had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1987, he spent a few years helping companies apply for permits to pollute rivers and lakes. (At night — without his firm’s knowledge — he had a second career as a professional break dancer. He met his wife, a nurse, when he fell off a platform at a dance club and landed on his head.)
But he quickly became disenchanted with corporate law. He moved to the E.P.A., where he fought polluters, and then the White House, and eventually relocated his family to a farm in New Jersey where they shoveled the manure of 35 sheep and kept watch over 175 chickens, and Mr. Hawkins began running a series of environmental groups.
The mayor of Washington, Adrian M. Fenty, asked Mr. Hawkins to move to the city in 2007 to lead the Department of the Environment. He quickly became a prominent figure, admired for his ability to communicate with residents and lawmakers. When the Water and Sewer Authority needed a new leader, board members wanted someone familiar with public relations campaigns. Mr. Hawkins’s mandate was to persuade residents to pay for updating the city’s antiquated pipes.
At a meeting with board members last month, Mr. Hawkins pitched his radical solution. Clad in an agency uniform — his name on the breast and creases indicating it had been recently unfolded for the first time — Mr. Hawkins suggested raising water rates for the average resident by almost 17 percent, to about $60 a month per household. Over the coming six years, that rate would rise above $100.
With that additional money, Mr. Hawkins argued, the city could replace all of its pipes in 100 years. The previous budget would have replaced them in three centuries.
The board questioned him for hours. Others have attacked him for playing on false fears.
“This rate hike is outrageous,” said Jim Graham, a member of the city council. “Subway systems need repairs, and so do roads, but you don’t see fares or tolls skyrocketing. Providing inexpensive, reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.”
Similar battles have occurred around the nation. In Philadelphia, officials are set to start collecting $1.6 billion for programs to prevent rain water from overwhelming the sewer system, amid loud complaints. Communities surrounding Cleveland threatened to sue when the regional utility proposed charging homeowners for the water pollution running off their property. In central Florida, a $1.8 billion proposal to build a network of drinking water pipes has drawn organized protests.
“We’re relying on water systems built by our great-grandparents, and no one wants to pay for the decades we’ve spent ignoring them,” said Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor at Tufts University and a member of the E.P.A.’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council.
“There’s a lot of evidence that people are getting sick,” he added. “But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become.”
To bring those lapses into the light, Mr. Hawkins has become a cheerleader for rate increases. He has begun a media assault highlighting the city’s water woes. He has created a blog and a Facebook page that explain why pipes break. He regularly appears on newscasts and radio shows, and has filled a personal Web site with video clips of his appearances.
It’s an all-consuming job. Mr. Hawkins tries to show up at every major pipe break, no matter the hour. He often works late into the night, and for three years he has not lived with his wife and two teenage children, who remained in New Jersey.
“The kids really miss their father,” said his wife, Tamara. “When we take him to the train station after a visit, my daughter in particular will sometimes cry. He’s missing out on his kids’ childhoods.”
And even if Mr. Hawkins succeeds, the public might not realize it, or particularly care. Last month, the utility’s board approved Mr. Hawkins’s budget and started the process for raising rates. But even if the bigger budget reduces the frequency of water pipe breaks by half — a major accomplishment — many residents probably won’t notice. People tend to pay attention to water and sewer systems only when things go wrong.
“But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr. Hawkins said recently, in between a meeting with local environmentalists and rushing home to do paperwork in his small, spartan apartment, near a place where he was once mugged at gunpoint.
“This is the fight of our lifetimes,” he added. “Water is tied into everything we should care about. Someday, people are going to talk about our sewers with a real sense of pride.”
On Foursquare and similar services
Telling Friends Where You Are (or Not)
By JENNA WORTHAM
AUSTIN, Tex. — As Jordan Viator roams the conference rooms, dimly lit bars and restaurants here at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, she often pulls out her cellphone and uses the Foursquare service to broadcast her location.
Such a service might sound creepy to the privacy-minded. But it came in handy for Ms. Viator when she arrived Friday at a party in a bar called Speakeasy and could not find anyone she knew. Her friends who also use Foursquare could see where she was, and some joined her a few minutes later.
“I only share my location with people I am comfortable meeting up with, and when I want to be found,” said Ms. Viator, a 26-year-old communications manager at a nonprofit company.
