"How Microbes Defend and Define Us"

From The New York Times
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: July 12, 2010

In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said. 

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. 

Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since. 

The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant. 

Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. “The normal bacteria just didn’t exist in her,” said Dr. Khoruts. “She was colonized by all sorts of misfits.” 

Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.” 

Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.” 

Dr. Weinstock is part of an international effort to shed light on those puzzling organs. He and his colleagues are cataloging thousands of new microbe species by gathering their DNA sequences. Meanwhile, other scientists are running experiments to figure out what those microbes are actually doing. They’re finding that the microbiome does a lot to keep us in good health. Ultimately, researchers hope, they will learn enough about the microbiome to enlist it in the fight against diseases. 

“In just the last year, it really went from a small cottage industry to the big time,” said David Relman of Stanford University. 

The microbiome first came to light in the mid-1600s, when the Dutch lens-grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek scraped the scum off his teeth, placed it under a microscope and discovered that it contained swimming creatures. Later generations of microbiologists continued to study microbes from our bodies, but they could only study the ones that could survive in a laboratory. For many species, this exile meant death. 

In recent years, scientists have started to survey the microbiome in a new way: by gathering DNA. They scrape the skin or take a cheek swab and pull out the genetic material. Getting the DNA is fairly easy. Sequencing and making sense of it is hard, however, because a single sample may yield millions of fragments of DNA from hundreds of different species. 

A number of teams are working together to tackle this problem in a systematic way. Dr. Weinstock is part of the biggest of these initiatives, known as the Human Microbiome Project. The $150 million initiative was started in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health. The project team is gathering samples from 18 different sites on the bodies of 300 volunteers. 

To make sense of the genes that they’re gathering, they are sequencing the entire genomes of some 900 species that have been cultivated in the lab. Before the project, scientists had only sequenced about 20 species in the microbiome. In May, the scientists published details on the first 178 genomes. They discovered 29,693 genes that are unlike any known genes. (The entire human genome contains only around 20,000 protein-coding genes.) 

“This was quite surprising to us, because these are organisms that have been studied for a long time,” said Karen E. Nelson of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.

The new surveys are helping scientists understand the many ecosystems our bodies offer microbes. In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species.

Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes. 

Some microbes can only survive in one part of the body, while others are more cosmopolitan. And the species found in one person’s body may be missing from another’s. Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one. 

This variation means that the total number of genes in the human microbiome must be colossal. European and Chinese researchers recently catalogued all the microbial genes in stool samples they collected from 124 individuals. In March, they published a list of 3.3 million genes. 

The variation in our microbiomes emerges the moment we are born. 

“You have a sterile baby coming from a germ-free environment into the world,” said Maria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico. Recently, she and her colleagues studied how sterile babies get colonized in a hospital in the Venezuelan city of Puerto Ayacucho. They took samples from the bodies of newborns within minutes of birth. They found that babies born vaginally were coated with microbes from their mothers’ birth canals. But babies born by Caesarean section were covered in microbes typically found on the skin of adults. 

“Our bet was that the Caesarean section babies were sterile, but it’s like they’re magnets,” said Dr. Dominguez-Bello. 

We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon. 

In addition to helping us digest, the microbiome helps us in many other ways. The microbes in our nose, for example, make antibiotics that can kill the dangerous pathogens we sniff. Our bodies wait for signals from microbes in order to fully develop. When scientists rear mice without any germ in their bodies, the mice end up with stunted intestines. 

In order to co-exist with our microbiome, our immune system has to be able to tolerate thousands of harmless species, while attacking pathogens. Scientists are finding that the microbiome itself guides the immune system to the proper balance. 

One way the immune system fights pathogens is with inflammation. Too much inflammation can be harmful, so we have immune cells that produce inflammation-reducing signals. Last month, Sarkis Mazmanian and June L. Round at Caltech reported that mice reared without a microbiome can’t produce an inflammation-reducing molecule called IL-10. 

The scientists then inoculated the mice with a single species of gut bacteria, known as Bacteroides fragilis. Once the bacteria began to breed in the guts of the mice, they produced a signal that was taken up by certain immune cells. In response to the signal, the cells developed the ability to produce IL-10. 

Scientists are not just finding new links between the microbiome and our health. They’re also finding that many diseases are accompanied by dramatic changes in the makeup of our inner ecosystems. The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight. 

In some cases, new microbes may simply move into our bodies when disease alters the landscape. In other cases, however, the microbes may help give rise to the disease. Some surveys suggest that babies delivered by Caesarian section are more likely to get skin infections from multiply-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s possible that they lack the defensive shield of microbes from their mother’s birth canal. 

Caesarean sections have also been linked to an increase in asthma and allergies in children. So have the increased use of antibiotics in the United States and other developed countries. Children who live on farms — where they can get a healthy dose of microbes from the soil — are less prone to getting autoimmune disorders than children who grow up in cities. 

Some scientists argue that these studies all point to the same conclusion: when children are deprived of their normal supply of microbes, their immune systems get a poor education. In some people, untutored immune cells become too eager to unleash a storm of inflammation. Instead of killing off invaders, they only damage the host’s own body. 

A better understanding of the microbiome might give doctors a new way to fight some of these diseases. For more than a century, scientists have been investigating how to treat patients with beneficial bacteria. But probiotics, as they’re sometimes called, have only had limited success. The problem may lie in our ignorance of precisely how most microbes in our bodies affect our health. 

Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues have carried out 15 more fecal transplants, 13 of which cured their patients. They’re now analyzing the microbiome of their patients to figure out precisely which species are wiping out the Clostridium difficile infections. Instead of a crude transplant, Dr. Khoruts hopes that eventually he can give his patients what he jokingly calls “God’s probiotic” — a pill containing microbes whose ability to fight infections has been scientifically validated. 

Dr. Weinstock, however, warns that a deep understanding of the microbiome is a long way off. 

“In terms of hard-boiled science, we’re falling short of the mark,” he said. A better picture of the microbiome will only emerge once scientists can use the genetic information Dr. Weinstock and his colleagues are gathering to run many more experiments. 

“It’s just old-time science. There are no short-cuts around that,” he said.

"Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software"

From The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR
Published: July 11, 2010

Google is bringing Android software development to the masses. 

The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones. 

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors. 

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves. 

“The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world,” said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project. 

The project is a further sign that Google is betting that its strategy of opening up its technology to all kinds of developers will eventually give it the upper hand in the smartphone software market. Its leading rival, Apple, takes a more tightly managed approach to application development for the iPhone, controlling the software and vetting the programs available. 

“We could only have done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” Mr. Abelson said. 

Mr. Abelson is a longtime proponent of making intellectual and scientific resources more open. He is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Creative Commons, and he helped initiate M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare program, which offers free online course materials used in teaching the university’s classes. 

The Google project, Mr. Abelson said, is intended to give users, especially young people, a simple tool to let them tinker with smartphone software, much as people have done with computers. Over the years, he noted, simplified programming tools like Basic, Logo and Scratch have opened the door to innovations of all kinds. Microsoft’s first product, for example, was a version of Basic, pared down to run on personal computers. 

The Google application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code — shown as graphic images and representing different smartphone capabilities— and put them together, similar to snapping together Lego blocks. The result is an application on that person’s smartphone. 

For example, one student made a program to inform a selected list of friends, with a short text message, where he was every 15 minutes. The program was created by putting three graphic code blocks together: one block showed the phone’s location sensor, another showed a clock (which he set for 15-minute intervals), and third linked to a simple database on a Web site, listing the selected friends. 

An onscreen button would turn on the program, Mr. Abelson explained, for perhaps a few hours on a Saturday night when the person wanted his friends to know where he was. 

A student at the University of San Francisco, Mr. Abelson said, made a program that automatically replied to text messages, when he was driving. “Please don’t send me text messages,” it read. “I’m driving.” 

A program by a nursing student at Indiana University enabled a phone to send an emergency message or make a call, if someone fell. It used the phone’s accelerometer to sense a fall. If the person did not get up in a short period or press an onscreen button, the program automatically texted or called the person designated to receive the alert. 

“These aren’t the slickest applications in the world,” Mr. Abelson said. “But they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.” 

The Google tool, of course, works only for phones running Android software. A sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. The tool is Web-based except for a small software download that automatically syncs the programs created on a personal computer, connected to the application inventor Web site, with an Android smartphone. When making programs, the phone must be connected to a computer with a U.S.B. link.

