This should be the last batch, I think...
Jun. 28th, 2005 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on new subway rules, which they'll never really enforce.
Watch Those Changing Rules: Finish Sodas on the Platform
By SEWELL CHAN
Subway riders afflicted by broken air-conditioning, foul odors, children selling candy bars for occasionally dubious causes and even the random groper have long sought relief by quickly switching cars.
No more.
Moving between cars - as well as resting one's feet on the seats, sipping from an open container (even a cup of coffee) and straddling a bicycle while riding the subway - will be prohibited under a new set of passenger rules adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's transit committee yesterday, the first such rule changes since 1994.
While riding between cars is already forbidden, managers at the authority said they wanted to make clear that even quickly darting from one car to another while the train is in motion is dangerous.
There is only one way, they said, to move safely to another car - exiting the train at the next station and then quickly re-entering it, even if passengers making a such a dash could face other perils, like tripping, smashing a finger or losing a purse between rapidly shutting doors.
And there is the fact that it is simply inconvenient. "Let's say you get on the train in the front, but you're in a hurry, and you need to exit in the back," offered Manny Guzman, a 15-year-old high school student from East New York, who was observed yesterday moving between two cars on an uptown No. 2 train. "It is unsafe, but I do it all the time." Banning this practice, he added, "makes no sense."
The transit committee, part of the authority's governing board, also weighed in on a host of other activities that vex or enrich the lives of riders, depending on one's point of view. Those who like to sip their coffee during their 6 a.m. commute might be annoyed, while others, who find that their commute is not improved by the addition of a man on a large bike, might embrace them.
Taking photographs, an activity viewed with suspicion by the authority last year, is now acceptable, as is registering voters. (But not on catwalks, which extend beyond the end of the platform, or emergency stairs, both of which will be officially off limits.) Sitting on a bicycle, riding a skateboard or wearing in-line skates on a moving train? Out. Drinking a soda on the platform is fine - but not on the train. (Food and drink vendors who rent space in stations would balk at a ban on their products, thus the clause that permits platform sipping.) Putting feet on the seat, once merely rude, is now illegal.
Then there are the sort of people who believe that because they hold a valid MetroCard, they are entitled to jump the turnstile if they are in a hurry or are foiled by malfunctioning equipment. The new rules make it clear that this is not an acceptable defense.
The rules, to take effect on Oct. 1, are enforceable by any police officer, who can issue a civil summons. Violators, who face fines of $25 to $100, can appeal to the Transit Adjudication Bureau.
The new rules were suggested in May 2004; at the time, they included a ban on unauthorized photography and videotaping, provisions that attracted criticism from civil libertarians, tourism promoters, artists and historians. That proposal, made ostensibly to thwart terrorism, created a yearlong controversy that delayed the final rules. The new set, which drops the photo and video ban, is expected to be passed by the authority's full board tomorrow.
Its members, who rarely debate even major spending issues put before them, found themselves in a lively discussion over both the fairness of the new rules and the authority's ability to enforce them.
Mark Page, the city's budget director, who represents Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on the board, observed: "It is, from time to time, convenient to absent oneself from a car or from a particular group of people."
Riders like Beatrice McCants, 30, said they had faced many such occasions. Ms. McCants, who works as a newspaper distributor in Midtown, said she was riding a Brooklyn-bound No. 3 train Wednesday when a man began masturbating in plain sight. "I thought, 'I've got to get off this train,' " she recalled. "Now I'm going to get a fine for that, for running from a flasher? I won't pay it!"
Assistant Chief Henry R. Cronin III, the commander of the Police Department's Transit Bureau, said police officers would use common sense in deciding whom to cite for violating the rules. Nearly three-quarters of the fleet of 6,182 subway cars have unlocked doors between cars; 1,649 cars have locked doors.
Over the last decade, 13 people have been killed, and 117 injured, while riding or moving between subway cars or riding outside them, said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He said at least two were killed last year alone. Officials said that some riders have successfully sued for injuries suffered between cars, and that explicitly banning moving between cars could strengthen the agency's position in such lawsuits.
An article on "fat camps".
For Overweight Children, Are 'Fat Camps' a Solution?
By ABBY ELLIN
Two summers ago, Alexis Werth Mason was 12 years old and weighed 133 pounds. Not huge, but at 4-foot-11, she was heavier than she wanted to be.
Shopping was painful. Classmates teased her. A neighbor told her that she was too big to pull on his sled. After desperately trying - and failing - at diets, her mother, Bonnie Werth, asked if she wanted to go to a weight-loss camp.
"She said, 'I can't go to a fat camp, Mommy, all the kids will make fun of me,' " Ms. Werth, the president of Team Services, a marketing firm in Woodbury, N.Y., recalled. "But I convinced her to go."
"It wasn't so much the weight loss," Ms. Werth said, "but I wanted her to be around other kids with the same problems. She felt very isolated and alone in her issues."
Alexis, who is known as Lexi, spent eight weeks at Camp Shane, in Ferndale, N.Y., and lost 25 pounds. She has kept off every ounce since.
This is a big deal.
It is easy, after all, to lose weight in a controlled environment, but it is a different story when you are back home and faced with temptations like pizza and ice cream and get little to no exercise. So it's not surprising that many children who attend weight-loss camps regain the weight.
"Coming home from camp was hard," Lexi, now 14, said. "I knew what I had to do, but I saw everyone eating at school. When you see all your friends pigging out and watching old movies and crying and stuff, you want to join in. It's peer pressure. So I ate in moderation."
Thousands of young people will be spending this summer at weight-loss camps, a popular option for parents who have no idea how to inspire their children to shed pounds. It is a slowly growing industry. Nationwide, there are about a dozen camps devoted strictly to weight loss, four of them opened in the last year. But whether they work remains unclear.
