The kittens are wreaking havoc

[conuly]

So, to distract myself, it's linky article time!

Here's one on wild turkeys on Staten Island. We're on the North Shore instead of the South, but we still have them.

And one on barefoot running

When you’re stalking barefoot runners, camouflage helps. “Some of them get kind of prancy when they notice you filming,” Peter Larson says. “They put on this notion of what they think barefoot running should be. It looks weird.” Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire who has been on the barefoot beat for two years now, is also a stickler about his timing. “You don’t want to catch them too early in a run, when they’re cold, or too late, when they’re tired.”

If everything comes together just right, you’ll be exactly where Larson was one Sunday morning in September: peeking out from behind a tree on Governors Island in New York Harbor, his digital video camera nearly invisible on an ankle-high tripod, as the Second Annual New York City Barefoot Run got under way about a quarter-mile up the road. Hundreds of runners — men and women, young and old, athletic and not so much so, natives from 11 different countries — came pattering down the asphalt straight toward his viewfinder.

About half of them were actually barefoot. The rest wore Vibram FiveFingers — a rubber foot glove with no heel cushion or arch support — or Spartacus-style sandals, or other superlight “minimalist” running shoes. Larson surreptitiously recorded them all, wondering how many (if any) had what he was looking for: the lost secret of perfect running.

It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the “one best way” — not the fastest, necessarily, but the best: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world.

So how did one of our greatest strengths become such a liability? “The data suggests up to 79 percent of all runners are injured every year,” says Stephen Messier, the director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest University. “What’s more, those figures have been consistent since the 1970s.” Messier is currently 11 months into a study for the U.S. Army and estimates that 40 percent of his 200 subjects will be hurt within a year. “It’s become a serious public health crisis.”

Nothing seems able to check it: not cross-training, not stretching, not $400 custom-molded orthotics, not even softer surfaces. And those special running shoes everyone thinks he needs? In 40 years, no study has ever shown that they do anything to reduce injuries. On the contrary, the U.S. Army’s Public Health Command concluded in a report in 2010, drawing on three large-scale studies of thousands of military personnel, that using shoes tailored to individual foot shapes had “little influence on injuries.”

Two years ago, in my book, “Born to Run,” I suggested we don’t need smarter shoes; we need smarter feet. I’d gone into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to learn from the Tarahumara Indians, who tackle 100-mile races well into their geriatric years. I was a broken-down, middle-aged, ex-runner when I arrived. Nine months later, I was transformed. After getting rid of my cushioned shoes and adopting the Tarahumaras’ whisper-soft stride, I was able to join them for a 50-mile race through the canyons. I haven’t lost a day of running to injury since.

“Barefoot-style” shoes are now a $1.7 billion industry. But simply putting something different on your feet doesn’t make you a gliding Tarahumara. The “one best way” isn’t about footwear. It’s about form. Learn to run gently, and you can wear anything. Fail to do so, and no shoe — or lack of shoe — will make a difference.

That’s what Peter Larson discovered when he reviewed his footage after the New York City Barefoot Run. “It amazed me how many people in FiveFingers were still landing on their heels,” he says. They wanted to land lightly on their forefeet, or they wouldn’t be in FiveFingers, but there was a disconnect between their intentions and their actual movements. “Once we develop motor patterns, they’re very difficult to unlearn,” Larson explains. “Especially if you’re not sure what it’s supposed to feel like.”

The only way to halt the running-injury epidemic, it seems, is to find a simple, foolproof method to relearn what the Tarahumara never forgot. A one best way to the one best way.

Earlier this year, I may have found it. I was leafing through the back of an out-of-print book, a collection of runners’ biographies called “The Five Kings of Distance,” when I came across a three-page essay from 1908 titled “W. G. George’s Own Account From the 100-Up Exercise.” According to legend, this single drill turned a 16-year-old with almost no running experience into the foremost racer of his day.

I read George’s words: “By its constant practice and regular use alone, I have myself established many records on the running path and won more amateur track-championships than any other individual.” And it was safe, George said: the 100-Up is “incapable of harm when practiced discreetly.”

Could it be that simple? That day, I began experimenting on myself.

When I called Mark Cucuzzella to tell him about my find, he cut me off midsentence. “When can you get down here?” he demanded.

“Here” is Two Rivers Treads, a “natural” shoe store sandwiched between Maria’s Taqueria and German Street Coffee & Candlery in Shepherdstown, W.Va., which, against all odds, Cucuzzella has turned into possibly the country’s top learning center for the reinvention of running.

“What if people found out running can be totally fun no matter what kind of injuries they’ve had?” Cucuzzella said when I visited him last summer. “What if they could see — ” he jerked a thumb back toward his chest — “Exhibit A?”

Cucuzzella is a physician, a professor at West Virginia University’s Department of Family Medicine and an Air Force Reserve flight surgeon. Despite the demands of family life and multiple jobs, he still managed enough early-morning miles in his early 30s to routinely run marathons at a 5:30-per-mile pace. But he constantly battled injuries; at age 34, severe degenerative arthritis led to foot surgery. If he continued to run, his surgeon warned, the arthritis and pain would return.

Cucuzzella was despondent, until he began to wonder if there was some kind of furtive, Ninja way to run, as if you were sneaking up on someone. Cucuzzella threw himself into research and came across the work of, among others, Nicholas Romanov, a sports scientist in the former Soviet Union who developed a running technique he called the Pose Method. Romanov essentially had three rules: no cushioned shoes, no pushing off from the toes and, most of all, no landing on the heel.