"The New Touch-Face of Vending Machines"

From The New York Times
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Published: May 25, 2010

Vending machines in neon-splashed Tokyo have electronic eyes that evaluate customers’ skin and wrinkles to determine whether they are old enough to buy tobacco. In bathrooms at upscale Canadian bars, vending machines with flat irons enable women to defrizz their locks. In Abu Dhabi, the lobby of a luxury hotel has a vending machine that dispenses gold bars and coins at more than $1,000 an ounce.

A new breed of vending machine is proliferating around the world — and while the United States is coming late to the party, Dr Pepper and Baby Ruth are already feeling sidelined.

Flashy and futuristic, souped-up machines are popping up everywhere, be it the Mondrian hotel in Miami or at Macy’s in Minneapolis. They have touch screens instead of buttons, facades that glow and pulse, and technology intended to blunt vending machine rage — sensors that ensure that a customer’s credit card is not charged unless the chosen item has dropped. These machines are not for quarters: purchases are measured in dollar amounts that typically start at two figures and go up.

Changing consumer preferences about shopping and the high cost of operating brick-and-mortar stores are inspiring premium brands to rethink how they sell their wares. As Gower Smith, whose company, ZoomSystems, has created about 1,000 automated kiosks called ZoomShops, put it, “A ZoomShop costs less than an employee.”

And with examples overseas showing there is money to be made, the so-called automated retail store (the term vending machine is so Industrial Revolution) is venturing into fashion, beauty products, electronics and more.

A couple of months ago, the Body Shop cosmetics franchise began offering skin care products with ingredients like hemp and vitamin E in deluxe machines at airports; soon will come shopping centers.

In the fall and winter, a company called U*tique will begin selling high-end beauty products in machines that light up when customers approach — a better reception than shoppers see from most retail employees.

In the last few years, Best Buy, Sephora, Apple and Proactiv have put their products in vending machines. Quiksilver offers board shorts and bikinis in machines at Standard hotels.

Such machines also offer nascent brands that have no store outlet another way to bring their products to market. Customers can make returns by calling a phone number on the receipt.

In an age of iPads, high-speed Internet service, A.T.M.’s and self-service check-in at airports, consumers expect instant gratification. Not only are they accustomed to researching and buying products on their own by touching screens and pressing buttons; they often prefer it.

A study published in 2008 by NCR Corporation found that 86 percent of North American consumers were more likely to do business with companies offering some sort of self-service. Many respondents also said they had a more positive perception of a brand if it offered self-service technology. This appears to be especially true of young shoppers.

“You will hear in studies, ‘My mom shops at the beauty counter, and I want to shop for products on my own,’ ” said Mara Segal, chief executive of U*tique, which plans to install up to 20 automated machines this year before going full throttle in 2011. “They are actively avoiding the counter.”

The new machines are meant to provide a feeling of discovery and charm often lacking in traditional retailing. Indeed, the machines are not “stocked” — they are, as Ms. Segal put it, “curated.” Merchandise in U*tique machines is arranged and lighted like works of modern art in a series of dainty portals, evoking a neon honeycomb.

“We put a lot of attention and focus on all the things that are sexy about retail,” she said.

The machines — which bridge the gap between old-fashioned stores and online shopping — are not only being installed in airports and malls. They are materializing in supermarkets, military bases, college campuses, even chain stores.

The economics make it easy to see why. Mall stores produce about $330 a square foot a year, while a 28-square-foot ZoomShop can generate $3,000 to $10,000 a square foot a year, Mr. Smith said.

Or consider airports, where stores make about $1,000 a square foot and ZoomShops generate $10,000 to $40,000 a square foot, he said. ZoomSystems, based in San Francisco, charges the brands in its machines a fee that includes the cost of rent at an airport or mall. Landlords typically take a percentage of the sales too.

As Mr. Smith noted, the attraction goes beyond payroll and rental expenses. If an airline closes a terminal, or if customer traffic is slow in a particular mall corridor, the machine can be unplugged and moved.

Machines have fewer inventory problems and less theft than a traditional store. Additionally, the main way a brick-and-mortar store discovers what its customers want is when they check out. Automated machines, in contrast, learn about consumers’ shopping habits from the moment they begin using the machine because every click is tracked.

“We’re starting to see, more and more, weirder items and weirder machines,” said Christopher D. Salyers, the author of a new book, “Vending Machines: Coined Consumerism” (Mark Batty Publisher), that chronicles the rise of the machines, from the boom in the 1800s Tutti-Frutti gum era to today.

At the same time, the classic vending machine business — sales of soda and snacks — is troubled. Research by IBISWorld said the industry is in decline because of trends toward more healthful eating, increased cigarette regulation, declining industrial work forces and more competition from fast-food restaurants and convenience stores open late or 24 hours.

Revenues for vending operators are expected to be $11.3 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, up from $11.1 billion in 2009. Yet the industry is expected to grow only 1 percent a year through 2015, down from a 2 percent growth rate over the five years ending 2010.

The newfangled machines, which cost $3,000 to tens of thousands of dollars, are now a small part of the industry, generating less than a $1 billion in revenue, said Chris Rezendes of VDC Research.

And expanding the vending frontier has not been without setbacks. One of the first automated convenience stores in the United States began operating in 2002 and was controversial.

Known as Shop 2000, it offered sundries — eggs, diapers, condoms — in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington. But as it turned out, one man’s convenience was another’s dehumanizing eyesore and the machine was shut down.

Other parts of the world are less hesitant. In Europe and Asia consumers buy underwear, umbrellas, toys, pizza and organic strawberries from machines.

Japan has one vending machine for about every 23 people, Mr. Salyers said. The country’s population density, low crime rate and fascination with technology have made it a vending paradise.

“They just line the streets,” Mr. Salyers said. “You can’t find a trash can there. But you can find a vending machine.”

"Migrating Thousands of Miles With Nary a Stop"

From The New York Times
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: May 24, 2010

In 1976, the biologist Robert E. Gill Jr. came to the southern coast of Alaska to survey the birds preparing for their migrations for the winter. One species in particular, wading birds called bar-tailed godwits, puzzled him deeply. They were too fat. 

“They looked like flying softballs,” said Mr. Gill. 

At the time, scientists knew that bar-tailed godwits spend their winters in places like New Zealand and Australia. To get there, most researchers assumed, the birds took a series of flights down through Asia, stopping along the way to rest and eat. After all, they were land birds, not sea birds that could dive for food in the ocean. But in Alaska, Mr. Gill observed, the bar-tailed godwits were feasting on clams and worms as if they were not going to be able to eat for a very long time. 

“I wondered, why is that bird putting on that much fat?” he said. 

Mr. Gill wondered if the bar-tailed godwit actually stayed in the air for a much longer time than scientists believed. It was a difficult idea to test, because he could not actually follow the birds in flight. For 30 years he managed as best he could, building a network of bird-watchers who looked for migrating godwits over the Pacific Ocean. Finally, in 2006, technology caught up with Mr. Gill’s ideas. He and his colleagues were able to implant satellite transmitters in bar-tailed godwits and track their flight. 

The transmitters sent their location to Mr. Gill’s computer, and he sometimes stayed up until 2 in the morning to see the latest signal appear on the Google Earth program running on his laptop. Just as he had suspected, the bar-tailed godwits headed out over the open ocean and flew south through the Pacific. They did not stop at islands along the way. Instead, they traveled up to 7,100 miles in nine days — the longest nonstop flight ever recorded. “I was speechless,” Mr. Gill said. 

Since then, scientists have tracked a number of other migrating birds, and they are beginning now to publish their results. Those results make clear that the bar-tailed godwit is not alone. Other species of birds can fly several thousand miles nonstop on their migrations, and scientists anticipate that as they gather more data in the years to come, more birds will join these elite ranks. 

“I think it’s going to be a number of examples,” said Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden. 

As more birds prove to be ultramarathoners, biologists are turning their attention to how they manage such spectacular feats of endurance. Consider what might be the ultimate test of human endurance in sports, the Tour de France: Every day, bicyclists pedal up and down mountains for hours. In the process, they raise their metabolism to about five times their resting rate. 

The bar-tailed godwit, by contrast, elevates its metabolic rate between 8 and 10 times. And instead of ending each day with a big dinner and a good night’s rest, the birds fly through the night, slowly starving themselves as they travel 40 miles an hour. 

“I’m in awe of the fact that birds like godwits can fly like this,” said Theunis Piersma, a biologist at the University of Groningen. 

