Some Times articles...
Jan. 28th, 2006 04:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
As you know, an earth-like planet has been found.
Search Finds Far-Off Planet Akin to Earth
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Now you see it, now you don't.
Astronomers say that by virtue of the ceaseless shifting of the billions of stars in the Milky Way and a trick of Einsteinian physics, they have briefly glimpsed the most Earth-like planet yet to be discovered outside the solar system. It is a ball of rock and ice only about 5.5 times as massive as Earth, smaller than any of the 160 previously discovered exoplanets, and is orbiting a dim reddish star 21,000 light-years from here.
The discovery, the researchers say, suggests that rock-ice planets like our own are predominant in the cosmos. That bodes well for future planet-hunting missions from space like the Terrestrial Planet Finders at NASA.
The distant planet manifested itself as a brief flash: As it passed at night in front of an even more distant star, its gravity focused and momentarily brightened the star's light.
It was all over in less than a day, a cosmic blink of an eye.
"It was the blip in the night that we have been waiting for," said Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, who led an international collaboration of 73 astronomers. They reported their findings yesterday at a news conference in Washington and are publishing them today in the journal Nature.
Alan P. Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in an e-mail message that the discovery was "a big one." Another expert who took no part in the research, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, said, "The result looks solid to me, and perhaps the planet is, too."
The planet, smaller than Neptune and dubbed OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, resides about 234 million miles from its star. At that distance, its surface temperature would be minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Beaulieu said.
The work was largely that of two large teams that have built far-flung observing networks to exploit a feature of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The theory says a massive object can act as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light from more distant objects in space.
One team, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, led by Andrzej Udalski of Warsaw University, has been set up to monitor the brightness of millions of Milky Way stars every night from a telescope in Chile, so as to catch fluctuations caused by the passage of intervening objects of various kinds: dim stars, so-called dark matter objects or planets.
Last July, alerted by the OGLE team that such a lensing event was under way, Dr. Beaulieu's team, Planet (for Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork), sprang into action to do high-resolution observations. On Aug. 9, that team recorded a tiny blip on a much larger blip that was caused by the passage of an unseen star, the planet's parent, in front of the more distant star. That tiny blip was the planet itself.
As Dr. Beaulieu explained in an e-mail message, it would have been much easier to see a giant gaseous type of planet. The long odds against detecting so small a planet as the new one argues for its commonness.
"If only a small fraction of the stars had such planets, we would have never detected this small planet," Dr. Beaulieu said.
Scott Tremaine, a theorist at Princeton, said, "The results suggest that rock-ice planets must be more common than gas giants."
France is growing fatter
France Battles a Problem That Grows and Grows: Fat
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
ROUBAIX, France - In a cold, stark municipal hall, 8-year-old Hatim sat silently as the pediatrician passed judgment.
At about 4 feet 6 inches and 95 pounds, the boy was declared overweight and in danger of becoming obese.
The morning pastry would have to go. So would the Oasis soft drinks and the after-school Nutella-on-bread. Meat and potatoes would be allowed, but only once a day. A snack could include milk or cheese, but not both. Baguettes were fine, but where were the veggies?
"23.6 body mass index," Dr. Corinne Fassler announced. "You have to raise your consciousness. You have to find a sport you like. But if you go to the swimming pool, don't go to the vending machine for chips."
The French are getting fatter, and Jan. 7 was National Weighing Day for the country's children. A voluntary army of hundreds of pediatricians fanned out to more than 80 cities to weigh, measure, interrogate and enlighten.
Roubaix is an economically depressed industrial town in northern France, the fattest region in the country. Fifty-one percent of the population here is overweight or obese, compared with the national average of 42 percent, according to the most recent national figures in 2003.
The trend line is most significant among children. While adult obesity is rising about 6 percent annually, among children the national rate of growth is 17 percent. At that rate, the French could be - quelle horreur - as fat as Americans by 2020. (More than 65 percent of the population in the United States is considered overweight or obese.)
Just a few years ago, obesity in France was a subject relegated to morning television talk shows and women's magazines. Now the issue has become political.
When Jean-Marie Le Guen, a doctor and Socialist member of Parliament, began introducing bills on how to stop what he calls France's "epidemic," some of his colleagues dismissed him as a radical fringe nuisance. Now he is considered a pioneer.
"It used to be little talked about, and when it was, it was the domain of women complaining that they had put on a little weight," said Dr. Le Guen, who has written a book, "Obesity: The New French Sickness." The sickness, he predicted, will be "one of the important themes" of the Socialists in the campaign for president next year.
Last September, France banned soda-and-snack-selling vending machines from public schools. The law also banned misleading television and print food advertising and imposed a 1.5 percent tax on the advertising budgets of food companies that did not encourage healthy eating. Schools have been urged to provide students with a half-hour of physical exercise a day.
But the backlash from the food industry and a lack of political will has made it impossible to impose changes in advertising. More drastic legislation was rejected by Parliament, including health warnings on the packages of unhealthy foods, much like alcohol and cigarette warnings; a proposal to force restaurants to display nutrition and calorie information on their menus; and an outright ban on television advertisements for unhealthy products.
With its universal health care coverage, the French government is also interested in cutting medical costs associated with obesity and diabetes. A recent advertising campaign by the National Collective of Associations of the Obese, an educational and lobbying organization, shows a markedly obese nude woman under the headline "Obesity Kills." (An estimated 55,000 people in France die of obesity-related illnesses every year.)
Some of the reasons for the increase in obesity are those that plague the United States and much of Europe: the lure of fast food and prepared foods, the ubiquity of unhealthy snacks and sedentary lives.
McDonald's is more profitable in France than anywhere else in Europe. Sales have increased 42 percent over the past five years. Some 1.2 million French, or 2 percent of the population, eat there every day.
There has also been a breakdown in the classical French tradition of mealtime as a family ritual so disciplined and honored that opening the refrigerator between meals for a child was a crime worthy of punishment. A side effect is a blame-the-mom syndrome, as fewer mothers have time to shop at markets every day or two for fresh foods and instead put more prepared dishes on the table.
Findus, the frozen food giant best known for its breaded, frozen fish filets, filmed French people eating over a period of time and was shocked by the results.
Contrary to the myth that the French spend hours sitting around the table savoring small portions of several courses, the films showed them eating in front of their television sets, while on the telephone and even alone. In fact, the average French meal, which 25 years ago lasted 88 minutes, is just 38 minutes today.
With all the awareness of obesity, there is also a countertrend. The French may have begun to embrace the large woman.
Six years ago, the French government declared the model and actress Laetitia Casta (5 feet 7, 120 pounds) the new "Marianne," the symbol of the republic on statues and public buildings.
But in his fashion show last October, the designer John Galliano stunned the audience by putting fat women on the runway alongside string-bean-thin models.
And last month, millions of television viewers voted and chose Magalie Bonneau, a 19-year-old student who is 5 feet 1 inch and weighs 165 pounds, as the winner of the hit talent and reality show "Star Academy." Libération called her the "icon of 'real people.' " A cover story in the magazine Télé Cable Satellite referred to her as the new "heavyweight" of the channel TF1.
She managed to lose 29 pounds during the rigors of the competition, and attributes her victory to her big voice, not her big build. Not that she thinks her size hurt. "Audiences are getting used to seeing plump girls," she said. "A barrier has been crossed."
