More articles...

[conuly]

But first! Does everybody on neopets have a different, individualized Temple of 1000 Tombs? If not, does anybody have a map for my tomb, do you think? (I'm going nutty trying to find a door that's gray, oval, with a pawprint on top of it. I've found the other doors that my parchment reccommends, but they have higher numbers than GOP, and they don't work.)

On to the articles....

On on Shrubboy

It would have been almost impossible to imagine, during the days and weeks that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that we might someday look back on that depressing time with a tinge of nostalgia. For Americans, and especially for those of us who live in New York City, those autumn memories are filled with rage and horror, fire and smoke, loss and death; but they are also filled with a spirit of courage, community and real patriotism. United we stood, even behind a government of dubious legitimacy, because we knew that there was no other way to defend what we valued.

In a strange way, Sept. 11 -- despite all the instantaneous proclamations that things would never be the same -- represented a final moment of innocence.

Now catastrophe has befallen another American city, with horrors and losses that may surpass the toppling of the twin towers. And while many people in New Orleans have shown themselves to be brave, generous and decent, this season's disaster has instilled more dread than pride, more anger than unity. Why is the mood so different now? At every level, the vacuum of leadership was appalling, but especially among the national leaders to whom all Americans look at a time of catastrophic peril. As rising waters sank the city, summer vacations in Texas and Wyoming, and shoe-shopping on Madison Avenue, appeared to take priority over the suffering on the Gulf Coast.

Four years after 9/11, we know much more than we knew then about the arrogance, dishonesty, recklessness and incompetence of a national government that was never worthy of its power.

We saw how the White House squandered, all too quickly, the uplifting national response to 9/11. Within a few months, Karl Rove was heard telling the Republican National Committee exactly how he planned to betray the Democrats who had unanimously lined up behind President Bush in the aftermath of the attack by using the "war on terror" as a domestic political weapon.

Rove replayed his cynical maneuver at the GOP convention last year, when New York served as the backdrop for more patriotic posturing -- while the Republicans in the White House and Congress refused to provide adequate funding to protect New York from another, possibly even more devastating attack. Disproportionate millions went from the Department of Homeland Security to rural towns that will never be threatened, while city and state officials continue to lack the money and manpower to protect ports, power stations and chemical plants. The same neglectful and perverse priorities withdrew funding from the levees protecting New Orleans.

We learned how the Bush administration misled the nation into invading Iraq to suppress a nonexistent threat from "weapons of mass destruction," while assuring us that the war would be cheap, easy, and almost bloodless. The administration's predictions have proved uniformly false and its prescriptions entirely useless, costing thousands of Iraqi and American casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars. The resulting damage to our national prestige, among both allies and enemies, may well be irreparable. And after all the sorrow and destruction, Iraq may end up as a hellhole of warring ethnic and religious groups, a haven for Islamist terrorists, and an instrument of the mullah regime in Iran.

We found out why the president, the vice president, and their aides wanted no investigation of the circumstances leading to the 9/11 attacks. For nine months they'd ignored the warnings of danger, first from the former officials of the Clinton administration, then from White House national security officials, and finally from the CIA itself in the notorious presidential daily briefing of Aug. 6, 2001.

More recently, we have discovered how they failed to act on an ominous report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, just weeks before 9/11, that pointed to the grave likelihood of a terrorist attack on New York City -- and of a deadly hurricane destroying New Orleans.

And we can have no doubt now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that critical agencies of the United States government are staffed by patronage hacks unable to fulfill the most basic responsibilities of the modern state. The outstanding example, of course, is Michael D. Brown -- apparently known as "Brownie" to the admiring president -- the FEMA chief whose résumé contains nothing to recommend him to one of the most critical positions in government, although he had amply padded it with unearned honors and bogus titles. He claimed, for instance, to have worked as an assistant city manager, when he was actually a glorified intern. (The holder of a degree from an unaccredited law school, Brown's most significant lifetime work experience was as a "commissioner" for a horse show association, a position he departed involuntarily and left off his official biography.)

In his pathetic insufficiency, Brown evidently was not alone at FEMA. The deputies and acting deputies and various other high-ranking pork-choppers -- many of whom had landed at the agency from positions with the Bush-Cheney campaign -- showed up with no experience in the hard work of saving lives and restoring communities.

But the FEMA phonies stand as symbols of far broader trouble in the Bush administration. When the Republicans first took over in 2001, and for many months thereafter, they assured us that they were the "grown-ups," and that they were "in charge." After 9/11, their flacks returned to this self-congratulatory theme, boasting that all Americans felt more secure and protected by Bush than they would if Al Gore were in the Oval Office. Their standard of accountability is to award the nation's highest decoration for public service to George Tenet and Jerry Bremer, as if nobody had noticed their notorious failures.

Pretenders such as these cannot extricate us from a debilitating war, nor can they rebuild the nation they destroyed; they have no idea how to allocate resources against terrorism, nor how to prepare for the disasters that will surely come. What the Republicans in power can do is set up photo ops, repeat spin points, concoct hollow slogans about "compassionate conservatism," and sidestep responsibility by whining about "the blame game."

On this anniversary, surrounded by the wreckage of four years of disastrously bad government, we must confront a profoundly disturbing reality. The performance of George W. Bush as president has proved to be far worse than even his most alienated critics could have predicted. His administration is far less concerned with our security than with its own self-serving ideology and its petty abuses of office.

Four years ago, as we contemplated potential threats from the enemies of civilization, it was impossible to conceive of the vast damage that our own government would inflict upon America before those enemies could strike again. The danger from the perpetrators of 9/11 has not abated, and suddenly we know how vulnerable we remain -- because the federal officials who have sworn to defend us, beginning with the president, have neither the character nor the competence to fulfill that oath.