Statistics about weight-loss camps are hard to come by. Campers often do not keep in touch with camp directors, nor do they always respond honestly to questionnaires.
But of the 1,000 campers who will weave their way this summer in and out of Tony Sparber's three New Image camps in Florida, California and the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, more than half are repeat customers. The figure is about the same for the 800 campers heading to Camp Shane in the Catskills.
"Maybe they're not losing the weight specifically, but instead they're learning something that they can use 20 years down the road and put into use when they're ready," said Marla Coleman, a former president of the American Camping Association.
Ms. Coleman added: "It's education. Knowledge. It goes to everything camp does, which is experiential learning."
Perhaps more important, Ms. Coleman said, camp gives children a reprieve from weight gain and the torment they often experience back in the real world. Many play sports for the first time, and have social lives.
But that is not always the case. Danielle Rothman, now 17, spent three summers at Camp Shane. "Everyone at Shane was overweight, yet people were still being made fun of about their weight," said Ms. Rothman, who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y.. "The more overweight kids are still made fun of. I was one of the thinner kids, and people would say, 'Why are you here?' It made me feel good, but after a while I wanted to hit them."
Weight-loss camps usually run for three weeks, six weeks or eight week sessions, and they cost about $7,500 for the entire summer - about $1,500 more than nonspecialized camps. Campers get about 1,500 calories a day, and campers generally spend three to four hours a day doing some kind of physical activity, as well other activities like drama or arts and crafts. There are weekly weigh-ins and regular classes in nutrition and cooking.
Most camps offer sessions for campers to explore their feelings about food and weight. But critics worry that the camps are not run by people who have the necessary credentials to handle children with serious emotional baggage, and that the sessions are too short to change a lifetime of bad habits.
Teresa Guerrero worked at a camp in Southern California in 2003 and 2004, where she was a guidance counselor.
"There were a lot of very messed-up kids," said Ms. Guerrero, 26, who is a doctoral candidate in clinical and school psychology at Hofstra. "The majority of them were compulsive overeaters."
"A lot were medicated, or ate out of boredom, or cut themselves," she said. "A lot had experienced divorce or the death of a parent. They could trace the weight gain back to that. It was a big responsibility for the counselors, none of whom was really equipped to deal with it."
One of the more promising programs is offered by the two-year-old Wellspring Camps, which operates Camp Wellspring, near Lake Placid, N.Y., for young women ages 14 to 22; Wellspring Adventure Camp near Asheville, N.C., for boys and girls 11 to 16; and Western Wellspring Adventure Camp in California, for boys and girls 13 to 18.
Unlike traditional weight-loss camps, Wellspring uses a cognitive behavioral approach. Campers set goals and monitor themselves, techniques that are components of behavior modification, one of the most widely accepted approaches to long-term weight-loss success.
Each camper is responsible for her own eating and exercise habits. At meals, for example, campers get "controlled" foods, like measured entrees and dessert, and "uncontrolled" foods: berries, melons or fat-free soups. They can eat as much of the uncontrolled foods as they want, but they have to jot down the calories and fat grams in a journal, with the goal of staying under 20 grams of fat and about 1,200 calories a day.
They use pedometers and are told to aim for a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. The overall goal is to change eating habits and make new ones.
"Self-control is a process in behavioral terms - keeping track of target behaviors and systematically evaluating these behaviors and goal setting," said Dr. Daniel Kirschenbaum, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern who helped design the program, but has no financial involvement in the camps.
Dr. Kirschenbaum said self-control could be taught like any other skill through instruction, modeling and encouragement.
So far, the camps have had encouraging success. A recent study by Wellspring found that 91 percent of all its campers had maintained the weight or continued to lose six months after camp ended; the weight loss afterward averaged 7.4 pounds. The camps plan to continue tracking campers' long-term weight loss to try to persuade health insurers to cover the programs.
Still, those involved agree that the most significant factor for success is the level of parental involvement once camp ends. It is not enough for the child to return home from 30 pounds lighter if the household does not change as well - whether that means eliminating junk foods or encouraging exercise.
"The people who are successful are the parents who go the extra mile and are observant and watch their kids," said Tony Sparber, 48, who has been in the industry for 25 years.
Although all camps offer lectures for parents on visiting day, only a few show up, organizers say.
After camp ends, a New Image nutritionist calls families each month. Every two months they receive a newsletter with recipes. But Mr. Sparber acknowledges that most people do not follow through. "It starts out strong, and as time goes on it fades," he said. This year, in an effort to reach more people, he is adding an online counseling program with a nutritionist, as well as a weight management and fitness program at the Jewish Community Center in Tenafly, N.J.
Only about one-third of the campers at Camp Wellspring and Wellspring Adventure Camp adhered to its after-care program, which includes keeping a daily online journal for self-monitoring and setting goals, and chatting with a behavioral coach by phone or e-mail.
All of those who followed that regimen, sustained or continued their weight loss at the three-month mark, said Ryan Craig, president of Wellspring camps, who is also director of the Academy of the Sierras, a boarding school for obese adolescents in Reedley, Calif.
Lexi Werth Mason attributes her weight-loss success to two things: her goal of fitting into a two-piece bathing suit, and her mother. When she first returned home from camp, her mother had snack bags full of pre-cut vegetables waiting for her. Every night they discuss what Lexi can eat. The two shop together, read labels, prepare menus and cook.
"People don't have time to sit down to home-cooked meals, and they're so busy they get Big Macs," said Lexi. "At camp I learned that there's 590 calories in one, so we don't do that anymore. Now we cook dinners because I'm conscious of what I'm eating. We substitute light or fat-free for sour cream. Even if you do have a cookie every once in a while, it's not that big of a deal. You work it off."