On cigarrette tax increases in NY
Still Smoking in New York City, and Venting About the $8 Pack
By ALAN FEUER
Mark Twain is said to have had a good line about the pains of quitting smoking: It's easy. Done it a thousand times.
Twain was probably not on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's mind on Monday when he announced that he was calling for a 50-cent increase in the city's cigarette tax. But getting smokers to quit clearly was.
"There's a clear correlation," the mayor said in Albany. "You raise your cigarette taxes, fewer children go and smoke."
The problem is that smokers are a stubborn bunch. If lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and the like have failed to stop them, why, some asked, would a simple pair of quarters do the trick?
"We're hooked," said Lou Sepe, who was pulling on a smoke yesterday afternoon outside his Times Square office. "That's the problem."
Smokers in the city now pay $3 in taxes, and if the tax increase becomes law, some brands could start costing more than $8 a pack, making New York the most expensive place to buy cigarettes in the country.
That does not bother Yuri Gridin, an information technology expert from New Jersey, where cigarettes are several dollars cheaper. Still, it bothers him that Joe Smoke will be hit much harder than the Dunhill set.
"It's a disgrace," he said. "Basically it affects poor people more than it affects the rich."
According to the city's health department, there are about 1.1 million smokers in New York - a decrease of 188,000 since 2002, when the last cigarette tax increase took effect. Still, cigarette taxes have been rising for years but it has not affected sales, said Damien Banner, a manager at Nat Sherman, which bills itself as the Tobacconist to the World.
Nonetheless, Mr. Banner believes that if taxes do keep rising, there will come a day when only the upper class will smoke.
When that point will come, he does not know. But he guesses that a $12 pack may be the threshold. "I don't see anyone paying more than that," he said.
An article about a teacher fired from Riker's for "undue familiarity"
Inspiring Rikers Teacher Runs Afoul of Jail's Rules
By MICHAEL WINERIP
JEFF KAUFMAN, a teacher at the Rikers Island jail, has a reputation as a good educator who cares about his student inmates. In 2004, without the aid of computers, his students finished first in a citywide stock market game competition against more than 50 high schools.
Elizabeth Lesher, who oversees the competition, said that at most schools, "students gather around computers, research stocks via Web sites such as Yahoo Finance, Market Watch or Nasdaq and enter their transactions online."
"The classroom environment at Rikers was very sparse," said Ms. Lesher, a director for the Foundation for Investor Education. "No attractive bulletin boards, no computers with Internet access and no industry specialists visited the classroom to provide investment ideas." Mr. Kaufman's students relied on the newspaper and his class lessons. That, she said, "speaks volumes about the teacher. Obviously I was very impressed."
In 2003, Mr. Kaufman's students won a citywide playwriting competition. In 2000 and 2001, he arranged for the student chorus at Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens to visit Rikers at Christmas and perform for his students.
Don Murphy, a fellow teacher, said Mr. Kaufman became so popular during his eight years at the jail that in 2004 he was unopposed in the election for union representative at Island Academy, the Rikers school, which serves about 1,000 teenage inmates.
David Lee, an inmate serving time for assault, who earned a General Educational Development diploma with one of the highest scores ever at Rikers, said no teacher worked harder. Mr. Kaufman made special arrangements for Mr. Lee to take college correspondence courses, spent his lunch hours tutoring him and then proctored each of the three-hour exams from Excelsior College.
In July 2003, Mr. Kaufman was off for the summer, but made special trips to Rikers so Mr. Lee could take his next college exam. "All the teachers were on vacation and school didn't begin until September," Mr. Lee wrote in a letter sent to this reporter from Rikers. "But Kaufman comes here to Rikers not once, but twice just so that he could give me the test on a hot summer day. He didn't have to come; he could have stayed home with his wife and kids."
"Mr. Kaufman wasn't only a teacher or test proctor," said Mr. Lee. "He inspired me to aim higher in life."
But on Friday, Mr. Kaufman received notice from his principal that he was no longer permitted to teach at Rikers.
His crime? "Undue familiarity."
Mr. Kaufman had given Mr. Lee his home address so the two could correspond by mail and try to arrange for Mr. Lee to take another of those Excelsior College exams while the inmate was in solitary confinement in the summer of 2004.
There is no allegation of anything improper about the content of those letters. Copies of 20 letters provided to a reporter by Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Lee mainly talked about learning. In one, the inmate thanked the teacher for sending books to him in solitary ("the Bing") and wrote that he was spending so much time reading, up to 12 hours a day, that he was getting headaches. "I don't mind being here at the Bing but I want to be able to take the test," wrote Mr. Lee.
Mr. Kaufman wrote back urging patience, saying that he was trying to work out arrangements with correction officials. "If your head begins to hurt from reading, stop. Your body is telling you it's enough."
How did school and correction officials know that Mr. Kaufman had given out his home address? Mr. Kaufman told them.
On Sept. 12, 2005, the Rikers principal, Frank Dody, sent out a security memo, in which he spelled out in writing, for the first time, what was meant by the prohibition against undue familiarity: "All contact with current/former students outside of the school area (home, upstate facilities) in the form of letters or phone calls must be authorized by the principal."
Mr. Kaufman read the memo, requested authorization and showed the principal a recent letter from Mr. Lee. Within days Mr. Kaufman was yanked from Rikers and placed in a holding room in Brooklyn for teachers under investigation.
Mr. Kaufman says he thinks the real reason he was investigated was that he had testified at a City Council hearing in December 2004 about how bad the Rikers school's services were for inmates being released. "That really upset Frank Dody," Mr. Kaufman says. "He wouldn't talk to me for months. He's using this incident to get me."
Mr. Dody said he was upset, but that's not why there was an investigation. He said that even though he had been principal six years and had only recently spelled out the rules in writing, anyone who had been at Rikers as long as Mr. Kaufman knew you weren't supposed to give out your address. "Teachers here have to live by the corrections rules," Mr. Dody said. "While the rules don't always make sense, even to me, they're in place for a reason, to keep everyone safe."
Mr. Dody acknowledged that the letter Mr. Kaufman showed him had nothing compromising in it. "From my reading of it, I didn't really see anything of any nature that would raise my eyebrows," Mr. Dody said.
Thomas Antenten, a corrections spokesman, said that once the principal made the decision to refer the case, officials had to investigate. "We take undue familiarity very seriously," he said. "Giving an inmate a personal address could lead to deadly consequences."
Inmates like Mr. Lee say Rikers has lost a rare, good teacher. "It was a wrong decision to demote Kaufman," Mr. Lee said. "I'm the one who initiated contact in order to see what options I had in seeking a better education."
David Lee was a 16-year-old junior with a B+ average at Francis Lewis High in Queens in January 2002. He says he got mixed up with the wrong people, and was at a Flushing apartment when a fight broke out and a man was stabbed to death. Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to first-degree assault in return for an eight-year sentence and is being held at Rikers pending the trial of a co-defendant charged with murder.
Within four months at Rikers, Mr. Lee took the G.E.D. In the middle of the test, he says, a brawl broke out and someone threw a chair at him, bruising a rib. Still, he comes from a family of good students, and even bruised, he finished with a top score. His younger sister, Sonia, is an A student in her sophomore year at George Washington University, and travels from Washington every other week to visit her brother in jail, bringing books he requests.