Not long ago, ornithologists had far lower expectations for birds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, for example, were known to spend winters in Central America and head to the United States for the summer. But ornithologists believed that the hummingbirds burned so much fuel flapping their wings that they simply could not survive a nonstop trip across the Gulf of Mexico. They were thought to have flown over Mexico, making stops to refuel. 

In fact, ruby-throated hummingbirds returning north in the spring will set out from the Yucatán Peninsula in the evening and arrive in the southern United States the next afternoon. 

In the 1960s, zoologists began to track bears and other mammals with radio collars, and then later moved on to satellite transmitters. All the while, ornithologists could only look on in envy. The weight and drag of the trackers made them impossible to put on migrating birds. 

Over the past decade, however, transmitters have finally shrunk to a size birds can handle. In Mr. Gill’s first successful experiment with bar-tailed godwits, he and his colleagues slipped a battery-powered model weighing just under an ounce into the abdominal cavity of the birds, which weigh about 12 ounces ounces and have a wingspan of 30 inches.

The epic odyssey that those transmitters recorded spurred Mr. Gill and other researchers to gather more data, both on bar-tailed godwits and other species. And even as they planned their experiments, tracking technology got better. This summer, for example, Mr. Gill will implant bar-tailed godwits with transmitters that weigh only six-tenths of an ounce.

Still, most migrating birds are so small that even a transmitter of that weight — about the same as three nickels — would be an intolerable burden. Fortunately, researchers have been able to scale down a different kind of tracking device. Known as a geolocator, it can get as light as two grains of rice, less than two-hundreths of an ounce. “Now we can track really small birds,” Dr. Hedenström said.

Geolocators can get so small because they do not communicate with satellites. Instead, they just record changing light levels. If scientists can recapture birds carrying geolocators, they can retrieve the data from the devices and use sophisticated computer programs to figure out the location of the birds based on the rising and setting of the sun.

In 2007, Carsten Egevang of Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues attached geolocators to Arctic terns nesting in Greenland. Based on years of bird spotting, the scientists knew that the terns migrated to the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and then returned to the Arctic the following spring. But they did not know much more than that. “It was all based on snapshots,” Dr. Egevang said.

In 2008, the scientists managed to capture 10 Arctic terns that had come back to Greenland. It then took them months to make sense of the data. “You have to use three kinds of special software,” Dr. Egevang said. “It takes quite a long time.”

The researchers reported this February that the Arctic terns flew from Greenland to a region of the Atlantic off the coast of North Africa, where they spent about three weeks. Unlike bar-tailed godwits, which wade on beaches for food, Arctic terns are ocean birds that can dive for fish in the open sea.

The Arctic terns then resumed their journey south. They spent five months in the Southern Ocean. “They probably just stayed on an iceberg and fished,” Dr. Egevang said.

In the spring, the terns then returned to the Arctic, often hugging the coasts of South America or Africa along the way. All told, the birds logged as much as 49,700 miles on their geolocators, the longest migration ever recorded. Over the 30-year lifetime of a tern, it may migrate about 1.5 million miles — the distance a spaceship would cover if it went to the moon and back three times.

Other scientists are now placing geolocators on small wading birds as well. In a paper to be published in the Wader Study Group Bulletin, a team of ornithologists describe attaching geolocators to four ruddy turnstones. The birds left northern Australia in May 2009 and flew nonstop to Taiwan, a distance of 4,700 miles.

After a few days in Taiwan, the ruddy turnstones took flight again, making a series of trips northward until they reached Alaska. At the end of the summer, three of the four birds took the same route back south. The fourth struck out on a different path. It flew 3,800 miles nonstop to the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific. From there, it flew 3,100 miles back to Australia.

Mr. Gill and his colleagues have recorded similar odysseys from other wading birds, using satellite transmitters. They found that bristle-thighed curlews fly as far as 6,000 miles without a stop, traveling from Alaska to the Marshall Islands. They have also recorded whimbrels flying 5,000 miles nonstop from Alaska to Central America.

This spring, scientists are attaching geolocators to more birds, and they expect to find new champions. One population of red knots, for example, is now arriving in Delaware Bay from its wintering grounds 5,500 miles away in Argentina. “My bet is that a lot of them make it in one go,” Dr. Piersma said.

The long journeys these transmitters are revealing pose a biological puzzle. Dr. Piersma and other scientists are trying to figure out how the birds manage to push their bodies so far beyond most animals, and why.

As Mr. Gill observed when he first observed bar-tailed godwits, a long journey requires a lot of food. It turns out that long-distance migrators will enlarge their liver and intestines as they feed, so that they can convert their food as fast as possible. They build up large breast muscles and convert the rest of their food to fat.

By the time the birds are ready to leave, their bodies are 55 percent fat. In humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese. But as soon as the birds are done eating, their livers and intestines become dead weight. They then essentially “eat” their organs, which shrink 25 percent. The birds use the proteins to build up their muscles even more.

Once they take flight, the birds take whatever help they can get. Bar-tailed godwits time their departure with the onset of stormy weather, so that they can take advantage of tailwinds. “That gives them an extra push,” Dr. Hedenström said.

The birds then fly for thousands of miles. How they get to their final destinations remains a mystery. One thing is clear: they somehow know where they are, even when they are flying over vast expanses of featureless ocean. “It’s as if they have a GPS on board,” Dr. Piersma said.

A bird like a bar-tailed godwit cannot rely on the tricks used by birds that take short migrations. They cannot follow landmarks, for example. Some birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. But they do so by sensing the tilt of the field lines. At the equator, the lines run parallel to the surface, making them useless for birds that have to travel between hemispheres. Dr. Piersma suspects that when birds travel several thousand miles, they have to combine several different navigation tricks together.

As spectacular as these migrations may be, it may not take long for birds to evolve them. Long-distance migrators are closely related to short-distance birds. It is possible that many birds have the potential to push themselves to make these vast journeys, but they do not because the costs outweigh the benefits.

When animals raise their metabolism above four or five times their resting rate (the Tour de France level), they can become so exhausted that they become very vulnerable to predators. They can even become more prone to getting sick. Birds that go on long migrations may have escaped this tradeoff.

Birds like the bar-tailed godwit have found places like the coast of Alaska where the supply of food is high and predators are scarce. By flying over the open ocean, they continue to avoid predators. They may also reduce their odds of picking up a parasite from another bird.

Their destinations are also safe enough for them to recover. Bar-tailed godwits that arrive in New Zealand face no predators, and so they can simply rest. “They just look exhausted. They’ll land and just go to sleep for several hours before they do anything else,” Mr. Gill said.

Unfortunately, some of the habitats on which these endurance champions depend are under serious threat. In the Delaware Bay, for example, fisherman are scooping up horseshoe crab eggs, which birds like the red knot travel thousands of miles to eat. When bar-tailed godwits return to Alaska in the spring, they make one stop along the coast of China and Korea, a favorite spot for many other migrating birds. The coastal wetlands there are disappearing fast, and many migrant birds are in decline.

“I hope we have these birds to study 100 years from now,” Dr. Piersma said. “But sometimes I wonder.”

"In Spain, A Delicacy Rooted in Earth and Tradition"

There is no question that jamon iberico de bellota is the absolute best ham there exists on this planet. I sampled some of it in Spain years ago, in the little pueblo blanco of Ronda, and the memory of its flavor is indelible. The natural sweetness and flavor of the meat was unsurpassed, and the paper thin slices of it had that pleasant slightly chewy texture of well-cured meat.

From The New York Times
By PAOLA SINGER
Published: January 17, 2010

AS we sauntered up the steep, narrow cobblestone streets of Cáceres in western Spain, it wasn’t hard to imagine life there in the Middle Ages. Night was falling, and before us were Gothic churches, Roman arches and Moorish towers, glowing in the soft light of lanterns. It was an arresting sight, but our thoughts soon veered elsewhere — to food and the sumptuous meal we were anticipating. 

Most people travel to this ancient city for its architectural treasures; my friends and I had come to eat pork.

Minutes later, we faced an encyclopedic list of traditional dishes at El Figón de Eustaquio, a family restaurant with jacketed waiters and white tablecloths. For starters, we had a plate of jamón Ibérico de bellota — cured ham made from acorn-fed pigs, which is the regional specialty — plus a round torta del casar, a creamy sheep’s milk cheese enveloped in a hard curd, and giant locally grown white asparagus. 