Lexi's mother said, "My fear was that when she lost all this weight that she would get so obsessive about it that it would develop into an eating disorder."
Ms. Werth continued: "From the day she came home, I said, 'It's not about leaving all this stuff behind.' The minute you deprive yourself of everything you've loved and enjoyed, you will end up compulsively overeating. I was trying to create a balance for her and proving to her that you could have your cookies every day but in moderation."
She added, "I signed her right up for Curves, and she got on her bicycle and rode to the gym and watched everything she's eating."
Ms. Werth also locks up junk food in a kitchen cabinet, and only she has the key. Lexi said she found that helpful.
Most important for Lexi, nothing tastes as great as thin feels. And that kind of motivation is something that no diet or weight-loss camp can instill in a person.
"Last winter my friend couldn't pull me on the sled because I was too heavy, and I was really upset about it," Lexi said. "This year, I went to his house and he pulled me, and that was one of the happiest days of my life."
A Lives article on hiking in Alaska.
Wild Night
By CINTHIA RITCHIE
The mosquitoes were the size of toads. At least that's what I say now. But they were big that summer, huge and hungry, swarming everything that moved. It was the mid-80's, and Anchorage had yet to be invaded by the big-box companies and the yuppie stores: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic. It was still smallish and homey, a place where neighbors brought over homemade muffins when you moved in. You could let your dog run loose; you could accidentally leave your wallet on the bus and someone would mail it to you one week later, with all the money intact and a small note taped to the side: ''Found this on the midtown bus and thought you might miss it.''
My boyfriend and I were out on the Resurrection Trail, sloshing through a dreary rain that showed no hope of letting up. I trudged behind him, complaining about the cold, the rough terrain, the way the mud splashed inside my boots. Just three weeks earlier, I moved here from a small desert town in Arizona, and I thought of myself as a gritty outdoors woman. I was used to dodging lizards on sandstone trails. Once, I had even been chased by wild pigs outside of Tucson. But this much green made me nervous. I felt claustrophobic, caged and as if we might walk forever and never reach our destination.
''Slow down,'' I screamed. ''My legs are shorter than yours.''
But he picked up the pace, his rifle thumping his hip in a way I found particularly annoying. To retaliate, I lagged farther and farther behind, my hat lost, my hair flapping my forehead. By the time I arrived at camp, the tent was set up and coffee was boiling over a miserable fire. We ate macaroni and cheese in damp silence. Even the dog knew better than to bark.
Later that night, after the rain stopped, I woke to an urgent slapping, as if something was trying to claw its way into the tent. I smacked my boyfriend awake.
''What's that?''
He perched up on one elbow.
''Skeeters,'' he said, and fell back to sleep. I lay in that dim summer twilight, the tent swaying and puckering from mosquito assault. Nothing could get me to go outside. Nothing.
But an hour later, I was rubbing bug dope over my face because I just had to go out. I don't know why. It was still light -- a haze that reminded me of childhood naps, and of how resentful I had felt at being ordered to sleep. I unzipped the tent flap, and at first the mosquitoes made me cower. The air smelled damp and sweet; the sky coated the trees in lavender shadows that were moody and undeniably beautiful. I headed for a nearby ridge, mosquitoes flying inside my mouth and stinging the tender areas around my eyes.
And then I saw the bear. It was snorting around the far corner of our campsite. I don't know how long it had been there, if it had been watching me or if it cared. I froze. This bear looked nothing like the glossy photographs in nature magazines. It smelled bad too, dark and spoiled, like rotten hamburger.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. I stood paralyzed, as mosquitoes feasted on my neck and shoulders and the bear rooted around our campfire. Its awful face poked into the ashes, huffing from its nose.
Finally, it gave one last bellowing snort and lumbered off into the woods. I stood unmoving. I had wet myself. When I finally mustered the courage to crawl back into the tent, I huddled inside my sleeping bag, sobbing and picking at my swelling bites.
The next morning we broke camp and headed home early. I tramped through a chilling rain, too exhausted even to complain. I felt disillusioned and defeated. Alaska had flattened my resolve in one night.
Still, even then, during that cold and long hike back to the trail head, the seduction had begun, almost invisible at first: the touch of birch leaves against my neck, the feel of mud on my bare knee when I fell, the kiss of wind on my face.
Twenty years and countless hikes later, I've come to understand that hiking Alaska's back country is like suffering through a first date. It's uncomfortable at times, even painful, but also hauntingly provocative. Walking for hours without passing another person makes you feel as if you've shed your skin and become part of the rocks and ridges.
When we got back to Anchorage, I took a Magic Marker and counted my mosquito bites: 121, 122, 123. I patted each one possessively. They were my battle scars, my penance and my initiation into a world where bugs swarmed and bears reeked and the sky stayed stubbornly light all summer. I thought of the purple light of the woods, the smell of the rain, the look of the mountains on the drive home: wild and stark and boldly primitive. I thought of all this, and I itched until my eyes watered, and I couldn't stop. It was maddening, that itch. It was irresistible and glorious.
And an article about part of the new WTC.
Built to Be Noticed, and to Return the Favor
By GLENN COLLINS
For three years now, 7 World Trade Center - the last tower to fall on Sept. 11, 2001, and the first to be reborn at ground zero - has meant a crucial question for its developer, Larry A. Silverstein.
Could he build a skyscraper atop a monumental concrete Con Edison substation - arguably the ugliest pedestal at any Manhattan building - and adorn it with a facade so arresting that tenants would clamor to rent office space there?
The answer is emerging these days at the northern edge of the trade center void. A shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass is being married to the brutalist 78-foot-tall substation with what looks like a sculptural installation: a kinetic, interactive stainless-steel wall.