Mobile services like Loopt and Google’s Latitude have promoted the notion of constantly beaming your location to a map that is visible to a network of friends — an idea that is not for everybody.
But now there is a different approach, one that is being popularized by Foursquare.
After firing up the Foursquare application on their phones, users see a list of nearby bars, restaurants and other places, select their location and “check in,” sending an alert to friends using the service.
This model, which may be more attractive than tracking because it gives people more choice in revealing their locations, is gathering speed in the Internet industry. Yelp, the popular site that compiles reviews of restaurants and other businesses, recently added a check-in feature to its cellphone application. And Facebook is expected to take a similar approach when it introduces location features to its 400 million users in coming months.
If checking in goes mainstream, it could give a lift to mobile advertising, which is now just a tiny percentage of overall spending on online ads. If a company was able to pitch offers to people who say they are at a particular spot, it would “allow for the sharpening of mobile advertising,” said Anne Lapkin, an analyst at the research firm Gartner.
The check-in idea got its start in 2004, when Foursquare’s predecessor, a service called Dodgeball, started to let people tell their friends where they were with a text-message blast.
Most cellphones at the time did not have GPS location features, “so using text to check in was a necessity,” said Dennis Crowley, who created the service with a classmate in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.
In 2005, Mr. Crowley sold Dodgeball to Google, which eventually shut it. He decided to expand on the idea with Foursquare.
“Each time you check in, you’re giving permission to share your location and get pinged with information about interesting things nearby,” Mr. Crowley said.
Since it was introduced at South by Southwest a year ago, Foursquare has swelled to more than 500,000 users. It now has 1.6 million check-ins a week. This year, Foursquare and other location services are the talk of the conference, which has become a launching pad and testing ground for Internet start-up companies.
One of the drawbacks to the check-in model, as opposed to constant tracking, is that people have to remember to use a service, said Josh Williams, co-founder of Gowalla, a location game. Gowalla revolves around finding virtual objects in real-world locations, something like a scavenger hunt.
“Just as people had to get into the habit of tweeting, they’ll have to learn the habit of checking in,” Mr. Williams said.
Many of these services are building in incentives to encourage regular use, often in the form of points and virtual badges.
Gowalla, which says about 100,000 people are using its application, is working with several companies to spread the word about its service at South by Southwest. Users who find a virtual drink coaster can redeem it at a participating bar for a free beverage. And the company teamed up with Palm to offer free cellphones to conference attendees who find a phone icon.
Other services are trying the check-in approach. Hot Potato allows users to create instant chat rooms around locations or events, like a concert. Whrrl hopes to lure users by treating check-ins as keys to exclusive virtual “societies.” And a service called MyTown lets people buy virtual property around them, in a twist on Monopoly.
For Yelp, check-ins are a way to make its users’ reviews more authoritative. Yelp users who check into a restaurant or bar can write a short review from the mobile application and earn points.
“If you go to a business often enough, you get a special badge deeming you a regular of a place,” said Eric Singley, a product manager at Yelp. “It adds an extra layer of credibility to a review online.”
Even Loopt, which since 2006 has relied on a live tracking approach, unveiled a new feature in November called Pulse, which allows users to check into locations to receive tips and suggestions on things to do nearby.
One big hurdle for tracking services like Loopt has been that the iPhone does not allow their applications to keep running in the background for continuous monitoring. Many early-adopter types who might try a new location service are iPhone owners.
But Sam Altman, a co-founder of Loopt, said the check-in model opened up some interesting advertising opportunities. Businesses can offer coupons and specials based on where people check in, he said, as they do with Loopt and Foursquare. “For advertisers, the places you go are much more interesting than the Web sites you click on,” he said.
On one school's structured recess using Playworks
Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has a New Boss
By WINNIE HU
NEWARK — At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.
Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.
They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.
“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.
“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”
Broadway Elementary brought in Ms. Parker in January out of exasperation with students who, left to their own devices, used to run into one another, squabble over balls and jump-ropes or monopolize the blacktop while exiling their classmates to the sidelines. Since she started, disciplinary referrals at recess have dropped by three-quarters, to an average of three a week. And injuries are no longer a daily occurrence.
“Before, I was seeing nosebleeds, busted lips, and students being a danger to themselves and others,” said Alejandro Echevarria, the principal. “Now, Coach Brandi does miracles with 20 cones and three handballs.”