At the Rikers school, Mr. Lee became a favorite. He showed Mr. Murphy, the computer teacher, how to use several desktop publishing programs. He was given a job doing janitorial work. With Mr. Kaufman's help, he took three college business courses and got A's. Neither he nor Mr. Kaufman knew what material was going to be on the tests and which chapters to focus on, so Mr. Lee read everything. "I would read 450, 500 pages of a textbook from cover to cover three to four times so I would truly understand," he said.
AS Mr. Lee was about to take his fourth college exam, in May 2004, he was caught with 17 packs of Newports. Smoking was banned at Rikers in 2003; cigarettes are considered contraband. Mr. Lee said he was offered a "slap on the wrist" if he'd give up his supplier but did not. For each pack of Newports, he was given 15 days in solitary, 9 months altogether in a 6-by-9-foot cell.
Mr. Antenten, the corrections spokesman, said he did not know the details of the case but added that Rikers makes no distinction between cigarettes and heroin when it comes to contraband. "It can lead to disputes between inmates that have bloody consequences," he said.
Mr. Lee said the teacher's letters helped keep him sane those nine months. "Not only did Kaufman help me pursue educational studies, but he offered moral support through the letters," he said.
The illegal letters sent to Mr. Kaufman's home are often quite moving. A July 28, 2004, letter begins with Mr. Lee thanking the teacher for the latest package of books. "You want to know what's funny," wrote Mr. Lee. "Before I was incarcerated, I never used to really read. I could honestly tell you that I read less than 10 books during my life outside and it was during my elementary school years. I wouldn't even bother to look at the cover of a book if I came across one.
"Now that I'm incarcerated, I treasure them. I'm not just talking about novels which enhance your vocabulary and reading comprehension but also self-help books. What I like about self-help books is that from reading just one significant quote which catches your eye, it could change your whole perception of life itself. From reading books you tap into the most brilliant minds of the present and past. In here they're like my most trusted friends."
At times, in the letters, Mr. Kaufman sounds like a stern father. Referring to the cigarette infraction that got Mr. Lee removed from the school and landed him in the Bing, Mr. Kaufman wrote, "We were all upset at your sudden leaving, but we have talked about consequences."
Mr. Kaufman, 50, said his background - he is a Cornell grad, a former police officer and lawyer for the indigent - makes him well-suited for teaching inmates. He will appeal the decision. "It's a place I feel I can be of most use to my students," he said.
In December, after spending more than two months in the Brooklyn holding room, Mr. Kaufman was sent to Queens Academy, where he is mentoring three new teachers. An Education Department spokesman, David Cantor, said Mr. Kaufman would soon be given a job teaching at an alternative high school.
Mr. Dody, the principal, said Mr. Kaufman's removal was solely a Correction Department decision.
But a November 2005 memo by the department's investigator, Capt. Matthew Boyd, indicates that the principal had a significant role. "Dr. Dody reports that he has determined that Mr. Kaufman's actions violate undue familiarity and I concur," the memo says.
Mr. Dody says he's not a doctor and the corrections memo is wrong.
Mr. Lee's younger sister, Sonia, wrote about his jail experiences in a term paper at George Washington that won a top a prize and was featured at a student lecture series. The paper includes the hardships her brother knew growing up, including the suicide of their mother, who suffered from manic depression. Sonia Lee plans to get a master's degree in public policy specializing in the prison system. Her prize paper calls for prisons that devote more resources to rehabilitation and education.
On partisan thought. Interesting.
A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious
By BENEDICT CAREY
Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.
The results are the latest from brain imaging studies that provide a neural explanation for internal states, like infatuation or ambivalence, and a graphic trace of the brain's activity.
In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.
The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.
The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.
After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The "cold reasoning" regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.
Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.
It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, "but you have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, 'All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.' "
He added, "It speaks to the character of the discourse that this quality is rarely talked about in politics."
On how well people without geometry understand, um, geometry.
Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle or any other geometric shape except circles.
The members use no measuring instruments or compasses, they have no maps, and their words for directions are limited to sunrise, sunset, upstream and downstream. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except "few" and "many," and even those words are not used consistently.
Yet, researchers have discovered, they appear to understand many principles of geometry as well as American children do, and in some cases almost as well as American adults. An article describing the findings appears in the Jan. 20 issue of Science.
"Across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities," said Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard, "and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches."
To test their understanding of geometry, the researchers presented 44 members of a Mundurukú group and 54 Americans with a series of slides illustrating various geometric concepts. Each slide had six images. Five of them were examples of the concept; one was not.
The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image that was "weird" or "ugly." For example, to test the concept of right angles, a slide shows five right triangles and one isosceles triangle. The isosceles triangle is the correct answer.
In data that do not appear in the article but were presented by e-mail from the authors, Mundurukú children scored the same as American children - 64 percent right - while Mundurukú adults scored 83 percent compared with 86 percent for the American adults.
The researchers also tested the Mundurukú with maps, demonstrating that people who had never seen a map before could use one correctly to orient themselves in space and to locate objects previously hidden in containers laid out on the ground.
The indigenous people were able to use the maps to find the objects, even when they were presented with the maps at varying angles so that they had to turn them mentally to match the pattern on the ground in front of them. Dr. Spelke found this particularly significant.
"The Mundurukú, who aren't themselves in a culture that relies on symbols of any kind, when they were presented with maps were able to spontaneously extract the geometric information in them," she said.
The idea that an understanding of geometry may be a universal quality of the human mind dates back at least as far as Plato. In the Meno dialogue by Plato, written about 380 B.C., he describes Socrates as he elicited correct answers to geometric puzzles from a young slave who had never studied the subject.
Do these findings among the Mundurukú confirm Socrates' contention that concepts of geometry are innate? Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. People learn things, after all, just by living in the world.
"In our article we do not use the word 'innate,' " he said in an e-mail message. "We do not know whether this core knowledge is present very early on - the youngest subjects we tested were 5 years old - or to what extent it is learned. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on."
Instead, Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge. "Our current thinking is that the human brain has been predisposed by millions of years of evolution to 'internalize,' either very early on or through very fast learning, various mental representations of the external world, including representations of space, time and number," he explained.
"I have proposed that such representations provide a universal foundation for the cultural constructions of mathematics," he added.
Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes. "Geometry is central to the development of science and the arts," she said. "The profile of abilities that the Mundurukú show is qualitatively very similar to what we see in our own culture. This suggests that we are finding some of the common ground at the center of human knowledge."
On a female-only fire station.
On Engine 22, It's Women Who Answer the Bell
By SARAH KERSHAW
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 17 - When the crew from Fire Engine Company 22 raced off at 7:50 a.m. the other day for the first call of their 24-hour shift, a woman reporting chest pains, their big red rig was primed for action but missing a typical feature: a man.
The four members of Engine 22, Division A, a captain, an engineer, a firefighter-paramedic and a firefighter, protect the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, an affluent peninsula on the Pacific Ocean. They are one of the few crews in the nation made up entirely of women, winding up together last October, as the captain, Joi Evans, said, because of "the way the cards fell."
Together they work, cook, shop, train and sleep in small dorm rooms in the station house, around the clock for 10 days a month, at a time when women are making some inroads into the fire service nationwide but are still only a sliver of the front line in one of the most physically grueling and male-dominated professions. With women accounting for about 8 percent of the 880 uniformed firefighters assigned to its station houses, compared with the national average of 2.5 percent, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, which has a female assistant chief, is considered one of the best departments for women to work, according to Women in the Fire Service, an advocacy group based in Madison, Wis.