Architects have said that this screen, intended to be a source of reflected color and light, may serve as the prototype for the cladding of a new, sturdier base at the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower that will be built next door. That skyscraper's security redesign is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday.
At 7 World Trade Center, the high-tech wall must also serve as a porous ventilator for hidden vaults of three-story transformers that need to breathe. Mr. Silverstein said there was "a whole set of design challenges that David had to solve," referring to David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of 7 World Trade Center.
To Mr. Childs, it was essential not to slap "some external piece of art" onto the 52-story tower, he said, "but something integral, that was designed from the start."
Mr. Childs sought the expertise of James Carpenter, whose Manhattan firm, James Carpenter Design Associates, also helped to create the glass cable-wall system at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, and is currently working on an extension to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
To observers, Mr. Childs hoped, it would seem that light was not only captured by the building, but also emanated from it. So the architects ordered 13.6-foot-long white glass sheets, low-iron panes that minimize the conventional greenish hue of glass, for the upper floors. These could be extended in one piece from the ceiling of each of the building's 42 tenant floors down past the spandrels, the horizontal panels at the base of each floor slab.
The spandrels themselves are curved, made of folded textured steel that reflects the light not only from the sky, but also from blue steel window sills at each floor. This configuration scatters light upward within the tower's glass skin, "embedding the sky in the glass surface," as Mr. Carpenter put it.
The resulting glass wall was so atypical - with a portion of the bottom of each floor's glass panes exposed to grimy air - that the architectural team had to design a twisty squeegee that could be deployed from movable maintenance scaffolding. Then a cleaning worker had to demonstrate to Mr. Silverstein that the squeegee could actually clean the exposed inner portions of the panes.
But how to match this airy glass tower to its stolid base, which comprises not only the seven-story substation - which feeds electricity to a million users in Manhattan - but also three floors of the building's mechanical systems?
"The answer was to link the upper and lower buildings together by light," said Mr. Carpenter, a 2004 MacArthur fellow who trained as an architect and sculptor, and has made the characteristics of light a focus of his designs. "We envisioned the whole building as prismatic - as a parallelogram prism."
So on the lower floors, the architects hoped to restate the design of the top of the building, using nothing more than a curtain wall, an independently supported outer screen. Hard hats are now installing 15-foot-tall, 5-foot-wide panels of elegantly machined and polished triangular steel prism bars in two rows set 6.5 inches apart. Each section weighs 1,500 pounds.
During the day, the 130,000 prisms are intended to make the wall an active surface. The prism sections are set off by 15 degrees, so they can reflect the sky in different directions. As pedestrians walk past the building, they are expected to experience kinetic reflections.
"The wall will create a moiré effect that moves by you, as if you are walking past stretched silk," Mr. Childs said.
But at dusk, 220,000 blue and white light-emitting diodes, which give off little heat and are easy to maintain, will illuminate the prismed wall from within. The lights will subtly reflect off the prisms out onto the street.
When the wall is activated, its evening glow will change in a sequence from tranquil, patterned fields of blue and white to more active modes: at times, the wall will follow passers-by - or at least, 12 motion-sensing cameras will. The sensors are randomly programmed to follow pedestrians on the sidewalks, creating multistory, moving columns of blue light on a white background as people pass the building. Sometimes two pedestrians heading in different directions will each be highlighted.
These days, the building's upper pylon seems to change dramatically during shifting light and weather conditions. At "Seven," as the tower is called by those who are toiling on its construction, the intensity of the glass skin's light-scattering effect is greatest in the early morning and late afternoon.
Mr. Carpenter said he hopes that 7 World Trade Center can be "not just a mirrored building," but will explore "the boundary between transparent and reflective."
The 741-foot-tall building will have 1.7 million square feet of office space, beginning at the building's 11th floor. By the end of August the tower - scheduled to be completed early next year - will have a finished floor to show to prospective tenants. Column-free, and nearly 10 feet in height, the office floors provide unobstructed views. The building's massive central core limits the floor plates to 40,000 square feet, but addresses security concerns by protecting elevators, stairways and sprinkler pipes behind two feet of concrete.
The bulky base of 7 World Trade Center enhances its safety, security experts say, since its occupied floors start well above possible blast effects from a truck bomb. The New York Police Department has insisted that the Freedom Tower, also being designed by Mr. Childs, incorporate a similar security core, as well as a hardened concrete base to protect tenants.
Mr. Carpenter and his chief assistant, Richard Kress, designed the lower reflective wall to cover only the north and south facades of 7 World Trade Center - which is bounded by Vesey, Barclay and Washington Streets - since the facade nearly abuts the monumental Verizon building.
The lobby will be dominated by a floor-to-ceiling, 14-by-70-foot wall of acid-etched translucent glass illuminated by whitish light-emitting diodes, created by Mr. Carpenter and the artist Jenny Holzer. She will program the wall to display moving text appropriate to the site, poetry that will evoke the history of New York.
The building has cost Mr. Silverstein of Silverstein Properties $700 million, "very significantly more than I ever expected to spend," he said. An important component of that expense - Mr. Silverstein would not say how much - has been to create the building's fancy curtain wall.
Space in the building is being offered for $50 to $60 per square foot, $15 higher than other space downtown, brokers say, though the tower's sales force says tax breaks and energy savings will make it more competitive. Though Mr. Silverstein is thus far tenantless, he said, "There are expressions of interest."
Mr. Silverstein has already put behind him the loss of the twin towers and his peripatetic quest for insurance settlements, but the effort to prettify 7 World Trade Center "has been the greatest challenge to date," he said. However, looking ahead to the re-unveiling of the Freedom Tower, he added: "It will pale in comparison to the challenges to come."