On flood control

In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm.

Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows.

Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings.

Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level - vowed never again.

After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an interview last week, "Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened."

So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years.

The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster.

London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic.

Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims.

Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history.

"They have something to teach us," said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. "We should capitalize on them for building the future here."

Innovations are happening in the United States as well. California is experimenting with "smart" levees wired with nervous systems of electronic sensors that sound alarms if a weakening levee threatens to open a breach, giving crews time to make emergency repairs.

"It's catching on," said William F. Kane, president of Kane GeoTech Inc., a company in Stockton, Calif., that wires levees and other large structures with failure sensors. "There's a lot of potential for this kind of thing."

While scientists hail the power of technology to thwart destructive forces, they note that flood control is a job for nature at least as much as for engineers. Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development.

"You'll never be able to control nature," said Rafael L. Bras, an environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who consults on the Venetian project. "The best way is to understand how nature works and make it work in our favor."

In humanity's long struggle against the sea, the Dutch experience in 1953 was a grim milestone. The North Sea flood produced the kind of havoc that became all too familiar on the Gulf Coast last week. When a crippled dike threatened to give way and let floodwaters spill into Rotterdam, a boat captain - like the brave little Dutch boy with the quick finger - steered his vessel into the breach, sinking his ship and saving the city.

"We were all called upon to collect clothes and food for the disaster victims," recalled Jelle de Boer, a Dutch high school student at the time who is now an emeritus professor of geology at Wesleyan University. "Cows were swimming around. They'd stand when they could, shivering and dying. It was a terrible mess."

The reaction was intense and manifold. Linking offshore islands with dams, seawalls and other structures, the Dutch erected a kind of forward defensive shield, drastically reducing the amount of vulnerable coastline. Mr. de Haan, director of the water branch of the Road and Hydraulic Engineering Institute of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, said the project had the effect of shortening the coast by more than 400 miles.

For New Orleans, experts say, a similar forward defense would seal off Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. That step would eliminate a major conduit by which hurricanes drive storm surges to the city's edge - or, as in the case of Katrina, through the barriers.

The Dutch also increased the height of their dikes, which now loom as much as 40 feet above the churning sea. (In New Orleans, the tallest flood walls are about half that size.) The government also erected vast complexes of floodgates that close when the weather turns violent but remain open at other times, so saltwater can flow into estuaries, preserving their ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them.

The Netherlands maintains large teams of inspectors and maintenance crews that safeguard the sprawling complex, which is known as Delta Works. The annual maintenance bill is about $500 million. "It's not cheap," Mr. de Haan said. "But it's not so much in relation to the gross national product. So it's a kind of insurance."

The 1953 storm also pounded Britain. Along the Thames, flooding killed more than 300 people, ruined farmland and frightened Londoners, whose central city narrowly escaped disaster.

The British responded with a plan to better regulate tidal surges sweeping up the Thames from the North Sea. Engineers designed an attractive barrier meant to minimize interference with the river's natural flow. It went into service in 1982 at Woolwich, about 10 miles east of central London.

Normally, its semicircular gates lie flush to the riverbed in concrete supporting sills, creating no obstacle to river traffic. When the need arises, the gates pivot up, rising as high as a five-story building to block rising waters. The authorities have raised the Thames barrier more than 80 times.

In Venice, the precipitating event was a 1966 flood that caused wide damage and economic loss. The upshot was an ambitious plan known as the Moses Project, named after the biblical parting of the Red Sea. Its 78 gargantuan gates would rest on the floor of the Adriatic Sea and rise when needed to block dangerous tidal surges.

Long debate over the project's merits repeatedly delayed the start of construction until May 2003. Opponents claim that the $4.5 billion effort will prove ineffective while threatening to kill the fragile lagoon in which Venice sits. In theory, the gates are to be completed by 2010.

"People fight doing things like this," said Dr. Bras, of M.I.T. "But when disaster strikes you realize how important it is to think ahead."

Planners did just that in Bangladesh after a 1991 hurricane created huge storm surges that killed more than 130,000 people. World charities helped build hundreds of concrete shelters on stilts, which in recent storms have saved thousands of lives.

In Japan, a continuous battle against flooding in dense urban areas has produced an effort to develop superlevees. Unlike the customary mounds of earth, sand and rock that hold back threatening waters, they are broad expanses of raised land meant to resist breaks and withstand overflows.

The approach being tried in California relies on a technology known as time-domain reflectometry. It works on the same principle as radar: a pulse of energy fired down a coaxial cable bounces back when it reaches the end or a distortion, like a bend or crimp.

Careful measurement of the echoes traveling back along the cable can disclose serious distortions and danger. Dr. Kane, of Kane GeoTech, has installed such a system in the Sacramento River delta, along a levee that is threatening to fail.

Could such a system have saved New Orleans? "It would have given them more information," said Charles H. Dowding, a top expert on the technology at Northwestern University. "The failure of a levee would have been detected." But experts say it is still unclear whether such a warning would have been enough to prevent the catastrophic breaches.

Dr. Bras says sensor technologies for detecting levee failure hold much promise. But he adds that less glamorous approaches, like regular maintenance, may be even more valuable, since prevention is always the best cure.

"We have to learn that things have to be reviewed, revised, maintained and repaired as needed," he said. "To see a city like New Orleans suffer such devastation - some of that was preventable."

He added that no matter how ambitious the coastal engineering, no matter how innovative and well maintained, the systems of levees, seawalls and floodgates were likely to suffer sporadic failures.

"Nature will throw big things at us once in a while," he said. "There's always the possibility that nature will trump us."