With an even higher number of women, Minneapolis had its first female fire chief sworn in a year ago, and 17 percent of its 380 uniformed firefighters are women, the department says.
On the other end of the spectrum, in the New York City Fire Department, the nation's largest and long considered by critics to be a backwater for women in firefighting, only 36 of the 11,430 uniformed firefighters are female, according to the department's latest figures.
"We're seeing the most progressive fire departments really doing a good job," said Terese M. Floren, executive director of Women in the Fire Service, who became one of the nation's first female firefighters when she started her career in Ohio in the 1970's. "But the rest of the fire service needs to get up to that mark, because they are not there. And when you are no longer an anomaly, no longer a token, no longer turning somebody's head, then you will have arrived."
Women have made greater gains in San Diego than in many other cities, officials said, partly because of a 1974 consent decree that required the fire department to recruit women and minorities. The 10-year decree came after a lawsuit filed by five women who said they were wrongly fired in the last weeks of their academy training in the early 1970's.
For the women of Engine 22, life in the station house on Catalina Boulevard and out on the streets of Point Loma is distinctly different now than it was before each of them worked with an all-woman crew.
Three have served almost two decades in San Diego and other cities. Each was, for many of those years, the only woman in a fire crew, at a time when they did not dare shower in the station house, when, their bladders bursting, they ran to restrooms at coffee shops or a florist, when they had to tailor their uniforms at the waist and chest, when they put up with snide remarks, pranks, hazing or worse from their male colleagues.
"I could have written a book," said April Lallo, 41, the firefighter-paramedic, who worked for the Los Angeles Fire Department for five years and in Orange County for nine. Ms. Lallo left the fire service to become a stockbroker but returned to the profession in San Diego after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because, she said, "My heart is really in this job."
"If you speak out," Ms. Lallo said, "it really hurts you to go on because then guys look at you and they're afraid of you. I don't want that. I can't change things here, or in the fire service, but I feel like I can influence them by being positive, coming in and just showing them we don't have an agenda, we're here to work with you."
The engineer, Melissa Cleary, 47, who maintains and drives the fire engine and has worked for the department here for 16 years, said she felt that as a female firefighter working with men, "You can't mess up."
"The thing about the four of us being together," Ms. Cleary said, "is we can make mistakes and we can laugh at one another and you don't have to feel like you're never going to hear the end of it."
"What if you need help with something?" she added. "I would never ask a man to help me with something."
After the 7:50 a.m. call, the crew members prepared breakfast in the kitchen at the small station house, offering Ms. Lallo, who is on a diet, oatmeal and other healthy alternatives to the cinnamon buns in the oven.
They teased Captain Evans, who is 47 and bears a striking resemblance to Martha Stewart, saying she was super-tidy and obsessed with decorating. They call her Martha Senior, though they make sure to tell her that she looks more like Ms. Stewart's daughter than like her sister. Ms. Cleary, who has run 33 marathons and rides a Harley, is known as Martha Junior because she does most of the cooking.
Among the four, there is deep trust, unconditional support and, of course, the freedom to talk about waxing, constipation and the "Oprah bra." (Ms. Lallo said that after seeing a show on bras, she rushed to Nordstrom to buy one that actually fit.)
After breakfast, the crew members went out on what they called a Code 9, an hour of exercise consisting of jogging and strength training at a park on Shelter Island. As they jogged in their department-issue T-shirts and shorts, their radios attached to their hips, an elderly man asked, "Are you cold, ladies?"
Ms. Cleary said no.
"I could light a fire," the man replied, and the crew members laughed.
As they left the park and climbed back into the fire engine, setting out to shop for lunch and dinner, a young man asked if he could be photographed with them.
"Did you just graduate?" he asked.
Under her breath, Ms. Lallo said, "Yeah, like 20 years ago."
Robyn Benincasa, 39, the firefighter, said: "Just graduating from the academy? That's a new one."
The crew is also often noticed by women, who think - especially when the women are in full bunker gear and helmets - that the rig may be loaded with hunky male firefighters. On several occasions, the crew members said, women have approached the rig and lifted their shirts.
The rest of the day was fairly quiet and included a training session in which the women practiced rappelling down cliffs above the ocean. They went out on five calls in 24 hours, four of them medical emergencies and one from someone who was locked out of his car. The lock-out call came at 7:30 p.m., just as Captain Evans was grilling chicken for a Caesar salad and Ms. Lallo was making whole-wheat croutons.
About 85 percent of the crew's calls are health related, the firefighters said, as many fire departments have merged paramedic and firefighter operations. Here in California, with a fast-growing population of immigrants and others without health insurance, the crew often feels like "the doctor's office," Ms. Benincasa said.
The crew members described exposure to diseases like AIDS on medical calls or getting killed by a car on the freeway responding to an accident as the biggest dangers of the job. But Ms. Benincasa, a top adventure sports racer, said her scariest moment came not while firefighting, but while swimming in Class IV rapids in Tibet.
The four members of the crew helped fight the harrowing wildfires that ravaged Southern California in 2003, but none reported having a near-death experience or a dramatic rescue from a flaming building in their years on the job.
Even so, just carrying 75 pounds of gear on their backs as they fight fires has inflicted many injuries, they said. The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department responded to 320 structure fires - buildings, homes or businesses - in the last fiscal year, and 43 since Jan. 1.
There is a much higher percentage of female police officers and paramedics than professional firefighters. The physical demands are cited as one reason more women are not in the fire service. In addition, the 24-hour shifts make it difficult for some women to find child care.
The other fields in public safety also opened to women sooner because firefighters, unlike paramedics and police officers, traditionally lived full time, fraternity-style, in the station houses. The presence of women in the other professions has also helped draw more women to them.
As night fell here and the crew members finished dinner, they chatted about the day and their personal lives. All but Ms. Lallo, a single mother raising a 2-year-old girl she adopted as an infant, are dating San Diego firefighters.
After dinner it was time for "stretch and skate," meaning a light yoga-style workout and, on this night, watching the figure skating championships.
The season premiere of "24," however, one of Ms. Lallo's favorite shows, was on television, so she holed up in her dorm room while the other three began the stretching.
Captain Evans was concerned that Ms. Lallo might be lonely, so Ms. Cleary said over the loudspeaker: "Stretch and '24.' Stretch and '24' in the bullpen," referring to the station's main office, and Ms. Lallo joined in the stretching.
Soon, the crew members went to sleep, roused later, at 4:45 a.m., by a call about a sick elderly man who had fallen out of his bed. By about 7:30 a.m., the next crew, Division B - four men - arrived at the station house to relieve Division A.
In this station house, male firefighters contend with friendly pranks by the women. Though many men in the fire service are known as excellent chefs, Ms. Cleary had pasted a strip of yellow police tape across Division B's refrigerator: "Danger: Men Cooking."
Search Finds Far-Off Planet Akin to Earth
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Now you see it, now you don't.
Astronomers say that by virtue of the ceaseless shifting of the billions of stars in the Milky Way and a trick of Einsteinian physics, they have briefly glimpsed the most Earth-like planet yet to be discovered outside the solar system. It is a ball of rock and ice only about 5.5 times as massive as Earth, smaller than any of the 160 previously discovered exoplanets, and is orbiting a dim reddish star 21,000 light-years from here.