Though I considered the herbed pork sirloin as an entree, my friend Joan insisted we order the esoteric-sounding secreto Ibérico, or Iberian secret. This simply presented pork filet, we later learned, comes from a special cut near the front leg that’s interspersed with very thin layers of fat. After making all sorts of silly jokes about the curious name of this dish, we ate in complete silence. It was incredibly tender, subtly seasoned and simply delicious. 

Cáceres, in the Extremadura region, is in the heart of Spain’s pig country. I had traveled there in search of the world’s best ham, a recent food obsession instigated by Spanish friends. Along the way, I discovered a variety of mouthwatering specialties, learned about unique traditions and met locals with a contagious passion for their culinary heritage.

As people’s knowledge and love of Spanish cuisine grow, delicacies like jamón Ibérico de bellota are entering the international spotlight. This time-honored ham arrived in the United States in 2008 to much fanfare. Sold for about $200 a pound at specialty stores like LaTienda.com, it became the most expensive cold cut in the country. Discerning consumers seem eager to pay this lofty price. This summer, the powerhouse brand 5J (Cinco Jotas) plans to enter the American market, joining the U.S.D.A.-certified producer Embutidos Fermín. 

“Iberian pork meat is extraordinary,” Ferran Adrià, the acclaimed chef at El Bulli, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Catalonia, said in a phone interview. “There’s nothing like it elsewhere in the world. There’s a great difference between a superior ham and all the rest.”

The secret of this superiority rests in the thousands of acres of dehesas — mountainous meadows populated by oak trees — where the indigenous black Iberian pigs have roamed since ancient times. They feed on grass, fruit and, most importantly, acorns that fall every autumn from holm and cork oaks. This gives their meat a unique nutty flavor and a high level of oleic acids, considered a healthy fat.

Spaniards take this food tradition seriously. More than 40 million cured hams were sold last year in Spain, and those derived from Iberian pigs are a particular source of national pride. Local residents started curing meats more than a thousand years ago, eventually turning the craft into an art.

Our sybaritic journey started in Salamanca, 130 miles west of Madrid. This lively city marks the unofficial beginning of the Iberian ham trail, which stretches roughly 300 miles down to Seville. My travel companions — María, an effusive Madrileña who drove expertly over cliff-hanging roads, and Joan, an adventurous Catalan who helped us discover the Iberian secret — were old friends and fellow carnivores.

After a brisk tour of Salamanca’s historic center and its lovely Plaza Mayor, we defied the custom of savoring one’s meals and ordered a few appetizers to go. We had an important appointment 30 miles south, in Guijuelo, a small town of dowdy, low-rise buildings and old-fashioned ham shops. I had arranged to visit several ham producers on our pilgrimage, and this was a required stop: the headquarters of Joselito, considered the Dom Pérignon of hams. 

Joselito’s owner, José Gómez, on first impression a laconic man, spoke long and fervently about the 100-year-old empire founded by his great-grandfather. “My customers are not concerned with price; they ask for the best,” he said. “The three key elements are breed, diet and curing.” 

While touring the company’s building, I received a master class. Each leg of ham spends about nine days covered in salt; it hangs for weeks in winter temperatures, so the salt penetrates deeply, then for months in summer heat, prompting a “sweating” process by which the fat further permeates the muscle fibers. This happens in cavernous chambers devoid of machinery, where windows are opened or shut depending on winds and humidity. When summer ends, the hams are moved to a dark cellar where they age for two or more years, intensifying their aroma and flavor, much like a fine wine. 

Joselito uses only hogs that are 100 percent Iberian. A whole leg, aged three years, starts at $1,000 in Spain, about $50 a pound. (Not all hams called Ibérico are acorn-fed. The label must include the word bellota.) In spite of so much tantalizing talk amid mesmerizing rows of sweet-smelling hams, no amuse-bouche was offered, and we left with empty stomachs. It was only later, savoring our memorable dinner in Cáceres, that we quelled our cravings.

After a good night’s rest at the NH Palacio de Oquendo, a renovated 16th-century palace in the old quarter, we had breakfast alfresco on the edge of the main plaza. Nothing beats a good cortado, the strong Spanish coffee, before a long drive.

The curvy, oak-lined southern roads led us to Jabugo, a village of plain white houses that lives and breathes jamón. There I met Maximiliano Portes, who in 2002 created the online brand Maximiliano Jabugo. His customers, he said, are everyday people who order airtight, pre-sliced cold cuts. Modern marketing notwithstanding, the only way to achieve high quality is through a slow, artisanal curing process. Mr. Portes’s hams hang in a thick-walled cellar, where meat has been cured since 1900. In fact, Jabugo’s quiet cobblestone streets, dotted with modest bars where local workers meet for afternoon drinks, showed no signs of modernity.

As we headed back north to Badajoz, a heavy rain slowed us. By the time we reached Rocamador, a rural hotel and restaurant in a 500-year-old former monastery, it was 11 p.m. and our stomachs were growling. Thanks to the Spanish custom of late dining, the kitchen was still open.

Though I was tempted by pork cheeks in a creamy vegetable sauce, for a change of pace I ordered thyme-seasoned suckling lamb with roasted potatoes. A glass of hearty Extremadura red was the perfect complement. Back in my country-chic room, aided by a lullaby of rattling leaves, I fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning I met Carlos Tristancho, owner of the hotel and surrounding land. He is a partner at País de Quercus, a company that sells organic meats to distinguished restaurants like Mugaritz and El Celler de Can Roca. A former actor, director and producer, Mr. Tristancho is an irrepressible, middle-age character who talks about love, sex and the soul the way most people discuss the weather.

During a rambling and wildly entertaining conversation, he spoke passionately of the importance of preserving Spain’s estimated seven million acres of dehesa. “This is an example of sustainability; some of the oaks here are 1,000 years old,” he said. Ideally, each animal needs six acres to roam, he said; if this balance is not respected, the ecosystem could be in danger

Soon we were headed to Madrid, laughing about how we had blushed at Mr. Tristancho’s bawdy comments. But while our road trip was ending, my food quest persisted. For various reasons, I had not yet sampled a Joselito ham; I knew I could not leave Spain until I had.

A few hours before my flight to New York, I walked to a gourmet shop on upscale Serrano Street. The man behind the counter carefully carved a few slices with a long knife and handed me a bite. He raised his eyebrows inquisitively. A pungent, slightly sweet and nutty flavor filled my mouth as the fat immediately melted away, revealing sea-salted, tender strings of meat. I can still taste it if I close my eyes.

BENEATH THE OAKS

GETTING THERE

Iberia, Continental Airlines, Air Europa and other carriers have nonstop flights from New York to Madrid. A recent Web search found fares starting at about $550 for February flights. The best way to see the area is by car; rental companies like Hertz and Avis have branches at the airport and at Madrid locations.

WHERE TO STAY

In Salamanca, Room Mate Vega (Plaza del Mercado 16; 34-92-327-2250; www.room-matehotels.com) is a stylish, moderately priced hotel just steps from the Plaza Mayor. Doubles from 60 euros (about $85 at $1.40 to the euro).

In Cáceres, the centrally located NH Palacio de Oquendo (Plaza San Juan 11; 34-92-721-5800; www.nh-hotels.com) faces a small square with specialty food shops and casual restaurants. Doubles from 65 euros.

In Badajoz, the Hotel Monasterio de Rocamador (Carretera Nacional Badajoz-Huelva, kilometer 41.100, Almendral; 34-92-448-9000; www.rocamador.com) offers quiet relaxation inside an old monastery surrounded by countryside. Rooms are spacious and decorated with handmade wood furniture. Doubles from about 100 euros.

WHERE TO EAT

In Cáceres, El Figón de Eustaquio (Plaza San Juan, 12-14; 34-92-724-4362; www.elfigondeeustaquio.com) is a cozy restaurant frequented by local families. Indulge in traditional specialties like secreto Ibérico and torta del casar.

At the Rocamador hotel’s restaurant in Badajoz, a seductive rock-walled space with large arched windows, order the thyme-perfumed suckling lamb.

For a taste of the southwest in Madrid, book a table at Sula (Jorge Juan 33; 34-91-781-6197; www.sula.es), a sleek haute cuisine restaurant that serves Joselito meats, including Iberian pork shoulder carpaccio.

"At Auction, the Secret Cache of an Icon"

An article on the late Robert Isabell's house.

Gorgeous, astonishing...genius...words fail when it comes to describing the impeccable taste that went into creating this fortress of solitude. The house is utterly art.

Needs to be seen to be believed.