Once Cucuzzella got used to this new style, it felt suspiciously easy, more like playful bouncing than serious running. As a test, he entered the Marine Corps Marathon. Six months after being told he should never run again, he finished in 2:28, just four minutes off his personal best.

“It was the beginning of a new life,” Cucuzzella told me. “I couldn’t believe that after a medical education and 20 years of running, so much of what I’d been taught about the body was being turned on its head.” Two weeks before turning 40, he won the Air Force Marathon and has since completed five other marathons under 2:35. Shortly before his 45th birthday this past September, he beat men half his age to win the Air Force Marathon again. He was running more on less training than 10 years before, but “felt fantastic.”

When he tried to spread the word, however, he encountered resistance. At a Runner’s World forum I attended before the Boston Marathon in April 2010, he told the story of how he bounced back from a lifetime of injuries by learning to run barefoot and relying on his legs’ natural shock absorption. Martyn Shorten, the former director of the Nike Sports Research Lab who now conducts tests on shoes up for review in Runner’s World, followed him to the microphone. “A physician talking about biomechanics — I guess I should talk about how to perform an appendectomy,” Shorten said. He then challenged Cucuzzella’s belief that cushioned shoes do more harm than good.

No matter. Cucuzzella went home and began hosting his own conferences. Peter Larson traveled from New Hampshire for Cucuzzella’s first gathering on a snowy weekend this past January. “I was a bit curious about how many people might show up to such an event in rural West Virginia,” Larson says. “Were the panelists going to outnumber the audience?” In fact, more than 150 attendees crowded right up to the dais.

Since then, West Virginia has become a destination for a growing number of those who are serious about the grass-roots reinvention of running. Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation shoemaker who created the Vivobarefoot line, flew in from London with the British running coach Lee Saxby for a one-day meeting with Cucuzzella. International researchers like Craig Richards, from Australia, and Hiro Tanaka, chairman of Exercise Physiology at the University of Fukuoka, have also visited, as well as scientists from a dozen different American states.

“He has turned a small town in an obese state into a running-crazed bastion of health,” Larson says. “Mark’s effort in transforming Shepherdstown is a testament to what a single person can accomplish.”

Not that he has everything figured out. I was at one of Cucuzzella’s free barefoot running clinics in May when he confronted his big problem: how do you actually teach this stuff? He had about 60 of us practicing drills on a grassy playground. “Now to run,” he said, “just bend forward from the ankles.” We all looked down at our ankles.

“No, no,” Cucuzzella said. “Posture, remember? Keep your heads up.”

We lifted our heads, and most of us then forgot to lean from the ankles. At that moment, a young girl flashed past us on her way to the monkey bars. Her back was straight, her head was high and her bare feet skittered along right under her hips.

“You mean like — ” someone said, pointing after the girl.

“Right,” Cucuzzella said. “Just watch her.”

So what ruined running for the rest of us who aren’t Tarahumara or 10 years old?

Back in the ’60s, Americans “ran way more and way faster in the thinnest little shoes, and we never got hurt,” Amby Burfoot, a longtime Runner’s World editor and former Boston Marathon champion, said during a talk before the Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon I attended last year. “I never even remember talking about injuries back then,” Burfoot said. “So you’ve got to wonder what’s changed.”

Bob Anderson knows at least one thing changed, because he watched it happen. As a high-school senior in 1966, he started Distance Running News, a twice-yearly magazine whose growth was so great that Anderson dropped out of college four years later to publish it full time as Runner’s World. Around then, another fledgling operation called Blue Ribbon Sports was pioneering cushioned running shoes; it became Nike. Together, the magazine and its biggest advertiser rode the running boom — until Anderson decided to see whether the shoes really worked.

“Some consumer advocate needed to test this stuff,” Anderson told me. He hired Peter Cavanagh, of the Penn State University biomechanics lab, to stress-test new products mechanically. “We tore the shoes apart,” Anderson says. He then graded shoes on a scale from zero to five stars and listed them from worst to first.

When a few of Nike’s shoes didn’t fare so well in the 1981 reviews, the company pulled its $1 million advertising contract with Runner’s World. Nike already had started its own magazine, Running, which would publish shoe reviews and commission star writers like Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson.

“Nike would never advertise with me again,” Anderson says. “That hurt us bad.” In 1985, Anderson sold Runner’s World to Rodale, which, he says, promptly abolished his grading system. Today, every shoe in Runner’s World is effectively “recommended” for one kind of runner or another. David Willey, the magazine’s current editor, says that it only tests shoes that “are worth our while.” After Nike closed its magazine, it took its advertising back to Runner’s World. (Megan Saalfeld, a Nike spokeswoman, says she was unable to find someone to comment about this episode.)

“It’s a grading system where you can only get an A,” says Anderson, who went on to become the founder and chief executive of Ujena Swimwear.

Just as the shoe reviews were changing, so were the shoes: fear, the greatest of marketing tools, entered the game. Instead of being sold as performance accessories, running shoes were rebranded as safety items, like bike helmets and smoke alarms. Consumers were told they’d get hurt, perhaps for life, if they didn’t buy the “right” shoes. It was an audacious move that flew in the face of several biological truths: humans had thrived as running animals for two million years without corrective shoes, and asphalt was no harder than the traditional hunting terrains of the African savanna.

