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Aug. 21st, 2013 03:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyFacial Scanning Is Making Gains in Surveillance
http://nyti.ms/19wv26D
WASHINGTON — The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
There have been stabs for over a decade at building a system that would help match faces in a crowd with names on a watch list — whether in searching for terrorism suspects at high-profile events like a presidential inaugural parade, looking for criminal fugitives in places like Times Square or identifying card cheats in crowded casinos.
The automated matching of close-up photographs has improved greatly in recent years, and companies like Facebook have experimented with it using still pictures.
But even with advances in computer power, the technical hurdles involving crowd scans from a distance have proved to be far more challenging. Despite occasional much-hyped tests, including one as far back as the 2001 Super Bowl, technical specialists say crowd scanning is still too slow and unreliable.
The release of the documents about the government’s efforts to overcome those challenges comes amid a surge of interest in surveillance matters inspired by the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. Interest in video surveillance was also fueled by the attack on the Boston Marathon, where suspects were identified by officials looking through camera footage.
In a sign of how the use of such technologies can be developed for one use but then expanded to another, the BOSS research began as an effort to help the military detect potential suicide bombers and other terrorists overseas at “outdoor polling places in Afghanistan and Iraq,” among other sites, the documents show. But in 2010, the effort was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security to be developed for use instead by the police in the United States.
After a recent test of the system, the department recommended against deploying it until more improvements could be made. A department official said the contractor was “continuing to develop BOSS,” although there is no sign of when it may be done. But researchers on the project say they made progress, and independent specialists say it is virtually inevitable that someone will make the broader concept work as camera and computer power continue to improve.
“I would say we’re at least five years off, but it all depends on what kind of goals they have in mind” for such a system, said Anil Jain, a specialist in computer vision and biometrics engineering at Michigan State University who was not involved in the BOSS project.
The effort to build the BOSS system involved a two-year, $5.2 million federal contract given to Electronic Warfare Associates, a Washington-area military contractor with a branch office in Kentucky. The company has been working with the laboratory of Aly Farag, a University of Louisville computer vision specialist, and the contract was steered to the firm by an earmark request in a 2010 appropriations bill by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.
Significant progress is already being made in automated face recognition using photographs taken under ideal conditions, like passport pictures and mug shots. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending $1 billion to roll out a Next Generation Identification system that will provide a national mug shot database to help local police departments verify identities.
But surveillance of crowds from a distance — in which lighting and shadows vary, and faces tend to be partly obscured or pointed in random directions — is still not reliable or fast enough. The BOSS research is intended to overcome those challenges by generating far more information for computers to analyze.
The system consists of two towers bearing “robotic camera structures” with infrared and distance sensors. They take pictures of the same subject from slightly different angles. A computer then processes the images into a “3-D signature” built from data like the ratios between various points on someone’s face to be compared against data about faces stored in a watch-list database, the documents show.
The Homeland Security Department hired the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to test the BOSS system at an arena in Kennewick, Wash. The plan, according to a “privacy impact assessment,” was to use 30 volunteers whose facial data would be mingled in a database among 1,000 mug shots to see whether the system could reliably recognize when any of the volunteers were present.
The agency set up six tests to determine the technology’s overall accuracy, determining afterward that “it was not ready for a D.H.S. customer” — meaning that police departments should not buy it.
In interviews, Ed Tivol of Electronic Warfare Associates and Dr. Farag both suggested that as computer processing becomes ever faster the remaining obstacles will fall away.
Mr. Tivol said the goal was to provide a match with an 80 percent to 90 percent certainty from a range of up to 100 meters, something “that has never been done.” While the system continued to have problems with light and shading in some tests, he said, in others the goal had been achieved at closer distances. Farther away, he said, the accuracy has fallen to 60 percent to 70 percent.
“The results were increasingly positive,” he said. There was a “significant improvement” in speed, too, he said. At first, it took the system six to eight minutes to process images, but it now takes under 30 seconds.
Still, he and Dr. Farag said, the officials overseeing the testing wanted a quicker turnaround. That might be easier with the more powerful computers available to the military, they said, but the government wanted them to use processors available off the shelf for civilian applications.
Several independent biometric specialists, given a description of the project’s test results, agreed that the system was not yet ready. They said 30 seconds was far too long to process an image for security purposes, and that its accuracy numbers would result in the police going out to question too many innocent people.
Several of the specialists also suggested that similar technology may be progressing more quickly in other laboratories that have not received taxpayer financing. A spokesman for Mr. McConnell stressed that while he requested that the contract go to Electronic Warfare Associates, it was “competitively bid.” Federal records show the firm was the only one to submit a bid.
Ginger McCall, a privacy advocate who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act and provided them to The New York Times, said the time was now — while such technology is still maturing and not yet deployed — to build in rules for how it may be used.
“This technology is always billed as antiterrorism, but then it drifts into other applications,” Ms. McCall said. “We need a real conversation about whether and how we want this technology to be used, and now is the time for that debate.”
In particular, she said, there should be limits on whose faces are loaded into them when they are ready for deployment. Ms. McCall said it would be acceptable to use it for terrorism watch lists, but she feared any effort to systematically track everyone’s public movements by using a comprehensive database of driver’s license photographs.
Still, Dr. Farag said, that kind of system is still very far off because it would take far too much computer processing power to load millions of images into a system and try to identify everyone at once, as opposed to sorting images in search of only a comparatively small number of faces on a watch list.
“Disappointments come when you are overambitious,” he said.
Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming
http://nyti.ms/14PZcNh
An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.
The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a recent slowdown in the pace of warming, which is often cited by climate change doubters, attributing it most likely to short-term factors.
The report emphasizes that the basic facts about future climate change are more established than ever, justifying the rise in global concern. It also reiterates that the consequences of escalating emissions are likely to be profound.
“It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010,” the draft report says. “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.”
The draft comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of several hundred scientists that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore. Its summaries, published every five or six years, are considered the definitive assessment of the risks of climate change, and they influence the actions of governments around the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions, for instance, largely on the basis of the group’s findings.
The coming report will be the fifth major assessment from the group, created in 1988. Each report has found greater certainty that the planet is warming and greater likelihood that humans are the primary cause.
The 2007 report found “unequivocal” evidence of warming, but hedged a little on responsibility, saying the chances were at least 90 percent that human activities were the cause. The language in the new draft is stronger, saying the odds are at least 95 percent that humans are the principal cause.
On sea level, which is one of the biggest single worries about climate change, the new report goes well beyond the assessment published in 2007, which largely sidestepped the question of how much the ocean could rise this century.
The new report also reiterates a core difficulty that has plagued climate science for decades: While averages for such measures as temperature can be predicted with some confidence on a global scale, the coming changes still cannot be forecast reliably on a local scale. That leaves governments and businesses fumbling in the dark as they try to plan ahead.
On another closely watched issue, the scientists retreated slightly from their 2007 position.
Regarding the question of how much the planet could warm if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled, the previous report largely ruled out any number below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The new draft says the rise could be as low as 2.7 degrees, essentially restoring a scientific consensus that prevailed from 1979 to 2007.
But the draft says only that the low number is possible, not that it is likely. Many climate scientists see only a remote chance that the warming will be that low, with the published evidence suggesting that an increase above 5 degrees Fahrenheit is more likely if carbon dioxide doubles.
The level of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is up 41 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and if present trends continue it could double in a matter of decades.
Warming the entire planet by 5 degrees Fahrenheit would add a stupendous amount of energy to the climate system. Scientists say the increase would be greater over land and might exceed 10 degrees at the poles.
They add that such an increase would lead to widespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.
The new document is not final and will not become so until an intensive, closed-door negotiating session among scientists and government leaders in Stockholm in late September. But if the past is any guide, most of the core findings of the document will survive that final review.
The document was leaked over the weekend after it was sent to a large group of people who had signed up to review it. It was first reported on in detail by the Reuters news agency, and The New York Times obtained a copy independently to verify its contents.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does no original research, but instead periodically assesses and summarizes the published scientific literature on climate change.
The draft document “is likely to change in response to comments from governments received in recent weeks and will also be considered by governments and scientists at a four-day approval session at the end of September,” the panel’s spokesman, Jonathan Lynn, said in a statement Monday. “It is therefore premature and could be misleading to attempt to draw conclusions from it.”
After winning the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, the group became a political target for climate doubters, who helped identify minor errors in the 2007 report. This time, the panel adopted rigorous procedures in the hope of preventing such mistakes.