"Window Watchers in a Lonely City Familiar Strangers in the Big City"

From The New York Times
By JULIE SCELFO
Published: November 11, 2009 

WHEN Suzi Jones and her husband purchased an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, two years ago, Ms. Jones, a freelance art director from Atlanta, thought what she would like most would be the hardwood floors, the tin ceilings and the renovated kitchen and bathroom. 

Soon after moving in, however, she discovered what she has come to think of as the apartment’s best feature: its view into the neighbors’ private lives. 

Ms. Jones, 41, was reading on the couch one afternoon when the Italian love song “Volare” began playing outside. Through the window, she could see what looked like a party being given by an elderly Italian woman and her husband in the garden of the brownstone directly behind her building. Charmed by the couple — who were celebrating the husband’s 80th birthday, she soon found out — and their happiness at being surrounded by what appeared to be family, Ms. Jones pulled up a chair to watch.

“She’s wearing a tight white jumpsuit and sunglasses and high heels,” she said. “He has completely black hair that’s swept into a pompadour. There’s all these little kids and other family members and they’re grilling.”

By the time someone turned down “That’s Amore” so the woman could toast her husband, Ms. Jones was smitten. “It’s part of the charm of the neighborhood,” she said. “There’s still a very old Italian contingent here that lives the way they lived 40 years ago. Nothing made me happier than getting to see inside their lives.” 

The ability to observe the private lives of strangers from the windows of our homes — and the knowledge that they can often watch us, as well — has long been a staple of city life, one that was immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film “Rear Window.” It has provided material for countless movies and books since then, most recently “The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York,” a book of drawings by Matteo Pericoli that asks well-known New Yorkers to describe what they see from their windows, and is the subject of “Out My Window NYC,” a new series of photographs by Gail Albert Halaban. 

This often inadvertent voyeurism gives rise to relationships that can be deeply meaningful, although the people involved may never actually meet, said Ethel Sheffer, an urban planner and past president of the American Planning Association’s New York Metro Chapter. “One doesn’t always know their names, but it’s a connection of some sort and it becomes part of the fabric of your life,” Ms. Sheffer said. “The density and the closeness, even if it’s anonymous,” creates a sense of intimacy, she added, and “makes for an understanding that we’re all here” together.

Or as Ms. Halaban, a fine art photographer who spent more than three years on her project, put it: “In a large city where there’s a lot going on around you, it can feel very isolating and lonely. By having contact with these total strangers through the window, it’s a safe way of having a relationship without the hard part of a relationship.”

These anonymous connections are vital because they supply not just a sense of community but one of emotional stability, said Karen L. Fingerman, a psychologist at Purdue University and the author, with Melinda Blau, of “Consequential Strangers.” 

“In the modern world, where we spend so much time with people other than intimates,” Dr. Fingerman said, relationships with strangers “have implications for our well-being, how secure we feel in the world, and how stimulated we feel by our environment.” 

It’s a more intimate version of what Jane Jacobs called the ballet of sidewalk life, noted Calvin Morrill, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an editor of “Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places.” “Simply looking out your apartment window and seeing other humans doing an activity in a consistent way and at a similar time can provide stability and support,” Dr. Morrill said. “People are making dinner, they’re sitting down with their families, or they’re alone watching the television — there’s a kind of reassurance there.” 

Moreover, in an age of reality TV, watching the neighbors can seem just like watching television. In some cases, it’s almost exactly the same thing.

Kerry Gaertner, 30, who lives in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was watching one of the first episodes of “The Real Housewives of New York City” when she realized that one of the stars, Alex McCord, lived directly across the street. Fascinated, she began making mental notes every time she saw Ms. McCord and her husband coming or going.

“If their car is gone,” Ms. Gaertner said, “I wonder, are they in the Hamptons?”

Although their relationship consists mainly of “nodding hello in the morning,” she said, she now feels obliged to act as their defender, making sure acquaintances know that she seriously doubts their on-screen portrayal as “social climbers.”

“They’re perfectly nice,” she said. “If they weren’t on television, they would be totally unremarkable neighbors. And I mean that in the nicest way possible.”

Mark Morris, the choreographer and dancer, whose view is included in “The City Out My Window,” said he regards the building across from his home on Third Avenue in Manhattan, where people are constantly moving in and out, as something of a cineplex. “There’s an empty apartment, and I see the new people, some couple, come in,” Mr. Morris, 53, said. “Then they cover the windows. Then you can’t tell from across the street if they’re male or female — and they’re naked, which is always interesting. Then a few weeks later, it’s empty again.”

To satisfy his curiosity, Mr. Morris said he keeps a set of binoculars handy, and isn’t bothered if the neighbors watch him in return. “It’s kind of comforting,” he said. “Everyone is alone together in their own separate units, but everybody knows how together they are. I don’t think it’s creepy. It’s kind of nice. That’s why you live in a big city.”

Using strangers as a buffer against isolation is common. Lisa Rubisch, 39, a commercial director and mother of two, said that when she lived on West 85th Street in the mid-1990s, she used to watch a man across the street whenever she was unable to sleep.

“He would sew in the dark every night, except for a small desk light. His hands would flutter up like a moth to the light,” she said. “I found the image so lonely and sad, but somehow soothing. Maybe because I was lonely, too. It gave me comfort.”

But anonymous companionship that promises comfort can sometimes deliver the opposite.

After she and her husband moved into a third-floor loft in SoHo in the 1970s, Debrah Pearson Feinn, a painter, thought she had found the ideal companion for her nocturnal work sessions — the painter in the third-floor loft across the street.

“At night my lights would be on, and my man across the way, his lights would also be on,” Ms. Pearson Feinn said. “It always made me feel good — oh, he’s working; we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing, making art.”

One night, after he had been keeping her company for about a year, the man’s lights did not go on. “Two weeks later, I found out he had committed suicide,” she said. “I was told he jumped off the Staten Island Ferry.”

For months, Ms. Pearson Feinn, now 62, said she felt a sense of loss whenever she saw the darkened room. “I didn’t even know his name,” she said. “But I missed him. It made me feel bad to see his studio empty.”

Richard V. Hamilton, a real estate agent with Halstead Property who lives in Chelsea, was confronted with an even more immediate experience of death one Thanksgiving a few years ago, when he glanced out his window while preparing hors d’oeuvres and saw what looked like an older woman’s body lying in a kitchen across the airshaft.

Mr. Hamilton called 911, and the police eventually gained access to the woman’s apartment. They discovered that she was indeed dead — and had been lying there, unnoticed, for at least two days.

“There was a very sad element to it,” said Mr. Hamilton, 48, who watched with his dinner guests as the emergency workers wrapped and removed the body. “It was a holiday weekend. Nobody was calling and checking, nobody knew,” he said. “She basically died alone.”

Later, he saw the woman’s furniture removed, the kitchen floors replaced and new tenants take up residency. The experience still haunts him, he said, because it reminds him of how fleeting life is. “It was the end of one person.”

For Mr. Hamilton, though, what is sometimes more disturbing than the things he has seen out his windows — including strangers in the heat of romance “so many times I don’t even watch anymore” — is the thought that others can observe him, even doing mundane things like taking out the garbage or watching television.

“I want privacy,” he said. “The home where I grew up in South Carolina was at least three miles to its nearest neighbor.”

When he is showing clients ground-floor apartments that face the street, he said, he warns them that living there “is a bit like being on display, like in a store.”

Ms. Pearson Feinn, the painter, said she long ago got used to the idea that neighbors can see into her loft, which has 16 enormous windows.

When she had one of her first dinner parties after months of remodeling, a neighbor who had watched the construction and was having his own dinner party that night stood up with his guests and applauded Ms. Pearson Feinn’s gathering.

“I thought it was a hoot,” she said, but one of her guests took offense, because he “felt his privacy was being invaded.”

Some people, in fact, claim to observe an unwritten code of looking away when they inadvertently observe something too private.

Ms. Rubisch, the commercial director, describes herself as “nearly obsessed with watching people,” but said she still makes a point of avoiding the windows directly across from her apartment near the Bowery, where the blinds are always open. The woman who lives there often wears nothing but underwear, Ms. Rubisch said, “so I try not to look. And the way the street is, we’re very close. You can really see every detail in the room.”

Even Suzanne Vega, a New Yorker who has made a career of chronicling the private lives of city dwellers in her songs, said that when it comes to actually watching a stranger in his or her own home, she feels uncomfortable. “Somehow the stark reality of seeing someone that I don’t know raiding their own refrigerator or doing other things, I’m, like, no thank you,” said Ms. Vega, 50. “I’m much more likely to look at someone on the subway and imagine what they’re doing.”