In 1985, Benno Nigg, founder and currently co-director of the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Lab, floated the notion that impact and rear-foot motion (called pronation) were dangerous. His work helped spur an arms race of experimental technology to counter those risks with plush heels and wedged shoes. Running magazines spread the new gospel. To this day, Runner’s World tells beginners that their first workout should be opening their wallets: “Go to a specialty running store . . . you’ll leave with a comfortable pair of shoes that will have you running pain- and injury-free.”

Nigg now believes mistakes were made. “Initial results were often overinterpreted and were partly responsible for a few ‘blunders’ in sport-shoe construction,” he said in a speech to the International Society of Biomechanics in 2005. The belief in the need for cushioning and pronation control, he told me, was, in retrospect, “completely wrong thinking.” His stance was seconded in June 2010, when The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that a study of 105 women enrolled in a 13-week half-marathon training program found that every single runner who was given motion-control shoes to control excess foot pronation was injured. “You don’t need any protection at all except for cold and, like, gravel,” Nigg now says.

Of course, the only way to know what shoes have done to runners would be to travel back to a time when no one ever wore them. So that’s what one anthropologist has effectively done. In 2009, Daniel Lieberman, chairman of Harvard’s human evolutionary biology department, located a school in Kenya where no one wore shoes. Lieberman noticed something unusual: while most runners in shoes come down hard on their heels, these barefoot Kenyans tended to land softly on the balls of their feet.

Back at the lab, Lieberman found that barefoot runners land with almost zero initial impact shock. Heel-strikers, by comparison, collide with the ground with a force equal to as much as three times their body weight. “Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain.”

Lieberman, who is 47 and a six-time marathoner, was so impressed by the results of his research that he began running barefoot himself. So has Irene Davis, director of Harvard Medical School’s Spaulding National Running Center. “I didn’t run myself for 30 years because of injuries,” Davis says. “I used to prescribe orthotics. Now, honest to God, I run 20 miles a week, and I haven’t had an injury since I started going barefoot.”

Last fall, at the end of a local 10-mile trail race, I surprised myself by finishing five minutes faster than I had four years ago, when I was in much better shape. I figured the result was a fluke — until it happened again. No special prep, awful travel schedule and yet a personal best in a six-mile race.

“I don’t get it,” I told Cucuzzella this past June when we went for a run together through the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown. “I’m four years older. I’m pretty sure I’m heavier. I’m not doing real workouts, just whatever I feel like each day. The only difference is I’ve been 100-Upping.”

It was five months since I discovered W.S. George’s “100-Up,” and I’d been doing the exercise regularly. In George’s essay, he says he invented the 100-Up in 1874, when he was an 16-year-old chemist’s apprentice in England and could train only during his lunch hour. By Year 2 of his experiment, the overworked lab assistant was the fastest amateur miler in England. By Year 5, he held world records in everything from the half-mile to 10 miles.

So is it possible that a 19th-century teenager succeeded where 21st-century technology has failed?

“Absolutely, yes,” says Steve Magness, a sports scientist who works with top Olympic prospects at Nike’s elite “Oregon Project.” He was hired by Alberto Salazar to create, essentially, a squad of anti-Salazars. Despite his domination of the marathon in the ’80s, Salazar was plagued with knee and hamstring problems. He was also a heel-striker, which he has described as “having a tire with a nail in it.” Magness’s brief is to find ways to teach Nike runners to run barefoot-style and puncture-proof their legs.

“From what you’re telling me, it sounds promising,” Magness told me. “I’d love to see it in action.”

Mark Cucuzzella was just as eager. “All right,” he said in the middle of our run. “Let’s get a look at this.” I snapped a twig and dropped the halves on the ground about eight inches apart to form targets for my landings. The 100-Up consists of two parts. For the “Minor,” you stand with both feet on the targets and your arms cocked in running position. “Now raise one knee to the height of the hip,” George writes, “bring the foot back and down again to its original position, touching the line lightly with the ball of the foot, and repeat with the other leg.”

That’s all there is to it. But it’s not so easy to hit your marks 100 times in a row while maintaining balance and proper knee height. Once you can, it’s on to the Major: “The body must be balanced on the ball of the foot, the heels being clear of the ground and the head and body being tilted very slightly forward. . . . Now, spring from the toe, bringing the knee to the level of the hip. . . . Repeat with the other leg and continue raising and lowering the legs alternately. This action is exactly that of running.”

Cucuzzella didn’t like it as a teaching method — he loved it. “It makes so much physiological and anatomical sense,” he said. “The key to injury-free running is balance, elasticity, stability in midstance and cadence. You’ve got all four right there.”

Cucuzzella began trying it himself. As I watched, I recalled another lone inventor, a Czechoslovakian soldier who dreamed up a similar drill: he’d throw dirty clothes in the bathtub with soap and water, then jog on top. You can’t heel strike or overstride on slippery laundry. There’s only one way to run in a tub: the one best way.

At the 1952 Olympics, Emil Zatopek became the only runner ever to win gold medals in all three distance events: 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and the marathon, the first he ever ran. Granted, “the Human Locomotive” wasn’t a pretty sight. During his final push to the finish line, his head would loll and his arms would grab at the air “as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart,” as one sportswriter put it.

But from the waist down, Zatopek was always quick, light and springy, like a kid swooping across a playground — or like this once-arthritic physician in front of me, laughing with excitement as he hopped up and down in his bare feet in a parking lot.

A piece on the invention of money (Did I already post this once?)

And on "smart" thermostats.

Here's a piece by the ACLU on the death of RealID. How can we kill one unpopular move through simple non-compliance, and yet we still have to take off our shoes in the airport?

