Sped. abb. postale art. 1legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma
By MATT RICHTEL
REDWOOD CITY, CALIFORNIA
EVEN AS SOME parents and edu-
cators express unease over how
engrossed today’s students are
with digital technology, many American
schools are intensifying its use in the
classroom.
The tension is on vivid display here
at Woodside High School, amid the for-
ested hills of Silicon Valley.
As elsewhere, it is not uncommon
at Woodside for students to send hun-
dreds of text messages a day or spend
hours playing video games, and virtu-
ally everyone is on Facebook. But the
principal, David Reilly, 37, a former
musician, is determined to engage
these 21st-century students on their
own terms. He has asked teachers to
build Web sites to communicate with
students, introduced popular classes
on using digital tools to record music,
secured funding for iPads to teach Man-
darin and obtained $3 million in grants
for a multimedia center.
“I am trying to take back their atten-
tion from their BlackBerrys and video
games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m
using technology to do it.”
One consequence of technology’s
impact on young people, say research-
ers, is the risk of developing brains
unable to sustain attention. “Their
brains are rewarded not for staying on
task but for jumping to the next thing,”
said Michael Rich, an associate pro-
fessor at Harvard Medical School and
executive director of the Center on
Media and Child Health in Boston. “The
worry is we’re raising a generation of
kids in front of screens whose brains
are going to be wired differently.”
The tension between technology and
learning surfaces in Vishal Singh, a
bright 17-year-old student whose ability
to be distracted by computers is rivaled
by his proficiency with them.
At the beginning of his junior year in
high school, he made a name for him-
self among friends and teachers with
his storytelling in videos made with
digital cameras and editing software.
He acts as his family’s tech-support
expert, helping his father, Satendra, a
lab manager, retrieve lost documents
on the computer, and his mother, Indra,
a security manager at the San Fran-
cisco airport, build her own Web site.
But he also plays video games 10
hours a week. He regularly sends Face-
book status updates at 2 a.m., even on
school nights, and has such a reputa-
tion for distributing links to videos that
his best friend calls him a “YouTube
bully.”
Teachers call Vishal one of their
brightest students. But he performed
poorly in English and algebra last
semester. He did get an A in film cri-
tique.
“He’s a kid caught between two
worlds,” said Mr. Reilly — one that is
virtual and one with real-life demands.
Several recent studies show that
young people tend to use home
By LYDIA POLGREEN and VIKAS BAJAJ
MADOOR, India — India’s rapidlygrowing private microcredit industryfaces imminent collapse as almost allborrowers in one of India’s largeststates have stopped repaying theirloans, encouraged by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsizeprofits on the backs of the poor.
The crisis has now reached a criti-cal stage, and is likely to reverberate around the globe. Indian banks, whichput up about 80 percent of the money that the companies lent to the poor,are increasingly worried that aftersurviving the global financial crisismostly unscathed, they could now faceserious losses. The banks have about $4 billion tied up in the industry, bank-ing officials say.
Initially the work of nonprofitgroups, the tiny loans to the poorknown as microcredit once seemed a promising path out of poverty for mil-lions. In recent years, foundations,venture capitalists and the WorldBank have used India as a petri dishfor similar for-profit “social enterpris-es” that seek to make money while fill-ing a social need. Like-minded indus-tries have sprung up in Africa, LatinAmerica and other parts of Asia.
But microfinance in pursuit of prof-its has led some companies around theworld to extend loans to poor villagersat exorbitant interest rates and withoutenough regard for their ability to repay.Some companies have more than dou-bled their revenues annually.
Responding to public anger — andgrowing reports of suicides among peo-ple unable to pay debts — legislators inthe state of Andhra Pradesh passed astringent new law restricting how thecompanies can lend and collect money.
Local leaders urged people to re-nege on their loans, and repaymentson nearly $2 billion in loans in the statehave virtually ceased. Lenders say thatless than 10 percent of borrowers havemade payments in the past few weeks.
If the trend continues, the industryfaces collapse in a state where morethan a third of its borrowers live.Lenders are also having trouble mak-ing new loans in other states, because banks have slowed lending to them asfears about defaults have grown.
One borrower, Durgamma Dappu,a widowed laborer, took a loan from a
KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Many in Andhra Pradesh have
stopped repaying microloans. This
woman’s indebted daughter fled.
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Vishal Singh, 17, often works on his computer instead of doing homework. He multitasks by answering texts from friends.
Tiny Loans,
Big Debts
Worry India
Con tin ued on Page IV
Con tin ued on Page IV
VIISCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
For cats, a big gulp
with a tongue’s touch. VIIIARTS & STYLES
Disney animation is
burdened by its past. VIBUSINESS OF GREEN
Uncertain future for
Hungarian miners.
Wired for DistractionStruggling to Learn in a Flood of Texting, Web Surfing and Games
INTELLIGENCE: Measuring happiness, one country at a time. Page II.
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Dictatorship of Law in Putin’s Russia
Russia’s newly outrageous legaltreatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky,the former owner of the country’s larg-est oil company, is a reminder that Rus-sia has yet to grasp the idea of equal jus-tice under law — especially when the Kremlin decides someone is in the way.
Mr. Khodorkovsky was convicted in2005 on trumped-up charges of fraud and disobeying a court order and lost his company to Kremlin loyalists. Rus-sians call his sort of case “telephonelaw,” imposed by the politically pow-erful through a call to the courthouse. With his sentence almost up, he wasjust tried again on suspect charges of embezzling and money-laundering.
The judge is expected to reach a deci-sion in December.
Two decades ago, the United States State Department urged the new Rus-sia to resurrect the jury system, as TheTimes described, to put the law in the hands of the Russian people. Jurieshad been abolished after the Sovietrevolution, along with anything rec-ognizable as courts and lawyers. Theywere reborn in 1993.
Defendants have a right to a jurytrial in a small fraction of crimes likemurder and kidnapping. Comparedwith non-jury trials in the Soviet era,when the acquittal rate was likely less than 1 percent, the rate with juries has
climbed to between 15 and 20 percent.Because of this apparent success, itis tempting to look for the growth of a familiar sense of justice. That search ends in disillusionment.
The Soviet system relied on prose-cutors to find what passed for the truth in criminal cases, so the foundation forreform is at odds with the new systemthat juries are part of, with truth sup-posedly emerging from the competingaccounts of the prosecution and thedefense.
More to the point, the old system isnot dead. Russia, the scholar JeffreyKahn said, has “a lot of bad legal hab-its.” One is the prosecutor’s “case file,”
which sealed the guilt of countless So-viet citizens and retains its terrifying force. Of the 791,802 criminal cases dis-posed of this year through September,only 465 were decided by a jury. Mr.Khodorkovsky wasn’t allowed a juryin either of his trials. Deliberately, the prosecution charged him only withcrimes that didn’t give that right. Ajury couldn’t be trusted, apparently, to look out for the state’s interests.
When Vladimir Putin heralded thestart of the era of law and democracy,he repeatedly described it as “thedictatorship of law.” As the Khodork-ovsky case dramatizes, that is a chill-ingly accurate description.
For an American tourist weanedon Gaelic kitsch and screenings of“The Quiet Man,” the landscapeof contemporary Ireland comes assomething of a shock. Drive fromDublin to the western coast andback, as I did two months ago, andyou’ll still find all the thatched-roof farmhouses, winding stone wallsand placid sheep that the postcards would lead you to expect. But round every green hill, there’s a swath ofminiature McMansions. Past every tumble-down castle, a cascade ofcondominiums. In sleepy fishing vil-lages that date to the days of Grace O’Malley, Ireland’s Pirate Queen(she was the Sarah Palin of the 16thcentury), half the houses look thepart — but the rest could have been thrown together haphazardly.