The discovery, the researchers say, suggests that rock-ice planets like our own are predominant in the cosmos. That bodes well for future planet-hunting missions from space like the Terrestrial Planet Finders at NASA.
The distant planet manifested itself as a brief flash: As it passed at night in front of an even more distant star, its gravity focused and momentarily brightened the star's light.
It was all over in less than a day, a cosmic blink of an eye.
"It was the blip in the night that we have been waiting for," said Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, who led an international collaboration of 73 astronomers. They reported their findings yesterday at a news conference in Washington and are publishing them today in the journal Nature.
Alan P. Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said in an e-mail message that the discovery was "a big one." Another expert who took no part in the research, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, said, "The result looks solid to me, and perhaps the planet is, too."
The planet, smaller than Neptune and dubbed OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, resides about 234 million miles from its star. At that distance, its surface temperature would be minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Beaulieu said.
The work was largely that of two large teams that have built far-flung observing networks to exploit a feature of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The theory says a massive object can act as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light from more distant objects in space.
One team, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, led by Andrzej Udalski of Warsaw University, has been set up to monitor the brightness of millions of Milky Way stars every night from a telescope in Chile, so as to catch fluctuations caused by the passage of intervening objects of various kinds: dim stars, so-called dark matter objects or planets.
Last July, alerted by the OGLE team that such a lensing event was under way, Dr. Beaulieu's team, Planet (for Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork), sprang into action to do high-resolution observations. On Aug. 9, that team recorded a tiny blip on a much larger blip that was caused by the passage of an unseen star, the planet's parent, in front of the more distant star. That tiny blip was the planet itself.
As Dr. Beaulieu explained in an e-mail message, it would have been much easier to see a giant gaseous type of planet. The long odds against detecting so small a planet as the new one argues for its commonness.
"If only a small fraction of the stars had such planets, we would have never detected this small planet," Dr. Beaulieu said.
Scott Tremaine, a theorist at Princeton, said, "The results suggest that rock-ice planets must be more common than gas giants."
France is growing fatter
France Battles a Problem That Grows and Grows: Fat
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
ROUBAIX, France - In a cold, stark municipal hall, 8-year-old Hatim sat silently as the pediatrician passed judgment.
At about 4 feet 6 inches and 95 pounds, the boy was declared overweight and in danger of becoming obese.
The morning pastry would have to go. So would the Oasis soft drinks and the after-school Nutella-on-bread. Meat and potatoes would be allowed, but only once a day. A snack could include milk or cheese, but not both. Baguettes were fine, but where were the veggies?
"23.6 body mass index," Dr. Corinne Fassler announced. "You have to raise your consciousness. You have to find a sport you like. But if you go to the swimming pool, don't go to the vending machine for chips."
The French are getting fatter, and Jan. 7 was National Weighing Day for the country's children. A voluntary army of hundreds of pediatricians fanned out to more than 80 cities to weigh, measure, interrogate and enlighten.
Roubaix is an economically depressed industrial town in northern France, the fattest region in the country. Fifty-one percent of the population here is overweight or obese, compared with the national average of 42 percent, according to the most recent national figures in 2003.
The trend line is most significant among children. While adult obesity is rising about 6 percent annually, among children the national rate of growth is 17 percent. At that rate, the French could be - quelle horreur - as fat as Americans by 2020. (More than 65 percent of the population in the United States is considered overweight or obese.)
Just a few years ago, obesity in France was a subject relegated to morning television talk shows and women's magazines. Now the issue has become political.
When Jean-Marie Le Guen, a doctor and Socialist member of Parliament, began introducing bills on how to stop what he calls France's "epidemic," some of his colleagues dismissed him as a radical fringe nuisance. Now he is considered a pioneer.
"It used to be little talked about, and when it was, it was the domain of women complaining that they had put on a little weight," said Dr. Le Guen, who has written a book, "Obesity: The New French Sickness." The sickness, he predicted, will be "one of the important themes" of the Socialists in the campaign for president next year.
Last September, France banned soda-and-snack-selling vending machines from public schools. The law also banned misleading television and print food advertising and imposed a 1.5 percent tax on the advertising budgets of food companies that did not encourage healthy eating. Schools have been urged to provide students with a half-hour of physical exercise a day.
But the backlash from the food industry and a lack of political will has made it impossible to impose changes in advertising. More drastic legislation was rejected by Parliament, including health warnings on the packages of unhealthy foods, much like alcohol and cigarette warnings; a proposal to force restaurants to display nutrition and calorie information on their menus; and an outright ban on television advertisements for unhealthy products.
With its universal health care coverage, the French government is also interested in cutting medical costs associated with obesity and diabetes. A recent advertising campaign by the National Collective of Associations of the Obese, an educational and lobbying organization, shows a markedly obese nude woman under the headline "Obesity Kills." (An estimated 55,000 people in France die of obesity-related illnesses every year.)
Some of the reasons for the increase in obesity are those that plague the United States and much of Europe: the lure of fast food and prepared foods, the ubiquity of unhealthy snacks and sedentary lives.
McDonald's is more profitable in France than anywhere else in Europe. Sales have increased 42 percent over the past five years. Some 1.2 million French, or 2 percent of the population, eat there every day.
There has also been a breakdown in the classical French tradition of mealtime as a family ritual so disciplined and honored that opening the refrigerator between meals for a child was a crime worthy of punishment. A side effect is a blame-the-mom syndrome, as fewer mothers have time to shop at markets every day or two for fresh foods and instead put more prepared dishes on the table.
Findus, the frozen food giant best known for its breaded, frozen fish filets, filmed French people eating over a period of time and was shocked by the results.
Contrary to the myth that the French spend hours sitting around the table savoring small portions of several courses, the films showed them eating in front of their television sets, while on the telephone and even alone. In fact, the average French meal, which 25 years ago lasted 88 minutes, is just 38 minutes today.
With all the awareness of obesity, there is also a countertrend. The French may have begun to embrace the large woman.
Six years ago, the French government declared the model and actress Laetitia Casta (5 feet 7, 120 pounds) the new "Marianne," the symbol of the republic on statues and public buildings.
But in his fashion show last October, the designer John Galliano stunned the audience by putting fat women on the runway alongside string-bean-thin models.
And last month, millions of television viewers voted and chose Magalie Bonneau, a 19-year-old student who is 5 feet 1 inch and weighs 165 pounds, as the winner of the hit talent and reality show "Star Academy." Libération called her the "icon of 'real people.' " A cover story in the magazine Télé Cable Satellite referred to her as the new "heavyweight" of the channel TF1.
She managed to lose 29 pounds during the rigors of the competition, and attributes her victory to her big voice, not her big build. Not that she thinks her size hurt. "Audiences are getting used to seeing plump girls," she said. "A barrier has been crossed."
On cigarrette tax increases in NY
Still Smoking in New York City, and Venting About the $8 Pack
By ALAN FEUER
Mark Twain is said to have had a good line about the pains of quitting smoking: It's easy. Done it a thousand times.
Twain was probably not on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's mind on Monday when he announced that he was calling for a 50-cent increase in the city's cigarette tax. But getting smokers to quit clearly was.
"There's a clear correlation," the mayor said in Albany. "You raise your cigarette taxes, fewer children go and smoke."
The problem is that smokers are a stubborn bunch. If lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and the like have failed to stop them, why, some asked, would a simple pair of quarters do the trick?