Some climate doubters challenge the idea that the earth is warming at all; others concede that it is, but deny human responsibility; still others acknowledge a human role, but assert that the warming is likely to be limited and the impacts manageable. Every major scientific academy in the world has warned that global warming is a serious problem.
The panel shifted to a wider range for the potential warming, dropping the plausible low end to 2.7 degrees, after a wave of recent studies saying higher estimates were unlikely. But those studies are contested, and scientists at Stockholm are likely to debate whether to stick with that language.
Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said he feared the intergovernmental panel, in writing its draft, had been influenced by criticism from climate doubters, who advocate even lower numbers. “I think the I.P.C.C. on this point has once again erred on the side of understating the degree of the likely changes,” Dr. Mann said.
However, Christopher B. Field, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who serves on the panel but was not directly involved in the new draft, said the group had to reflect the full range of plausible scientific views.
“I think that the I.P.C.C. has a tradition of being very conservative,” Dr. Field said. “They really want the story to be right.”
Regarding the likely rise in sea level over the coming century, the new report lays out several possibilities. In the most optimistic, the world’s governments would prove far more successful at getting emissions under control than they have been in the recent past, helping to limit the total warming.
In that circumstance, sea level could be expected to rise as little as 10 inches by the end of the century, the report found. That is a bit more than the eight-inch increase in the 20th century, which proved manageable even though it caused severe erosion along the world’s shorelines.
At the other extreme, the report considers a chain of events in which emissions continue to increase at a swift pace. Under those conditions, sea level could be expected to rise at least 21 inches by 2100 and might increase a bit more than three feet, the draft report said.
Hundreds of millions of people live near sea level, and either figure would represent a challenge for humanity, scientists say. But a three-foot rise in particular would endanger many of the world’s great cities — among them New York; London; Shanghai; Venice; Sydney, Australia; Miami; and New Orleans.
At the Printer, Living Tissue
http://nyti.ms/16mKf92
Someday, perhaps, printers will revolutionize the world of medicine, churning out hearts, livers and other organs to ease transplantation shortages. For now, though, Darryl D’Lima would settle for a little bit of knee cartilage.
Dr. D’Lima, who heads an orthopedic research lab at the Scripps Clinic here, has already made bioartificial cartilage in cow tissue, modifying an old inkjet printer to put down layer after layer of a gel containing living cells. He has also printed cartilage in tissue removed from patients who have undergone knee replacement surgery.
There is much work to do to perfect the process, get regulatory approvals and conduct clinical trials, but his eventual goal sounds like something from science fiction: to have a printer in the operating room that could custom-print new cartilage directly in the body to repair or replace tissue that is missing because of injury or arthritis.
Just as 3-D printers have gained in popularity among hobbyists and companies who use them to create everyday objects, prototypes and spare parts (and even a crude gun), there has been a rise in interest in using similar technology in medicine. Instead of the plastics or powders used in conventional 3-D printers to build an object layer by layer, so-called bioprinters print cells, usually in a liquid or gel. The goal isn’t to create a widget or a toy, but to assemble living tissue.
At labs around the world, researchers have been experimenting with bioprinting, first just to see whether it was possible to push cells through a printhead without killing them (in most cases it is), and then trying to make cartilage, bone, skin, blood vessels, small bits of liver and other tissues. There are other ways to try to “engineer” tissue — one involves creating a scaffold out of plastics or other materials and adding cells to it. In theory, at least, a bioprinter has advantages in that it can control the placement of cells and other components to mimic natural structures.
But just as the claims made for 3-D printing technology sometimes exceed the reality, the field of bioprinting has seen its share of hype. News releases, TED talks and news reports often imply that the age of print-on-demand organs is just around the corner. (Accompanying illustrations can be fanciful as well — one shows a complete heart, seemingly filled with blood, as the end product in a printer).
The reality is that, although bioprinting researchers have made great strides, there are many formidable obstacles to overcome.
“Nobody who has any credibility claims they can print organs, or believes in their heart of hearts that that will happen in the next 20 years,” said Brian Derby, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain who reviewed the field last year in an article in the journal Science.
For now, researchers have set their sights lower. Organovo, for instance, a San Diego company that has developed a bioprinter, is making strips of liver tissue, about 20 cells thick, that it says could be used to test drugs under development.
A lab at the Hannover Medical School in Germany is one of several experimenting with 3-D printing of skin cells; another German lab has printed sheets of heart cells that might some day be used as patches to help repair damage from heart attacks. A researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, Thomas Boland, has developed a method to print fat tissue that may someday be used to create small implants for women who have had breast lumpectomies. Dr. Boland has also done much of the basic research on bioprinting technologies. “I think it is the future for regenerative medicine,” he said.
Dr. D’Lima acknowledges that his dream of a cartilage printer — perhaps a printhead attached to a robotic arm for precise positioning — is years away. But he thinks the project has more chance of becoming reality than some others.
“Printing a whole heart or a whole bladder is glamorous and exciting,” he said. “But cartilage might be the low-hanging fruit to get 3-D printing into the clinic.”
One reason, he said, is that cartilage is in some ways simpler than other tissues. Cells called chondrocytes sit in a matrix of fibrous collagens and other compounds secreted by the cells. As cells go, chondrocytes are relatively low maintenance — they do not need much nourishment, which simplifies the printing process.
Keeping printed tissue nourished, and thus alive, is one of the most difficult challenges facing researchers. Most cells need to be within a short distance — usually a couple of cell widths — of a source of nutrients. Nature accomplishes this through a network of microscopic blood vessels, or capillaries.
But trying to emulate capillaries in bioprinted tissue is difficult. With his fat tissue, Dr. Boland’s approach is to build channels into the degradable gel containing the fat cells, and line the channels with the kind of cells found in blood vessels. When the printed fat is implanted, the tubes “start to behave as micro blood vessels,” he said.
The body naturally produces chemical signals that would cause it to start growing small blood vessels into the implant, Dr. Boland said, but the process is slow. With his approach, he said, “we expect this will be sped up, and hopefully keep the cells alive.”
With cartilage, Dr. D’Lima does not need to worry about blood vessels — the chondrocytes get the little nourishment they need through diffusion of nutrients from the joint lining and bone, which is aided by compression of the cartilage as the joints move. Nor does he need to be concerned with nerves, as cartilage lacks them.
But there is still plenty to worry about. Although it is less than a quarter of an inch thick, cartilage of the type found in the knee or hip has a complex structure, with several layers in which collagen and other fibrous materials are oriented differently.
“The printing demands change with every layer,” Dr. D’Lima said. “Most 3-D printers just change the shape. We are changing the shape, the composition, the type of cells, even the orientation of the cells.”
Dr. D’Lima has been involved in orthopedic research for years; one of his earlier projects, a sensor-laden knee-replacement prosthesis called the electronic knee, has provided invaluable data about the forces that act on the joint. So he was aware of other efforts to make and repair cartilage. “But we didn’t want to grow tissue in the lab and then figure how to transplant it into the body,” he said. “We wanted to print it directly in the body itself.”
He and his colleagues began thinking about using a thermal inkjet printer, in which tiny channels containing the ink are heated, producing a vapor bubble that forces out a drop. The technology is very reliable and is used in most consumer printers, but the researchers were wary because of the heat produced. “We thought it would kill the cells,” Dr. D’Lima said.
But Dr. Boland, then at Clemson University, and others had already done the basic research that showed that the heat pulse was so rapid that most cells survived the process.
Dr. D’Lima’s group soon discovered another problem: the newest thermal inkjets were too sophisticated for their work. “They print at such high resolution that the print nozzles are too fine for cells to squeeze through,” he said.
They found a 1990s-era Hewlett-Packard printer, a Deskjet 500, with bigger nozzles. But that printer was so old that it was difficult finding ink cartridges; the researchers finally located a supplier in China who had some.
Their idea was to replace the ink in the cartridges with their cartilage-making mixture, which consisted of a liquid called PEG-DMA and the chondrocytes. But even that created a problem — the cells would settle out of the liquid and clog the printhead. So the researchers had to devise a way to keep the mixture stirred up.
The mixture also has to be liquid to be printed, but once printed it must become a gel — otherwise the end product would just be a watery mess. PEG-DMA becomes a gel under ultraviolet light, so the solution was to keep the print area constantly exposed to UV light to harden each drop as it was printed. “So now you’re printing tissue,” Dr. D’Lima said.