It’s as if there were only two erasin Irish history: the Middle Ages andthe housing bubble.
This actually isn’t a bad way ofthinking about Ireland’s 20th cen-tury. The island spent decade after decade isolated, premodern andrural — and then in just a few short years, boom, modernity! The Irishsometimes say that their 1960s didn’thappen until the 1990s, when secu-larization and the sexual revolution finally began in earnest in what had been one of the most conservativeand Catholic countries in the world.But Ireland caught up fast: the kind of social and economic change that took 50 years or more in many placeswas compressed into a single revolu-tionary burst.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when everyone wanted to takecredit for this transformation. Free-market conservatives hailed Ire-land’s rapid growth as an example ofthe miracles that free trade, tax cutsand deregulation accomplish. (In1990, Ireland ranked near the bot-tom of European Union nations inGross Domestic Product per capita. In 2005, it ranked second.)
Progressives and secularistssuggested that Ireland was thriving because it had finally escaped theCatholic Church’s repressive grip,which kept horizons narrow andfamilies large, and limited femaleeconomic opportunity.
The European elite regardedIreland as a case study in the benefitsof European Union integration,since the more tightly the Irishbound themselves to Continentalinstitutions, the faster their grossdomestic product rose.
Nobody tells those kinds of stories anymore.
The Celtic housing bubble wasmore inflated than America’s (a lot of
those McMansions are half-finished and abandoned), the Celtic banking industry was more reckless in itsbets, and Ireland’s debts, privateand public, make our budget woeslook manageable by comparison.
The Irish economy is on every-body’s mind again these days, butthat’s because the government has just been forced to apply for a bailout from the European Union, lest Ire-land become the green thread thatunravels the European quilt.
If the bailout does its work and the Irish situation stabilizes, the world’s attention will move on to the nextE.U. country on the brink, wheth-er it’s Portugal, Spain or Greece(again).
But when the story of the GreatRecession is remembered, Irelandwill offer the most potent cautionarytale. Nowhere did the imaginations of utopians run so rampant, and no-where did they receive a more sting-ing rebuke.
To the utopians of capitalism, the Irish experience should be a re-minder that the biggest booms canproduce the biggest busts, and that debt and ruin always shadow pros-perity and growth. To the utopiansof secularism, the Irish experienceshould be a reminder that the wan-ing of a powerful religious tradition can breed decadence as well as liber-ation. (“Ireland found riches a goodsubstitute for its traditional culture,”Christopher Caldwell noted, but now“we may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poorcountry returns to poverty without its culture.”)
But it’s the utopians of Europeanintegration who should learn thehardest lessons from the Irish story.The continent-wide ripples fromIreland’s banking crisis have vindi-cated the Euroskeptics who arguedthat the European Union was ex-panded too hastily, and that a singlecurrency couldn’t accommodatesuch a wide diversity of nations. And the Irish government’s hat-in-hand pilgrimages to Brussels have vindi-cated every nationalist who fearedthat economic union would eventu-ally mean political subjugation. The yoke of the European Union is lighterthan the yoke of the British Empire, but Ireland has returned to a kind of vassal status all the same.
As for the Irish themselves, their idyllic initiation into global capital-ism is over, and now they probablyunderstand the nature of modernity a little better. At times, it can seem to deliver everything you ever wanted, and wealth beyond your dreams. Butyou always have to pay for it.
E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S
ROSS DOUTHAT
Ireland’s Paradise Lost
LONDON
Liberty is an “inherent and inalien-able” right of Americans, along withthe “pursuit of happiness.” Note thedistinction here, evidence of the wis-dom of the Founding Fathers. TheDeclaration of Independence guar-antees freedom but, when it comes tohappiness, only the quest for it is un-derwritten.
Happiness is hard to quantify and,most fleeting of emotions, harder tosustain. It may be induced by no morethan a shaft of sunlight, a scent carriedby the breeze on a busy street, a beau-tifully wrought phrase, a succulentsauce, a tender memory or a passage from the “Ode to Joy.”
Its cousin, contentment, is imbuedwith a slightly different quality, per-haps a more measured satisfaction, onethat acknowledges the eternal light anddark of life but, through wisdom andexperience, overcomes fluctuations ofmood and fortune to arrive at the stateof being, well, happy enough.
To be human is to puzzle over exis-tence, to be unrequited, to know thepain of others — in short to suffer.Some of the highest art comes precise-ly out of that suffering, transposing thepersonal into the universal. This art,be it Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Pi-casso’s “Guernica,” in turn gives plea-sure. Such is the tantalizing labyrinth of life. As John Stuart Mill observed,“It is better to be a Socrates dissatis-fied than a pig satisfied.”
Given how difficult happiness is topin down, it is little wonder that gov-ernments have steered clear of trying to measure it. The United States has noformal gauge of how successful its citi-
zens’ “pursuit of happiness” is. Other measurements — of economic growth,per-capita income, consumer confi-dence and life expectancy — have beenassumed to provide a rough guide. Ina way they do. The unhappiest societ-ies in the world, by any measure, are those in sub-Saharan Africa.
But, with the galloping progress oftechnology and productivity in devel-oped societies, and the accompanying increase in stress, more governments are wondering whether expandinggross domestic product may be a poor guide to well-being. Back in 2008, Bhu-tan decided its government programs
should be judged not by the economicbenefits they offer, but by the happi-ness they produce. The British govern-ment recently announced that it willstart to measure people’s contentmentlevel and asked a national statistician, Jil Matheson, to devise questions.
She might consider the following:1) How often do you forget your username and password and how irritated do you get? 2) What do you feel when your phone breaks and you get trans-ferred via voicemail hell to a Banga-lore call center? 3) Do surveillancecameras on every corner improveyour mood? 4) How about drizzle? 5) How much debt do you have and whomdo you blame? 6) Do you like your fam-
ily and/or neighbors?I’ve no idea what results Matheson
is going to get. The British have been around long enough to value stoicism, a good laugh and the wisdom of hop-ing for the best. The French tend to begrumpier. They’re also on the happi-ness-measurement trail. PresidentNicolas Sarkozy has been impressed by the work of two Nobel economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, who believe sustainability and well-being must become central to economicmeasurement. But the national statis-tic office, Insee, has found it easier to measure discontent than happiness.No surprise, there.
One organization, the New Econom-ics Foundation, has been publishing a Happy Planet Index for a few years.Eight of the top 10 countries are in Lat-in America, with Costa Rica leadingthe pack and violence-wracked Colom-bia not far behind. Latin America is, of course, the most unequal of continents.It is also, in general, a place of strong families, strong sunlight and strongtraditions, where pursuit of pleasureoften trumps pursuit of profit.
The mystery remains. Happinessindexes are just fine, but I don’t think they’ll make us any happier. Boredomis a terrible affliction in modern societ-ies. I like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’sadvice: “As life is action and passion,it is required of a man that he shouldshare the passion and action of histime, at the peril of being judged not tohave lived.” That sort of happiness isnot available in Costa Rica.
I also find truth in this Chinese prov-erb: If you want to be happy for a day,get drunk; a week, kill a pig; a month,get married; for life, be a gardener.Voltaire was right: cultivate your gar-den.
Higher courts in Russia have the power to reverse jury decisions, and they routinely do. Prosecutors
facing a skeptical jury are allowed to keep trying for a conviction — sometimes as many as four times.
Alexei V. Pichugin,
former top security
officer for Yukos, was
arrested in 2003 on
suspicion of having
organized a double
murder and attacks
on his employer’s
business rivals.
After being delayed multiple times
because of illnesses, and then having
six jurors drop out on the same day, the
first jury in Mr. Pichugin’s case was
dismissed in 2004. Mr. Pichugin’s
lawyers said the jury had been at most
three weeks from a verdict, and was
leaning toward acquittal. A second jury
convicted him in a closed trial in 2005.