"We're hooked," said Lou Sepe, who was pulling on a smoke yesterday afternoon outside his Times Square office. "That's the problem."
Smokers in the city now pay $3 in taxes, and if the tax increase becomes law, some brands could start costing more than $8 a pack, making New York the most expensive place to buy cigarettes in the country.
That does not bother Yuri Gridin, an information technology expert from New Jersey, where cigarettes are several dollars cheaper. Still, it bothers him that Joe Smoke will be hit much harder than the Dunhill set.
"It's a disgrace," he said. "Basically it affects poor people more than it affects the rich."
According to the city's health department, there are about 1.1 million smokers in New York - a decrease of 188,000 since 2002, when the last cigarette tax increase took effect. Still, cigarette taxes have been rising for years but it has not affected sales, said Damien Banner, a manager at Nat Sherman, which bills itself as the Tobacconist to the World.
Nonetheless, Mr. Banner believes that if taxes do keep rising, there will come a day when only the upper class will smoke.
When that point will come, he does not know. But he guesses that a $12 pack may be the threshold. "I don't see anyone paying more than that," he said.
An article about a teacher fired from Riker's for "undue familiarity"
Inspiring Rikers Teacher Runs Afoul of Jail's Rules
By MICHAEL WINERIP
JEFF KAUFMAN, a teacher at the Rikers Island jail, has a reputation as a good educator who cares about his student inmates. In 2004, without the aid of computers, his students finished first in a citywide stock market game competition against more than 50 high schools.
Elizabeth Lesher, who oversees the competition, said that at most schools, "students gather around computers, research stocks via Web sites such as Yahoo Finance, Market Watch or Nasdaq and enter their transactions online."
"The classroom environment at Rikers was very sparse," said Ms. Lesher, a director for the Foundation for Investor Education. "No attractive bulletin boards, no computers with Internet access and no industry specialists visited the classroom to provide investment ideas." Mr. Kaufman's students relied on the newspaper and his class lessons. That, she said, "speaks volumes about the teacher. Obviously I was very impressed."
In 2003, Mr. Kaufman's students won a citywide playwriting competition. In 2000 and 2001, he arranged for the student chorus at Louis Armstrong Middle School in Queens to visit Rikers at Christmas and perform for his students.
Don Murphy, a fellow teacher, said Mr. Kaufman became so popular during his eight years at the jail that in 2004 he was unopposed in the election for union representative at Island Academy, the Rikers school, which serves about 1,000 teenage inmates.
David Lee, an inmate serving time for assault, who earned a General Educational Development diploma with one of the highest scores ever at Rikers, said no teacher worked harder. Mr. Kaufman made special arrangements for Mr. Lee to take college correspondence courses, spent his lunch hours tutoring him and then proctored each of the three-hour exams from Excelsior College.
In July 2003, Mr. Kaufman was off for the summer, but made special trips to Rikers so Mr. Lee could take his next college exam. "All the teachers were on vacation and school didn't begin until September," Mr. Lee wrote in a letter sent to this reporter from Rikers. "But Kaufman comes here to Rikers not once, but twice just so that he could give me the test on a hot summer day. He didn't have to come; he could have stayed home with his wife and kids."
"Mr. Kaufman wasn't only a teacher or test proctor," said Mr. Lee. "He inspired me to aim higher in life."
But on Friday, Mr. Kaufman received notice from his principal that he was no longer permitted to teach at Rikers.
His crime? "Undue familiarity."
Mr. Kaufman had given Mr. Lee his home address so the two could correspond by mail and try to arrange for Mr. Lee to take another of those Excelsior College exams while the inmate was in solitary confinement in the summer of 2004.
There is no allegation of anything improper about the content of those letters. Copies of 20 letters provided to a reporter by Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Lee mainly talked about learning. In one, the inmate thanked the teacher for sending books to him in solitary ("the Bing") and wrote that he was spending so much time reading, up to 12 hours a day, that he was getting headaches. "I don't mind being here at the Bing but I want to be able to take the test," wrote Mr. Lee.
Mr. Kaufman wrote back urging patience, saying that he was trying to work out arrangements with correction officials. "If your head begins to hurt from reading, stop. Your body is telling you it's enough."
How did school and correction officials know that Mr. Kaufman had given out his home address? Mr. Kaufman told them.
On Sept. 12, 2005, the Rikers principal, Frank Dody, sent out a security memo, in which he spelled out in writing, for the first time, what was meant by the prohibition against undue familiarity: "All contact with current/former students outside of the school area (home, upstate facilities) in the form of letters or phone calls must be authorized by the principal."
Mr. Kaufman read the memo, requested authorization and showed the principal a recent letter from Mr. Lee. Within days Mr. Kaufman was yanked from Rikers and placed in a holding room in Brooklyn for teachers under investigation.
Mr. Kaufman says he thinks the real reason he was investigated was that he had testified at a City Council hearing in December 2004 about how bad the Rikers school's services were for inmates being released. "That really upset Frank Dody," Mr. Kaufman says. "He wouldn't talk to me for months. He's using this incident to get me."
Mr. Dody said he was upset, but that's not why there was an investigation. He said that even though he had been principal six years and had only recently spelled out the rules in writing, anyone who had been at Rikers as long as Mr. Kaufman knew you weren't supposed to give out your address. "Teachers here have to live by the corrections rules," Mr. Dody said. "While the rules don't always make sense, even to me, they're in place for a reason, to keep everyone safe."
Mr. Dody acknowledged that the letter Mr. Kaufman showed him had nothing compromising in it. "From my reading of it, I didn't really see anything of any nature that would raise my eyebrows," Mr. Dody said.
Thomas Antenten, a corrections spokesman, said that once the principal made the decision to refer the case, officials had to investigate. "We take undue familiarity very seriously," he said. "Giving an inmate a personal address could lead to deadly consequences."
Inmates like Mr. Lee say Rikers has lost a rare, good teacher. "It was a wrong decision to demote Kaufman," Mr. Lee said. "I'm the one who initiated contact in order to see what options I had in seeking a better education."
David Lee was a 16-year-old junior with a B+ average at Francis Lewis High in Queens in January 2002. He says he got mixed up with the wrong people, and was at a Flushing apartment when a fight broke out and a man was stabbed to death. Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to first-degree assault in return for an eight-year sentence and is being held at Rikers pending the trial of a co-defendant charged with murder.
Within four months at Rikers, Mr. Lee took the G.E.D. In the middle of the test, he says, a brawl broke out and someone threw a chair at him, bruising a rib. Still, he comes from a family of good students, and even bruised, he finished with a top score. His younger sister, Sonia, is an A student in her sophomore year at George Washington University, and travels from Washington every other week to visit her brother in jail, bringing books he requests.
At the Rikers school, Mr. Lee became a favorite. He showed Mr. Murphy, the computer teacher, how to use several desktop publishing programs. He was given a job doing janitorial work. With Mr. Kaufman's help, he took three college business courses and got A's. Neither he nor Mr. Kaufman knew what material was going to be on the tests and which chapters to focus on, so Mr. Lee read everything. "I would read 450, 500 pages of a textbook from cover to cover three to four times so I would truly understand," he said.
AS Mr. Lee was about to take his fourth college exam, in May 2004, he was caught with 17 packs of Newports. Smoking was banned at Rikers in 2003; cigarettes are considered contraband. Mr. Lee said he was offered a "slap on the wrist" if he'd give up his supplier but did not. For each pack of Newports, he was given 15 days in solitary, 9 months altogether in a 6-by-9-foot cell.