Watch Those Changing Rules: Finish Sodas on the Platform
By SEWELL CHAN
Subway riders afflicted by broken air-conditioning, foul odors, children selling candy bars for occasionally dubious causes and even the random groper have long sought relief by quickly switching cars.
No more.
Moving between cars - as well as resting one's feet on the seats, sipping from an open container (even a cup of coffee) and straddling a bicycle while riding the subway - will be prohibited under a new set of passenger rules adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's transit committee yesterday, the first such rule changes since 1994.
While riding between cars is already forbidden, managers at the authority said they wanted to make clear that even quickly darting from one car to another while the train is in motion is dangerous.
There is only one way, they said, to move safely to another car - exiting the train at the next station and then quickly re-entering it, even if passengers making a such a dash could face other perils, like tripping, smashing a finger or losing a purse between rapidly shutting doors.
And there is the fact that it is simply inconvenient. "Let's say you get on the train in the front, but you're in a hurry, and you need to exit in the back," offered Manny Guzman, a 15-year-old high school student from East New York, who was observed yesterday moving between two cars on an uptown No. 2 train. "It is unsafe, but I do it all the time." Banning this practice, he added, "makes no sense."
The transit committee, part of the authority's governing board, also weighed in on a host of other activities that vex or enrich the lives of riders, depending on one's point of view. Those who like to sip their coffee during their 6 a.m. commute might be annoyed, while others, who find that their commute is not improved by the addition of a man on a large bike, might embrace them.
Taking photographs, an activity viewed with suspicion by the authority last year, is now acceptable, as is registering voters. (But not on catwalks, which extend beyond the end of the platform, or emergency stairs, both of which will be officially off limits.) Sitting on a bicycle, riding a skateboard or wearing in-line skates on a moving train? Out. Drinking a soda on the platform is fine - but not on the train. (Food and drink vendors who rent space in stations would balk at a ban on their products, thus the clause that permits platform sipping.) Putting feet on the seat, once merely rude, is now illegal.
Then there are the sort of people who believe that because they hold a valid MetroCard, they are entitled to jump the turnstile if they are in a hurry or are foiled by malfunctioning equipment. The new rules make it clear that this is not an acceptable defense.
The rules, to take effect on Oct. 1, are enforceable by any police officer, who can issue a civil summons. Violators, who face fines of $25 to $100, can appeal to the Transit Adjudication Bureau.
The new rules were suggested in May 2004; at the time, they included a ban on unauthorized photography and videotaping, provisions that attracted criticism from civil libertarians, tourism promoters, artists and historians. That proposal, made ostensibly to thwart terrorism, created a yearlong controversy that delayed the final rules. The new set, which drops the photo and video ban, is expected to be passed by the authority's full board tomorrow.
Its members, who rarely debate even major spending issues put before them, found themselves in a lively discussion over both the fairness of the new rules and the authority's ability to enforce them.
Mark Page, the city's budget director, who represents Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on the board, observed: "It is, from time to time, convenient to absent oneself from a car or from a particular group of people."
Riders like Beatrice McCants, 30, said they had faced many such occasions. Ms. McCants, who works as a newspaper distributor in Midtown, said she was riding a Brooklyn-bound No. 3 train Wednesday when a man began masturbating in plain sight. "I thought, 'I've got to get off this train,' " she recalled. "Now I'm going to get a fine for that, for running from a flasher? I won't pay it!"
Assistant Chief Henry R. Cronin III, the commander of the Police Department's Transit Bureau, said police officers would use common sense in deciding whom to cite for violating the rules. Nearly three-quarters of the fleet of 6,182 subway cars have unlocked doors between cars; 1,649 cars have locked doors.
Over the last decade, 13 people have been killed, and 117 injured, while riding or moving between subway cars or riding outside them, said Lawrence G. Reuter, the president of New York City Transit, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He said at least two were killed last year alone. Officials said that some riders have successfully sued for injuries suffered between cars, and that explicitly banning moving between cars could strengthen the agency's position in such lawsuits.
An article on "fat camps".
For Overweight Children, Are 'Fat Camps' a Solution?
By ABBY ELLIN
Two summers ago, Alexis Werth Mason was 12 years old and weighed 133 pounds. Not huge, but at 4-foot-11, she was heavier than she wanted to be.
Shopping was painful. Classmates teased her. A neighbor told her that she was too big to pull on his sled. After desperately trying - and failing - at diets, her mother, Bonnie Werth, asked if she wanted to go to a weight-loss camp.
"She said, 'I can't go to a fat camp, Mommy, all the kids will make fun of me,' " Ms. Werth, the president of Team Services, a marketing firm in Woodbury, N.Y., recalled. "But I convinced her to go."
"It wasn't so much the weight loss," Ms. Werth said, "but I wanted her to be around other kids with the same problems. She felt very isolated and alone in her issues."
Alexis, who is known as Lexi, spent eight weeks at Camp Shane, in Ferndale, N.Y., and lost 25 pounds. She has kept off every ounce since.
This is a big deal.
It is easy, after all, to lose weight in a controlled environment, but it is a different story when you are back home and faced with temptations like pizza and ice cream and get little to no exercise. So it's not surprising that many children who attend weight-loss camps regain the weight.
"Coming home from camp was hard," Lexi, now 14, said. "I knew what I had to do, but I saw everyone eating at school. When you see all your friends pigging out and watching old movies and crying and stuff, you want to join in. It's peer pressure. So I ate in moderation."
Thousands of young people will be spending this summer at weight-loss camps, a popular option for parents who have no idea how to inspire their children to shed pounds. It is a slowly growing industry. Nationwide, there are about a dozen camps devoted strictly to weight loss, four of them opened in the last year. But whether they work remains unclear.