Mr. Pichugin is serving a life sentence.
CASE
EXAMPLES OF MULTIPLE JURY TRIALS IN RUSSIA
JURIES
OUTCOME
Physicist
Valentin V.
Danilov was
accused of
spying for
China in
2001.
The first jury voted 8 to 4 to
acquit Mr. Danilov. Prosecutors
appealed the decision, and the
Supreme Court overturned the
verdict based on procedural
violations. A second jury
unanimously convicted him
in a closed trial in 2004.
Mr. Danilov was sentenced to 14
years in prison.
Igor V. Sutyagin
was arrested
in 1999 on
suspicion of
espionage and
revealing state
secrets.
The first judge assigned to the case
sent it back to the prosecutor for
further investigation. A jury trial began
in 2003, but after a series of delays,
judge and jury were replaced with no
explanation. A second jury convicted
him in a closed trial in 2004.
Mr. Sutyagin was sentenced to 15
years in prison. He was released this
summer as part of a prisoner swap
with the United States, though he
maintains his innocence.
Multiple Jeopardy
By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — Iosif L. Nagle was at hissmall theater when he saw two young men waiting for him in the audience.Something about their faces markedthemas lawenforcement.A few minutes later the three of them
were talking over vodka. The subject was the jury that Mr. Nagle sat on,which, after four months of testimony, was leaning toward acquittal.The visitors said it would be awful
if such criminals went unpunished.Would he consider withdrawing from the jury on the grounds of illness?“I told them, ‘Why should I say I’m
sick? You did your job badly, guys,’ ”said Mr. Nagle, 56.Introduced into Russia amid a raft of
liberal reforms in 1993, juries brought real competition to Russia’s courts,granting acquittals in 15 to 20 percent of cases, compared with less than 1percent in cases decided by judges.But the state has never been happy
about letting ordinary people handlehigh-profile prosecutions.Some juries have been dismissed on
the verge of important verdicts. Whenthey vote to acquit, their verdicts areroutinelyoverturnedbyhighercourts.Meanwhile, the number of jury trialsremains small — around 600 a yearout of a total of more than one million — that they vanish into a justice sys-tem that in some important ways has changed little since Soviet days.The people on Mr. Nagle’s jury last
summer were ordinary Muscovites.Mr. Nagle, artistic director at Mos-
cow’s French Language Theater,came eagerly. So did Rakhilya Z. Sal-nikova, a crane operator. “I felt that it would be an honor for
me, that they would have that muchtrust in me,” she said.Igor V. Izmestiev, who sat in the metal
defendant’s cage in the courtroom, hadthe sleek, well-fed look of the new rich.Thoughtherewere12otherdefendants,accused of carrying out killings for him,this was the man who mattered.A multimillionaire and former
senator, Mr. Izmestiev, 44, had risento prominence in his native Bashkor-tostan, a southwestern republic thatsits on enormous reserves of crude oil.He owed much of his success to Murta-za G. Rakhimov, who for two decadesran the region like a personal fief.Mr. Izmestiev was arrested on sus-
picion of murder in 2007. Commenta-tors offered various explanations,most often that it served as a warning shot to Mr. Rakhimov, who was forced from power this summer. Charges against Mr. Izmestiev in-
cluded attempting to bribe a FederalSecurity Service agent, organizingand leading a criminal gang, ordering five murders, burning down a printingbusiness, and attempting to kill Mr.Rakhimov’s son, Ural. A new charge, terrorism, was tacked on in 2008. The jury trial was closed to the public. In the jury room, the panel was split,
occasionally arguing so passionatelythat the bailiff had to come in, said Lid-ia S. Vasilyeva, one of the jurors. Shefelt that Mr. Izmestiev was probably
guilty of some wrongdoing. “You don’t get that kind of money
without getting your hands dirty,”she said. “But everything they tried tohang on him, it was absurd.” She was one of four jurors who said
they were not convinced. “I think that guilt, not just of one per-
son, but of several people, was not prov-en,” said Teimuraz Bagylly, a business-man who withdrew after five months.By the time the trial was half over,
Mr. Nagle said, he had been persuad-ed that the charges were driven bypolitics and money. “We expected thatthere would be some main evidencewhich proved everything,” he said.“But it never appeared.” When Mr. Nagle submitted a note
informing the judge that law enforce-ment officials had urged him to with-
draw, a blatant violation of Russianlaw, there was no response, he said. Ms. Vasilyeva said she too was ap-
proached to drop off the jury. By late February, seven months into
the trial, 10 jurors had left. Although thewithdrawal of one more would result ina dismissal, two or three weeks were allthey needed to reach deliberations.But on February 25, the judge an-
nounced that a victim in the case was sick and the trial would have to wait.March came, and then April, and the 12jurors would remain in the jury room,playing cards, on the days when theywere called to appear. Though theywere still split, all 12 felt a stubborn de-sire to finish, Ms. Vasilyeva said. Then a fourth juror submitted a note
saying she was leaving, for Siberia, of-fering to return if testimony resumed,
said her fellow jurors. On May 12, thepanel was dismissed.Ms. Vasilyeva, a retired telephone
operator, said she was angry enough tospeak publicly about the dismissal.“Wheremoneyandpolitics aremixed
up,” she said, “there is no justice.”Mr. Nagle was similarly outspoken.
“The law doesn’t work. People in pow-er can do whatever they want with the law,” he said. As for the case against Mr. Izmes-
tiev, it will most likely end in a matter of weeks. This spring, Russia’s Constitutional
Court ruled that terrorism cases were too important to be trusted to ordinarycitizens who are, the court reasoned,toovulnerable to intimidation.So this time, the verdict will be de-
cided by a panel of three judges.
By ROBERT F. WORTH
CAIRO — It is never easy to be an animal rights activist in the Arab world. But on Id al-Adha, the annual Muslim religious holiday when the streets run red with the blood of slaughtered sheep, cows and camels, it is a nightmare. “Ah, I can’t stand it!”
wailed Amina Abaza. “Islam is all about compassion, but we don’t practice it!” An ebullient 55-year-old,
Ms. Abaza has spent a decadecampaigning to spare the ani-mals, or at least require morehumane slaughtering meth-ods. She has a long way to go.The scene in Cairo’s work-
ing-class Sayyida Zeinab neighborhoodonNovember16 was fairly typical: camels bellowedasblood-soakedbutchers wrestled dozens of animals to the ground and slashed their throats for an admiring crowd. Neighbors leaned out their
windows to watch and cheer,orsnapcellphonepictures.Little boys daubed theirhands in the blood and spat-tered one another, and teenag-ershelpedremovesteamingentrails from the carcasses.Scores of people pressed for-ward to buy fresh meat for theritual holiday meal, standingin puddles of clotted gore.For most Muslims, the
holiday is a joyful time witha charitable theme: accord-ing to tradition, a third of theslaughtered meat is to be giv-
en to relatives, and a third tothe poor. It is a welcome gift inEgypt, where the price of meathas been rising and manyfamilies cannot afford it.What bothers Ms. Abaza
and other activists is not theprinciple of Id al-Adha — theFeast of Sacrifice — whichcommemorates the story inwhich God allows Abraham toslaughter a ram instead of hisown son. Nor do they object toanimal slaughter itself (Ms.Abaza is not a vegetarian).Instead, they complain that
many butchers fail to abide even by Islam’s own stric-tures: that the animal should not be mistreated, and should not see or hear other animals being killed.“If you want to give a good
image of Muslims and the Koran, why do you do this?” Ms. Abaza said. “Why are we Muslims the ones known for this kind of behavior?”