But Dr. D’Lima and his group are investigating other materials for their gel. While PEG-DMA is biocompatible (and approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration), it would remain in the body and might eventually cause inflammation. So they are looking for substances that could degrade over time, to be replaced by the matrix produced by the chondrocytes. The printed material could be formulated to degrade at the same rate as the natural matrix is produced.
There are plenty of other challenges as well, Dr. D’Lima said, including a basic one — how to get the right kinds of cells, and enough of them, for the printer. It would not make much sense to use a patient’s own limited number of cartilage cells from elsewhere in the body. So his lab is investigating the use of stem cells, precursor cells that can become chondrocytes. “The advantage of stem cells is that it would mean a virtually unlimited supply,” Dr. D’Lima said.
Dr. D’Lima’s team is investigating other technologies that might be used in combination with bioprinting, including electrospinning, a method of creating the fibers in the matrix, and nanomagnetism, a way to orient the fibers. His lab takes a multidisciplinary approach — he even attends Siggraph, the large annual computer graphics convention, to get ideas. “They’re like 10 years ahead of medical technology,” he said.
Meanwhile, the lab has upgraded its printing technology. The Deskjet is still around, but it has not been used in more than a year. It has been supplanted by a much more sophisticated device from Hewlett-Packard — essentially a programmable printhead that allows the researchers to adjust drop size and other characteristics to optimize the printing process.
Dr. D’Lima said the biggest remaining hurdles were probably regulatory ones — including proving to the F.D.A. that printed cartilage can be safe — and that most of the scientific challenges had been met. “I think in terms of getting it to work, we are cautiously optimistic,” he said.
Deaf Student, Denied Interpreter by Medical School, Draws Focus of Advocates
http://nyti.ms/163iBug
Speaking with the parents of a sick infant, Michael Argenyi, a medical student, could not understand why the child was hospitalized. During another clinical training session, he missed most of what a patient with a broken jaw was trying to convey about his condition.
His incomprehension, Mr. Argenyi explained, was not because of a deficiency in academic understanding. Rather, he simply could not hear.
Mr. Argenyi, 26, is legally deaf. Despite his repeated requests to use an interpreter during clinical training, administrators at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., have refused to allow it. They have contended that Mr. Argenyi, who is able to speak, communicated well enough without one and that patients could be more hesitant to share information when someone else was present. They added that doctors needed to focus on the patient (not a third party) to rely on visual clues to make a proper diagnosis.
Mr. Argenyi took a leave of absence at the end of his second year, in 2011, after suing Creighton for the right to finish his medical training with an interpreter. The case, scheduled to go to trial on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Omaha, is attracting the attention of the federal government and advocates who are concerned that it could deal a setback to continuing efforts to achieve equality for people with disabilities.
“I couldn’t understand so much of the communication in the clinic,” Mr. Argenyi wrote in an e-mail. “It was humiliating to present only half of a history because I had missed so much of what was communicated. I was embarrassed every time I would miss medicine names that I knew from classes but couldn’t understand when the patient or a colleague spoke them.”
Despite making tremendous strides over the past four decades with the passage of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, those with disabilities remain underrepresented in higher education and in the work force. In the medical field, people who are deaf or hard of hearing remain less likely to hold high-skilled positions than those without impairments.
Universities tend to provide requested accommodations after admitting a student who they know has a disability, proponents for the deaf say. And most arrangements for the deaf are settled long before any issues reach a courtroom, said Curtis Decker, the executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, a federally financed association of legal services programs.
But, he said of Mr. Argenyi’s lawsuit, “It’s a very important case because, I think, if it’s successful it will send a very powerful message to the university community that the law does cover them and the law is clear about the accommodations that they need to provide.”
Creighton officials maintain that they have provided Mr. Argenyi with the necessary tools for him to succeed in medical school.
“Michael Argenyi is a very bright, capable young man who Creighton believes will make a good doctor,” said Scott Parrish Moore, the lead counsel for Creighton.
After being accepted to Creighton four years ago, Mr. Argenyi asked the university to provide a real-time captioning system for lectures and a cued speech interpreter. (Mr. Argenyi, who does not know sign language, can read lips. An interpreter helps by mouthing words while using hand signals to clarify sounds.) These were the same accommodations that Mr. Argenyi, who had a diagnosis of profound deafness when he was 8 months old, received for much of his schooling, from grade school through undergraduate studies at Seattle University.
Creighton provided Mr. Argenyi with just one of the aides that his audiologist had recommended — an FM system, which amplifies the sounds he hears in cochlear implants. The university also provided note takers for lectures, priority seating and audio podcasts.
Soon after classes began, Mr. Argenyi told school officials that the accommodations were inadequate and that he was missing information. He sued in federal court in Omaha in September 2009, arguing that the university was legally required to pay for and provide necessary aides.
Mr. Argenyi said he hired his own interpreter and transcription service, which cost him more than $100,000 during his two years in medical school. The breaking point, he said, came during his clinical work in his second year when Creighton refused to allow him to use an interpreter, even if he paid for it himself. The university did allow Mr. Argenyi to use interpreters during a couple of clinics while the Justice Department was trying to broker a settlement, but stopped when a deal could not be reached.
Mr. Argenyi is pursuing degrees in public health and social work at Boston University, which is providing his requested transcription services, while the lawsuit is pending.
Gays in Russia Find No Haven, Despite Support From the West
http://nyti.ms/1cGgXaH
MOSCOW — If this article were published in a newspaper based in Russia, it could be labeled 18+ — like an X-rated movie — and start with the following disclaimer: “This article contains information not suitable for readers younger than 18 years of age, according to Russian legislation.”
Such warnings, put on any articles that discuss homosexuality or gay rights, are the result of a law nominally aimed at “protecting” children by banning “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships” but widely understood as an effort to suppress homosexuality and Russia’s fledgling gay rights movement.
The law, signed by President Vladimir V. Putin in June, has ignited international condemnation and blindsided the Kremlin with the sort of toxic political controversy that officials had desperately hoped to avoid ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. The last Olympics on Russian soil, in 1980, was marred by the boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The furor includes a boycott of Russian vodka in gay bars throughout the West and some calls for a boycott of the Sochi Games altogether. Beyond putting organizers on the defensive, it has cast worldwide attention on the cruel circumstances in which most gay people live in modern Russia.
Despite the breathtaking wealth and vibrant culture in the metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia remains a country where discrimination and even violence against gay people are widely tolerated.
“What is going on now in Russia contradicts its place in the world,” said Anton Krasovsky, a television anchor who was immediately fired from his job at the government-controlled KontrTV network in January after he announced during a live broadcast that he is gay, saying he was fed up with lying about his life and offended by the legislation.
Few gay people in Russia openly acknowledge their sexual orientation, and those who do are often harassed. When some gay people protested the propaganda law by kissing outside the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament, police officers stood by and watched as the demonstrators were doused with water and beaten by antigay and religious supporters of the bill.
An overwhelming 88 percent of Russians support the gay propaganda ban, according to a survey conducted in June by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center. A survey conducted in April by the Levada Center found that 35 percent of Russians believed that homosexuality was a disease and 43 percent believed that it was a bad habit, a result of poor parenting or a lack of discipline, or a symptom of abuse.
Last month, Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, called same-sex marriage “a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse.”
Mixed signals from senior Russian officials over how the propaganda law might be enforced during the Games have undercut assertions by the International Olympic Committee that gay athletes and spectators have nothing to worry about, and have left organizing officials facing harsh criticism and demanding clarifications from the Kremlin.
There have been comparisons to Nazi Germany as host of the 1936 Olympics inside and outside Russia, including one by Jay Leno during an interview with President Obama last week on “The Tonight Show.”
“Something that shocked me about Russia,” Mr. Leno told the president. “Suddenly, homosexuality is against the law. I mean, this seems like Germany: Let’s round up the Jews. Let’s round up the gays. Let’s round up the blacks. I mean, it starts with that.”
Mr. Obama, on Mr. Leno’s show and again at a White House news conference on Friday, noted that Russia was not alone in its treatment of gay people, but he denounced the legislation and said he expected Mr. Putin and the Russian government to prevent any discrimination in Sochi.
“I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgendered persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them,” he told Mr. Leno. At the White House, Mr. Obama said he opposed a boycott of the Games, but added, “Nobody is more offended than me by some of the antigay and lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.”
Russian officials say the criticism is unfair and inaccurate. In 1993, Russia repealed the Soviet-era law that made gay sex a crime.
“This is not about imposing any kind of sanctions against homosexuality,” Mr. Putin said, defending the propaganda law at a news conference in June. “This is about protecting children.”