Mr. Antenten, the corrections spokesman, said he did not know the details of the case but added that Rikers makes no distinction between cigarettes and heroin when it comes to contraband. "It can lead to disputes between inmates that have bloody consequences," he said.
Mr. Lee said the teacher's letters helped keep him sane those nine months. "Not only did Kaufman help me pursue educational studies, but he offered moral support through the letters," he said.
The illegal letters sent to Mr. Kaufman's home are often quite moving. A July 28, 2004, letter begins with Mr. Lee thanking the teacher for the latest package of books. "You want to know what's funny," wrote Mr. Lee. "Before I was incarcerated, I never used to really read. I could honestly tell you that I read less than 10 books during my life outside and it was during my elementary school years. I wouldn't even bother to look at the cover of a book if I came across one.
"Now that I'm incarcerated, I treasure them. I'm not just talking about novels which enhance your vocabulary and reading comprehension but also self-help books. What I like about self-help books is that from reading just one significant quote which catches your eye, it could change your whole perception of life itself. From reading books you tap into the most brilliant minds of the present and past. In here they're like my most trusted friends."
At times, in the letters, Mr. Kaufman sounds like a stern father. Referring to the cigarette infraction that got Mr. Lee removed from the school and landed him in the Bing, Mr. Kaufman wrote, "We were all upset at your sudden leaving, but we have talked about consequences."
Mr. Kaufman, 50, said his background - he is a Cornell grad, a former police officer and lawyer for the indigent - makes him well-suited for teaching inmates. He will appeal the decision. "It's a place I feel I can be of most use to my students," he said.
In December, after spending more than two months in the Brooklyn holding room, Mr. Kaufman was sent to Queens Academy, where he is mentoring three new teachers. An Education Department spokesman, David Cantor, said Mr. Kaufman would soon be given a job teaching at an alternative high school.
Mr. Dody, the principal, said Mr. Kaufman's removal was solely a Correction Department decision.
But a November 2005 memo by the department's investigator, Capt. Matthew Boyd, indicates that the principal had a significant role. "Dr. Dody reports that he has determined that Mr. Kaufman's actions violate undue familiarity and I concur," the memo says.
Mr. Dody says he's not a doctor and the corrections memo is wrong.
Mr. Lee's younger sister, Sonia, wrote about his jail experiences in a term paper at George Washington that won a top a prize and was featured at a student lecture series. The paper includes the hardships her brother knew growing up, including the suicide of their mother, who suffered from manic depression. Sonia Lee plans to get a master's degree in public policy specializing in the prison system. Her prize paper calls for prisons that devote more resources to rehabilitation and education.
On partisan thought. Interesting.
A Shocker: Partisan Thought Is Unconscious
By BENEDICT CAREY
Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
"Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study, to be presented Saturday at meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, Calif.
The results are the latest from brain imaging studies that provide a neural explanation for internal states, like infatuation or ambivalence, and a graphic trace of the brain's activity.
In 2004, the researchers recruited 30 adult men who described themselves as committed Republicans or Democrats. The men, half of them supporters of President Bush and the other half backers of Senator John Kerry, earned $50 to sit in an M.R.I. machine and consider several statements in quick succession.
The first was a quote attributed to one of the two candidates: either a remark by Mr. Bush in support of Kenneth L. Lay, the former Enron chief, before he was indicted, or a statement by Mr. Kerry that Social Security should be overhauled. Moments later, the participants read a remark that showed the candidate reversing his position. The quotes were doctored for maximum effect but presented as factual.
The Republicans in the study judged Mr. Kerry as harshly as the Democrats judged Mr. Bush. But each group let its own candidate off the hook.
After the participants read the contradictory comment, the researchers measured increased activity in several areas of the brain. They included a region involved in regulating negative emotions and another called the cingulate, which activates when the brain makes judgments about forgiveness, among other things. Also, a spike appeared in several areas known to be active when people feel relieved or rewarded. The "cold reasoning" regions of the cortex were relatively quiet.
Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.
It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, "but you have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, 'All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.' "
He added, "It speaks to the character of the discourse that this quality is rarely talked about in politics."
On how well people without geometry understand, um, geometry.
Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle or any other geometric shape except circles.
The members use no measuring instruments or compasses, they have no maps, and their words for directions are limited to sunrise, sunset, upstream and downstream. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except "few" and "many," and even those words are not used consistently.
Yet, researchers have discovered, they appear to understand many principles of geometry as well as American children do, and in some cases almost as well as American adults. An article describing the findings appears in the Jan. 20 issue of Science.
"Across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities," said Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard, "and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches."
To test their understanding of geometry, the researchers presented 44 members of a Mundurukú group and 54 Americans with a series of slides illustrating various geometric concepts. Each slide had six images. Five of them were examples of the concept; one was not.
The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image that was "weird" or "ugly." For example, to test the concept of right angles, a slide shows five right triangles and one isosceles triangle. The isosceles triangle is the correct answer.
In data that do not appear in the article but were presented by e-mail from the authors, Mundurukú children scored the same as American children - 64 percent right - while Mundurukú adults scored 83 percent compared with 86 percent for the American adults.
The researchers also tested the Mundurukú with maps, demonstrating that people who had never seen a map before could use one correctly to orient themselves in space and to locate objects previously hidden in containers laid out on the ground.
The indigenous people were able to use the maps to find the objects, even when they were presented with the maps at varying angles so that they had to turn them mentally to match the pattern on the ground in front of them. Dr. Spelke found this particularly significant.
"The Mundurukú, who aren't themselves in a culture that relies on symbols of any kind, when they were presented with maps were able to spontaneously extract the geometric information in them," she said.
The idea that an understanding of geometry may be a universal quality of the human mind dates back at least as far as Plato. In the Meno dialogue by Plato, written about 380 B.C., he describes Socrates as he elicited correct answers to geometric puzzles from a young slave who had never studied the subject.
Do these findings among the Mundurukú confirm Socrates' contention that concepts of geometry are innate? Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. People learn things, after all, just by living in the world.
"In our article we do not use the word 'innate,' " he said in an e-mail message. "We do not know whether this core knowledge is present very early on - the youngest subjects we tested were 5 years old - or to what extent it is learned. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on."
Instead, Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge. "Our current thinking is that the human brain has been predisposed by millions of years of evolution to 'internalize,' either very early on or through very fast learning, various mental representations of the external world, including representations of space, time and number," he explained.
"I have proposed that such representations provide a universal foundation for the cultural constructions of mathematics," he added.
Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes. "Geometry is central to the development of science and the arts," she said. "The profile of abilities that the Mundurukú show is qualitatively very similar to what we see in our own culture. This suggests that we are finding some of the common ground at the center of human knowledge."
On a female-only fire station.
On Engine 22, It's Women Who Answer the Bell
By SARAH KERSHAW
SAN DIEGO, Jan. 17 - When the crew from Fire Engine Company 22 raced off at 7:50 a.m. the other day for the first call of their 24-hour shift, a woman reporting chest pains, their big red rig was primed for action but missing a typical feature: a man.
The four members of Engine 22, Division A, a captain, an engineer, a firefighter-paramedic and a firefighter, protect the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, an affluent peninsula on the Pacific Ocean. They are one of the few crews in the nation made up entirely of women, winding up together last October, as the captain, Joi Evans, said, because of "the way the cards fell."