Ms. Abaza and a small butgrowing band of fellow activ-ists have had some impact. In2006 she helped an Australianreporter film at a slaughter-house with a hidden camera.The resulting exposé createda scandal in Australia, andsoon afterward the Austra-liangovernmentsuspendedshipping live sheep to Egypt.“People think we are at-
tacking Islam,” she said. “They accuse you of being an American, a Jew, a Freema-son.”When she first started
her organization in 2001, theSociety for the Protection ofAnimal Rights in Egypt, herrhetoricwas largelyborrowedfrom similar Western groups.“Then I discovered that
there are animal rights in Islam,” she said. “Once we started using the Islamic ar-guments, they didn’t attack us as much.”
In Russia, the System
Often Stymies Juries
caIro journal
Relying on Islam
To Fight for Animal Rights
SCOTT NELSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
People gathered in Cairo’s Sayyida Zeinab
neighborhood as butchers slaughtered a bull. Critics say
Islamic law on mistreating animals is being ignored.
Dawlat Magdy and Scott Nelson contributed reporting from Cairo, and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.
Repubblica NewYork
W O R L D T R E N D S
IV MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010
LENS
private microfinance company be-cause she wanted to build a house.
She had never had a bank account or earned a regular salary but wasgiven a $200 loan, which she strug-gled to repay. So she took anotherfrom a different company, then an-other, until she was nearly $2,000 indebt. In September she fled her vil-lage, leaving her family to forfeit her tiny plot of land.
“These institutions are using quite coercive methods to collect,” said V.Vasant Kumar, the state’s minister for rural development. “They aren’tlooking at sustainability or ensur-ing the money is going to income-generating activities. They are justmaking money.”
Reddy Subrahmanyam, a seniorofficial who helped write the Andhra Pradesh law, accuses microfinancecompanies of making “hyperprofits off the poor,” and said the industrywas no better than the widely de-spised village loan sharks it was in-tended to replace.
“The money lender lives in thecommunity,” he said. “At least youcan burn down his house. With these companies, it is loot and scoot.”
Indeed, some of the anger appearsto have been fueled by the recentinitial public offering of shares bySKS Microfinance, India’s largestfor-profit microlender, backed byfamous investors like George Soros and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of
Sun Microsystems. Vikram Akula, chairman of SKS
Microfinance, defended the indus-try’s record, saying that a few rogue operators may have given improper loans, but that destroying microfi-nance would result in “nothing less than financial apartheid.”
Indian microfinance companieshave some of the world’s lowest in-terest rates for small loans. Mr. Aku-la said that his company had reducedits interest rate to 24 percent.
Vijay Mahajan, the chairman ofBasix, an organization that providesmicroloans, estimates that only 20percent have borrowed more thanthey can afford and that just 1 per-cent are in serious trouble.
One of India’s leading social work-ers, Ela Bhatt, who heads the Self-Employed Women’s Association,said microfinance firms had lostsight of the fact that the poor neededbusiness and financial advice as wellas loans.
Mr. Mahajan said that the indus-try was planning to create a fund to help restructure loans.
The collapse of the industry could have severe consequences for bor-rowers, who may be forced to resortto money lenders once again.
K. Shivamma, 38, took her first loanhoping to reverse several years of crop failure brought on by drought.
“When you take the loan they say,‘Don’t worry, it is easy to pay back,’”Ms. Shivamma said.
Now she owes nearly $2,000. The TV, the phone and the two buffaloes she bought with one loan were soldlong ago. “I know it is a vicious cir-cle,” she said. “But there is no choicebut to go on.”
By ROD NORDLAND
KABUL, Afghanistan — They breakup child suicide-bomber rings, takedown drug lords and corrupt govern-ment ministers and kick in doors torescue kidnapped diplomats.
Two men and two women, they are part of an elite Afghan police unitknown as Eagle Four, whose exploitshave made them so famous that teammembers are often stopped on thestreets of Kabul and congratulated— when they are not fielding deaththreats from the Taliban.
“A lot of people come up and say, ‘I wish our national police were all likeyou guys,’ ” said one of them, Najebul-lah Sadiq.
They are, in short, too good to betrue, which they are not.
“Eagle Four” is a popular new po-lice show on Tolo TV here, financedlargely by American Embassy “pub-lic diplomacy” money in an effort toraise the esteem in which Afghanshold their much-maligned policeforce.
Life is still a long way from imitating art on Kabul’s mean streets.
The Eagle Four team includes wom-en, which is unheard of here. Most of the tiny handful of female Afghan po-lice officers are afraid to even go intolocal police stations for fear of sexualassault. Even the actresses in the showhave had problems from their families over story lines involving male coun-terparts.
And real Afghan police officersremain at or near the bottom of theprestige scale in Afghanistan. Theirranks are riddled with drug addicts,
and corrupt officers are the norm; 80percent are illiterate. Even their most elite units are still classified by theirNATO trainers as dependent on coali-tion partners.
“Eagle Four” is not only a propagan-da exercise, but also a training one, its financers say. “It is a bit of both,” saidDavid Ensor, director of communica-tions for the American Embassy. “To help build capacity in the nascent Af-ghan film and TV industry, and if itsets a standard for police work that issomething to aspire to, great.”
Four weeks into the 13-part series,
the show has built a devoted following. Loosely modeled on the American tele-vision series “24,” the show has taken advantage of that show’s widespread popularity here.
Mr. Sadiq plays the Eagle Fourteam leader Kamran. Kamran is theJack Bauer figure, a tough interroga-tor brow-beating a captured would-besuicide bomber into confession withlines like, “You didn’t make it to para-dise today.”
Mr. Sadiq says the show gives hisreal-life colleagues something to as-pire to. “As an Afghan, I wish and hopethey would become as good as what wesee on the show.”
But not everyone is a fan. YamaTanha, 22, a shopkeeper, has watched all four episodes (the latest aired inmid-November), and says he is notimpressed. “It’s about as realistic as‘Tom and Jerry,’ ” he said.
Crime Unit
Defies Truth
In Kabul
Wired for Distraction: Struggling to Learn
CHRISTOPH BANGERT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The television series ‘‘Eagle Four’’ portrays the much-maligned
Afghan police as heroic. A makeup artist prepares an actor for a scene.
India’s Tiny Loans, Big Debtscomputers for entertainment, notlearning .
Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives27,000 texts in a month, her fingersclicking at a blistering pace as she car-ries on as many as seven text conver-sations at a time. But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitask-ing for the three B’s on her recent prog-ress report.
“I’ll be reading a book for homeworkand I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pickup the phone to reply to the text mes-sage, and then 20 minutes later realize,‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’”
Some shyer students do not social-ize through technology — they recede into it. Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an in-trovert, plays six hours of video gameson weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in thebathroom before school.
“It’s a way for me to separate myself,”Ramon says. “If there’s an argumentbetween my mom and one of my broth-ers, I’ll just go to my room and startplaying video games and escape.”
Some parents wholly embrace com-puter use.
“If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on top of theworld,” said John McMullen, 56, a re-tired criminal investigator whose son,Sean, plays video games for four hoursafter school and twice that on week-ends. He was playing more but found his habit pulling his school grades be-low a level he was comfortable with. Hesays he sometimes wishes that his par-ents would force him to quit playing andstudy. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus.
“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean.
Sam Crocker, who has straight A’sbut lower achievement test scores than
he would like, blames the Internet. “I know I can read a book, but then I’m upand checking Facebook,” he says, add-ing: “Facebook is amazing because itfeels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the ab-sence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.”
Some neuroscientists have beenstudying people like Sam and Vishal. German researchers found that play-ing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, andalso led to a “significant decline” instudents’ ability to remember vocabu-lary words.