On the parasitic hairworm, too cool

Parasitic Hairworm Charms Grasshopper Into Taking It for a Swim
By NICHOLAS WADE

Only in science fiction do people's minds get possessed by alien beings. For grasshoppers, zombification is an everyday hazard, and it obliges them to end their lives in a bizarre manner.

Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects it.

The interaction occurs as the worm induces the grasshopper to seek out a large body of water and then leap into it.

The parasite, known as a hairworm, lives and breeds in fresh water. But it spends the early part of its life cycle eating away the innards of the grasshoppers and crickets it infects.

When it is fully grown, it faces a difficult problem, that of returning to water. So it has evolved a clever way of influencing its host to deliver just one further service - the stricken grasshopper looks for water and dives in.

The suicidal behavior of the infected grasshoppers has been studied by a team of biologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, France, led by Frédéric Thomas and David Biron.

They did their fieldwork around a swimming pool on the border of a forest near Avène les Bains in southern France. Hordes of infected grasshoppers - more than 100 a night - arrive at the pool during summer nights at the behest of the parasites.

The biologists captured grasshoppers before their suicidal plunge and removed the worms.

The worms grow to several times the length of the grasshopper's body before they emerge. Because of their unusual size, it is easy to extract and analyze the different sets of proteins that they produce before, during and after they compel their hosts to drown themselves.

"We found the parasite produces and injects proteins into the brain of its host," Dr. Thomas said.

Two of the proteins belonged to a well-known family of signaling agents known as the Wnt family that are deployed in developing the cells of the nervous system.

Though produced by the worm, the two proteins seemed similar to insect-type proteins and perhaps developed so as to mimic them, the French biologists report in an article in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Parasites have long been known to influence their hosts' behavior in ways beneficial to the parasite. The rabies virus, for instance, makes animals rabid so that they bite others and transmit the virus.

An unusually specific instance of behavioral manipulation was discovered recently in a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.

The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.

Somehow the larva reprograms the spider into executing, over and over again, just the first two steps in a five-step subroutine from the early phase of web-building.

If the larva is removed just before it can kill its host, the orb weaver will spin a platform-style web that and the following night, but revert to its usual web on the third night, as if it has shaken off some mesmerizing chemical the wasp has injected into its nervous system.

The hairworm seems to have perfected an equally intimate manipulation of its host by inducing a fantastical desire to swim, of which the grasshopper is scarcely more capable than the worm is of flying.

This is not the parasite's only trick. No one knows how, from its aquatic home, the hairworm manages to infect a terrestrial species. Dr. Thomas said he suspects that the larvae, minuscule on hatching, first infect aquatic insects like mosquito larvae and hide as cysts in their tissues.

When the adult mosquito flies away and when it dies, its body may be eaten by a grasshopper or cricket. The hairworm "will then develop, eating absolutely everything not essential to keep its host alive," Dr. Thomas said. The zombified grasshopper is reduced to just its head, legs and outer skeleton by the time it goes for its final swim.

There are some 300 species of hairworm found around the world. Their billions of larvae "will infect everything - frogs, fish, snails," Dr. Thomas said. But it is only in grasshoppers, crickets and katydids that these uninvited guests are able to usurp both the body and mind of their hosts.

On Wells College....

Wells College: Newly, and Uneasily, Coed
By MICHELLE YORK

AURORA, N.Y. - Sarah Alexander celebrated the start of her last year at Wells College the way many other seniors before her have. She ran across the picturesque campus to the shores of Cayuga Lake, where she stripped to her lingerie and jumped into the water.

So did many of her fellow seniors. But dozens of students decided to stay away, especially the relatively few newly arrived male students. The men did not want to seem like oglers, and some women did not want to risk being ogled. "You couldn't catch a man over there," said Jamaul B. Phillips, 18, who is from Yonkers.

Wells College, which since 1868 had educated only women, began accepting men this year in hopes of bolstering its dwindling enrollment. For many students and alumnae, it was a crushing decision. After the college announced last October that it would go coeducational, about half of the students protested and two filed a lawsuit, which they later dropped.

The students - 33 men and 383 women - came to campus late last month. Both sexes are now trying to navigate the new social landscape. "I do not say 'babe' on this campus, you know what I mean?" said Daniel J. Henderson, 22, a freshman majoring in environmental studies.

Mr. Henderson studied automotive technology at a community college in Syracuse, but transferred here for a different curriculum and small classes. In addition, his mother is an alumna. He did not think about the possible hostility until a few days before he came. "I was pretty scared," he said. "You can't walk in here and be a guy."

But by toning down his language and jokes, he said, he has avoided offending his female classmates. "You have to be more understanding," he said. "Not to sound clichéd, but you have to be in touch with the feminine side of yourself."

Mr. Phillips is also being cautious, picking up after himself and taking out the garbage in his coed dorm. "You can't do guy stuff," he said. "Every time you want to sit and watch sports or a game, it turns into a movie."

"Not that I don't like 'Spanglish,' " he added quickly, referring to the 2004 movie, a romantic comedy about a Mexican maid in an American household.

But women willing to watch movies with him makes for a better atmosphere than the one earlier this year when he toured the campus as a prospective student. Then, in the middle of the turmoil, the women were "somewhat nasty."

"I could see the dirty looks in their eyes," he said. "But I was not going to let that stop me from coming."

Women are not angry with the men as much as they are with the college for making the change, said Ms. Alexander, who is from Toronto. "We're heartbroken," she said. "People are crying a lot when they think about it."

Wells was a place where women did not have to fuss over their appearance or fight to be taken seriously by their professors. They could enjoy the camaraderie of their campus sisters and their playful traditions. Besides jumping into the lake, the women dance around the maypole each May and kiss the feet of the statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, before exams.