He added: “The law does not in any way infringe on the rights of sexual minorities. They are full-fledged members of our society and are not being discriminated against in any way.”
Gay rights advocates disagree, saying the law is vague and can be used to arrest anyone who appears to support gay rights.
American rights groups, backed by athletes like Blake Skjellerup, a speed skater, and Greg Louganis, the gold medalist diver, are leading efforts to pressure Russia and the International Olympic Committee, including the vodka boycott and a petition signed by more than 300,000 people.
Some, like Stephen Fry, a British comedian who is gay, are urging a boycott of Sochi, while others want protests there to avoid punishing athletes.
Critics say Russia’s repression of gay rights is part of a pattern that also includes a tightening of pressure on civil society groups, and steps to limit foreign influences — all seemingly out of sync with Russia’s push to host international events, like the recently completed 2013 World University Games in Kazan and the international track and field championships now under way in Moscow.
Beyond Sochi, Russia will hold the World Cup in 2018 and is bidding for the World Expo in 2020. Asked if the gay rights issue might derail the bid, a spokeswoman for the deputy prime minister, Arkady Dvorkovich, noted that Russia was competing with Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal.
Russian gay rights advocates said the outrage in the West was providing new energy and financial support to their still relatively young movement. It is also raising pressure, including fears of increased violence.
“It’s not only a question of the period of the Olympic Games; here, there should be no law like this,” said Kirill Kalugin, 21, who was beaten by counterdemonstrators at a gay pride event in St. Petersburg last month and then detained by the police. “I feel very offended that I am being presented as an enemy of my own people.”
Mr. Krasovsky, the fired television anchor, likened life for gay people in Russia to that in the rural America in 1989, seven years before the Defense of Marriage Act became law. He also noted that in 1987, Britain adopted a ban on providing information about homosexuality to children nearly identical to the Russian law.
Aleksandr Smirnov, 39, a freelance journalist, said he was forced to quit his job in the press office of a deputy mayor in Moscow after he was featured with more than two dozen other gay Muscovites in a special issue of Afisha magazine in February. Being gay in Russia means “you are under permanent stress,” he said.
As for gay propaganda, he said the notion was ridiculous.
“Seven years ago, I wrote a letter to my mother, explaining my position, and I tried to explain to her that this has nothing to do with the existing stereotypes,” Mr. Smirnov said. “I told her that when I was about 13, I just felt, that, you know, I like boys, just the way the boys, not gays, at this same age, started to have feelings toward girls and women. I was not seduced. I was not lured into it, provoked into it. This happened quite naturally.”
Rights advocates said that Russia was growing more dangerous for gay people. This year, there have been at least two killings motivated by antigay bias in the country, including the savage beating death in May of a young man in Volgograd who was also sodomized with beer bottles.
Mr. Smirnov said that even in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, where there are large gay populations, as well as a thriving and visible gay night life that includes several gay bars and clubs, bias was inescapable.
“If you ask gays in Moscow whether they were attacked, or insulted, practically everyone will admit that it happened to him,” he said. “We are just at the very, very beginning of the movement for the rights of gays. And this new law, you know, it seals our mouths and ties our hands and feet.”
Hurricane Sandy Crept Up on a Boy Who Couldn’t Swim. Guess What He Did.
http://nyti.ms/17CeJSx
After Hurricane Sandy brought the ocean to his doorstep, Kenrick Sultan felt a new sense of vulnerability. A shy 15-year-old, he has lived by water his entire life — but he never learned how to swim.
He was born in Antigua, the Caribbean Island known for its 365 beaches. For the past decade, he has lived in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Before this summer, he had set foot on the beach there exactly once and never so much as dipped a toe in the waves.
But having watched the waters of Hurricane Sandy creep up his street, Kenrick finally decided to conquer his fear of the water. “If I’m in trouble, I’d be able to float,” he explained.
Looking slightly terrified behind blue-tinted goggles, Kenrick lowered his slender frame into a pool at a nearby high school. Alongside him stood Ray Belmont, a volunteer instructor who himself only recently learned to swim, spouting advice and encouragement. “Keep kicking, keep kicking, keep kicking!” Mr. Belmont shouted. “The feet go all the time, even when you’re breathing.”
The hourlong class, held on a steamy summer evening, was a step toward addressing one of New York’s more persistent and surprising disparities: many of the poor and working-class residents who live along some of the most popular beaches in the city cannot swim.
Poverty, culture and a fear of the water have proved stubborn impediments, leaving seaside residents unable to revel in the resource in their backyard that other New Yorkers ride the subway for an hour or more to experience.
The issue is as much about public safety as recreation, said Shawn Slevin, founder of the Swim Strong Foundation, a nonprofit group in New York that provides free and discounted swim lessons to young people like Kenrick, as well as adults. On average, each day 10 people drown in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the drowning rate among black children ages 5 to 14 is almost three times that of white children.
“I can’t swim, and I’ve always been afraid of the water,” Kenrick’s mother, Mary Sultan, said. “I never let my three children go to the beach.”
Until recently, Kenrick was content to while away his free time across the street from his house in Bayswater Park, which overlooks Jamaica Bay. Now and then, he and his friends kick a soccer ball around, but mostly they talk — about school, about girls, about favorite video games and, of course, about the hurricane that ravaged the Rockaways last fall.
“I was awake the entire night,” said Kenrick, recalling the evening of Oct. 29 when Hurricane Sandy inundated much of his neighborhood. “The water was coming slowly at first and then it started rushing onto our street from both directions. It was scary.”
The sense of helplessness that arrived with the storm surge helped spur him to finally learn to swim. Five of the eight Rockaways residents killed by the hurricane drowned.
Five years earlier, Kenrick’s best friend, Raynald Chance Belmont, 15, had learned from Swim Strong, which is administered and staffed entirely by volunteers. Because swim lessons typically cost as much as $1 a minute, learning to swim can be something of a luxury, not unlike sleep-away camp or private tutors, affordable mainly to affluent families.
But Swim Strong is only one of a number of programs giving free or low-cost swim lessons to New Yorkers. The largest, by far, is a program called Learn to Swim offered by the city’s parks department, which provides free swim lessons at select pools through an online lottery system throughout the year. In the fiscal year that ended in June, the department taught 27,709 children and 1,110 adults to swim. It has taught an additional 24,000 second-grade students through a new program called Swim for Life.
After Chance learned to swim, his father, Ray Belmont, asked if he could sign up for lessons, too.
“It was always a goal,” recalled Mr. Belmont, 39, a property underwriter. “It was huge for me. It was a big accomplishment. I’m two blocks from the ocean and before, if something happened to my children, I wouldn’t be able to help them. As an adult, there’s a different kind of fear. I had to overcome that by getting lessons for myself.”
Like a number of Swim Strong alumni, Mr. Belmont decided to give back by volunteering as an instructor. He was eager to teach his son’s friend.
But first, Kenrick’s mother, who works seven days a week as a cashier and home health aide, needed to be persuaded. She had refused his requests before.
“He wanted to learn how to swim a long time ago and then started asking for lessons again recently,” said Ms. Sultan, 51, who owns a two-family house with her husband and sister. “At first, I told him I couldn’t afford it. But I came around.”
Once a week in the swimming pool at the local high school, where Kenrick will be a sophomore in the fall, Mr. Belmont works with him on the basics of swimming. His inaugural lesson in June was the first time that Kenrick had ever been in a pool.
“There’s the breathing, there’s the kicking, there’s the stroke, and it’s confusing,” Mr. Belmont said. “After a while it becomes automatic. Kenrick’s still very tight, but once he starts to incorporate the breathing, he loosens up.”
During his fourth lesson early last month, Kenrick experienced something new as he let go of Mr. Belmont’s hand for several feet in the pool. “Today, when I was doing it by myself, I felt myself floating,” he said.
Kenrick still is not sure about the ocean. The first word that enters his mind when he thinks of the Atlantic, he said, is “drowning.”
He might be coming around, though. This summer, he has a part-time job picking up litter at Rockaway Beach. The other day, as he peered through one of the telescopes on the Boardwalk, he studied the swimmers cavorting and laughing in the waves. And he had to admit: “It looked kind of fun.”
http://nyti.ms/19wv26D
WASHINGTON — The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
There have been stabs for over a decade at building a system that would help match faces in a crowd with names on a watch list — whether in searching for terrorism suspects at high-profile events like a presidential inaugural parade, looking for criminal fugitives in places like Times Square or identifying card cheats in crowded casinos.