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found thatwhen rats have a new experience, theirbrains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a breakfrom their exploration do they process those patterns.
These and other brain studies sug-gest to researchers that periods of restare critical in allowing the brain to syn-thesize information, make connectionsbetween ideas and even develop the sense of self. “Downtime is to the brainwhat sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Richof Harvard Medical School. “But kidsare in a constant mode of stimulation.”
Vishal can attest to that.“I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, hav-
ing a conversation or two with a friend,listening to music at the same time. I’mdoing a million things at once,” he says.“Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop thisand do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”
But it is thanks to the Internet, hesays, that he has discovered film-making. Without the Internet, “I alsowouldn’t know what I want to do withmy life.”
Teachers at Woodside are dividedover whether embracing computers isthe right solution.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said AlanEaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. Hesays that technology has led to a “bal-kanization of their focus and duration
of stamina,” and that schools make theproblem worse when they adopt thetechnology.
“When rock ’n’ roll came about, wedidn’t start using it in classrooms likewe’re doing with technology,” he says.
Mr. Reilly hopes that computers canbe combined with education to betterengage students and give them techni-cal skills without compromising deep analytical thought. But in Vishal’s case,computers and schoolwork seem moreand more to be mutually exclusive.Marcia Blondel, a teacher, says that, after a decent start to the school year,Vishal has fallen back into bad habits.
Vishal says he is investing himselfmore in his filmmaking. But he is alsousing Facebook late at night and surf-ing for videos. The evidence comes ina string of Facebook updates.
Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours ofshooting, 8+ hours of editing. All forjust a three-minute scene. Mind =Dead.”
Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, final-ly got to spend a day relaxing ... nowabout that homework ...”
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Students at Woodside High
School in California are allowed
to use their phones at lunch and
between classes.
Con tin ued from Page I
Con tin ued from Page I
The bad guys have no
chance against the police
on Afghan television.
Malia Wollan contributed reporting.
Lydia Polgreen reported from Ma-door, and Vikas Bajaj from Mum-bai, India. Hari Kumar contributedreporting from Madoor.
We’re all going to die!But, hopefully, not at the same
time.At least, that is, if we survive the
latest flurry of doomsday scenarios.Human-
ity may havedodged the black hole that some fearedwould swallow the Earth, or at least a good-size chunk of Switzerland,when the Large
Hadron Collider began its search this year for “God particles” leftover from the first moments of the universe. But the universe remains fraught with insomnia-generatingperils.
Especially as we count down to2012, which, as some doomsayersand Hollywood screenwriters be-lieve, was prophesized on the Mayancalendar as the end of everything.There are the usual suspects: killerasteroids, plagues, mega-volcanoes, nuclear war and climate change.And some lesser-known loomingapocalypses, like a collision with theplanet Nibiru or an upside-down flipin the Earth’s axis.
Luckily, some proactive para-noids are seeking solutions.
Scientists say a large asteroidkilled off the dinosaurs 65 millionyears ago and a small one flatteneda forest in Siberia in 1908. But almostany asteroid hit could spell doomfor modern civilization. That is whyRussell Schweickart, a former as-tronaut writing in The Times, urgedthe United States government tofund $250 million to $300 million fora NASA “detection-and-deflectionprogram.” Potential asteroid threatscould be tracked with telescopesand radar, buying enough time, Mr.Schweickart suggested, for a modestspacecraft to nudge them off theirdeadly trajectories. (The Hollywood
solution starred Bruce Willis, thespace shuttle and a nuclear warheador two.)
If an asteroid did hit the Earth,those who survived the initial im-pact could face a deadly disruption in the food supply as vast clouds ofash blocked out the sun. Of course, a mass die-off of plants could alsoresult from nuclear war, climate change or the mega-volcanoes that lurk beneath Montana and the Azores. But prevention and forethought may prevail. In icy Longyearbyen, Norway, scientistshave created the Global Seed Vault.Thousands of varieties of seeds are stored under the permafrost. The Times called it “a sort of backuphard drive, in case natural disas-ters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.”
As for nuclear war, “Countdownto Zero,” a documentary releasedthis year, encourages us to havenightmares about atomic annihila-tion. As The Times summed up its message, “the rise of global terror-ism, the expanding nuclear club, the increased availability of fissile ma-terial on the black market: all point to a higher likelihood of nuclearattack than ever before.”
The film offers a plan for nuclearweapons that is either naïve or uto-pian: just get rid of them. All of them.Lucy Walker, the director, stressedto The Times that the weapons haveno place in a volatile, post-cold warworld. “No matter what you usedto think,” she said, “the only stablesolution today is zero.”
Other doomsday threats may bedeflected by rational thought. TheDiscoveryNews Web site listed itsTop Ten Reasons Why the EarthWon’t End in 2012. Among the pro-nouncements: the moon’s gravitywould keep the Earth’s axis fromflip-flopping, just as it always has,and the planet Nibiru would notswing by Earth. Why? Because, ac-cording to the site, “There isn’t sucha planet any more than the planetNaboo from the Star Wars trilogy isreal.” KEVIN DELANEY
KanatSaudabayev,Kazakh foreign minister and O.S.C.E.chairman-in-office.
Kazakhstan on the World StageTrust, tradition, transparency and tolerance
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010 V
#;∼?6ι⊥;⊥ζΘ−;π11θ?ξ?ζι−ι!
Repubblica NewYork
B U S I N E S S O F G R E E N
VI MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010
By TODD WOODY
NIPTON, California — Withseven large solar power plantsalready approved that wouldcover 108 square kilometers ofthe California desert, environ-mentalists and regulators haveincreasingly become concernedabout the impact that industri-alization of the desert will haveon fragile landscapes.
“If wildlife issues are not atthe top of a developer’s list,they should be,” said KarenDouglas, the chairwoman ofthe California Energy Commis-sion, which licenses large solarthermal power plants, withtheir huge mirror arrays, solardishes and towers. “The foot-print of these solar projects isunprecedented, and obviouslythey can impact a range of spe-cies.”
In October, the CaliforniaEnergy Commission approvedTessera Solar’s huge Calicoproject in Southern Californiaonly after the company agreedto slash the project nearly inhalf to avoid having to relocatemost of the 104 desert tortoises
found on the site this year. Andthe commission’s staff hasindicated that it is unlikely torecommend the licensing ofSolar Millennium’s 250-mega-watt Ridgecrest power plantbecause of its impact on thedesert tortoise and the Mohaveground squirrel.
In October, the Quechan Indi-an Tribe sued the United States government over its approval ofa second Tessera power plant,contending that the 709-mega-watt Imperial Valley SolarProject would harm the flat-tailed horned lizard, an animalproposed for endangered spe-cies protection. It is part of the tribe’s creation story.
On the construction site of the$2 billion Ivanpah solar powerplant here, biologists scan fordesert tortoises in a landscapestudded with creosote bushes.
“Nobody is allowed on thesite without a biologist to escortthem,” said Mercy Vaughn, the lead biologist for BrightSourceEnergy, the Oakland, Califor-nia, company that is buildingthe 370-megawatt power plant.
BrightSource, which is backedby Google, Morgan Stanley andseveral oil companies, waitedthree years for the project to belicensed by the California En-ergy Commission.
The company shrank Ivanpahby 12 percent, reducing the num-ber of tortoises that would haveto be relocated and avoiding anarea of rare plants.
The energy commission inSeptember licensed Ivanpahover the objections of the Sierra Club, the Center for BiologicalDiversity and other environ-mental groups.
“If you put a project in thewrong place and even do somethings to reduce its impact, it’sstill bad,’’ said Lisa Belenky, asenior lawyer with the Centerfor Biological Diversity.