Now, a rumor is circulating that some of the men have a checklist of the women they want to sleep with, Ms. Alexander said. "People told us we wouldn't notice a difference, but from the moment men arrived on campus you could notice a difference. Women are waking up early to put on makeup, and that's odd," she said.

Henry Wells, a founder of Wells Fargo and a friend of Cornell's benefactor, Ezra Cornell, established this college, whose campus is 30 miles north of Ithaca, when women were not considered capable of higher learning. "Give her the opportunity," he wrote.

Frances Folsom Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland, was a student at Wells, as was Pleasant T. Rowland, the creator of the popular American Girl dolls.

The news that the college would go coed created ripples far beyond campus. One alumna wrote a letter to the college's president, Lisa Marsh Ryerson, saying the founder would haunt her.

"I believe Henry Wells would have haunted me if I let Wells College close," said Ms. Marsh Ryerson, a Wells alumna herself. But she said that even her 8-year-old daughter had moaned: "What have you done? Boys are so yucky."

Jennifer LaBarbera was one of the students who filed suit, claming breach of contract: Wells had recruited her to attend an all-women's college. After the judge denied an injunction that would have prevented Wells from enrolling men while the suit worked its way through court, the students dropped it. Ms. LaBarbera transferred to Smith College.

The great-great-great-great granddaughter of Henry Wells, Stephanie Redmond, 18, of Washington State, said that earlier this year a Wells student had tracked her down and asked her to support the protest. But Ms. Redmond said the move to admit men had encouraged her to enroll at Wells this year as a freshman. She plans on a career in engineering, a male-dominated field, and said attending an all-women's college might have put her at a disadvantage. "I was glad, in fact," she said.

So was Travis A. Niles, 18, who said the men were now the pioneers. "No one is throwing knives," he said. "It's weird being in the minority, but it's probably good for us."

On teaching, and Shakespeare

Through Shakespeare, Lessons of Life and Devotion
By ANITA GATES

In a fifth-grade classroom in a poor and dangerous part of Los Angeles, Hobart Boulevard Elementary School pupils (mostly Latino and Asian) are doing "Hamlet." They are so good at it that at one point Sir Ian McKellen, who has played Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Richard II and Richard III, drops in to watch, to do a little recitation of his own and to praise them.

"The best thing about the Hobart Shakespeareans is that they know what they're saying," Sir Ian tells them, adding that this cannot be said of every adult who has ever appeared in a Shakespearean play.

In Mel Stuart's fine and passionate documentary "The Hobart Shakespeareans," which has its premiere tonight on the PBS series "P.O.V.," several things are clear. The 49-year-old teacher, Rafe Esquith, is a genius and saint. The American education system would do well to imitate him. These children's lives have been changed by their year with this man. And it is not all about Elizabethan drama.

Mr. Esquith's pupils play guitar. They name the six states that border Idaho. They discuss whether Huckleberry Finn would be doing the right thing to turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave. They visit the Lincoln Memorial on a class trip.

Their classroom world operates like the real one: with money. In this case the currency is play money, in which they are paid salaries. It costs more to sit at the front of the class than in the back. Not doing your homework brings a $50 fine. At Christmas, Mr. Esquith gives them real Barnes & Noble gift certificates.

But it is the yearlong study of a single Shakespearean play that symbolizes Mr. Esquith's methods and his success. It is thrilling to hear Brenda De Leon read a speech of Ophelia's beautifully, to watch Lidia Medina express Gertrude's pain and to see Alan Avila, who was considered a problem student by a previous teacher, tackle the title role of the melancholy Danish prince. At the outset, Mr. Esquith explains what "Hamlet" is about: death. "They're throwing skulls all over the graveyard," he says.

During Christmas vacation, the children in the play come in every day to work on it. Mr. Esquith tells the camera that this is teaching them discipline, teamwork and sacrifice. He is a man fond of mottoes: "Be nice and work hard." "There are no shortcuts." As Hamlet says: "Words. Words. Words."

But words have impact. This is clearest, on a class visit to the campus of U.C.L.A., Mr. Esquith's alma mater, when he tells the children: "This is the life you're working for. You can do this." He has Ivy League pennants on his classroom wall, gifts from former students who have gone on to those schools, to prove it.

On dizziness

Symptom: Dizziness. Cause: Often Baffling.
By RICHARD SALTUS

On the Fourth of July, a 63-year-old man was taken by wheelchair into the emergency room of a suburban Virginia hospital, overwhelmed with dizziness and nausea and gripped by sweat-inducing anxiety.

"I felt dim and lightheaded, like I was just going to fade out," said John Farquhar, a semiretired consultant in Washington. "I said, 'I'm going to die.' "

His wife, Lou, a nurse, had driven him to the hospital, taking big curves gingerly because the motion of a sweeping turn "made me feel like I was pulling 30 G's like a fighter pilot," said Mr. Farquhar, who otherwise was healthy and fit.

The attacks had begun the previous day, out of the blue, while he was playing with the couple's dog, Sascha.

Lifting her high in the air, "I snapped my head back, and suddenly it seemed that my body was turning, and the room was spinning around," Mr. Farquhar recounted. "I felt profoundly dizzy and nauseated."

The episode passed, but the queasiness returned not long afterward, set off by the on-screen action on a DVD. When Mr. Farquhar got out of bed the next day, the world was spinning so violently that he crumpled to his knees, and he could barely make his way to the bathroom, where he vomited, leading to the trip to the E.R.

Dizziness is one of the most miserable of sensations, and it can be disabling.

The technical term for the false sensation that you and the world are spinning is vertigo. (In Alfred Hitchcock's film "Vertigo," the James Stewart character actually suffers from acrophobia, or fear of heights.)

There are many causes of vertigo, most of them temporary and treatable, but sometimes the condition signals a serious problem, like a tumor or a stroke. Dizziness and lightheadedness are among the most frequent complaints that cause people to seek medical help.