Also from the ACLU, a bit about finding out the "secret interpretation" of the PATRIOT Act. Secret interpretation... what? That's just creepy to contemplate.

In High Schools, a Critical Lens on Food

A commercial for McDonald’s fish sandwiches played in a classroom at Park Slope Collegiate one day last month as part of a class called the Science of Food. It was clear that many students had seen the ad — several sang along with the jingle — but this was the first time they had been asked to critique it.

“Who is the target audience for this ad?” asked their teacher, Joni Tonda.

“Us!” yelled the 23 students, practically in unison.

Through the class, which is part of a new program being taught at 15 city high schools, students are becoming aware that they are part of a lucrative demographic, and they are learning how companies target them.

Media literacy is only one part of Ms. Tonda’s lesson plan, which is based on a curriculum developed by a nonprofit group, FoodFight. The group’s founders, Carolyn Cohen and Deborah Lewison-Grant, two former public school teachers, set out to change the way adolescents think about food. By one estimate, 35 percent of adolescents in the United States are overweight or obese.

Though there have been several recent attempts to improve school food and to plant edible gardens at public schools — Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign among them — those efforts have largely been focused on elementary and junior high schools.

“High school students have been ignored in this conversation about the obesity epidemic,” Ms. Cohen said. “It’s a serious health crisis.”

The lesson plan blends media literacy, politics, nutrition and cooking. Students learn how to evaluate food labels, to prepare nutritious and affordable meals, and to identify the political and economic forces that shape their diet. Some will visit urban farms, food co-ops and a 400-acre farm upstate.

Sarah Katz, one of the first teachers trained in the program, in August 2010, said the curriculum appealed to her because of its interdisciplinary nature and because it was not preachy.

“Telling kids what they should and shouldn’t eat is not really effective,” said Ms. Katz, who taught a class called Food for Thought at Essex Street Academy last spring. “Teenagers don’t do things because adults tell them to. They need to care and have enough information to make their own choices.”

A FoodFight course begins with a critical look at marketing campaigns. Some students react with outrage. “Kids don’t like to be played by corporations,” Ms. Katz said. “They want to make their own choices.”

At another point, the class discusses why some neighborhoods lack access to healthy, affordable food, an issue that resonates with students because many FoodFight classes are taught in poor neighborhoods.

Students keep a food journal and learn how lobbyists try to influence federal dietary recommendations.

In the lesson about advertising at Park Slope Collegiate, Ms. Tonda organized her students into small groups and asked them to create a slogan for a real or imagined food product. Three boys in the back of the class designed an energy bar called Pro-Fit. “It’s more than protein; it’s Pro-Fit!” their slogan read.

Takiyah Newton, a senior, said, “I signed up for the class because I wanted to learn about the food we eat, and society and stuff.” A highlight, she said, was “learning about these companies and how they’re tricking us.”

Ms. Tonda said she had seen some changes in students’ behavior. After a lesson about the consequences of consuming too much sugar, Ms. Newton switched from McDonald’s sweetened iced tea to a no-calorie drink, Ms. Tonda said, and now brings bottled water to class. Another student, affected by the images of a crowded chicken farm in the documentary “Food Inc.,” has asked her mother to stop buying meat from industrial producers.

Ms. Katz, at Essex Street Academy, was skeptical at first that her students would alter their diets. But when she quizzed parents, it became clear that habits were changing. One student said he had cut out sugar-sweetened beverages. “His mom said, ‘So that’s why they’re still sitting there in the fridge!’ ” Ms. Katz said.

Before Brandon Rosales took the class last year, he drank a lot of soda and never thought about portion sizes. “I would skip breakfast, eat a light lunch and then stuff myself at dinner,” said Mr. Rosales, who acknowledged that he was overweight.

After his food journal revealed the unhealthy pattern, he began replacing juice and soda with water, he said, and started eating smaller meals. Since he took the class, he said, he has lost 10 pounds, and he continues to maintain the journal.

“Now my food journal looks clean,” he said. “My meals are good; I drink water. It’s like a healthy person’s journal.” His family history provides some motivation. “I have a family full of diabetics,” he said. “I want to live a happy life not having to put insulin in like my grandmas do.”

School Lunch Proposals Set Off a Dispute

The government has some thoughts on how to make the federally financed school lunch program more nutritious: A quarter-cup of tomato paste on pizza will no longer be considered a vegetable. Cut back on potatoes and add more fresh peaches, apples, spinach and broccoli. And hold the salt.

The proposed changes — the first in 15 years to the $11 billion school-lunch program — are meant to reduce rising childhood obesity, Agriculture Department officials say. Food companies including Coca-Cola, Del Monte Foods and the makers of frozen pizza and French fries have a huge stake in the new guidelines and many argue that it would raise the cost of meals and call for food that too many children just will not eat.

With some nutrition experts rallying to the Obama administration’s side, the battle is shaping up as a contentious and complicated fight involving lawmakers from farm states and large low-income urban areas that rely on the program, which fed some 30 million children last year with free or subsidized meals. Food companies have spent more than $5.6 million so far lobbying against the proposed rules.

A group of farm-state senators have already succeeded in blocking an Agriculture Department plan to limit the amount of starchy foods in school meals, and are now hoping to win a larger victory. The group includes Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who once worked picking potatoes and led the opposition to the new starch rules last month.

A third of American children are obese or overweight, according to the government, and roughly 40 percent of the calories they eat are consumed in the school lunch period. Nutrition experts say if the nation wants to make progress on the obesity crisis among children, what they eat at lunchtime has to be addressed.