The automated matching of close-up photographs has improved greatly in recent years, and companies like Facebook have experimented with it using still pictures.
But even with advances in computer power, the technical hurdles involving crowd scans from a distance have proved to be far more challenging. Despite occasional much-hyped tests, including one as far back as the 2001 Super Bowl, technical specialists say crowd scanning is still too slow and unreliable.
The release of the documents about the government’s efforts to overcome those challenges comes amid a surge of interest in surveillance matters inspired by the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. Interest in video surveillance was also fueled by the attack on the Boston Marathon, where suspects were identified by officials looking through camera footage.
In a sign of how the use of such technologies can be developed for one use but then expanded to another, the BOSS research began as an effort to help the military detect potential suicide bombers and other terrorists overseas at “outdoor polling places in Afghanistan and Iraq,” among other sites, the documents show. But in 2010, the effort was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security to be developed for use instead by the police in the United States.
After a recent test of the system, the department recommended against deploying it until more improvements could be made. A department official said the contractor was “continuing to develop BOSS,” although there is no sign of when it may be done. But researchers on the project say they made progress, and independent specialists say it is virtually inevitable that someone will make the broader concept work as camera and computer power continue to improve.
“I would say we’re at least five years off, but it all depends on what kind of goals they have in mind” for such a system, said Anil Jain, a specialist in computer vision and biometrics engineering at Michigan State University who was not involved in the BOSS project.
The effort to build the BOSS system involved a two-year, $5.2 million federal contract given to Electronic Warfare Associates, a Washington-area military contractor with a branch office in Kentucky. The company has been working with the laboratory of Aly Farag, a University of Louisville computer vision specialist, and the contract was steered to the firm by an earmark request in a 2010 appropriations bill by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.
Significant progress is already being made in automated face recognition using photographs taken under ideal conditions, like passport pictures and mug shots. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending $1 billion to roll out a Next Generation Identification system that will provide a national mug shot database to help local police departments verify identities.
But surveillance of crowds from a distance — in which lighting and shadows vary, and faces tend to be partly obscured or pointed in random directions — is still not reliable or fast enough. The BOSS research is intended to overcome those challenges by generating far more information for computers to analyze.
The system consists of two towers bearing “robotic camera structures” with infrared and distance sensors. They take pictures of the same subject from slightly different angles. A computer then processes the images into a “3-D signature” built from data like the ratios between various points on someone’s face to be compared against data about faces stored in a watch-list database, the documents show.
The Homeland Security Department hired the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to test the BOSS system at an arena in Kennewick, Wash. The plan, according to a “privacy impact assessment,” was to use 30 volunteers whose facial data would be mingled in a database among 1,000 mug shots to see whether the system could reliably recognize when any of the volunteers were present.
The agency set up six tests to determine the technology’s overall accuracy, determining afterward that “it was not ready for a D.H.S. customer” — meaning that police departments should not buy it.
In interviews, Ed Tivol of Electronic Warfare Associates and Dr. Farag both suggested that as computer processing becomes ever faster the remaining obstacles will fall away.
Mr. Tivol said the goal was to provide a match with an 80 percent to 90 percent certainty from a range of up to 100 meters, something “that has never been done.” While the system continued to have problems with light and shading in some tests, he said, in others the goal had been achieved at closer distances. Farther away, he said, the accuracy has fallen to 60 percent to 70 percent.
“The results were increasingly positive,” he said. There was a “significant improvement” in speed, too, he said. At first, it took the system six to eight minutes to process images, but it now takes under 30 seconds.
Still, he and Dr. Farag said, the officials overseeing the testing wanted a quicker turnaround. That might be easier with the more powerful computers available to the military, they said, but the government wanted them to use processors available off the shelf for civilian applications.
Several independent biometric specialists, given a description of the project’s test results, agreed that the system was not yet ready. They said 30 seconds was far too long to process an image for security purposes, and that its accuracy numbers would result in the police going out to question too many innocent people.
Several of the specialists also suggested that similar technology may be progressing more quickly in other laboratories that have not received taxpayer financing. A spokesman for Mr. McConnell stressed that while he requested that the contract go to Electronic Warfare Associates, it was “competitively bid.” Federal records show the firm was the only one to submit a bid.
Ginger McCall, a privacy advocate who obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act and provided them to The New York Times, said the time was now — while such technology is still maturing and not yet deployed — to build in rules for how it may be used.
“This technology is always billed as antiterrorism, but then it drifts into other applications,” Ms. McCall said. “We need a real conversation about whether and how we want this technology to be used, and now is the time for that debate.”
In particular, she said, there should be limits on whose faces are loaded into them when they are ready for deployment. Ms. McCall said it would be acceptable to use it for terrorism watch lists, but she feared any effort to systematically track everyone’s public movements by using a comprehensive database of driver’s license photographs.
Still, Dr. Farag said, that kind of system is still very far off because it would take far too much computer processing power to load millions of images into a system and try to identify everyone at once, as opposed to sorting images in search of only a comparatively small number of faces on a watch list.
“Disappointments come when you are overambitious,” he said.
Climate Panel Cites Near Certainty on Warming
http://nyti.ms/14PZcNh
An international panel of scientists has found with near certainty that human activity is the cause of most of the temperature increases of recent decades, and warns that sea levels could conceivably rise by more than three feet by the end of the century if emissions continue at a runaway pace.
The scientists, whose findings are reported in a draft summary of the next big United Nations climate report, largely dismiss a recent slowdown in the pace of warming, which is often cited by climate change doubters, attributing it most likely to short-term factors.
The report emphasizes that the basic facts about future climate change are more established than ever, justifying the rise in global concern. It also reiterates that the consequences of escalating emissions are likely to be profound.
“It is extremely likely that human influence on climate caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010,” the draft report says. “There is high confidence that this has warmed the ocean, melted snow and ice, raised global mean sea level and changed some climate extremes in the second half of the 20th century.”
The draft comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of several hundred scientists that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore. Its summaries, published every five or six years, are considered the definitive assessment of the risks of climate change, and they influence the actions of governments around the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions, for instance, largely on the basis of the group’s findings.
The coming report will be the fifth major assessment from the group, created in 1988. Each report has found greater certainty that the planet is warming and greater likelihood that humans are the primary cause.
The 2007 report found “unequivocal” evidence of warming, but hedged a little on responsibility, saying the chances were at least 90 percent that human activities were the cause. The language in the new draft is stronger, saying the odds are at least 95 percent that humans are the principal cause.
On sea level, which is one of the biggest single worries about climate change, the new report goes well beyond the assessment published in 2007, which largely sidestepped the question of how much the ocean could rise this century.
The new report also reiterates a core difficulty that has plagued climate science for decades: While averages for such measures as temperature can be predicted with some confidence on a global scale, the coming changes still cannot be forecast reliably on a local scale. That leaves governments and businesses fumbling in the dark as they try to plan ahead.
On another closely watched issue, the scientists retreated slightly from their 2007 position.
Regarding the question of how much the planet could warm if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled, the previous report largely ruled out any number below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The new draft says the rise could be as low as 2.7 degrees, essentially restoring a scientific consensus that prevailed from 1979 to 2007.
But the draft says only that the low number is possible, not that it is likely. Many climate scientists see only a remote chance that the warming will be that low, with the published evidence suggesting that an increase above 5 degrees Fahrenheit is more likely if carbon dioxide doubles.
The level of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is up 41 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and if present trends continue it could double in a matter of decades.
Warming the entire planet by 5 degrees Fahrenheit would add a stupendous amount of energy to the climate system. Scientists say the increase would be greater over land and might exceed 10 degrees at the poles.
They add that such an increase would lead to widespread melting of land ice, extreme heat waves, difficulty growing food and massive changes in plant and animal life, probably including a wave of extinctions.
The new document is not final and will not become so until an intensive, closed-door negotiating session among scientists and government leaders in Stockholm in late September. But if the past is any guide, most of the core findings of the document will survive that final review.
The document was leaked over the weekend after it was sent to a large group of people who had signed up to review it. It was first reported on in detail by the Reuters news agency, and The New York Times obtained a copy independently to verify its contents.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does no original research, but instead periodically assesses and summarizes the published scientific literature on climate change.
The draft document “is likely to change in response to comments from governments received in recent weeks and will also be considered by governments and scientists at a four-day approval session at the end of September,” the panel’s spokesman, Jonathan Lynn, said in a statement Monday. “It is therefore premature and could be misleading to attempt to draw conclusions from it.”