Although doctors often see patients with the symptom, its cause can be a challenge to determine, said Dr. Jonathan Olshaker, chief of the emergency department at Boston Medical Center, who has written a textbook chapter on vertigo.

"The staff has a concern that they're not going to be able to figure out what it is, or that the person is a difficult-to-treat patient," Dr. Olshaker said. In fact, a vast majority of patients have a specific, identifiable cause for their dizziness, he said.

When he lectures other doctors, Dr. Olshaker said, he tells them: "You hate this topic. Dizziness is associated with nausea, fear, anxiety and frustration - and that's in the physician. Never mind the patient!"

Even when the cause is probably not serious, doctors generally are cautious, ordering a number of tests and sometimes consulting with neurologists to make sure the cause of the vertigo is not life-threatening.

Mr. Farquhar's symptoms galvanized the emergency room staff members, who chided him for not calling 911 and immediately checked for evidence of a stroke or a heart attack. An IV was started, and blood was drawn for analysis. He was also asked to perform a series of neurological tasks, which he passed easily, and he answered repeated questions about his medical history and medications. (Many drugs can bring on the symptoms.)

Ruling out life-threatening causes, the doctors told Mr. Farquhar that he was most likely suffering from benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, or B.P.P.V., a common cause of dizziness caused by a malfunction of the inner ear's balance mechanism.

The problem accounts for perhaps 25 to 40 percent of patients seeking medical attention for dizziness. "Paroxysmal" refers to the episodic pattern of vertigo attacks, and "positional" means that the spinning sensations are brought on by certain movements.

Tilting the head back to look upward is a typical trigger. The disorder has been nicknamed "top-shelf vertigo," and hair salon customers sometimes experience it when leaning back for a shampoo, as do patients sitting in dental chairs.

The diagnosis and treatment of vertigo have markedly improved in the last two decades. The cause of most benign positional vertigo is now believed to be calcium debris that has dislodged from a part of the inner ear and strayed into one of the fluid-filled semicircular canals of the sensitive vestibular system.

The system is a cluster of structures that keeps the brain updated on the body's orientation and movement in space.

These microscopic flecks of calcium debris do not in themselves lead to problems, but sometimes in their meandering they brush against delicate, hairlike cells, sending misinformation to the brain.

When those signals conflict with more accurate signals from other nerves, the brain responds with disorientation and vertigo.

The three semicircular canals of the inner ear loop out - more or less at right angles, like three edges of a box meeting at the corner - from a chamber called the vestibule.

The slight fluid movements in these canals in response to head movements and gravity activate the hair-trigger cells that relay positional information to the brain.

Inside the vestibule, scores of tiny "stones" called otoliths are attached to a membrane, and when the head turns in any direction, the slight force imparted to the otoliths is translated into nerve messages about motion and orientation.

The road to benign positional vertigo starts when some of the otoliths, or fragments of them, come loose from the membrane and go rafting in the endolymph, the fluid inside the tiny canals.

They tend to settle by gravity in the rearmost canal, which loops down and up like the debris trap under a sink.

A variety of things can set the "ear rocks," as they're also known, to wandering: blows to the head or sudden movements (roller coasters can have this effect), and perhaps most often, simply the wear and tear of aging on the balance organs.

It may be hard to identify the cause of a particular episode, and for many people the first time they have symptoms is waking up in the morning or rolling over in bed.

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo can be distinguished from some other disorders by the fact that hearing is not affected, that dizziness occurs in repeated brief episodes (usually a few seconds to a minute) and can be provoked by specific body movements.

In fact, the classic test for this type of vertigo is performed by having the patient turn the head at an angle and lie down, first on one side, then the other, while the physician watches for a characteristic jerking movement of the eyes called nystagmus.

The emergency room doctors diagnosed Mr. Farquhar's problem in part by the results of this test. While waiting for an appointment with a Washington specialist in balance problems, Dr. Dennis Fitzgerald, Mr. Farquhar was essentially bedridden, propped up with pillows and sedated with Valium.

By the time he saw the doctor a week later, he felt slightly better, as if his brain were getting accustomed to the disinformation from his affected ear. But he felt nowhere near normal.

Dr. Fitzgerald, who says he has treated more than 2,000 cases of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo in the last 15 years, confirmed the diagnosis. He then performed what has become accepted as the definitive treatment, a series of head gyrations called the Epley maneuvers.

The maneuvers involve moving the head into four different positions sequentially, taking advantage of gravity to roll the calcium flecks out of the sensitive part of the canal to a place where they cause less trouble.

In cases like Mr. Farquhar, the Epley maneuvers are repeated, the patient sits up, and the treatment is complete. For the next 48 hours, Mr. Farquhar was cautioned to avoid a variety of movements that could send the debris tumbling back into the canal.

"Most doctors who do this say that 80 percent of patients have their symptoms alleviated in one set of treatments," Dr. Fitzgerald says.

The remaining 20 percent, he added, need repeated treatments, and the overall recurrence rate is 25 percent to 30 percent, though the episodes may not come back for months or years.

Within a few days, Mr. Farquhar was much improved and was able to walk several blocks and go into his office to work. Two months later, he continued to be free of nearly all his symptoms, except a brief lingering feeling of unease just after waking up in the morning.

For all but the most intractable cases, which occasionally require surgery, the simple and low-tech Epley maneuvers rank among the most effective and certainly the least costly of treatments for such a common and disabling source of misery.

"Vertigo is a horrible feeling," said Dr. Olshaker, the Boston emergency room chief. "The physician does need to have empathy for these patients. And in recent time, we're seeing more awareness of the condition and the Epley maneuvers, both in the E.R. and the primary care clinic."