Statistics about weight-loss camps are hard to come by. Campers often do not keep in touch with camp directors, nor do they always respond honestly to questionnaires.
But of the 1,000 campers who will weave their way this summer in and out of Tony Sparber's three New Image camps in Florida, California and the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, more than half are repeat customers. The figure is about the same for the 800 campers heading to Camp Shane in the Catskills.
"Maybe they're not losing the weight specifically, but instead they're learning something that they can use 20 years down the road and put into use when they're ready," said Marla Coleman, a former president of the American Camping Association.
Ms. Coleman added: "It's education. Knowledge. It goes to everything camp does, which is experiential learning."
Perhaps more important, Ms. Coleman said, camp gives children a reprieve from weight gain and the torment they often experience back in the real world. Many play sports for the first time, and have social lives.
But that is not always the case. Danielle Rothman, now 17, spent three summers at Camp Shane. "Everyone at Shane was overweight, yet people were still being made fun of about their weight," said Ms. Rothman, who lives in Dix Hills, N.Y.. "The more overweight kids are still made fun of. I was one of the thinner kids, and people would say, 'Why are you here?' It made me feel good, but after a while I wanted to hit them."
Weight-loss camps usually run for three weeks, six weeks or eight week sessions, and they cost about $7,500 for the entire summer - about $1,500 more than nonspecialized camps. Campers get about 1,500 calories a day, and campers generally spend three to four hours a day doing some kind of physical activity, as well other activities like drama or arts and crafts. There are weekly weigh-ins and regular classes in nutrition and cooking.
Most camps offer sessions for campers to explore their feelings about food and weight. But critics worry that the camps are not run by people who have the necessary credentials to handle children with serious emotional baggage, and that the sessions are too short to change a lifetime of bad habits.
Teresa Guerrero worked at a camp in Southern California in 2003 and 2004, where she was a guidance counselor.
"There were a lot of very messed-up kids," said Ms. Guerrero, 26, who is a doctoral candidate in clinical and school psychology at Hofstra. "The majority of them were compulsive overeaters."
"A lot were medicated, or ate out of boredom, or cut themselves," she said. "A lot had experienced divorce or the death of a parent. They could trace the weight gain back to that. It was a big responsibility for the counselors, none of whom was really equipped to deal with it."
One of the more promising programs is offered by the two-year-old Wellspring Camps, which operates Camp Wellspring, near Lake Placid, N.Y., for young women ages 14 to 22; Wellspring Adventure Camp near Asheville, N.C., for boys and girls 11 to 16; and Western Wellspring Adventure Camp in California, for boys and girls 13 to 18.
Unlike traditional weight-loss camps, Wellspring uses a cognitive behavioral approach. Campers set goals and monitor themselves, techniques that are components of behavior modification, one of the most widely accepted approaches to long-term weight-loss success.
Each camper is responsible for her own eating and exercise habits. At meals, for example, campers get "controlled" foods, like measured entrees and dessert, and "uncontrolled" foods: berries, melons or fat-free soups. They can eat as much of the uncontrolled foods as they want, but they have to jot down the calories and fat grams in a journal, with the goal of staying under 20 grams of fat and about 1,200 calories a day.
They use pedometers and are told to aim for a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. The overall goal is to change eating habits and make new ones.
"Self-control is a process in behavioral terms - keeping track of target behaviors and systematically evaluating these behaviors and goal setting," said Dr. Daniel Kirschenbaum, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern who helped design the program, but has no financial involvement in the camps.
Dr. Kirschenbaum said self-control could be taught like any other skill through instruction, modeling and encouragement.
So far, the camps have had encouraging success. A recent study by Wellspring found that 91 percent of all its campers had maintained the weight or continued to lose six months after camp ended; the weight loss afterward averaged 7.4 pounds. The camps plan to continue tracking campers' long-term weight loss to try to persuade health insurers to cover the programs.
Still, those involved agree that the most significant factor for success is the level of parental involvement once camp ends. It is not enough for the child to return home from 30 pounds lighter if the household does not change as well - whether that means eliminating junk foods or encouraging exercise.
"The people who are successful are the parents who go the extra mile and are observant and watch their kids," said Tony Sparber, 48, who has been in the industry for 25 years.
Although all camps offer lectures for parents on visiting day, only a few show up, organizers say.
After camp ends, a New Image nutritionist calls families each month. Every two months they receive a newsletter with recipes. But Mr. Sparber acknowledges that most people do not follow through. "It starts out strong, and as time goes on it fades," he said. This year, in an effort to reach more people, he is adding an online counseling program with a nutritionist, as well as a weight management and fitness program at the Jewish Community Center in Tenafly, N.J.
Only about one-third of the campers at Camp Wellspring and Wellspring Adventure Camp adhered to its after-care program, which includes keeping a daily online journal for self-monitoring and setting goals, and chatting with a behavioral coach by phone or e-mail.
All of those who followed that regimen, sustained or continued their weight loss at the three-month mark, said Ryan Craig, president of Wellspring camps, who is also director of the Academy of the Sierras, a boarding school for obese adolescents in Reedley, Calif.
Lexi Werth Mason attributes her weight-loss success to two things: her goal of fitting into a two-piece bathing suit, and her mother. When she first returned home from camp, her mother had snack bags full of pre-cut vegetables waiting for her. Every night they discuss what Lexi can eat. The two shop together, read labels, prepare menus and cook.
"People don't have time to sit down to home-cooked meals, and they're so busy they get Big Macs," said Lexi. "At camp I learned that there's 590 calories in one, so we don't do that anymore. Now we cook dinners because I'm conscious of what I'm eating. We substitute light or fat-free for sour cream. Even if you do have a cookie every once in a while, it's not that big of a deal. You work it off."