BrightSource executivescounter that they designedIvanpah to minimize its dis-turbance of the desert. “Wehave someone tracking all thetortoises continuously so when-ever we determine one’s at risk, someone gets put on it,” said Ms.Vaughn.
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
OROSZLANY, Hungary —When the directors of Hunga-ry’s last remaining coal-firedpower plant announced thatthey would close its coal mine and begin dismantling theplant at the end of this year,the news sent shock wavesthrough this industrial city,where a statue of three min-ers stands in the square.
It was well known that the government-owned Vertesiplant and its mine were kept afloat only by more than $30 million in annual state subsi-dies. But more than 3,000 ofOroszlany’s 20,000 residentswork in industries related to coal. The plant is one of thetown’s biggest taxpayers.And the area’s 5,000 homes,its stores and its factories get their heat from the plant.
“We know that coal is anold technique that is not sus-tainable here, but we have notfound an alternative,” saidGabor Rajnai, Oroszlany’smayor. “Everyone is think-ing about how are we going to keep warm in winter.”
The Vertesi plant will be al-lowed to continue limited op-erations for three years after the mine’s closure, in part tobuy time for the town to find a heating alternative.
Determined to reduce Eu-rope’s reliance on coal, theEuropean Commission isfighting a complicated battleagainst the subsidies thathave long sustained coal,an influential but pollution-plagued industry. In May, the Brussels-based governingbody for the European Union announced that economicbailouts and favors for coalmines and power plants were forbidden after this year, pre-cipitating Vertesi’s demise.
As countries endeavor toreduce their fossil fuel emis-sions, many are trying towean themselves from coal,the most highly emitting fuel. But coal is also the lifebloodof communities from Hun-gary to Germany.
Though the EuropeanUnion generally prohibitsnational subsidies, coal had long been an exception. Butthat position has shifted asconcerns over global warm-ing have grown and bettersources of renewable energyhave become available.
In 2007, the EuropeanUnion committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by20 percent below 1990 levelsby 2020, producing 20 percentof its electricity from renew-able energy sources.
“If we want to lower ourcarbon emissions, why onearth — of all industries —does the coal industry getthis preferential treatment?” asked Connie Hedegaard, theEuropean Union’s climate
change minister. Coal is often referred to as
a cheap fuel, but that designa-tion is not always accurate,energy analysts say. In some places, cheaper resourcesare now available, and the la-bel does not take into account the pollution caused by burn-ing coal.
The European Union’semissions trading systemeffectively forces powercompanies to pay for some of coal’s excessive emissions.The European Union’s goalis not to completely eliminate
coal but to replace it, where itis not economical, with clean-er forms of power. But ending coal subsidies is not easy.
Germany and Spain object-ed vigorously to the proposedDecember 31 deadline, argu-ing that the recession maderevoking subsidies this yearimpractical. Coal accountsfor 30 percent of electricityproduction and 17 percent ofenergy consumption in theEuropean Union.
Europe passed the first law phasing out operating subsi-dies to the coal industry in2002 — and the deadline had been moved back repeatedly.Some countries, like Franceand Italy, have ended sub-sidies. Some subsidies, likethose intended to retrainformer miners or to clean upmining sites, were not pro-hibited.
Bowing to pressure, the
exasperated ministers of the European Union said in Julythat they would grant a verylimited extension of certainsubsidies until 2014, but witha host of new stipulations.For example, subsidies cannow be awarded “only in the context of a closure plan” thatfully shuts the plants by Janu-ary 2014, and they have to bereduced 33 percent every 15months. And money cannot beused to obtain access to new coal reserves. The proposalwill be voted on this year.
“In many places, Europeancoal is not competitive butquite a lot of people work in thesector,’’ said Marlene Holzner,a spokeswoman for the Euro-pean Union’s energy ministry.“The idea was to help these re-gions phase out coal so therewouldn’t be such a hard effecton employment.”
Before the global reces-sion, Oroszlany built a newindustrial park to attractsmall manufacturing — Gen-eral Electric has a factorythere — to provide jobs oncecoal had died. But that effortis still young.
“We knew the minewouldn’t work forever, butthis is just too fast,” said Mr. Rajnai, the mayor.
In the 1990s, there were6,500 people working at thepower plant; now there are1,500. In 2009, 800 people lost their jobs and 300 are still un-employed, despite programsfor job retraining. Vertesistill provides about 5 percent of the country’s electricity.
The miners, whose extend-ed families have never knownanother profession, face anuncertain future. “After 20years of work in the mine,your body is pretty damaged and so you’re not so employ-able,” said Csaba Fekete, 39, preparing for his shift.
Judit Bertalan, a localmember of Parliament, who opposes the closure of themine, said, “Even though weare in the E.U., people in Hun-gary here think of it as a local issue.”
ISAAC BREKKEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TAMAS DEZSO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Subsidies for a dirty-burning fuelare hard to cut.
ONLINE:
BEYOND FOSSIL FUELS
Photographs of the coal minethat feeds the Vertesi power plant in Oroszlany.nytimes.com/world
Towns Suffer as Europe Drops Coal
Solar Industry Invades a Fragile Desert
Miners in Oroszlany are facing the end of their
livelihood as Hungary phases out the nation’s last coal-
fired power plant. Top, the plant’s coal yard.
Before it can build
its solar project
in California,
BrightSource
Energy must
manage the
relocation of species
like the imperiled
desert tortoise.
Repubblica NewYork
S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010 VII
By NICHOLAS WADE
It has taken four engineersand a bunch of integral equa-tions to figure it out, but wenow know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, andnot at all the way you mightsuppose.
Cats lap water so fast that thehuman eye cannot follow what is happening. With the use ofhigh-speed photography, theneatness of the feline solution has been captured.
Species that cannot fullyclose their mouths to createsuction —and that includesmost adult carnivores — must resort to some other mecha-nism.
Dog owners are familiarwith a canine’s unseemly lap-ping noises that ensue whentheir pet drinks. The dog isthrusting its tongue into thewater, forming a crude cup and hauling in the liquid.
Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reisand Roman Stocker of the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy, joined by Sunghwan Jungof the Virginia Polytechnic In-stitute and Jeffrey M. Aristoffof Princeton University in NewJersey.
Writing in the journal Sci-ence, the four engineers reportthat the cat’s lapping methoddepends on its instinctive abil-ity to calculate the balance be-tween opposing gravitationaland inertial forces.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving theupper side down so that the tip lightly touches the surface ofthe water. The tongue is thenpulled upward at high speed,drawing a column of water be-hind it.
Just at the moment thatgravity overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down, the cat’s jawsclose over the jet of water and swallow it.
The cat laps four times a
second — too fast for the hu-man eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per sec-ond.
The team tested its findings with a machine that mimickeda cat’s tongue, using a glassdisk at the end of a piston toserve as the tip. After calcu-lating things like the Froudenumber and the aspect ratio,they figured out how fast acat should lap to get the great-est amount of water into itsmouth.
The cats were way ahead
of them: they lap at just thatspeed.
So do bigger cats lap at dif-ferent speeds?
The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequencyshould be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multipliedby 4.6. They then befriended azoo curator in Massachusettswho let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguarsand ocelots turned out to lap at the predicted speeds .
Dr. Stocker was inspiredto undertake the exercise bywatching the family cat, CuttaCutta. Cutta Cutta’s namecomes from the word for “manystars” in Jawoyn, a language ofthe Australian aborigines
He wondered what hydro-dynamic problems it might besolving as it drank. He consult-ed Dr. Reis, an expert in fluidmechanics, and the study was under way.
At first, Dr. Stocker and hiscolleagues assumed that theraspy hairs on a cat’s tongue,so useful for grooming, mustalso be involved in drawingwater into its mouth. But the tipof the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that wasneeded.