Together they work, cook, shop, train and sleep in small dorm rooms in the station house, around the clock for 10 days a month, at a time when women are making some inroads into the fire service nationwide but are still only a sliver of the front line in one of the most physically grueling and male-dominated professions. With women accounting for about 8 percent of the 880 uniformed firefighters assigned to its station houses, compared with the national average of 2.5 percent, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, which has a female assistant chief, is considered one of the best departments for women to work, according to Women in the Fire Service, an advocacy group based in Madison, Wis.
With an even higher number of women, Minneapolis had its first female fire chief sworn in a year ago, and 17 percent of its 380 uniformed firefighters are women, the department says.
On the other end of the spectrum, in the New York City Fire Department, the nation's largest and long considered by critics to be a backwater for women in firefighting, only 36 of the 11,430 uniformed firefighters are female, according to the department's latest figures.
"We're seeing the most progressive fire departments really doing a good job," said Terese M. Floren, executive director of Women in the Fire Service, who became one of the nation's first female firefighters when she started her career in Ohio in the 1970's. "But the rest of the fire service needs to get up to that mark, because they are not there. And when you are no longer an anomaly, no longer a token, no longer turning somebody's head, then you will have arrived."
Women have made greater gains in San Diego than in many other cities, officials said, partly because of a 1974 consent decree that required the fire department to recruit women and minorities. The 10-year decree came after a lawsuit filed by five women who said they were wrongly fired in the last weeks of their academy training in the early 1970's.
For the women of Engine 22, life in the station house on Catalina Boulevard and out on the streets of Point Loma is distinctly different now than it was before each of them worked with an all-woman crew.
Three have served almost two decades in San Diego and other cities. Each was, for many of those years, the only woman in a fire crew, at a time when they did not dare shower in the station house, when, their bladders bursting, they ran to restrooms at coffee shops or a florist, when they had to tailor their uniforms at the waist and chest, when they put up with snide remarks, pranks, hazing or worse from their male colleagues.
"I could have written a book," said April Lallo, 41, the firefighter-paramedic, who worked for the Los Angeles Fire Department for five years and in Orange County for nine. Ms. Lallo left the fire service to become a stockbroker but returned to the profession in San Diego after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because, she said, "My heart is really in this job."
"If you speak out," Ms. Lallo said, "it really hurts you to go on because then guys look at you and they're afraid of you. I don't want that. I can't change things here, or in the fire service, but I feel like I can influence them by being positive, coming in and just showing them we don't have an agenda, we're here to work with you."
The engineer, Melissa Cleary, 47, who maintains and drives the fire engine and has worked for the department here for 16 years, said she felt that as a female firefighter working with men, "You can't mess up."
"The thing about the four of us being together," Ms. Cleary said, "is we can make mistakes and we can laugh at one another and you don't have to feel like you're never going to hear the end of it."
"What if you need help with something?" she added. "I would never ask a man to help me with something."
After the 7:50 a.m. call, the crew members prepared breakfast in the kitchen at the small station house, offering Ms. Lallo, who is on a diet, oatmeal and other healthy alternatives to the cinnamon buns in the oven.
They teased Captain Evans, who is 47 and bears a striking resemblance to Martha Stewart, saying she was super-tidy and obsessed with decorating. They call her Martha Senior, though they make sure to tell her that she looks more like Ms. Stewart's daughter than like her sister. Ms. Cleary, who has run 33 marathons and rides a Harley, is known as Martha Junior because she does most of the cooking.
Among the four, there is deep trust, unconditional support and, of course, the freedom to talk about waxing, constipation and the "Oprah bra." (Ms. Lallo said that after seeing a show on bras, she rushed to Nordstrom to buy one that actually fit.)
After breakfast, the crew members went out on what they called a Code 9, an hour of exercise consisting of jogging and strength training at a park on Shelter Island. As they jogged in their department-issue T-shirts and shorts, their radios attached to their hips, an elderly man asked, "Are you cold, ladies?"
Ms. Cleary said no.
"I could light a fire," the man replied, and the crew members laughed.
As they left the park and climbed back into the fire engine, setting out to shop for lunch and dinner, a young man asked if he could be photographed with them.
"Did you just graduate?" he asked.
Under her breath, Ms. Lallo said, "Yeah, like 20 years ago."
Robyn Benincasa, 39, the firefighter, said: "Just graduating from the academy? That's a new one."
The crew is also often noticed by women, who think - especially when the women are in full bunker gear and helmets - that the rig may be loaded with hunky male firefighters. On several occasions, the crew members said, women have approached the rig and lifted their shirts.
The rest of the day was fairly quiet and included a training session in which the women practiced rappelling down cliffs above the ocean. They went out on five calls in 24 hours, four of them medical emergencies and one from someone who was locked out of his car. The lock-out call came at 7:30 p.m., just as Captain Evans was grilling chicken for a Caesar salad and Ms. Lallo was making whole-wheat croutons.
About 85 percent of the crew's calls are health related, the firefighters said, as many fire departments have merged paramedic and firefighter operations. Here in California, with a fast-growing population of immigrants and others without health insurance, the crew often feels like "the doctor's office," Ms. Benincasa said.
The crew members described exposure to diseases like AIDS on medical calls or getting killed by a car on the freeway responding to an accident as the biggest dangers of the job. But Ms. Benincasa, a top adventure sports racer, said her scariest moment came not while firefighting, but while swimming in Class IV rapids in Tibet.
The four members of the crew helped fight the harrowing wildfires that ravaged Southern California in 2003, but none reported having a near-death experience or a dramatic rescue from a flaming building in their years on the job.
Even so, just carrying 75 pounds of gear on their backs as they fight fires has inflicted many injuries, they said. The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department responded to 320 structure fires - buildings, homes or businesses - in the last fiscal year, and 43 since Jan. 1.
There is a much higher percentage of female police officers and paramedics than professional firefighters. The physical demands are cited as one reason more women are not in the fire service. In addition, the 24-hour shifts make it difficult for some women to find child care.
The other fields in public safety also opened to women sooner because firefighters, unlike paramedics and police officers, traditionally lived full time, fraternity-style, in the station houses. The presence of women in the other professions has also helped draw more women to them.
As night fell here and the crew members finished dinner, they chatted about the day and their personal lives. All but Ms. Lallo, a single mother raising a 2-year-old girl she adopted as an infant, are dating San Diego firefighters.
After dinner it was time for "stretch and skate," meaning a light yoga-style workout and, on this night, watching the figure skating championships.
The season premiere of "24," however, one of Ms. Lallo's favorite shows, was on television, so she holed up in her dorm room while the other three began the stretching.
Captain Evans was concerned that Ms. Lallo might be lonely, so Ms. Cleary said over the loudspeaker: "Stretch and '24.' Stretch and '24' in the bullpen," referring to the station's main office, and Ms. Lallo joined in the stretching.
Soon, the crew members went to sleep, roused later, at 4:45 a.m., by a call about a sick elderly man who had fallen out of his bed. By about 7:30 a.m., the next crew, Division B - four men - arrived at the station house to relieve Division A.
In this station house, male firefighters contend with friendly pranks by the women. Though many men in the fire service are known as excellent chefs, Ms. Cleary had pasted a strip of yellow police tape across Division B's refrigerator: "Danger: Men Cooking."