Lexi's mother said, "My fear was that when she lost all this weight that she would get so obsessive about it that it would develop into an eating disorder."
Ms. Werth continued: "From the day she came home, I said, 'It's not about leaving all this stuff behind.' The minute you deprive yourself of everything you've loved and enjoyed, you will end up compulsively overeating. I was trying to create a balance for her and proving to her that you could have your cookies every day but in moderation."
She added, "I signed her right up for Curves, and she got on her bicycle and rode to the gym and watched everything she's eating."
Ms. Werth also locks up junk food in a kitchen cabinet, and only she has the key. Lexi said she found that helpful.
Most important for Lexi, nothing tastes as great as thin feels. And that kind of motivation is something that no diet or weight-loss camp can instill in a person.
"Last winter my friend couldn't pull me on the sled because I was too heavy, and I was really upset about it," Lexi said. "This year, I went to his house and he pulled me, and that was one of the happiest days of my life."
A Lives article on hiking in Alaska.
Wild Night
By CINTHIA RITCHIE
The mosquitoes were the size of toads. At least that's what I say now. But they were big that summer, huge and hungry, swarming everything that moved. It was the mid-80's, and Anchorage had yet to be invaded by the big-box companies and the yuppie stores: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic. It was still smallish and homey, a place where neighbors brought over homemade muffins when you moved in. You could let your dog run loose; you could accidentally leave your wallet on the bus and someone would mail it to you one week later, with all the money intact and a small note taped to the side: ''Found this on the midtown bus and thought you might miss it.''
My boyfriend and I were out on the Resurrection Trail, sloshing through a dreary rain that showed no hope of letting up. I trudged behind him, complaining about the cold, the rough terrain, the way the mud splashed inside my boots. Just three weeks earlier, I moved here from a small desert town in Arizona, and I thought of myself as a gritty outdoors woman. I was used to dodging lizards on sandstone trails. Once, I had even been chased by wild pigs outside of Tucson. But this much green made me nervous. I felt claustrophobic, caged and as if we might walk forever and never reach our destination.
''Slow down,'' I screamed. ''My legs are shorter than yours.''
But he picked up the pace, his rifle thumping his hip in a way I found particularly annoying. To retaliate, I lagged farther and farther behind, my hat lost, my hair flapping my forehead. By the time I arrived at camp, the tent was set up and coffee was boiling over a miserable fire. We ate macaroni and cheese in damp silence. Even the dog knew better than to bark.
Later that night, after the rain stopped, I woke to an urgent slapping, as if something was trying to claw its way into the tent. I smacked my boyfriend awake.
''What's that?''
He perched up on one elbow.
''Skeeters,'' he said, and fell back to sleep. I lay in that dim summer twilight, the tent swaying and puckering from mosquito assault. Nothing could get me to go outside. Nothing.
But an hour later, I was rubbing bug dope over my face because I just had to go out. I don't know why. It was still light -- a haze that reminded me of childhood naps, and of how resentful I had felt at being ordered to sleep. I unzipped the tent flap, and at first the mosquitoes made me cower. The air smelled damp and sweet; the sky coated the trees in lavender shadows that were moody and undeniably beautiful. I headed for a nearby ridge, mosquitoes flying inside my mouth and stinging the tender areas around my eyes.
And then I saw the bear. It was snorting around the far corner of our campsite. I don't know how long it had been there, if it had been watching me or if it cared. I froze. This bear looked nothing like the glossy photographs in nature magazines. It smelled bad too, dark and spoiled, like rotten hamburger.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. I stood paralyzed, as mosquitoes feasted on my neck and shoulders and the bear rooted around our campfire. Its awful face poked into the ashes, huffing from its nose.
Finally, it gave one last bellowing snort and lumbered off into the woods. I stood unmoving. I had wet myself. When I finally mustered the courage to crawl back into the tent, I huddled inside my sleeping bag, sobbing and picking at my swelling bites.
The next morning we broke camp and headed home early. I tramped through a chilling rain, too exhausted even to complain. I felt disillusioned and defeated. Alaska had flattened my resolve in one night.
Still, even then, during that cold and long hike back to the trail head, the seduction had begun, almost invisible at first: the touch of birch leaves against my neck, the feel of mud on my bare knee when I fell, the kiss of wind on my face.
Twenty years and countless hikes later, I've come to understand that hiking Alaska's back country is like suffering through a first date. It's uncomfortable at times, even painful, but also hauntingly provocative. Walking for hours without passing another person makes you feel as if you've shed your skin and become part of the rocks and ridges.
When we got back to Anchorage, I took a Magic Marker and counted my mosquito bites: 121, 122, 123. I patted each one possessively. They were my battle scars, my penance and my initiation into a world where bugs swarmed and bears reeked and the sky stayed stubbornly light all summer. I thought of the purple light of the woods, the smell of the rain, the look of the mountains on the drive home: wild and stark and boldly primitive. I thought of all this, and I itched until my eyes watered, and I couldn't stop. It was maddening, that itch. It was irresistible and glorious.
And an article about part of the new WTC.
Built to Be Noticed, and to Return the Favor
By GLENN COLLINS
For three years now, 7 World Trade Center - the last tower to fall on Sept. 11, 2001, and the first to be reborn at ground zero - has meant a crucial question for its developer, Larry A. Silverstein.
Could he build a skyscraper atop a monumental concrete Con Edison substation - arguably the ugliest pedestal at any Manhattan building - and adorn it with a facade so arresting that tenants would clamor to rent office space there?
The answer is emerging these days at the northern edge of the trade center void. A shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass is being married to the brutalist 78-foot-tall substation with what looks like a sculptural installation: a kinetic, interactive stainless-steel wall.