On Baton Rouge's reaction to refugees

In Baton Rouge, a Tinge of Evacuee Backlash
By PETER APPLEBOME

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Last week came the rumors - of riots at Wal-Marts, of break-ins at homes, of drug gangs from New Orleans roaming the streets of its more sedate neighbor 75 miles up Interstate 10.

Today came the reality - of a dozen or more relatives crowded under one roof, of hours stuck in traffic trying to get to school or work, of frustration and fear about what kind of city Baton Rouge will be with at least 100,000 evacuees and rescue workers added to the 227,000 residents it had before the storm hit.

Make no mistake. The overwhelming response of people in Baton Rouge to Hurricane Katrina has been one of compassion and sacrifice with every church in town, it seems, housing or feeding evacuees.

But there have also been runs on gun stores, mounting frustration over gridlocked roads and an undercurrent of fear about crime and the effect of the evacuees.

After the chaos of the storm, which did some damage here, and a long weekend, Tuesday was the first day most residents returned to work and school. Before the evacuation, blacks made up about half the population of Baton Rouge and almost 70 percent of New Orleans, and in conversations in which race is often explicit or just below the surface, voices on the street, in shops, and especially in the anonymous hothouse of talk radio were raising a new question: just how compassionate can this community, almost certainly home to more evacuees than any other, afford to be?

"You can't take the city out of the yat, and you can't take the yat out of the city," said Frank Searle, a longtime Baton Rouge resident, using a slang term for New Orleanians derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at?"

"These people will not assimilate here," Mr. Searle said. "They put up with the crime in New Orleans, and now it's staring them in the face, but up here that's not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they have to. This is the South. We will take care of it."

For a week Baton Rouge, the state capital, home of Louisiana State University and a place that sees itself as a less raucous cousin to what had been the kingdom of sin and merriment to its south, has been trying to come to terms with its sudden status as the state's most populous city.

"It's a new Baton Rouge we're living in, isn't it?" said Jeanine Smallwood of suburban Prairieville, in the middle of a 90-minute drive to work that should have taken 20.

Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read, "Kill the cops."

"Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to."

She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for the best.

"People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said.

Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns.

Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will."

Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it.

"I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr. Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I have some protection."

Many evacuees are staying with family or friends, their campers, S.U.V.'s and pickups parked on front lawns or circular driveways.

Most people at the broad array of shelters were dazed but appreciative of the help from local volunteers like the Louisiana State University students, upbeat and attentive, tending to sick and exhausted evacuees at the triage center on campus.

But others, particularly those at the main Red Cross shelter at the River Center convention center downtown, were seething with frustration, not just over the disaster they were fleeing, but from the sense that they were being treated not so much like guests as people being warehoused until they could be shipped elsewhere.

Patricia Perry, a postal employee from New Orleans, said anyone with a wristband from the River Center shelter was being stereotyped outside it as one of "those people" - looters, criminals, outcasts.

"It's like a stigma," she said. "All they really want to do is get us out of town. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I work hard. I pay my taxes. Surely, this state can find a place for us to live."

Still, many residents, with the sense of intimacy that remains so much a part of Southern life, took their role as hosts seriously, as if it would be bad manners, the ultimate sin in the South, to do otherwise.

So when Pam Robertson, manager of a convenience store, asked a customer how he was doing, it was not dutiful chatter but a real question that begged for a real answer.

When it came, she took the man's hand in hers over the counter and talked about her friend Hunter, evacuated from Loyola University, about her upbringing in the town of Henderson in the heart of Cajun country, about the grid of local streets here.

She greeted one and all with the same missionary zeal, as if the right words could somehow undo the disaster of the past week.

And when asked how she was doing, or even when they didn't, she replied: "I'm tired, but I'm hanging in. It's good. It's all good. God is good. We'll get through it."

Another article on 9/11

With a Wrench of the Gut
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Babies were born, and then they walked, and a contentious presidential race came and went. There were two heat waves, a blackout and 665 Yankees and Mets home games.

Scores of fresh New Yorkers, from Calcutta and Kalamazoo, whose memories of the 2001 attack on the city were formed by the television screen, have rolled up to the gates of the region's airports and decided to make their homes here. The city's restaurants are full again. Those who are not running for office have tucked their flag pins away.

And still, Kathy Kelly, who is 23, calls her parents in Brooklyn every time she gets on and off the subway.

Mark Scherzer, like perhaps thousands of New Yorkers, finds himself looking up with mild panic when he hears a plane flying low, or a sudden loud noise, even though, he says, the attack "has significantly receded in my consciousness."

Steven DiGennaro, 34, stops by the wall of victims near ground zero once a week on the way to the Staten Island ferry terminal, to look at the name of his cousin. Then he boards the boat, hoists a Heineken, and thinks.

Four years after the 2001 terrorist attack, many New Yorkers seem trapped between a daily life free of the terrible memories of that day, and an inability to fully forget. Many go for weeks or even months without thinking about it at all, but then feel eerily transported back to that morning by a sudden sound, or the sight of a police officer searching bags in the subway, or a certain hue of the sky.

To some degree, the ability to move on is dictated by personal circumstances - whether or not there was a personal loss suffered that day, where you were standing, how much you saw up close. Events like the London subway bombings, the release of audiotapes from that day, and the runup to the mayoral primary (Sept. 11, 2001, was also Primary Day), make the feelings acute.

It seems that a great many New Yorkers exist in a state of repression mixed with heavy doses of both fatalism and optimism, ever cognizant that their city could be a target again, yet unwilling to leave or, in most cases, surrender their routines. In interviews with dozens of residents all around the city, the great majority began the conversation saying that Sept. 11 2001, was rarely on their minds.