After winning the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, the group became a political target for climate doubters, who helped identify minor errors in the 2007 report. This time, the panel adopted rigorous procedures in the hope of preventing such mistakes.
Some climate doubters challenge the idea that the earth is warming at all; others concede that it is, but deny human responsibility; still others acknowledge a human role, but assert that the warming is likely to be limited and the impacts manageable. Every major scientific academy in the world has warned that global warming is a serious problem.
The panel shifted to a wider range for the potential warming, dropping the plausible low end to 2.7 degrees, after a wave of recent studies saying higher estimates were unlikely. But those studies are contested, and scientists at Stockholm are likely to debate whether to stick with that language.
Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said he feared the intergovernmental panel, in writing its draft, had been influenced by criticism from climate doubters, who advocate even lower numbers. “I think the I.P.C.C. on this point has once again erred on the side of understating the degree of the likely changes,” Dr. Mann said.
However, Christopher B. Field, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who serves on the panel but was not directly involved in the new draft, said the group had to reflect the full range of plausible scientific views.
“I think that the I.P.C.C. has a tradition of being very conservative,” Dr. Field said. “They really want the story to be right.”
Regarding the likely rise in sea level over the coming century, the new report lays out several possibilities. In the most optimistic, the world’s governments would prove far more successful at getting emissions under control than they have been in the recent past, helping to limit the total warming.
In that circumstance, sea level could be expected to rise as little as 10 inches by the end of the century, the report found. That is a bit more than the eight-inch increase in the 20th century, which proved manageable even though it caused severe erosion along the world’s shorelines.
At the other extreme, the report considers a chain of events in which emissions continue to increase at a swift pace. Under those conditions, sea level could be expected to rise at least 21 inches by 2100 and might increase a bit more than three feet, the draft report said.
Hundreds of millions of people live near sea level, and either figure would represent a challenge for humanity, scientists say. But a three-foot rise in particular would endanger many of the world’s great cities — among them New York; London; Shanghai; Venice; Sydney, Australia; Miami; and New Orleans.
At the Printer, Living Tissue
http://nyti.ms/16mKf92
Someday, perhaps, printers will revolutionize the world of medicine, churning out hearts, livers and other organs to ease transplantation shortages. For now, though, Darryl D’Lima would settle for a little bit of knee cartilage.
Dr. D’Lima, who heads an orthopedic research lab at the Scripps Clinic here, has already made bioartificial cartilage in cow tissue, modifying an old inkjet printer to put down layer after layer of a gel containing living cells. He has also printed cartilage in tissue removed from patients who have undergone knee replacement surgery.
There is much work to do to perfect the process, get regulatory approvals and conduct clinical trials, but his eventual goal sounds like something from science fiction: to have a printer in the operating room that could custom-print new cartilage directly in the body to repair or replace tissue that is missing because of injury or arthritis.
Just as 3-D printers have gained in popularity among hobbyists and companies who use them to create everyday objects, prototypes and spare parts (and even a crude gun), there has been a rise in interest in using similar technology in medicine. Instead of the plastics or powders used in conventional 3-D printers to build an object layer by layer, so-called bioprinters print cells, usually in a liquid or gel. The goal isn’t to create a widget or a toy, but to assemble living tissue.
At labs around the world, researchers have been experimenting with bioprinting, first just to see whether it was possible to push cells through a printhead without killing them (in most cases it is), and then trying to make cartilage, bone, skin, blood vessels, small bits of liver and other tissues. There are other ways to try to “engineer” tissue — one involves creating a scaffold out of plastics or other materials and adding cells to it. In theory, at least, a bioprinter has advantages in that it can control the placement of cells and other components to mimic natural structures.
But just as the claims made for 3-D printing technology sometimes exceed the reality, the field of bioprinting has seen its share of hype. News releases, TED talks and news reports often imply that the age of print-on-demand organs is just around the corner. (Accompanying illustrations can be fanciful as well — one shows a complete heart, seemingly filled with blood, as the end product in a printer).
The reality is that, although bioprinting researchers have made great strides, there are many formidable obstacles to overcome.
“Nobody who has any credibility claims they can print organs, or believes in their heart of hearts that that will happen in the next 20 years,” said Brian Derby, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain who reviewed the field last year in an article in the journal Science.
For now, researchers have set their sights lower. Organovo, for instance, a San Diego company that has developed a bioprinter, is making strips of liver tissue, about 20 cells thick, that it says could be used to test drugs under development.
A lab at the Hannover Medical School in Germany is one of several experimenting with 3-D printing of skin cells; another German lab has printed sheets of heart cells that might some day be used as patches to help repair damage from heart attacks. A researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, Thomas Boland, has developed a method to print fat tissue that may someday be used to create small implants for women who have had breast lumpectomies. Dr. Boland has also done much of the basic research on bioprinting technologies. “I think it is the future for regenerative medicine,” he said.
Dr. D’Lima acknowledges that his dream of a cartilage printer — perhaps a printhead attached to a robotic arm for precise positioning — is years away. But he thinks the project has more chance of becoming reality than some others.
“Printing a whole heart or a whole bladder is glamorous and exciting,” he said. “But cartilage might be the low-hanging fruit to get 3-D printing into the clinic.”
One reason, he said, is that cartilage is in some ways simpler than other tissues. Cells called chondrocytes sit in a matrix of fibrous collagens and other compounds secreted by the cells. As cells go, chondrocytes are relatively low maintenance — they do not need much nourishment, which simplifies the printing process.
Keeping printed tissue nourished, and thus alive, is one of the most difficult challenges facing researchers. Most cells need to be within a short distance — usually a couple of cell widths — of a source of nutrients. Nature accomplishes this through a network of microscopic blood vessels, or capillaries.
But trying to emulate capillaries in bioprinted tissue is difficult. With his fat tissue, Dr. Boland’s approach is to build channels into the degradable gel containing the fat cells, and line the channels with the kind of cells found in blood vessels. When the printed fat is implanted, the tubes “start to behave as micro blood vessels,” he said.
The body naturally produces chemical signals that would cause it to start growing small blood vessels into the implant, Dr. Boland said, but the process is slow. With his approach, he said, “we expect this will be sped up, and hopefully keep the cells alive.”
With cartilage, Dr. D’Lima does not need to worry about blood vessels — the chondrocytes get the little nourishment they need through diffusion of nutrients from the joint lining and bone, which is aided by compression of the cartilage as the joints move. Nor does he need to be concerned with nerves, as cartilage lacks them.
But there is still plenty to worry about. Although it is less than a quarter of an inch thick, cartilage of the type found in the knee or hip has a complex structure, with several layers in which collagen and other fibrous materials are oriented differently.
“The printing demands change with every layer,” Dr. D’Lima said. “Most 3-D printers just change the shape. We are changing the shape, the composition, the type of cells, even the orientation of the cells.”
Dr. D’Lima has been involved in orthopedic research for years; one of his earlier projects, a sensor-laden knee-replacement prosthesis called the electronic knee, has provided invaluable data about the forces that act on the joint. So he was aware of other efforts to make and repair cartilage. “But we didn’t want to grow tissue in the lab and then figure how to transplant it into the body,” he said. “We wanted to print it directly in the body itself.”
He and his colleagues began thinking about using a thermal inkjet printer, in which tiny channels containing the ink are heated, producing a vapor bubble that forces out a drop. The technology is very reliable and is used in most consumer printers, but the researchers were wary because of the heat produced. “We thought it would kill the cells,” Dr. D’Lima said.
But Dr. Boland, then at Clemson University, and others had already done the basic research that showed that the heat pulse was so rapid that most cells survived the process.
Dr. D’Lima’s group soon discovered another problem: the newest thermal inkjets were too sophisticated for their work. “They print at such high resolution that the print nozzles are too fine for cells to squeeze through,” he said.
They found a 1990s-era Hewlett-Packard printer, a Deskjet 500, with bigger nozzles. But that printer was so old that it was difficult finding ink cartridges; the researchers finally located a supplier in China who had some.
Their idea was to replace the ink in the cartridges with their cartilage-making mixture, which consisted of a liquid called PEG-DMA and the chondrocytes. But even that created a problem — the cells would settle out of the liquid and clog the printhead. So the researchers had to devise a way to keep the mixture stirred up.
The mixture also has to be liquid to be printed, but once printed it must become a gel — otherwise the end product would just be a watery mess. PEG-DMA becomes a gel under ultraviolet light, so the solution was to keep the print area constantly exposed to UV light to harden each drop as it was printed. “So now you’re printing tissue,” Dr. D’Lima said.