The Agriculture Department said the proposed rules would add about $6.8 billion over the next five years, about 14 cents to the cost of a school lunch. But, “our proposed rule will improve the health and nutrition of our children and is based on sound science,” Kevin Concannon, an Agriculture Department under secretary, said in a statement.

Nutritionists like Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University and the author of “Food Politics,” called the proposed guidelines long overdue. “Schools are supposed to set an example of many values of society, and one of them ought to be eating well,” Ms. Nestle said. “It’s unfortunate that the food industry is putting profits before the health of children.”

According to a Harvard School of Public Health study, published this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, starchy carbohydrates like those in potatoes are responsible for many of the nation’s health problems, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. French fries and potato chips are the worst uses of the potato, but even boiled potatoes contribute to weight gain, the study found.

“And kids in school are getting the full brunt of that in their potato-rich diets,” said Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “While potatoes do have important nutrients, the nutrients can be found in other foods.”

The food industry agrees that eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing salt is a good thing. It says it has developed healthier foods over time to make school lunches more nutritious. But they say the government’s proposals go too far too quickly.

The National Potato Council, for example, said the proposal to offer fewer weekly servings of potatoes in favor of other vegetables and fruits was overly restrictive. “Everyone thinks that the only thing kids eat in school are French fries,” said John Keeling, the council’s executive vice president and chief executive. “But 90 percent of the potatoes served in schools are baked, boiled or mashed.”

Mr. Keeling said potatoes provided many of the nutrients like potassium and fiber that the Agriculture Department recommends and that limiting potatoes would increase the cost of meals. “Ninety percent of kids aren’t getting enough of the nutrients they need or the vegetables they need. It doesn’t make sense to tell them to eat less,” Mr. Keeling said. Besides, he added, children will actually eat potatoes as opposed to some other vegetables.

Leah Schmidt, director of nutrition services for Hickman Mills C-1 Schools in Kansas City, Mo., said children would eat other vegetables if they were cooked and seasoned to children’s tastes. “But there is no denying kids will eat potatoes,” she said. “They are popular.”

The American Frozen Food Institute said it was particularly concerned that the new guidelines would overly restrict sodium levels and greatly increase portions of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable serving. Schools would not be able to serve popular tomato products like salsa and spaghetti sauce unless the portions greatly exceeded one-quarter cup to count as a helping of vegetables. Corey Henry, a spokesman for the institute, called the tomato paste rules ridiculous. “You would basically render a pizza inedible if you had to put that much sauce on it to meet the new standards, and pizza is a big part of school lunches,” Mr. Henry said.

The government’s proposal echoes an uproar 30 years ago when the Reagan administration proposed saving money on the school lunch program by making a serving of ketchup a vegetable instead of a condiment. The idea was widely mocked and was never put in place.

The industry’s arguments have been persuasive, especially to lawmakers from agricultural states or from districts with a large number of low-income students. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, largely echoed the industry’s arguments in a letter last June that asked the Agriculture Department to reconsider its recommendations on the timeframe for reducing sodium and the tomato paste rules.

Schools that serve more than 60 percent of their lunches for free or reduced prices are reimbursed $2.79 per meal by the federal government. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus worry that that might not be enough to cover the additional cost of preparing healthier meals in low-income districts.

The House has passed a bill directing the Agriculture Department to basically start over with a new proposal while the Senate has restricted the department from cutting back on potatoes.

“This whole fight obscures the fact that the U.S.D.A.’s proposal is about helping kids eat a wide variety of vegetable and make lunches overall healthier,” said Margo G. Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit research group. “It’s about our children’s health. I think that point has long since been lost.”

For Kurds in Turkey, a Country’s Conflict Rends Families

Portraits of Mevlude Gungen’s two eldest children hang just above the television, the only piece of furniture in her spare living room. On a recent day, the set was tuned to the station run by a Kurdish militant group, bringing her news of the conflict that has haunted her country — and her family — for years.

Her daughter Emine ran away to join the militants two years ago, at age 14. Her son Ramazan, now 20, was drafted last year into the Turkish Army.

That has left the family, like so many others in this Kurdish corner of the country, stuck in the middle — caught between a guerrilla movement fighting for minority rights and local autonomy and a central government that says it wants to make peace, but fears carving up the country.

“My other children do not understand where either of them are,” said Ms. Gungen, 35, who has six younger children. “Sometimes I hear them saying, ‘What happens if they face each other? Do you think Emine will kill Ramazan, or that Ramazan will kill Emine?’ ”

She chastises them for voicing such thoughts, but says she wonders herself. She at least hears from her son, who writes and calls. But she has not heard from her daughter since the day Emine ran away to a militant training camp with her distant cousin and best friend, Heybet Gungen, who was also 14. Heybet’s brother Salih is also serving in the Turkish armed forces.

Ms. Gungen’s anxiety rises and falls with the frequency of the clashes between the government and the guerrillas, known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

Fighting has increased since June, rising to a pitch recently when a particularly deadly militant attack led the government to send thousands of soldiers to hunt down the fighters. Ms. Gungen pictures her daughter in danger — and alone. In late September, she watched in horror as the P.K.K.’s Denmark-based TV channel broadcast news that her daughter’s friend Heybet had been killed during a firefight with Turkish soldiers near the Iraq border, just an hour from home. She was 15.

“It was like I lost my own daughter that day, too,” Ms. Gungen said. “They were always together.”