But after talking for 10 minutes, their faces would pinch and they would look into the distance remembering where they were that day, the feeling of low-grade fear that lingers in tunnels and airports, and their ambivalence about the ensuing political experience of the country.

"I just don't think about it that much," said I-Huei Go, 29, an editor and researcher who moved to Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, from Ohio in 1999. "But when I do talk about it, I remember it in a very physical way. I remember walking on Henry Street in Carroll Gardens to vote. I remember very viscerally the sounds I heard, and the debris that was coming across the water. When those memories come up, they are visceral, physical ones."

The television and newspaper images from the Gulf Coast have also brought back memories.

"Certainly the devastation there is reminiscent of the devastation in the downtown area after 9/11," said Mr. Go. But New Yorkers say that the hurricane's grim embrace has been all-encompassing. "As a resident here," Mr. Go said of 9/11, "I could still escape it."

New York, ever dynamic, has changed subtly around its edges since the terrorist attack. Roughly 850,000 new residents have migrated into the city, and thousands of new apartments have been built. The physical space at ground zero, save the Deutsche Bank building, which is still shrouded in gloomy black fabric, looks like a construction site, drawing tourists who stare blankly at the hole in the ground trying to conjure what was once there. Many companies that seemed poised to leave Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11 have, in fact, remained.

Even Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees from the north tower and became a symbol of that day's destruction, has considered putting parts of its operations back downtown; its headquarters are now in Midtown. "For Cantor, the west side of downtown is just too close to the footprint of where we lost so many of our friends and colleagues," said Howard W. Lutnick, the firm's chief executive. "But the east side of downtown was far enough to not be an emotional factor."

That is partly because only 200 of the 960 employees who were working for Cantor in 2001 are still with the firm, he said. "That means we have 600 people now who do not have those emotional issues at all. They are sort of more like everyone else."

Everyone else, it seems, has tucked what happened here in a place that they cannot easily access, but that comes to them daily, weekly, or just once in a while when they hear or see something that serves as a trigger.

Elizabeth Beier, a book editor who lives in Chelsea, thinks about that day whenever she walks by the Garden of Eden grocery on 14th Street; there, she recalls her compulsion to stock up on turkey, bread, fruit and mozzarella cheese, standing in line behind dozens of others who had the same urge that day.

James Gailliard, 50, who lives in the Bronx and works in New Jersey, often stares across the Hudson River from his office and feels "truly emotional, where I see the vision of those two buildings that are supposed to be there."

Many people interviewed said that seeing old episodes of "Friends," or films featuring the towers in the background brought an abrupt sense of vulnerability, as if someone who was telling a bland little joke had suddenly reached out and slapped them.

Sunil Chugh, 25, who lives and works in Jackson Heights, Queens, has a daily reminder of a neighbor who died. "They never moved his car," Mr. Chugh said. "It is still parked outside his house, and his picture is in the car window with a sign that says 'Sept. 11, 2001.' Every day, I pass by that and I look and I think."

And for others, certain experiences took on new, more ominous meanings. Lisa Hynes, a lawyer who lives on Staten Island, had a baby eight weeks before the blackout of 2003, and when the lights went out found herself crying in the middle of Manhattan.

"There were no traffic lights. I was with my baby and I just panicked," said Ms. Hynes, 40. "Even this morning, when it was quiet in the ferry terminal, it struck me. Because our city is so active and loud, and one thing that really struck me that day was the dead silence."

Some people who live and work near ground zero have learned to filter out the memories. Every day, Annette Robinson, 34, a baby sitter, walks by Chambers Street, where she stood and watched the towers fall on her way to work. But it is usually only the sounds of ambulances that transports her back.

Mr. Scherzer, 54, who has lived for 27 years on Cedar Street, was evacuated from his apartment and was unable to return for 16 months. He said he did not think about what happened on a daily basis. "If I had consuming memories every time I looked out my window, I couldn't function," he said.

Michael Slater, 50, thinks of Sept. 11 on slow F trains, although he has a living reminder in his home. In 2001, he was with his wife, Leslye Noyes, who was in labor at St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan, deprived of anesthesia because the hospital was saving it for the patients who were expected but never came. They watched the towers burn from the labor and delivery floor. Later that evening, after his third child, Maxine, was born, Mr. Slater caught the F train, which had just resumed service, to go home to Park Slope, Brooklyn, to be with his two older children.

"Everyone on the train was totally somber," he remembered. "I am not the kind of person to do this, but something came over me and so I stood up and said, 'Hey everybody, not everything that happened today was horrible.' And I took out pictures of my daughter. People were hugging me and clapping and they passed the pictures up and down the car. Some people were in tears. It really was great."

The yellow ribbons around parts of the city have faded, and flag pins, which at one point were more fashionable than any handbag in history, are rarely on display these days.

John Bivona, 63, who lives in Brooklyn, wore a flag lapel pin for months after the attack. "I had never worn those kind of things before," he said. "I don't know if I still have it now, and I have no desire to wear it."

Four years later, there is still palpable disbelief. "I went to a concert the other night at the Battery," said Ms. Robinson, the baby sitter, "and the sun was coming down. At those moments you feel that New York is still so strong and it is still so beautiful. And at other times, I look down Chambers Street and it all comes back, and I can't believe that I stood there and watched it happen."

On the outsourcing of tutors

A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard
By SARITHA RAI

COCHIN, India - A few minutes before 7 on a recent morning, Greeshma Salin swiveled her chair to face the computer, slipped on her headset and said in faintly accented English, "Hello, Daniela." Seconds later she heard the response, "Hello, Greeshma."

The two chatted excitedly before Ms. Salin said, "We'll work on pronouns today." Then she typed in, "Daniela thinks that Daniela should give Daniela's horse Scarlett to Daniela's sister."