Those who don’t mind watching and being watched, though, sometimes find that good things can come of it.

Not long after losing her nighttime painting companion, Ms. Pearson Feinn noticed another painter across the street observing her at work. Their anonymous relationship continued for several months, she said, until finally he “called me and said ‘Hi, I wanted to introduce myself.’ ”

“We literally started a friendship,” she continued, “and he came over and had dinner with me and my husband.”

More than 30 years later, they’re still friends.

"Ecosystem in Peru Is Losing a Key Ally"

From The New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: November 7, 2009 

ICA, Peru — A small grove of huarango, the storied Peruvian tree that can live over a millennium, rests like a mirage amid the sand dunes on this city’s edge. The tree has provided the inhabitants of this desert with food and timber since before the Nazca civilization etched geoglyphs into the empty plain south of here about 2,000 years ago. 
 
The huarango, a giant relative of the mesquite tree of the American Southwest, survived the rise and fall of Pre-Hispanic civilizations, and plunder by Spanish conquistadors, whose chroniclers were astounded by the abundance of huarango forests and the strange Andean camelids, like guanacos and llamas, that flourished there. 

Today, though, Peruvians pose what might be a final challenge to the fragile ecosystem supported by the huarango near the southwestern coast of Peru. Villagers are cutting down the remnants of these once vast forests. They covet the tree as a source of charcoal and firewood. 

The depletion of the huarango is raising alarm among ecologists and fostering a nascent effort to save it. 

“We don’t realize that we are cutting off one of our own limbs when we destroy a huarango,” said Consuelo Borda, 34, who helps direct a small reforestation project here, explaining how the tree’s pods can be ground into flour, sweetened into molasses or fermented into beer. 

But many Peruvians view the huarango as prime wood for charcoal to cook a signature chicken dish called “pollo broaster.” The long-burning huarango, a hardwood rivaling teak, outlasts other forms of charcoal. Villagers react to a prohibition by regional authorities on cutting down huarango with a shrug. 

“The woodcutters come at night, using handsaws instead of chainsaws to avoid detection,” said Reina Juárez, 66, a maize farmer in San Pedro, a village of about 24 families near a grove of huarango on the outskirts of Ica. “They remove the wood by donkey and then sell it.” 

That the huarango survives at all to be harvested may be something of a miracle. Following centuries of systematic deforestation, only about 1 percent of the original huarango woodlands that once existed in the Peruvian desert remain, according to archaeologists and ecologists. 

Few trees are as well suited to the hyperarid ecosystem of the Atacama-Sechura Desert, nestled between the Andes and the Pacific. The huarango captures moisture coming from the west as sea mist. Its roots are among the longest of any tree, extending more than 150 feet to tap subterranean water channels. 

The resilience of the huarango and its role in taming one of the world’s driest climates have long beguiled this country’s poets. Schoolchildren here, for instance, recite the words of José María Arguedas, a leading 20th-century writer: “The huarangos let in the sun, while keeping out the fire.” 

But poetry is one thing. The necessities of human civilizations, and their capacity to wreak havoc on the ecosystems on which they depend, are another. 

A team of British archaeologists described in a groundbreaking study this month how the Nazca, who etched their lines in the desert a thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish, induced an environmental catastrophe by clearing the huarango to plant crops like cotton and maize, exposing the landscape to desert winds, erosion and floods. 

David Beresford-Jones, an archaeologist at Cambridge University who was a co-author of the study, said that perhaps the only fragment of old-growth huarango woodland left is in Usaca, about a five-hour drive from Ica, where there are still some trees that were alive when the Incas conquered the southern coast of Peru in the 15th century. 

“It takes centuries for the huarango to be of substantial size, and only a few hours to fell it with a chainsaw,” Mr. Beresford-Jones said. “The tragedy is that this remnant is being chain-sawed by charcoal burners as we speak.” 

With support from Britain’s Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and Trees for Cities, a British charity promoting tree planting in urban areas, Ms. Borda’s reforestation project seeks to reverse the damage by the charcoal harvesters, whose mud ovens dot the desert landscape in villages around Ica. 

It is an uphill struggle in an impoverished desert. The black market for huarango in raw firewood form thrives. A carbonero, or charcoal seller, can sell a kilogram of charcoal made from the tree for about 50 cents, or a bushel of huarango as firewood for about $1 — bargains in a place where a gallon of natural gas costs more than $10. 

So far, Ms. Borda’s arduous project has planted about 20,000 huarangos in Ica and nearby areas. It also teaches schoolchildren about the history of the huarango in Peruvian culture and its significance as a keystone species for the desert, its roots fixing nitrogen in poor soil and its leaves and pods providing organic material as forage. 

But researchers say the project is a trifle of what must be done to reforest Peru’s deserts. 

“Peru needs a massive rethink about its development trajectory,” said Alex Chepstow-Lusty, a paleoecologist with the French Institute of Andean Studies who worked on the Nazca study with Mr. Beresford-Jones, the Cambridge University archaeologist, analyzing pollen that showed the transformation of Nazca lands from rich in huarango to fields of maize and cotton to the virtually lifeless desert that exists today. 

“With Peru’s glaciers predicted to disappear by 2050, the Andes need trees to capture the moisture coming from Amazonia, which is also the source of water going down to the coast,” said Mr. Chepstow-Lusty in an interview from Cuzco, in Peru’s highlands. “Hence a major program of reforestation is required, both in the Andes and on the coast.” 

Nothing on this scale is happening around Ica. Instead, the growth that one sees in poor villages are of shantytowns called pueblos jóvenes, where residents eke out a living as farmhands or in mining camps. 

Outside one village, Santa Luisa, the buzz of a chainsaw interrupted the silence of the desert next to an oven preparing charcoal. 

The chainsaw’s owner, a woodcutter from the highlands named Rolando Dávila, 48, swore that he no longer cut down huarango but focused instead on the espino, another hardy tree known as acacia macarantha. “But we all know huarango is the prize of the desert,” he said. “For many of us, the wood of the huarango is the only way to survive.”

Andrea Zárate contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.

Links 28 October 2009

The Life Span of a Rodent May Aid Human Health

Santiago, Chile, Is Hardly Sleepy Anymore

Tater Tots for Two: It’s a Date!

Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

Nobel Prizes 2009

One of the most striking things about this year's Nobel Prizes is that many of the awardees are foreign-born Americans.

For the Nobel in Medicine or Physiology, Elizabeth H. Blackburn was originally from Australia and Jack W. Szostak was born in London. The third winner, Carol W. Greider, a native American, nevertheless trained under Blackburn as a graduate student.

For the Nobel in Physics, Charles K. Kao was born in Shanghai but holds dual British and American citizenship. William S. Boyle holds dual Canadian and American citizenship. The last winner is George E. Smith, who is American.

For the Nobel in Chemistry, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in India but holds American citizenship. Of the two other winners, one is an Israeli woman and the other a native American.

For the Nobel Peace Prize, while Barack Obama is a native American, his father is Kenyan. So he is born of immigrant blood as well.

The prizewinner for the Nobel in Economics for 2009 has yet to be announced.

I think it's only going to be a matter of time before some schmuck of a local politician brings up the Nobel Prizes of 2009 as an argument for a pro-foreign talent policy in Singapore (and if such a politician does do so, remember, you read it here first).

I won't be criticizing our "FT" policy in this blog. There is ample material out there in other Singapore blogs excoriating this policy.

I shall simply point out that the foreign-born American Nobel prizewinners of 2009 are all naturalized American citizens, indicating that they are well-integrated into American society. This is something that I think no one in Singapore can claim has happened to an appreciable extent in our own country. Citizenship take-up rates are low; they are even lower when compared to take-up rates for permanent residency, which indicates foreigners are interested in the perks of living here, but not the responsibilities or rights. [You could hardly blame them: the right to vote is the most fundamental and valuable right of a citizen, and most native Singaporean citizens have never had the opportunity to exercise it, so why bother taking up citizenship?]

Secondly, the United States of America allow dual citizenship with a number of other countries (the UK, Australia and Canada). Many of the naturalized American Nobel winners hold dual citizenship. That is probably no small matter in persuading them to take up American citizenship. The last I checked, Singapore doesn't permit dual citizenship of any kind.

So if the next time some guy dressed in white holds up the Nobel prizewinners of 2009 as an example of the wonders of foreign talent, you know what a spurious argument that is.