Turkey and its Kurdish citizens have a long and acrimonious history. For decades, the central government, bent on a strict assimilation policy, cracked down on Kurds for expressions of their cultural identity, such as reading publications in Kurdish or listening to Kurdish music. That set the stage for an armed uprising that began in 1984, when the P.K.K. effectively declared war on the state.

Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed in a series of militant attacks and government reprisals that drove hundreds of thousands of Kurds from rural villages. Turkey, the United States and the European Union designated the P.K.K. a terrorist group.

In recent years, the government — in an attempt to join the European Union — has made some concessions to the Kurds, but promised constitutional changes have yet to be made, and many people remain wary.

The struggle for Kurdish rights has been emotionally messy. Many in the Kurdish southeast are partisans of the P.K.K.; others remain sympathetic to the group and its ambitions but are, at the same time, weary of war and eager for a peaceful resolution.

Families find themselves similarly torn, especially since military service is mandatory for Turkish young men, including Kurds. The young men who feel the most passionate about the rebels run away to join them. Those who disagree with their methods, or are unwilling to live their lives as fugitives, are forced to take up arms for a country from which many feel deeply excluded — and sometimes to take up arms against those they know, or love.

Some Kurdish nationalists and analysts claim that the government has chosen in recent years to deploy more Kurdish conscripts in their home region, where they are more likely to fight the P.K.K., in an attempt to prove the rebels are cold killers and to gain Kurds’ support.

“In the past, posting Kurdish soldiers to the east was considered to be unsafe by the army because of the lack of trust in the minority,” said Mithat Sancar, professor of law at Ankara University. “However, recently it has become almost intentional that young Kurds would be at the forefronts of the battle against the P.K.K., sending the message that the group also killed their own youth.”

The notoriously tight-lipped Turkish military has refused to address the claims. But Taubet Gungen, 45, who lost her daughter, Heybet, needs no confirmation. “The state brings our children face to face, and makes brothers kill each other,” she said.

Since the day her daughter died, she has forbidden her seven other children to speak about it, afraid that the pain would overcome her.

Taubet Gungen and her distant relative, Emine’s mother, say they had no inkling their daughters would run away. They still seem shocked, even as they describe the girls’ childhoods in which bitterness was a constant.

Emine, the more political of the two girls, knew well the family history; four uncles served jail time for what her mother describes as “defending their rights.”

Her mother, Mevlude, says she feels the government knows what changes could bring peace, but the slow pace of change makes her worry leaders are “ignoring the issues on purpose.”

She often watches the P.K.K. channel, beamed into the country via satellite because its transmissions are banned in Turkey. The channel includes a steady diet of news of the mistreatment of Kurds in Turkey and includes tributes to P.K.K. “martyrs” who die in battle, which is how Mevlude learned of the death of her daughter’s friend.

Like many children in this mountain town, Emine participated in antigovernment protests from a young age and even took part in her first daylong hunger strike to support prisoners’ rights when she was just 8.

“Like any mother, I would say to her, ‘Please eat, you will get sick,’ ” Mevlude Gungen said. “But she would say ‘No, I will do what everyone else is doing.’ ”

Here in Sirnak, residents say that the number of young people heading out to the mountains that surround the city to join the militants has grown in recent months as clashes between the guerrillas and the army have intensified.

According to figures collected by the International Crisis Group, which studies conflict worldwide, 111 members of the security forces have been killed since June, as have 31 civilians and at least 80 P.K.K. fighters.

This month, P.K.K. fighters killed 24 Turkish soldiers and wounded 18 more in a complex attack. In response, the Turkish military sent more than 10,000 troops backed by surveillance drones, helicopters and fighter jets into the southern province of Hakkari, just 90 miles from here, and across the border into Iraq. The operation has killed at least 270 militants and wounded more than 210, Turkey’s top military commander, Gen. Necdet Ozel, told the news channel NTV last week.

“Everyone’s children are going to the mountains, not only ours,” said Taubet Gungen. “There are thousands of mothers whose children are in the mountains. We are used to it, the same way our sons go away to the army.”

If their other children choose to join the P.K.K., neither woman thinks they could stop them; the children would just run away like Emine and Heybet, they say.

“I want peace for both sides,” Emine’s mother said. “The men in the army are our children, but so are the ones in the mountains. My daughter is with the P.K.K., but I am a soldier’s mother, too.”

A piece on science education in college

LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State Dining Room. He tested a steering wheel designed by middle schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot that plays soccer. It was meant as an inspirational moment: children, science is fun; work harder.

Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.

“We’re losing an alarming proportion of our nation’s science talent once the students get to college,” says Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who has studied the matter. “It’s not just a K-12 preparation issue.”

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for medical school fade. There is no doubt that the main majors are difficult and growing more complex. Some students still lack math preparation or aren’t willing to work hard enough.

Other deterrents are the tough freshman classes, typically followed by two years of fairly abstract courses leading to a senior research or design project. “It’s dry and hard to get through, so if you can create an oasis in there, it would be a good thing,” says Dr. Goldberg, who retired last year as an engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now an education consultant. He thinks the president’s chances of getting his 10,000 engineers is “essentially nil.”

In September, the Association of American Universities, which represents 61 of the largest research institutions, announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques.

“There is a long way to go,” says Hunter R. Rawlings, the association’s president, “and there is an urgent need to accelerate the process of reform.”