"Is this an awkward sentence?" she asked. "How can you make it better?"

Nothing unusual about this exchange except that Ms. Salin, 22, was in Cochin, a city in coastal southern India, and her student, Daniela Marinaro, 13, was at her home in Malibu, Calif.

Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms. Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing.

Using a simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Daniela, an eighth grader at Malibu Middle School, said, "I get C's in English and I want to score A's," and added that she had given no thought to her tutor being 20,000 miles away, other than the situation feeling "a bit strange in the beginning."

She and her sister, Serena, 10, a fourth grader at Malibu Elementary, are just 2 of the 350 Americans enrolled in Growing Stars, an online tutoring service that is based in Fremont, Calif., but whose 38 teachers are all in Cochin. They offer tutoring in mathematics and science, and recently in English, to students in grades 3 to 12.

Five days each week, at 4:30 a.m. in Cochin, the teachers log on to their computers just as students in the United States settle down to their books and homework in the early evening.

Growing Stars is one of at least a half-dozen companies across India that are helping American children complete their homework and prepare for tests.

As in other types of outsourcing, the driving factor in "homework outsourcing," as the practice is known, is the cost. Companies like Growing Stars and Career Launcher India in New Delhi charge American students $20 an hour for personal tutoring, compared with $50 or more charged by their American counterparts.

Growing Stars pays its teachers a monthly salary of 10,000 rupees ($230), twice what they would earn in entry-level jobs at local schools.

Critics have raised concern about the quality of the instruction.

"Online tutoring is not closely regulated or monitored; there are few industry standards," said Rob Weil, deputy director at the educational issues department at the American Federation of Teachers. Quality becomes a trickier issue with overseas tutoring because monitoring is harder, said Boria Sax, director of research, development and training for the online offerings of Mercy College, based in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Growing Stars is rapidly expanding to accommodate students from the East Coast, Canada, Great Britain and Australia.

Its recruits, mostly with recent postgraduate and teaching degrees, already have deep subject knowledge. They must go through two weeks of technical, accent and cultural training that includes familiarization with the differences between British English, widely used in India, and American English.

"They learn to use 'eraser' instead of its Indian equivalent, 'rubber,' and understand that 'I need a pit stop' could mean 'I need to go to the loo,' " said Saji Philip, a software entrepreneur of Indian origin and the company's chairman and co-founder who works in New Jersey.

Still, the cultural divide is real. In Cochin, Leela Bai Nair, 48, a former teacher who has 23 years of experience and is an academic trainer for Growing Stars, said she was "floored at first when 10-year old American students addressed me as Leela. All my teaching life in India, my students addressed me as Ma'am," she said.

That same morning in Cochin, an English teacher, Anya Tharakan, 24, directed her student away from the subject of video games to concentrate on a passage from "Alice in Wonderland," enlivening the lessons with puzzles and picture games.

Ms. Tharakan, who tutors Serena Marinaro among others, said a bit of the cultural gulf was being bridged when students asked her "How big is your home?" or "Do you have friends at work?" or "Can you send me your photo?" For her part, Ms. Tharakan is learning about soccer and rap music from her students.

Thomas Marinaro, a chiropractor in Los Angeles and the father of Daniela and Serena, had been unhappy with the face-to-face tutoring he had previously arranged for his daughters at home. After three months with Growing Stars, however, Dr. Marinaro said the girls' math skills were already much improved. As a bonus, it cost a third of what he paid the home tutor.

Dr. Marinaro said that he had misgivings when he first considered enrolling his daughters for English tutoring. "I thought, how could somebody from India teach them English?" But after a few weeks of monitoring, he said he relaxed. "I want my girls to develop a good vocabulary and write better, and I believe they are learning to do that."

Biju Mathew, an Indian-born software engineer, set up Growing Stars after moving to the Silicon Valley five years ago to work for a technology start-up company. In India, he had been paying $10 a month for twice-a-week tutoring sessions for his children.

In the United States, he found, a similar service could cost $50 or more per hour. The idea of homework outsourcing was born, and the company began offering its services in January 2004.

Growing Stars has been cautious, offering its students a choice of United States- or India-based tutors for English. It charges a $10 premium above its normal $20 rate for students who choose a tutor in the United States. When parents have expressed concern over a tutor's accent, the firm has offered a change of instructor.

Other online tutoring firms in the United States adopt varied approaches. Tutor.com, for instance, uses only tutors based in North America. SmarThinking of Washington, D.C., has tutors in the United States but also has instructors in South Africa, the Philippines, India and Chile. However, only those in the United States provide English lessons.

"We haven't found any cultural divide," said SmarThinking's chief executive and co-founder, Burck Smith. Eliminating factors such as skin color, appearance, gender and accent made the Internet "more egalitarian than most classrooms," he said.

The demand for online tutoring is reflected in the firm's 50 percent growth rate in the last few years. Twenty new clients - including high schools and colleges - have signed on for tutoring beginning this fall.

Firms like Growing Stars are aggressively looking to expand their online tutoring under federal programs. This summer, for instance, Growing Stars' tutors ran a successful pilot for the Upward Bound program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The program, financed by the federal Department of Education, helps children of high school age get into college. With the start of the academic year this fall, Growing Stars expects to provide online tutoring in math to 80 students from Marist's Upward Bound program.

Also, the firm has just been approved as a licensed tutoring provider in California under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Currently, Growing Stars is trying to find a way for its teachers to be fingerprinted by the Department of Justice to meet legal requirements of the program.

Mr. Philip, the chairman, said his company's work would help make Americans more competitive.

"Offshore tutoring," he said, "is a step toward ensuring that we are not always beaten in competition against Japanese carmakers, Indian software firms and Chinese manufacturers."