The project required no fi-nancing. The robot that mim-icked the cat’s tongue was builtfor an experiment on the Inter-national Space Station, and theengineers simply borrowed itfrom a neighboring lab.
By ERIK OLSEN
The rapidly growing field of molecular animation seeks to bring the power of cinema tobiology, re-creating in vividdetail the complex inner ma-chinery of living cells.
“The ability to animate real-ly gives biologists a chance tothink about things in a wholenew way,” said Janet Iwasa,a cell biologist and molecularanimator at Harvard Medical School.
In 2006 Dr. Iwasa spentthree months at the GnomonSchool of Visual Effects inHollywood learning the pro-cess.
To compose her animations, she draws on publicly avail-able resources like the Protein Data Bank, a database con-taining three-dimensional co-ordinates for all of the atoms ina protein.
“All that we had before —microscopy, X-ray crystallog-raphy — were all snapshots,”said Tomas Kirchhausen,a professor in cell biologyat Harvard Medical Schooland a frequent collaboratorwith Dr. Iwasa. “For me, theanimations are a way to glueall this information togetherin some logical way. By do-ing animation I can see whatmakes sense, what doesn’t make sense. They force us toconfront whether what we are doing is realistic or not.” Forexample, Dr. Kirchhausenstudies the process by whichcells engulf proteins and other molecules. He says anima-tions help him picture how aparticular protein functionswithin the cell.
If there is a Steven Spielberg of molecular animation, it isprobably Drew Berry, a cellbiologist at the Walter andEliza Hall Institute of Medi-cal Research in Melbourne,Australia. Mr. Berry’s workis revered for artistry andaccuracy, and has also beenshown in museums, includingthe Museum of Modern Art inNew York and the Centre Pom-pidou in Paris. In 2008, his ani-
mations formed the backdrop for a night of music and scienceat the Guggenheim Museum inManhattan called “Genes and Jazz.”
“Scientists have alwaysdone pictures to explain their ideas, but now we’re discover-ing the molecular world andable to express and show what it’s like down there,” Mr. Berrysaid. “Our understanding isjust exploding.”
In October, Mr. Berry wasawarded a 2010 MacArthurFellowship, which he says hewill put toward developingvisualizations that explorethe patterns of brain activityrelated to human conscious-ness.
The new molecular anima-tors are quick to pay hom-age to pioneers in moleculargraphics like Arthur J. Olson
and David Goodsell, both atthe Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California.
Perhaps the pivotal mo-ment for molecular anima-tions came four years ago witha video called “The Inner Life of the Cell.” Produced by Bio-Visions, a scientific visualiza-tion program at Harvard, and a Connecticut-based scientificanimation company calledXvivo, the three-minute filmdepicts marauding white blood cells attacking infections inthe body. (It garnered intense media attention on YouTube.) BioVisions’ most recent ani-mation, “Powering the Cell:Mitochondria,” delves into the complex molecules in our cellsthat convert food into energy. Produced in high definition,“Powering the Cell” takesviewers on a swooping roller
coaster ride.Sophisticated programs
like Maya allow animatorsto create entire worlds, butthat isn’t always necessary ordesirable in biology. A Mas-sachusetts company calledDigizyme has developed away to pull data directly intoMaya from the Protein DataBank so that many of the morethan 63,000 proteins in the da-tabase can be easily renderedand animated.
Gaël McGill, Digizyme’schief executive, says access tothis data is critical to scientificaccuracy. “For us the starting point is always the science,”Dr. McGill said. “Do we havedata to support the imagewe’re going to create?”
Some in the scientific com-munity are uncertain aboutthe value of these animations for research.
“Some animations areclearly more Hollywood thanuseful display,” says PeterWalter, a Howard HughesMedical Institute investigator at the University of California,San Francisco. “It can become hard to distinguish betweenwhat is data and what is fan-tasy.”
Dr. McGill acknowledgesthat showing cellular pro-cesses can involve significant conjecture. Animators takeliberty with color and spaceto highlight a particular func-tion or part of the cell. “All theevents we are depicting are sosmall they are below the wave-length of light,” he said.
But he contends that thesevisualizations will be increas-ingly necessary.
Certainly, it will play a sig-nificant part in education.The Harvard biologist E. O.Wilson is leading a projectto develop a digital biologytextbook that will integratecomplex visualizations. Theproject will include visualiza-tions from Mr. Berry and isbeing overseen by Dr. McGill,who says, “I think visualiza-tion is going to be the key tothe future.”
A formula proves
what an animal
instinctively knows.
Some biologists fear
animation turns
facts to fantasy.
Animation: At the Corner
Of Hollywood and Science
A Feline’s Smooth Approach to Drinking
ROBERT A. LUE/BIOVISIONS AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Molecular animation lets scientists see biological processes in action (albeit with
altered colors). An image from ‘‘The Inner Life of the Cell.’’
Repubblica NewYork
A R T S & S T Y L E S
VIII MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010
By CELIA W. DUGGER
JOHANNESBURG — When he was only in his 20s Ernest Cole, a photog-rapher who stood barely 152 centi-meters tall, created one of the mostharrowing pictorial records of what itwas like to be black in apartheid South Africa. He went into exile in 1966, and the next year his work was published in the United States in a book, “Houseof Bondage,” but his photographs werebanned in his homeland, where he and his work have remained little known.
For much of the late 1970s and 1980s Mr. Cole was homeless in New York.He died at 49 in 1990, just a week afterNelson Mandela walked free.
His sister flew back to South Africawith his ashes.
Mr. Cole is at last having anotherkind of homecoming. The largest ret-rospective of his work ever mountedis on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, built in the neo-Classical stylealmost a century ago in an era whenSouth Africa’s great mining fortunes were being made on the backs of black labor. It still possesses the power toshock and anger.
“How could white people do this tous?” asked Lebogang Malebana, 14, ashe stood before a photograph of nude gold-mine recruits who had been herd-ed into a grimy room for examination.“How could they put naked black men on display like that?”
Lebogang, an eighth grader, haddrifted in from a nearby apartment.His mother is a maid; his father is injail. “It’s very sad,” he said as he lin-gered over the black-and-white im-ages.
“I feel angry,” Jimmy Phindi Tjege,27, who like many young black SouthAfricans has never held a job, said ashe gestured to the rest of the gallery. “This room is full of anger.”
Mr. Cole’s captions and photographs are imbued with wrenching emo-tions.
Next to a photo of a maid holdinga white baby whose lips are pressed to the woman’s forehead, the caption says: “Servants are not forbidden to love. Woman holding child said, ‘I lovethis child, though she’ll grow up to treatme just like her mother does.’”
Next year the exhibition will travelto Pretoria, where Mr. Cole’s familystill lives, and other South African cit-ies; an American tour is also planned.
The son of a washerwoman and atailor, Mr. Cole quit high school in 1957at 16 as the Bantu education law meantto consign blacks to menial labor wentinto effect.
When he was 20, the apartheid au-thorities bulldozed the black townshipwhere his family lived.
Somehow, pretending to be an or-phan, he had by then persuaded apart-heid bureaucrats to reclassify him ascolored, or mixed race, despite hisdark skin.
His ability to pass as colored gave
him the mobility that proved crucial to his photography.
In New York in the mid-1970s, a desti-tute Mr. Cole lost his photographs and negatives to an auction of unclaimeditems.
For years rumors circulated thatprints had survived in Sweden. When the South African photographer Da-vid Goldblatt received the Hasselblad
Award in 2006, and traveled to Goth-enburg, Sweden, to accept it, he wasshown the images. “They can’t lie in a vault,” he said.
The Hasselblad Foundation orga-nized the Cole exhibition.
“He wasn’t just brave,” said Mr.Goldblatt. “He wasn’t just enterpris-ing. He was a supremely fine photog-rapher.”