But Dr. D’Lima and his group are investigating other materials for their gel. While PEG-DMA is biocompatible (and approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration), it would remain in the body and might eventually cause inflammation. So they are looking for substances that could degrade over time, to be replaced by the matrix produced by the chondrocytes. The printed material could be formulated to degrade at the same rate as the natural matrix is produced.
There are plenty of other challenges as well, Dr. D’Lima said, including a basic one — how to get the right kinds of cells, and enough of them, for the printer. It would not make much sense to use a patient’s own limited number of cartilage cells from elsewhere in the body. So his lab is investigating the use of stem cells, precursor cells that can become chondrocytes. “The advantage of stem cells is that it would mean a virtually unlimited supply,” Dr. D’Lima said.
Dr. D’Lima’s team is investigating other technologies that might be used in combination with bioprinting, including electrospinning, a method of creating the fibers in the matrix, and nanomagnetism, a way to orient the fibers. His lab takes a multidisciplinary approach — he even attends Siggraph, the large annual computer graphics convention, to get ideas. “They’re like 10 years ahead of medical technology,” he said.
Meanwhile, the lab has upgraded its printing technology. The Deskjet is still around, but it has not been used in more than a year. It has been supplanted by a much more sophisticated device from Hewlett-Packard — essentially a programmable printhead that allows the researchers to adjust drop size and other characteristics to optimize the printing process.
Dr. D’Lima said the biggest remaining hurdles were probably regulatory ones — including proving to the F.D.A. that printed cartilage can be safe — and that most of the scientific challenges had been met. “I think in terms of getting it to work, we are cautiously optimistic,” he said.
Deaf Student, Denied Interpreter by Medical School, Draws Focus of Advocates
http://nyti.ms/163iBug
Speaking with the parents of a sick infant, Michael Argenyi, a medical student, could not understand why the child was hospitalized. During another clinical training session, he missed most of what a patient with a broken jaw was trying to convey about his condition.
His incomprehension, Mr. Argenyi explained, was not because of a deficiency in academic understanding. Rather, he simply could not hear.
Mr. Argenyi, 26, is legally deaf. Despite his repeated requests to use an interpreter during clinical training, administrators at the Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., have refused to allow it. They have contended that Mr. Argenyi, who is able to speak, communicated well enough without one and that patients could be more hesitant to share information when someone else was present. They added that doctors needed to focus on the patient (not a third party) to rely on visual clues to make a proper diagnosis.
Mr. Argenyi took a leave of absence at the end of his second year, in 2011, after suing Creighton for the right to finish his medical training with an interpreter. The case, scheduled to go to trial on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Omaha, is attracting the attention of the federal government and advocates who are concerned that it could deal a setback to continuing efforts to achieve equality for people with disabilities.
“I couldn’t understand so much of the communication in the clinic,” Mr. Argenyi wrote in an e-mail. “It was humiliating to present only half of a history because I had missed so much of what was communicated. I was embarrassed every time I would miss medicine names that I knew from classes but couldn’t understand when the patient or a colleague spoke them.”
Despite making tremendous strides over the past four decades with the passage of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, those with disabilities remain underrepresented in higher education and in the work force. In the medical field, people who are deaf or hard of hearing remain less likely to hold high-skilled positions than those without impairments.
Universities tend to provide requested accommodations after admitting a student who they know has a disability, proponents for the deaf say. And most arrangements for the deaf are settled long before any issues reach a courtroom, said Curtis Decker, the executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, a federally financed association of legal services programs.
But, he said of Mr. Argenyi’s lawsuit, “It’s a very important case because, I think, if it’s successful it will send a very powerful message to the university community that the law does cover them and the law is clear about the accommodations that they need to provide.”
Creighton officials maintain that they have provided Mr. Argenyi with the necessary tools for him to succeed in medical school.
“Michael Argenyi is a very bright, capable young man who Creighton believes will make a good doctor,” said Scott Parrish Moore, the lead counsel for Creighton.
After being accepted to Creighton four years ago, Mr. Argenyi asked the university to provide a real-time captioning system for lectures and a cued speech interpreter. (Mr. Argenyi, who does not know sign language, can read lips. An interpreter helps by mouthing words while using hand signals to clarify sounds.) These were the same accommodations that Mr. Argenyi, who had a diagnosis of profound deafness when he was 8 months old, received for much of his schooling, from grade school through undergraduate studies at Seattle University.
Creighton provided Mr. Argenyi with just one of the aides that his audiologist had recommended — an FM system, which amplifies the sounds he hears in cochlear implants. The university also provided note takers for lectures, priority seating and audio podcasts.
Soon after classes began, Mr. Argenyi told school officials that the accommodations were inadequate and that he was missing information. He sued in federal court in Omaha in September 2009, arguing that the university was legally required to pay for and provide necessary aides.
Mr. Argenyi said he hired his own interpreter and transcription service, which cost him more than $100,000 during his two years in medical school. The breaking point, he said, came during his clinical work in his second year when Creighton refused to allow him to use an interpreter, even if he paid for it himself. The university did allow Mr. Argenyi to use interpreters during a couple of clinics while the Justice Department was trying to broker a settlement, but stopped when a deal could not be reached.
Mr. Argenyi is pursuing degrees in public health and social work at Boston University, which is providing his requested transcription services, while the lawsuit is pending.
Gays in Russia Find No Haven, Despite Support From the West
http://nyti.ms/1cGgXaH
MOSCOW — If this article were published in a newspaper based in Russia, it could be labeled 18+ — like an X-rated movie — and start with the following disclaimer: “This article contains information not suitable for readers younger than 18 years of age, according to Russian legislation.”
Such warnings, put on any articles that discuss homosexuality or gay rights, are the result of a law nominally aimed at “protecting” children by banning “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships” but widely understood as an effort to suppress homosexuality and Russia’s fledgling gay rights movement.
The law, signed by President Vladimir V. Putin in June, has ignited international condemnation and blindsided the Kremlin with the sort of toxic political controversy that officials had desperately hoped to avoid ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. The last Olympics on Russian soil, in 1980, was marred by the boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The furor includes a boycott of Russian vodka in gay bars throughout the West and some calls for a boycott of the Sochi Games altogether. Beyond putting organizers on the defensive, it has cast worldwide attention on the cruel circumstances in which most gay people live in modern Russia.
Despite the breathtaking wealth and vibrant culture in the metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia remains a country where discrimination and even violence against gay people are widely tolerated.
“What is going on now in Russia contradicts its place in the world,” said Anton Krasovsky, a television anchor who was immediately fired from his job at the government-controlled KontrTV network in January after he announced during a live broadcast that he is gay, saying he was fed up with lying about his life and offended by the legislation.
Few gay people in Russia openly acknowledge their sexual orientation, and those who do are often harassed. When some gay people protested the propaganda law by kissing outside the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament, police officers stood by and watched as the demonstrators were doused with water and beaten by antigay and religious supporters of the bill.
An overwhelming 88 percent of Russians support the gay propaganda ban, according to a survey conducted in June by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center. A survey conducted in April by the Levada Center found that 35 percent of Russians believed that homosexuality was a disease and 43 percent believed that it was a bad habit, a result of poor parenting or a lack of discipline, or a symptom of abuse.
Last month, Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, called same-sex marriage “a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse.”
Mixed signals from senior Russian officials over how the propaganda law might be enforced during the Games have undercut assertions by the International Olympic Committee that gay athletes and spectators have nothing to worry about, and have left organizing officials facing harsh criticism and demanding clarifications from the Kremlin.
There have been comparisons to Nazi Germany as host of the 1936 Olympics inside and outside Russia, including one by Jay Leno during an interview with President Obama last week on “The Tonight Show.”
“Something that shocked me about Russia,” Mr. Leno told the president. “Suddenly, homosexuality is against the law. I mean, this seems like Germany: Let’s round up the Jews. Let’s round up the gays. Let’s round up the blacks. I mean, it starts with that.”
Mr. Obama, on Mr. Leno’s show and again at a White House news conference on Friday, noted that Russia was not alone in its treatment of gay people, but he denounced the legislation and said he expected Mr. Putin and the Russian government to prevent any discrimination in Sochi.
“I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgendered persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them,” he told Mr. Leno. At the White House, Mr. Obama said he opposed a boycott of the Games, but added, “Nobody is more offended than me by some of the antigay and lesbian legislation that you’ve been seeing in Russia.”