Architects have said that this screen, intended to be a source of reflected color and light, may serve as the prototype for the cladding of a new, sturdier base at the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower that will be built next door. That skyscraper's security redesign is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday.
At 7 World Trade Center, the high-tech wall must also serve as a porous ventilator for hidden vaults of three-story transformers that need to breathe. Mr. Silverstein said there was "a whole set of design challenges that David had to solve," referring to David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of 7 World Trade Center.
To Mr. Childs, it was essential not to slap "some external piece of art" onto the 52-story tower, he said, "but something integral, that was designed from the start."
Mr. Childs sought the expertise of James Carpenter, whose Manhattan firm, James Carpenter Design Associates, also helped to create the glass cable-wall system at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, and is currently working on an extension to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
To observers, Mr. Childs hoped, it would seem that light was not only captured by the building, but also emanated from it. So the architects ordered 13.6-foot-long white glass sheets, low-iron panes that minimize the conventional greenish hue of glass, for the upper floors. These could be extended in one piece from the ceiling of each of the building's 42 tenant floors down past the spandrels, the horizontal panels at the base of each floor slab.
The spandrels themselves are curved, made of folded textured steel that reflects the light not only from the sky, but also from blue steel window sills at each floor. This configuration scatters light upward within the tower's glass skin, "embedding the sky in the glass surface," as Mr. Carpenter put it.
The resulting glass wall was so atypical - with a portion of the bottom of each floor's glass panes exposed to grimy air - that the architectural team had to design a twisty squeegee that could be deployed from movable maintenance scaffolding. Then a cleaning worker had to demonstrate to Mr. Silverstein that the squeegee could actually clean the exposed inner portions of the panes.
But how to match this airy glass tower to its stolid base, which comprises not only the seven-story substation - which feeds electricity to a million users in Manhattan - but also three floors of the building's mechanical systems?
"The answer was to link the upper and lower buildings together by light," said Mr. Carpenter, a 2004 MacArthur fellow who trained as an architect and sculptor, and has made the characteristics of light a focus of his designs. "We envisioned the whole building as prismatic - as a parallelogram prism."
So on the lower floors, the architects hoped to restate the design of the top of the building, using nothing more than a curtain wall, an independently supported outer screen. Hard hats are now installing 15-foot-tall, 5-foot-wide panels of elegantly machined and polished triangular steel prism bars in two rows set 6.5 inches apart. Each section weighs 1,500 pounds.
During the day, the 130,000 prisms are intended to make the wall an active surface. The prism sections are set off by 15 degrees, so they can reflect the sky in different directions. As pedestrians walk past the building, they are expected to experience kinetic reflections.
"The wall will create a moiré effect that moves by you, as if you are walking past stretched silk," Mr. Childs said.
But at dusk, 220,000 blue and white light-emitting diodes, which give off little heat and are easy to maintain, will illuminate the prismed wall from within. The lights will subtly reflect off the prisms out onto the street.
When the wall is activated, its evening glow will change in a sequence from tranquil, patterned fields of blue and white to more active modes: at times, the wall will follow passers-by - or at least, 12 motion-sensing cameras will. The sensors are randomly programmed to follow pedestrians on the sidewalks, creating multistory, moving columns of blue light on a white background as people pass the building. Sometimes two pedestrians heading in different directions will each be highlighted.
These days, the building's upper pylon seems to change dramatically during shifting light and weather conditions. At "Seven," as the tower is called by those who are toiling on its construction, the intensity of the glass skin's light-scattering effect is greatest in the early morning and late afternoon.
Mr. Carpenter said he hopes that 7 World Trade Center can be "not just a mirrored building," but will explore "the boundary between transparent and reflective."
The 741-foot-tall building will have 1.7 million square feet of office space, beginning at the building's 11th floor. By the end of August the tower - scheduled to be completed early next year - will have a finished floor to show to prospective tenants. Column-free, and nearly 10 feet in height, the office floors provide unobstructed views. The building's massive central core limits the floor plates to 40,000 square feet, but addresses security concerns by protecting elevators, stairways and sprinkler pipes behind two feet of concrete.
The bulky base of 7 World Trade Center enhances its safety, security experts say, since its occupied floors start well above possible blast effects from a truck bomb. The New York Police Department has insisted that the Freedom Tower, also being designed by Mr. Childs, incorporate a similar security core, as well as a hardened concrete base to protect tenants.
Mr. Carpenter and his chief assistant, Richard Kress, designed the lower reflective wall to cover only the north and south facades of 7 World Trade Center - which is bounded by Vesey, Barclay and Washington Streets - since the facade nearly abuts the monumental Verizon building.
The lobby will be dominated by a floor-to-ceiling, 14-by-70-foot wall of acid-etched translucent glass illuminated by whitish light-emitting diodes, created by Mr. Carpenter and the artist Jenny Holzer. She will program the wall to display moving text appropriate to the site, poetry that will evoke the history of New York.
The building has cost Mr. Silverstein of Silverstein Properties $700 million, "very significantly more than I ever expected to spend," he said. An important component of that expense - Mr. Silverstein would not say how much - has been to create the building's fancy curtain wall.
Space in the building is being offered for $50 to $60 per square foot, $15 higher than other space downtown, brokers say, though the tower's sales force says tax breaks and energy savings will make it more competitive. Though Mr. Silverstein is thus far tenantless, he said, "There are expressions of interest."
Mr. Silverstein has already put behind him the loss of the twin towers and his peripatetic quest for insurance settlements, but the effort to prettify 7 World Trade Center "has been the greatest challenge to date," he said. However, looking ahead to the re-unveiling of the Freedom Tower, he added: "It will pale in comparison to the challenges to come."