The school is one of a growing number across the country that are reining in recess to curb bullying and behavior problems, foster social skills and address concerns over obesity. They also hope to show children that there is good old-fashioned fun to be had without iPods and video games.
Playworks, a California-based nonprofit organization that hired Ms. Parker to run the recess program at Broadway Elementary, began a major expansion in 2008 with an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It has placed recess coaches in 170 schools in low-income areas of nine cities, including Boston, Washington and Los Angeles, and of Silicon Valley.
Playworks schools are not the only ones with organized recess games. In Florida, Broward County’s 140 elementary schools swapped recess for 30 minutes of teacher-supervised physical activities in 2007. Last year in Kearney, Neb., the district had a university professor and five students teach recess games and draw in students who tended to stand against the fence.
Although many school officials and parents like the organized activity, its critics say it takes away the only time that children have to unwind.
In Wyckoff, N.J., an upper-middle-class township in Bergen County with a population of 17,000, hundreds of people signed a petition in protest after the district replaced recess in 2007 with a “midday fitness” program.
“I just can’t imagine going through the entire day without a break, whether you’re an adult or a child,” said Maria Costa, a Wyckoff mother of three who said that every day her daughter came home feeling stress after rushing through lunch to run laps. “It’s just not natural.”
Recess has since been restored in Wyckoff’s middle school, and on alternating days in elementary schools.
Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”
Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.
“You still have to pay attention,” she said. “You still have to follow rules. You don’t have that time for your brain to relax.”
Adeola Whitney, executive director for Playworks in the Newark area, said that the recess coaches used a playbook with hundreds of games and gave students a say in what they do.
“It’s not rigid in any way, and it certainly allows for their creativity,” Ms. Whitney said. “In some cases, we’re teaching children how to play if they can’t go to the park because it’s drug-infested, or their parents can’t afford to send them to activities.”
Each school pays Playworks $23,500 a year to run a recess program — Broadway Elementary is using a grant from Covanta Energy, which owns a waste-to-energy plant in Newark — and the rest of the expenses for training, equipment, after-school activities and field trips are covered through the nonprofit’s grants and donations.
It is not just about fun and games. At University Heights Charter School in Newark, another of New Jersey’s eight Playworks programs, students have learned to settle petty disputes, like who had the ball first or who pushed whom, not with fists but with the tried and true rock-paper-scissors.
“Recess used to end with bad feelings that would continue to play out in the first 20 minutes of class,” said Misha Simmonds, the charter school’s executive director. “Instead of recess being a refreshing time, it took away from readiness to learn.”
Ms. Parker, 28, the coach at Broadway Elementary, had worked as a counselor for troubled teenagers in a group home in Burlington, N.C. Besides her work at recess, she visits each class once a week to play games that teach lessons about cooperation, sportsmanship and respect.
“These are the things that matter in life: who you are as a human being at the core,” she said.
Broadway Elementary, with 367 students in kindergarten to fourth grade, rises above a rough-hewn industrial neighborhood in the North Ward. Nearly all the students are black or Hispanic, and poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.
There are three 15-minute recesses, with more than 100 children at a time packed into a fenced-in basketball court equipped with nothing more than a pair of netless hoops.
On a chilly morning, Ms. Parker shoveled snow off the blacktop so that the students could go outside after being cooped up in the cafeteria during recess in the previous week. She drew squares in blue and green chalk for a game called switch, a fast-paced version of musical chairs — without the chairs. (She goes through a box of chalk a week.)
Ms. Parker, who greets students with hugs and a cheerful “hello-hello,” keeps the rules simple so that they can focus on playing rather than on following directions. “We’re trying to get them to exert energy, to get it all out,” she said. “They can be as loud as they want. I never tell them to be quiet unless I’m telling them something.”
Jose Salcedo, a fourth grader, volunteers as a junior coach, though he said that he and his friends sometimes missed the old recess, because “nobody would tell us what to do.”
Others, like Khizeeq Murphy, 10, say they look forward to playing different games every day. Before, Khizeeq said, he used to just run and dribble a basketball.
Kazmir Payne, a second grader, wishes he could have his free time back, but his mother, Kizzy, appreciates the more regimented recess.
“It’s better this way because that’s how other kids get hurt, when you’re horse-playing,” she said. “I think the more supervision, the better.”
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