Russian officials say the criticism is unfair and inaccurate. In 1993, Russia repealed the Soviet-era law that made gay sex a crime.
“This is not about imposing any kind of sanctions against homosexuality,” Mr. Putin said, defending the propaganda law at a news conference in June. “This is about protecting children.”
He added: “The law does not in any way infringe on the rights of sexual minorities. They are full-fledged members of our society and are not being discriminated against in any way.”
Gay rights advocates disagree, saying the law is vague and can be used to arrest anyone who appears to support gay rights.
American rights groups, backed by athletes like Blake Skjellerup, a speed skater, and Greg Louganis, the gold medalist diver, are leading efforts to pressure Russia and the International Olympic Committee, including the vodka boycott and a petition signed by more than 300,000 people.
Some, like Stephen Fry, a British comedian who is gay, are urging a boycott of Sochi, while others want protests there to avoid punishing athletes.
Critics say Russia’s repression of gay rights is part of a pattern that also includes a tightening of pressure on civil society groups, and steps to limit foreign influences — all seemingly out of sync with Russia’s push to host international events, like the recently completed 2013 World University Games in Kazan and the international track and field championships now under way in Moscow.
Beyond Sochi, Russia will hold the World Cup in 2018 and is bidding for the World Expo in 2020. Asked if the gay rights issue might derail the bid, a spokeswoman for the deputy prime minister, Arkady Dvorkovich, noted that Russia was competing with Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal.
Russian gay rights advocates said the outrage in the West was providing new energy and financial support to their still relatively young movement. It is also raising pressure, including fears of increased violence.
“It’s not only a question of the period of the Olympic Games; here, there should be no law like this,” said Kirill Kalugin, 21, who was beaten by counterdemonstrators at a gay pride event in St. Petersburg last month and then detained by the police. “I feel very offended that I am being presented as an enemy of my own people.”
Mr. Krasovsky, the fired television anchor, likened life for gay people in Russia to that in the rural America in 1989, seven years before the Defense of Marriage Act became law. He also noted that in 1987, Britain adopted a ban on providing information about homosexuality to children nearly identical to the Russian law.
Aleksandr Smirnov, 39, a freelance journalist, said he was forced to quit his job in the press office of a deputy mayor in Moscow after he was featured with more than two dozen other gay Muscovites in a special issue of Afisha magazine in February. Being gay in Russia means “you are under permanent stress,” he said.
As for gay propaganda, he said the notion was ridiculous.
“Seven years ago, I wrote a letter to my mother, explaining my position, and I tried to explain to her that this has nothing to do with the existing stereotypes,” Mr. Smirnov said. “I told her that when I was about 13, I just felt, that, you know, I like boys, just the way the boys, not gays, at this same age, started to have feelings toward girls and women. I was not seduced. I was not lured into it, provoked into it. This happened quite naturally.”
Rights advocates said that Russia was growing more dangerous for gay people. This year, there have been at least two killings motivated by antigay bias in the country, including the savage beating death in May of a young man in Volgograd who was also sodomized with beer bottles.
Mr. Smirnov said that even in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, where there are large gay populations, as well as a thriving and visible gay night life that includes several gay bars and clubs, bias was inescapable.
“If you ask gays in Moscow whether they were attacked, or insulted, practically everyone will admit that it happened to him,” he said. “We are just at the very, very beginning of the movement for the rights of gays. And this new law, you know, it seals our mouths and ties our hands and feet.”
Hurricane Sandy Crept Up on a Boy Who Couldn’t Swim. Guess What He Did.
http://nyti.ms/17CeJSx
After Hurricane Sandy brought the ocean to his doorstep, Kenrick Sultan felt a new sense of vulnerability. A shy 15-year-old, he has lived by water his entire life — but he never learned how to swim.
He was born in Antigua, the Caribbean Island known for its 365 beaches. For the past decade, he has lived in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Before this summer, he had set foot on the beach there exactly once and never so much as dipped a toe in the waves.
But having watched the waters of Hurricane Sandy creep up his street, Kenrick finally decided to conquer his fear of the water. “If I’m in trouble, I’d be able to float,” he explained.
Looking slightly terrified behind blue-tinted goggles, Kenrick lowered his slender frame into a pool at a nearby high school. Alongside him stood Ray Belmont, a volunteer instructor who himself only recently learned to swim, spouting advice and encouragement. “Keep kicking, keep kicking, keep kicking!” Mr. Belmont shouted. “The feet go all the time, even when you’re breathing.”
The hourlong class, held on a steamy summer evening, was a step toward addressing one of New York’s more persistent and surprising disparities: many of the poor and working-class residents who live along some of the most popular beaches in the city cannot swim.
Poverty, culture and a fear of the water have proved stubborn impediments, leaving seaside residents unable to revel in the resource in their backyard that other New Yorkers ride the subway for an hour or more to experience.
The issue is as much about public safety as recreation, said Shawn Slevin, founder of the Swim Strong Foundation, a nonprofit group in New York that provides free and discounted swim lessons to young people like Kenrick, as well as adults. On average, each day 10 people drown in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the drowning rate among black children ages 5 to 14 is almost three times that of white children.
“I can’t swim, and I’ve always been afraid of the water,” Kenrick’s mother, Mary Sultan, said. “I never let my three children go to the beach.”
Until recently, Kenrick was content to while away his free time across the street from his house in Bayswater Park, which overlooks Jamaica Bay. Now and then, he and his friends kick a soccer ball around, but mostly they talk — about school, about girls, about favorite video games and, of course, about the hurricane that ravaged the Rockaways last fall.
“I was awake the entire night,” said Kenrick, recalling the evening of Oct. 29 when Hurricane Sandy inundated much of his neighborhood. “The water was coming slowly at first and then it started rushing onto our street from both directions. It was scary.”
The sense of helplessness that arrived with the storm surge helped spur him to finally learn to swim. Five of the eight Rockaways residents killed by the hurricane drowned.
Five years earlier, Kenrick’s best friend, Raynald Chance Belmont, 15, had learned from Swim Strong, which is administered and staffed entirely by volunteers. Because swim lessons typically cost as much as $1 a minute, learning to swim can be something of a luxury, not unlike sleep-away camp or private tutors, affordable mainly to affluent families.
But Swim Strong is only one of a number of programs giving free or low-cost swim lessons to New Yorkers. The largest, by far, is a program called Learn to Swim offered by the city’s parks department, which provides free swim lessons at select pools through an online lottery system throughout the year. In the fiscal year that ended in June, the department taught 27,709 children and 1,110 adults to swim. It has taught an additional 24,000 second-grade students through a new program called Swim for Life.
After Chance learned to swim, his father, Ray Belmont, asked if he could sign up for lessons, too.
“It was always a goal,” recalled Mr. Belmont, 39, a property underwriter. “It was huge for me. It was a big accomplishment. I’m two blocks from the ocean and before, if something happened to my children, I wouldn’t be able to help them. As an adult, there’s a different kind of fear. I had to overcome that by getting lessons for myself.”
Like a number of Swim Strong alumni, Mr. Belmont decided to give back by volunteering as an instructor. He was eager to teach his son’s friend.
But first, Kenrick’s mother, who works seven days a week as a cashier and home health aide, needed to be persuaded. She had refused his requests before.
“He wanted to learn how to swim a long time ago and then started asking for lessons again recently,” said Ms. Sultan, 51, who owns a two-family house with her husband and sister. “At first, I told him I couldn’t afford it. But I came around.”
Once a week in the swimming pool at the local high school, where Kenrick will be a sophomore in the fall, Mr. Belmont works with him on the basics of swimming. His inaugural lesson in June was the first time that Kenrick had ever been in a pool.
“There’s the breathing, there’s the kicking, there’s the stroke, and it’s confusing,” Mr. Belmont said. “After a while it becomes automatic. Kenrick’s still very tight, but once he starts to incorporate the breathing, he loosens up.”
During his fourth lesson early last month, Kenrick experienced something new as he let go of Mr. Belmont’s hand for several feet in the pool. “Today, when I was doing it by myself, I felt myself floating,” he said.
Kenrick still is not sure about the ocean. The first word that enters his mind when he thinks of the Atlantic, he said, is “drowning.”
He might be coming around, though. This summer, he has a part-time job picking up litter at Rockaway Beach. The other day, as he peered through one of the telescopes on the Boardwalk, he studied the swimmers cavorting and laughing in the waves. And he had to admit: “It looked kind of fun.”
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Date: 2013-08-21 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-22 06:24 am (UTC)