Kanye West’s outbursts over the years are motivated by a consistent, ifpeculiar, internal logic: that Mr. West isn’t to be disturbed.
When he’s comfortable, and not feeling cornered, he can be thoughtful, as he was during anextended visit re-cently to a New Yorkradio station. “As a celebrity, as soon asyou become a star, as
soon as it pops off for you, at that pointyou stop growing,” he admitted.
On November 21, Mr. West, 33, re-leased his fifth album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fel-la/Def Jam), and it’s terrific. And yet by not allowing for responses to his work other than awe, the value of the
work itself is diminished; it becomesan object of admiration, not of study.Instead the focus is on Mr. West’s per-sona and character. The result is that he becomes a polarizing public figure.
Even his consistent success — 14Grammy Awards, four platinumalbums and more — has done littleto change his public image. He’s cer-tainly the only rapper to be insultedby two American presidents.
Nevertheless, Mr. West seems virtually incapable of making a bad record. His music — ornate, ostenta-tious, curious and vivacious— is all within recognized formulas.
A producer as well as a rapper, Mr. West controls all of the major ele-
ments of his songs.For an egotist Mr. West isn’t scared
of collaboration. That explains the most amusing bit in this album’s liner notes, from the credits for “All of the Lights”: “Additional Vocals: Rihan-na, Kid Cudi, Tony Williams, The-Dream, Charlie Wilson, John Legend, Elly Jackson (La Roux), Alicia Keys, Elton John, Fergie, Ryan Leslie, Drake, Alvin Fields & Ken Lewis.” Maybe three or four of these peopleare audibly identifiable. Neverthe-less, the patchwork of performers gnaws away at this album’s impact. In part that’s why it can feel bloodlesscompared with Mr. West’s previousalbum, “808s & Heartbreak,” which
was a consistent and unnerving meditation on personal loss.
He’s a better rapper than he’s ever been, as good as anyone he’s emu-lated. (His flow pattern on “Monster”recalls Juvenile’s “Ha,” a surprise.)
He’s currently working on a col-laborative album with Jay-Z: even acouple of years ago that would havebeen conceivable only with Mr. West producing, not rapping. But on the two songs here where Jay-Z appears,Mr. West at least matches him, maybe bests him.
On “Gorgeous” he sneers at thecompetition, “You blowing up?/That’s good/Fantastic,” maybe the iciest blow-off since Jay-Z’s “ ‘You got
a little dough? That’s cool with me.’ ”And of course there’s the music, de-
cidedly moody yet crisp, with dense orchestration against scraped-updrums and samples. Often the songs sound like two ideas, one glossy and one raw, superimposed on each other.And Mr. West finds different ways to sound phenomenal — “Dark Fan-tasy” recalls vintage Wu-Tang Clan; “Devil in a New Dress” is reminiscent of Mr. West’s 2004 debut, “The Col-lege Dropout.”
Mr. West isn’t content without feedback; his effort is valueless with-out response. Plenty of artists insist their work speaks for them, but asspectacular as his work is, Mr. West will never be one of them. Mr. West is someone worth interrogating, and that’s the highest compliment of all.
LOS ANGELES — As Princess Rapunzel races through the mysti-cal forests of “Tangled,” swimming rivers and clambering through se-cret tunnels, she has to work over-
time to keep pacewith her boyfriend,a rapscallion named Flynn Ryder. She’s daring, this teen-age princess, but all that hair is an awfullot for one little ani-
mated head to carry.The real-life weight sitting on top
of “Tangled,” by Walt Disney Ani-mation Studios, is equally daunt-ing. As the 50th animated moviecreated by the studio that inventedthe medium — but has lately had a hard time finding its voice — “Tan-gled” must answer an ethereal butimportant question: Exactly what is Disney’s animated identity thesedays?
Disney animated movies usedto mean something very specific. They were painterly fantasies,often centered on a young hero ingenerational conflict, that drippedwith sophisticated visuals — think about the square edges in “Sleeping Beauty” or the swirling ballroom scene in “Beauty and the Beast.” The music was impossibly catchy. (Try to shake “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from “Cinderella.”) Scene-stealing female villains (Cruella deVil, Ursula the Sea Witch) mixed with distinct, unexpected caregiv-ers (the dwarfs, Rafiki from “The Lion King”) amid the songs, life les-sons and comic business.
But the studio clung too long to the formulas that had workedbefore — particularly hand-drawnanimation — and suddenly a dullparade of releases (“Treasure Planet,” “Brother Bear,” “Home onthe Range,” “Chicken Little,” “Meet the Robinsons”) sent audiences running for the dazzling new digital imagery pioneered by Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.
People came to know that a Pixarfilm meant grown-up cinematictouches (nimble tracking shots,subtle changes in the texture of light), unconventional plots — a scream-processing factory, an oldman on a balloon flight — and swift-ly edited chase sequences, usuallyin the final act. DreamWorks Ani-mation excelled at snarky, sequel-seeking romps brimming withpop culture references and vocal performances from big-name stars.A Disney animated movie? Moreoften than not, that stood for rud-derless mediocrity.
“There has been no single guid-ing sensibility, and that is anenormous problem with this kind of cinematic endeavor,” said NealGabler, author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagi-nation.” “To make art you need a sensibility.”
“Tangled,” opening this fall and
winter worldwide, could mark aturning point. For the first time since John Lasseter and Ed Cat-mull of Pixar were put in charge ofWalt Disney Animation Studios, a duty that came with Disney’s $7.4billion purchase of Pixar in 2006, the pair have had enough time with“Tangled” to pull off a masterpiece.Mr. Lasseter has spent over three years working on the film — asmuch time as he has spent on Pixar hits over the years.
“I think we’re there,” Mr. Lasseter said of a creative turn-around at Disney. “This film is asgood as a Pixar film, but it’s classic Disney, and I love that: heart, hu-mor, beauty, music, wonderment, the love story.
Some people believe audiencestoday have grown past what is clas-sic Disney storytelling, that theyhave become too cynical for it. I willnever believe that.”
Audiences expecting a solemn re-telling of the classic Rapunzel talewill be disappointed. The core of the fairy tale is all there — “Rapunzel,Rapunzel, let down your hair” — but the story has been expanded.
Rapunzel herself has a flow and
grace — what old-time Disney art-ists call “the golden poses” — that isnot typical of computer animation,which has a hard time with curves, but is a hallmark of the Disney prin-cesses. (To achieve this look Disneydeveloped a tool to allow artists to draw on a computerized screenwith a stylus. )
But “Tangled” is also a depar-ture. There are modern story elements, never-before-seen tech-nological advances and lots of Lasseter’s touches.
The directors said the horse chases are meant to feel like the speeding-car sequences from the “Bourne” movies.
The princess, voiced by the singer Mandy Moore, is tough: she smacks Flynn with a frying pan when he climbs into her tower and uses her hair like a whip.
Making the leading man an un-likable thief is a subtle yet startling twist for Disney, and Flynn (voiced by Zachary Levi, the star of the television series “Chuck”) is glib ina way that many people now associ-ate with DreamWorks.
“We want to make a Disney filmfor today’s audiences, but we don’t just want to copy the past,” Mr.Lasseter said. “We want to copy the essence.”
BROOKS
BARNES
ESSAY
JON
CARAMANICA
ESSAY
Disney’s Hopes RideOn Rapunzel’s Hair
A giant in movie animation tries torecapture its magic.
Apartheid,
In Black
And White
Kanye West, All Talk and a Lot of Show
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ERNEST COLE FAMILY TRUST/HASSELBLAD FOUNDATION COLLECTION
Ernest Cole’s photographs, once banned and feared lost, are on display
in Johannesburg. A child clutches a chalkboard in an overheated