"How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect"

From The New York Times
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: October 5, 2009 

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” 

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large. 

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. 

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.” 

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others. 

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.” 

Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

"I.B.M. Joins Pursuit of $1,000 Personal Genome"

From The New York Times
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 5, 2009 

One of the oldest names in computing is joining the race to sequence the genome for $1,000. On Tuesday, I.B.M. plans to give technical details of its effort to reach and surpass that goal, ultimately bringing the cost to as low as $100, making a personal genome cheaper than a ticket to a Broadway play.

The project places I.B.M. squarely in the middle of an international race to drive down the cost of gene sequencing to help move toward an era of personalized medicine. The hope is that tailored genomic medicine would offer significant improvements in diagnosis and treatment. 

I.B.M. already has a wide range of scientific and commercial efforts in fields like manufacturing supercomputers designed specifically for modeling biological processes. The company’s researchers and executives hope to use its expertise in semiconductor manufacturing, computing and material science to design an integrated sequencing machine that will offer advances both in accuracy and speed, and will lower the cost.

“More and more of biology is becoming an information science, which is very much a business for I.B.M.,” said Ajay Royyuru, senior manager for I.B.M.’s computational biology center at its Thomas J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. 

DNA sequencing began at academic research centers in the 1970s, and the original Human Genome Project successfully sequenced the first genome in 2001 and cost roughly $1 billion. 

Since then, the field has accelerated. In the last four to five years, the cost of sequencing has been falling at a rate of tenfold annually, according to George M. Church, a Harvard geneticist. In a recent presentation in Los Angeles, Dr. Church said he expected the industry to stay on that curve, or some fraction of that improvement rate, for the foreseeable future. 

At least 17 startup and existing companies are in the sequencing race, pursuing a range of third-generation technologies. Sequencing the human genome now costs $5,000 to $50,000, although Dr. Church emphasized that none of the efforts so far had been completely successful and no research group had yet sequenced the entire genome of a single individual.

The I.B.M. approach is based on what the company describes as a “DNA transistor,” which it hopes will be capable of reading individual nucleotides in a single strand of DNA as it is pulled through an atomic-size hole known as a nanopore. A complete system would consist of two fluid reservoirs separated by a silicon membrane containing an array of up to a million nanopores, making it possible to sequence vast quantities of DNA at once. 

The company said the goal of the research was to build a machine that would have the capacity to sequence an individual genome of up to three billion bases, or nucleotides, “in several hours.” A system with this power and speed is essential if progress is to be made toward personalized medicine, I.B.M. researchers said.

At the heart of the I.B.M. system is a novel mechanism, something like nanoscale electric tweezers. This mechanism repeatedly pauses a strand of DNA, which is naturally negatively charged, as an electric field pulls the strand through a nanopore, an opening just three nanometers in diameter. A nanometer, one one-billionth of a meter, is approximately one eighty-thousandths the width of a human hair.

The I.B.M. researchers said they had successfully used a transmission electron microscope to drill a hole through a semiconductor device that was intended to “ratchet” the DNA strand through the opening and then stop for perhaps a millisecond to determine the order of four nucleotide bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine or thymine — that make up the DNA molecule. The I.B.M. team said that the project, which began in 2007, could now reliably pull DNA strands through nanopore holes but that sensing technology to control the rate of movement and to read the specific bases had yet to be demonstrated.

Despite the optimism of the I.B.M. researchers, an independent scientist noted that various approaches to nanopore-based sequencing had been tried for years, with only limited success. 

“DNA strands seem to have a mind of their own,” said Elaine R. Mardis, co-director of the genome center at Washington University in St. Louis, noting that DNA often takes a number of formations other than a straight rod as it passes through a nanopore.

Dr. Mardis also said previous efforts to create uniform silicon-based nanopore sensors had been disappointing. 

One of the crucial advances needed to improve the quality of DNA analysis is to be able to read longer sequences. Current technology is generally in the range of 30 to 800 nucleotides, while the goal is to be able to read sequences of as long as one million bases, according to Dr. Church, who spoke in July at a forum sponsored by Edge.org, a nonprofit online science forum. 

Other approaches to faster, cheaper sequencing include a biological nanopore approach being pursued by Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a start-up based in England, and an electron microscopy-based system being designed by Halcyon Molecular, a low-profile Silicon Valley start-up that has developed a technique for stretching single strands of DNA laid out on a thin carbon film. The company may be able to image strands as long as one million base pairs, said Dr. Church, who is an adviser to the company, and to several others. 

“To bring about an era of personalized medicine, it isn’t enough to know the DNA of an average person,” said Gustavo Stolovitzky, an I.B.M. biophysicist, who is one of the researchers who conceived of the I.B.M. project. “As a community, it became clear we need to make efforts to sequence in a way that is fast and cheap.”

"Alternative Energy Projects Stumble on a Need for Water"

From The New York Times
By TODD WOODY
Published: September 29, 2009

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs.

But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water.

Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water war. The public is divided, pitting some people who hope to make money selling water rights to the company against others concerned about the project’s impact on the community and the environment.

“I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” George Tucker, a retired chemical engineer, said on a blazing afternoon.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.

“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.

Conflicts over water could shape the future of many energy technologies. The most water-efficient renewable technologies are not necessarily the most economical, but water shortages could give them a competitive edge.

In California, solar developers have already been forced to switch to less water-intensive technologies when local officials have refused to turn on the tap. Other big solar projects are mired in disputes with state regulators over water consumption.

To date, the flashpoint for such conflicts has been the Southwest, where dozens of multibillion-dollar solar power plants are planned for thousands of acres of desert. While most forms of energy production consume water, its availability is especially limited in the sunny areas that are otherwise well suited for solar farms.

At public hearings from Albuquerque to San Luis Obispo, Calif., local residents have sounded alarms over the impact that this industrialization will have on wildlife, their desert solitude and, most of all, their water.

Joni Eastley, chairwoman of the county commission in Nye County, Nev., which includes Amargosa Valley, said at one hearing that her area had been “inundated” with requests from renewable energy developers that “far exceed the amount of available water.”

Many projects involve building solar thermal plants, which use cheaper technology than the solar panels often seen on roofs. In such plants, mirrors heat a liquid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. As in a fossil fuel power plant, that steam must be condensed back to water and cooled for reuse.

The conventional method is called wet cooling. Hot water flows through a cooling tower where the excess heat evaporates along with some of the water, which must be replenished constantly. An alternative, dry cooling, uses fans and heat exchangers, much like a car’s radiator. Far less water is consumed, but dry cooling adds costs and reduces efficiency — and profits.

The efficiency problem is especially acute with the most tried-and-proven technique, using mirrors arrayed in long troughs. “Trough technology has been more financeable, but now trough presents a separate risk — water,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with New Energy Finance, a London research firm.

That could provide opportunities for developers of photovoltaic power plants, which take the type of solar panels found on residential rooftops and mount them on the ground in huge arrays. They are typically more expensive and less efficient than solar thermal farms but require a relatively small amount of water, mainly to wash the panels.

In California alone, plans are under way for 35 large-scale solar projects that, in bright sunshine, would generate 12,000 megawatts of electricity, equal to the output of about 10 nuclear power plants.

Their water use would vary widely. BrightSource Energy’s dry-cooled Ivanpah project in Southern California would consume an estimated 25 million gallons a year, mainly to wash mirrors. But a wet-cooled solar trough power plant barely half Ivanpah’s size proposed by the Spanish developer Abengoa Solar would draw 705 million gallons of water in an area of the Mojave Desert that receives scant rainfall.

The German developer Solar Millennium hopes land in the valley, above, can be home to solar plants. Public opinion, partly because of water issues, appears to be split. 

George Tucker opposes a water-cooled solar plant. “I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” he said. 

One of the most contentious disputes is over a proposed wet-cooled trough plant that NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility giant FPL Group, plans to build in a dry area east of Bakersfield, Calif.

NextEra wants to tap freshwater wells to supply the 521 million gallons of cooling water the plant, the Beacon Solar Energy Project, would consume in a year, despite a state policy against the use of drinking-quality water for power plant cooling. 

Mike Edminston, a city council member from nearby California City, warned at a hearing that groundwater recharge was already “not keeping up with the utilization we have.” 

The fight over water has moved into the California Legislature, where a bill has been introduced to allow renewable energy power plants to use drinking water for cooling if certain conditions are met.

“By allowing projects to use fresh water, the bill would remove any incentives that developers have to use technologies that minimize water use,” said Terry O’Brien, a California Energy Commission deputy director.