The latest research also suggests that there could be more subtle problems at work, like the proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences, which provides another incentive for students to leave STEM majors. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

MATTHEW MONIZ bailed out of engineering at Notre Dame in the fall of his sophomore year. He had been the kind of recruit most engineering departments dream about. He had scored an 800 in math on the SAT and in the 700s in both reading and writing. He also had taken Calculus BC and five other Advanced Placement courses at a prep school in Washington, D.C., and had long planned to major in engineering.

But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’ ” And as he looked ahead at the curriculum, he did not see much relief on the horizon.

So Mr. Moniz, a 21-year-old who likes poetry and had enjoyed introductory psychology, switched to a double major in psychology and English, where the classes are “a lot more discussion based.” He will graduate in May and plans to be a clinical psychologist. Of his four freshman buddies at Notre Dame, one switched to business, another to music. One of the two who is still in engineering plans to work in finance after graduation.

Mr. Moniz’s experience illustrates how some of the best-prepared students find engineering education too narrow and lacking the passion of other fields. They also see easier ways to make money.

Notre Dame’s engineering dean, Peter Kilpatrick, will be the first to concede that sophomore and junior years, which focus mainly on theory, remain a “weak link” in technical education. He says his engineering school has gradually improved its retention rate over the past decade by creating design projects for freshmen and breaking “a deadly lecture” for 400 students into groups of 80. Only 50 to 55 percent of the school’s students stayed through graduation 10 years ago. But that figure now tops 75 percent, he says, and efforts to create more labs in the middle years could help raise it further.

“We’re two years into that experiment and, quite honestly, it’s probably going to take 5 to 10 years before we’re really able to inflesh the whole curriculum with this project-based learning,” Dean Kilpatrick says.

No one doubts that students need a strong theoretical foundation. But what frustrates education experts is how long it has taken for most schools to make changes.

The National Science Board, a public advisory body, warned in the mid-1980s that students were losing sight of why they wanted to be scientists and engineers in the first place. Research confirmed in the 1990s that students learn more by grappling with open-ended problems, like creating a computer game or designing an alternative energy system, than listening to lectures. While the National Science Foundation went on to finance pilot courses that employed interactive projects, when the money dried up, so did most of the courses. Lecture classes are far cheaper to produce, and top professors are focused on bringing in research grants, not teaching undergraduates.

In 2005, the National Academy of Engineering concluded that “scattered interventions” had not resulted in widespread change. “Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,” it said, “is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.”

Since becoming Notre Dame’s dean in 2008, Dr. Kilpatrick has revamped and expanded a freshman design course that had gotten “a little bit stale.” The students now do four projects. They build Lego robots and design bridges capable of carrying heavy loads at minimal cost. They also create electronic circuit boards and dream up a project of their own.

“They learn how to work with their hands, how to program the robot and how to work with design constraints,” he says. But he also says it’s inevitable that students will be lost. Some new students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical engineering is. Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits. By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.

“We’re in a worldwide competition, and we’ve got to retain as many of our students as we can,” Dean Kilpatrick says. “But we’re not doing kids a favor if we’re not teaching them good life and study skills.”

WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, in Massachusetts, one of the nation’s oldest technological schools, has taken the idea of projects to heart. While it still expects students to push their way through standard engineering and science classes, it ripped up its traditional curriculum in the 1970s to make room for extensive research, design and social-service projects by juniors and seniors, including many conducted on trips with professors overseas. In 2007, it added optional first-year projects — which a quarter of its freshmen do — focused on world problems like hunger or disease.

“That kind of early engagement, and letting them see they can work on something that is interesting and important, is a big deal,” says Arthur C. Heinricher, the dean of undergraduate studies. “That hooks students.”

And so late this past summer, about 90 freshmen received e-mails asking if they typically received flu vaccines. The e-mails were not from the health services office, but from students measuring how widely flu spreads at different rates of vaccination. Two of the students had spent part of their freshmen year researching diseases and devising a survey. Now, as juniors, they were recruiting the newcomers to take part in simulations, using neon wristbands and stickers, to track how many of them became “infected” as they mingled during orientation.

Brenna Pugliese, one of the juniors and a biology major, says the two-day exercise raised awareness on campus of the need for more students to get the vaccine. “I can honestly say that I learned more about various biology topics than I ever learned in any other class,” she says.

Teachers say they have been surprised by the sophistication of some of the freshmen projects, like a device to harvest kinetic energy that is now being patented. But the main goals are to enable students to work closely with faculty members, build confidence and promote teamwork. Studies have shown that women, in particular, want to see their schoolwork is connected to helping people, and the projects help them feel more comfortable in STEM fields, where men far outnumber women everywhere except in biology.

Seventy-four percent of W.P.I. undergraduates earn bachelor’s degrees within four years and 80 percent by six years.

Most of the top state research universities have added at least a splash of design work in the freshman year. The University of Illinois began this fall to require freshmen engineering students to take a course on aspirations for the profession and encourages them to do a design project or take a leadership seminar. Most technical schools push students to seek summer internships and take semesters off to gain practical work experiences. The hope is that the lure of high-paying jobs during an economic downturn will convince more students to stick with it.

Some private schools have also adjusted their grading policies to ease some of the pressure on STEM students. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long given freshmen only “pass” or “no record” grades in the first half of the year while they get used to the workload. W.P.I. lets undergraduates take up to three classes for which no grade is recorded if they would have received less than a C. Any required courses would have to be repeated.

Ilea Graedel, a 20-year-old junior in aerospace engineering, says that policy provides “a nice buffer if you want to try something new, like a class outside your comfort zone.”

But what really helps Ms. Graedel get through the rigors of STEM, she says, is hanging onto her aspirations. She grew up in a farming area in Washington State, the only student from her high school class of 26 pursuing a technology degree. She has wanted to be an astronaut since she was 3, when her mother took her to Boeing’s Museum of Flight in Seattle and bought her a book called “I Want to Be an Astronaut.”

The space program has been sharply cut back. Still, she says, “I’m going to hold onto that dream very dearly.”

Taming Unruly Wind Power

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in the Pacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

The devices then function as thermal batteries, capable of giving back the energy when it is needed. Microchips run both systems, ensuring that tap-water and room temperatures in the home hardly vary.

“It’s a little bit of that Big Brother control, almost,” said Theresa Rothweiler, a teacher’s aide in the Port Angeles, Wash., school system who nonetheless signed up for the program with her husband, Bruce, a teacher.

She said she had been intrigued by an ad that Bonneville placed in the local paper that asked consumers to help enable the grid to absorb more renewable energy, especially wind.

“We’re always looking at ways to save energy, or be more efficient or green, however you want to put it,” said Ms. Rothweiler, who worries about leaving the planet a livable place for her 21-year-old daughter, Gretchen. Bonneville paid for the special technology, which runs around $1,000 per home.

The initial goal of Bonneville’s pilot program is to gain experience in charging and “discharging” the water heaters and space heaters to see how much response operators can count on as the use of these thermal batteries expands.

Mark K. Lauby, director of reliability assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which enforces standards on the grid, said that such storage innovations would be “the holy grail” as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy.

While the threat of excess supply is most severe in the Pacific Northwest, other regions may land in the same situation in coming years because a surplus would threaten to destabilize the electric system as much as a shortage.

California, for example, is committed to getting a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

That would be harder if it had to turn off the wind machines on their best generating days to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed.

For decades, the Bonneville Power Administration rarely had a problem with excess supply. Its backbone is hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, and while the operators must often run all of the falling water through its power-producing turbines for environmental reasons, the grid could adjust the supply by turning off fossil fuel plants.

That balance began to shift over the last few years as entrepreneurs built hundreds of wind machines nearby in the Columbia River Gorge, an area that utility executives now call a “wind ghetto.” While the wind turbines produce electricity far below their capacity most hours of the year, they get busy when a storm rolls through, which is when river flows are highest, too.

The agency can simply shut down the wind machines, and it did so intermittently this summer when excess power threatened the grid. But that angered the wind operators, who earn money from the electricity they sell and from tax and other credits based on their production.

This June, several wind companies appealed Bonneville’s policy to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, calling it discriminatory, and in August they filed a federal court challenge that is still pending.

For Bonneville, the full dangers of excess supply first hit home during the June 2010 emergency, when a severe storm whipped through the region. The transmission network had so much power that the agency turned off all its fossil fuel generation, gave electricity away to neighboring networks and even told the system’s only nuclear plant to slash its production by 78 percent, a highly unusual step.

The region squeaked through, but the agency was stretching its resources “to their limits,” said Doug Johnson, a spokesman for Bonneville. At one point the system was running almost entirely on renewable energy.

“This is probably about the only place in the country where that could happen,” said Michael Milstein, another spokesman with the agency.

The problem was complicated by environmental rules involving the hydroelectric dams.

The dams were built with spillways, or paths where operators can divert water without passing it through the power-producing turbines. But when the water goes through the spillways, it picks up nitrogen bubbles that can kill juvenile fish, so there are strict limits on their use.

Operators can usually keep the system in balance without excessive use of spillways, but in the June 2010 case, they were coping with as many as 2,000 megawatts of wind power, roughly double Seattle’s power use or what two nuclear plants can deliver.

Wind installations have grown since then. So Bonneville began advertising for volunteers to accept extra electricity, mainly homeowners with electric heat and with water heaters of recent vintage.

Plumbers install a mixing valve on the water heaters to keep the faucet temperature safe, and new wiring and a small computer keep track of energy flows.

The agency says that some 200 homes will soon have the adapted water heaters, space heaters or both. In hundreds more, it is installing more traditional controls that will allow it to turn water heaters off. Another utility in the region, Portland General Electric, is about to begin a similar program paid for by the federal Energy Department.

For the time being, the storage devices collectively can absorb the output of only a handful of wind turbines.

A 100-gallon home water heater can store about 26 kilowatt-hours, or about a day’s worth of electricity for a typical house, or less if the house relies on electricity for heat.

The ceramic bricks in the space heater can store 40 kilowatt-hours, or more in some larger configurations. The heat can be drawn off by passing air and delivered to living spaces by a fan, with the bricks also functioning as a thermal battery.

Some of this equipment dates from the late 1980s and was originally designed for offering “time of use” rates, so that a homeowner could buy electricity during hours when it was cheaper and store it. But coordination over a broad area by a utility to manage regional flows is new.

One nagging question is who will pay for the installations if they are carried out on a larger scale.

While Bonneville pays for them now, Philip D. Lusk, the power resources manager for the utility department of the city of Port Angeles — the Rothweilers’ retail supplier — said the agency might have to find additional ways of compensating consumers to get the thousands of volunteers it will eventually need to make the system effective.

If the installations are judged to benefit everyone because they improve stability, the cost might be spread among all ratepayers. But if Bonneville decides that they mainly benefit the wind generators because they never have to unplug their turbines, the agency could try to charge that industry.

Either way, said Mr. Johnson, the Bonneville spokesman, the agency will have to come up with a solution to “the cranky nature of wind.”

And finally, a post about infrastructure jobs bills.