NextEra has resisted using dry cooling but is considering the feasibility of piping in reclaimed water. “At some point if costs are just layered on, a project becomes uncompetitive,” said Michael O’Sullivan, a senior vice president at NextEra.

Water disputes forced Solar Millennium to abandon wet cooling for a proposed solar trough power plant in Ridgecrest, Calif., after the water district refused to supply the 815 million gallons of water a year the project would need. The company subsequently proposed to dry cool two other massive Southern California solar trough farms it wants to build in the Mojave Desert.

“We will not do any wet cooling in California,” said Rainer Aringhoff, president of Solar Millennium’s American operations. “There are simply no plants being permitted here with wet cooling.”

One solar developer, BrightSource Energy, hopes to capitalize on the water problem with a technology that focuses mirrors on a tower, producing higher-temperature steam than trough systems. The system can use dry cooling without suffering a prohibitive decline in power output, said Tom Doyle, an executive vice president at BrightSource.

The greater water efficiency was one factor that led VantagePoint Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, to invest in BrightSource. “Our approach is high sensitivity to water use,” said Alan E. Salzman, VantagePoint’s chief executive. “We thought that was going to be huge differentiator.”

Even solar projects with low water consumption face hurdles, however. Tessera Solar is planning a large project in the California desert that would use only 12 million gallons annually, mostly to wash mirrors. But because it would draw upon a severely depleted aquifer, Tessera may have to buy rights to 10 times that amount of water and then retire the pumping rights to the water it does not use. For a second big solar farm, Tessera has agreed to fund improvements to a local irrigation district in exchange for access to reclaimed water. 

“We have a challenge in finding water even though we’re low water use,” said Sean Gallagher, a Tessera executive. “It forces you to do some creative deals.”

In the Amargosa Valley, Solar Millennium may have to negotiate access to water with scores of individuals and companies who own the right to stick a straw in the aquifer, so to speak, and withdraw a prescribed amount of water each year.

“There are a lot of people out here for whom their water rights are their life savings, their retirement,” said Ed Goedhart, a local farmer and state legislator, as he drove past pockets of sun-beaten mobile homes and luminescent patches of irrigated alfalfa. Farmers will be growing less of the crop, he said, if they decide to sell their water rights to Solar Millennium. 

“We’ll be growing megawatts instead of alfalfa,” Mr. Goedhart said.

While water is particularly scarce in the West, it is becoming a problem all over the country as the population grows. Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that as intensive renewable energy development spreads, water issues will follow.

“When we start getting 20 percent, 30 percent or 40 percent of our power from renewables,” Mr. Kammen said, “water will be a key issue.”

"Temasek made big gains"

A cheery article courtesy of the Straits Times vindicating one of our sovereign weath funds. Coincidentally, I went to school with the reporter who wrote this; he used to crib shamelessly from my notes for literature class (funny, he's the one who ended up in journalism!).

Ah, but time to inject some anti-spin, here and here. The wizards of Temasek aren't as smart as they like to think they are. 

Kawagoe, Reinventing Lego, Design Thinking

In a departure from reproducing stories in full (which I think actually contravenes fair use policy, shame on me!), I'm only providing the links to 3 interesting stories I read today.



Kawagoe - The vanished Edo



Reinventing Lego - An inspiring business turnaround (and one of the few toys NOT made in China)



Design Thinking - relevant to my job today

"The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)"

From The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR
Published: July 18, 2009

FEW concepts in business have been as popular and appealing in recent years as the emerging discipline of “open innovation.” It is variously described as crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence and peer production — and these terms apply to a range of practices.

The overarching notion is that the Internet opens the door to a new world of democratic idea generation and collaborative production. Early triumphs like the Linux operating system and the Wikipedia Web encyclopedia are seen as harbingers.

In the new model, innovation is often portrayed as a numbers game. The more heads, the better — all weighing in, commenting, offering ideas. Collective knowledge prevails, as if a force of egalitarian inevitability.

But a look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. “There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”

The Netflix Prize is a stellar example of crowdsourcing. In October 2006, Netflix, the movie rental company, announced that it would pay $1 million to the contestant who could improve the movie recommendations made by Netflix’s internal software, Cinematch, by at least 10 percent. In other words, the company wanted recommendations that were at least 10 percent closer to the preferences of its customers, as measured by their own ratings.

(Cinematch analyzes each customer’s film-viewing habits and recommends other movies that the customer might enjoy. More accurate recommendations increase Netflix’s appeal to its audience.)

The contest will end next week because a contestant finally surpassed the 10 percent hurdle on June 26, and, according to the rules of the competition, rivals have 30 days from that date to try to beat the leader. The frontrunner is a seven-person team, and its members are statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. It is led by statisticians at AT&T Research.

The leading team is a very elite crowd, indeed, but it is also one that was made possible by the Internet. The original three AT&T researchers (one has since joined Yahoo Research, but remains on the contest team) made good strides in the first year of the contest. But to make further progress, they went looking for people with other skills and perspectives. So they reached out eventually to a pair of two-person teams, who were among the leaders in the rankings posted on the contest Web site.

“The leader board was right there,” said Chris Volinsky, director of statistics research at AT&T. “It was pretty obvious who the top teams were.”

Though leading, his team may not win. But the teams in close pursuit are similar collaborations of skilled researchers and engineers.

The Netflix contest has lured experts worldwide not only because of the prize money but also because it offered a daunting challenge. The contestants’ algorithms must find patterns nestled in a collection of more than 100 million movie ratings. What is learned in tackling such a large-scale data analysis and predictive-modeling problem could well be applied in many industries, like Web commerce or telecommunications. “It made sense for us both from the perspective of AT&T and scientific research,” Mr. Volinsky explained.

In the Netflix contest, the winning idea is simply the one with the highest score. But often, companies rely on a contributing crowd for ideas, though management then chooses. I.B.M., for example, conducts online brainstorming sessions it calls Jams — 13 over the last seven years.

I.B.M. used one session to guide its strategy for investing in new growth fields, starting in 2006. An estimated 150,000 employees, clients, business partners and academics participated. Management sifted through the ideas and committed $100 million to invest in several opportunities to apply technology innovations to energy saving, health care and smart electricity grids.

“It starts out as crowdsourcing and it is culled to a set of action items,” said Jeffrey T. Kreulen, a researcher at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

Open-innovation models are adopted to overcome the constraints of corporate hierarchies. But successful projects are typically hybrids of ideas flowing from a decentralized crowd and a hierarchy winnowing and making decisions. In Linux’s case, anyone can submit code, but Linus Torvalds and a few lieutenants decide what code will be included in the operating system, noted Mr. Malone of M.I.T. Even Wikipedia — produced by collaborating clusters of contributors focused on particular areas of interest — relies on administrators to make final judgments on whether to delete a challenged article, he added.

“Most of the interesting examples of collective intelligence contain many different design patterns,” Mr. Malone said.

In a recent paper, “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence,” Mr. Malone and his two co-authors, Robert Laubacher, a research scientist at M.I.T., and Chrysanthos Dellarocas, a professor at the University of Maryland, use a biological analogy in calling the design patterns of collective intelligence systems “genes.” They studied the genelike building blocks in more than 250 examples of collective intelligence enabled by the Web. The intent, they write, is to provide a systematic framework for thinking about collective intelligence, so “managers can do more than just look at examples and hope for inspiration.”

OPENING the corporate doors to ideas and inspiration from the collective crowd holds great potential, but there are pitfalls, warns Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. To succeed, Mr. Chesbrough said, a company must have a culture open to outside ideas and a system for vetting and acting on them.

“In business, it’s not how many ideas you have,” he observed. “What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services.”

"A Stage for Social Ego to Battle Anguished Id"

The only reason I am posting this is that Hable con ella is one of my favorite Almodovar films and Cafe Muller really was a great metaphor for the movie.

From The New York Times
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: June 30, 2009 

Because dance does not use words, and much of its spell lies in aspects of contrast, rhythm and coordination, it is only occasionally taken seriously as drama. With the greatest choreographers of recent decades, it has been, and yet even Martha Graham, George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham — to name but three — have not won the acceptance as theater artists that they deserve. As dramatists, they at least equal the playwrights who have been their contemporaries. But this is still too seldom said. 

One of Ms. Bausch's most important early works, "Cafe Müller," was based on memories of having grown up in the restaurant and hotel run by her parents. More Photos » 

The productions of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, however, always and immediately made a striking impact as theater, and the audiences they attracted included many who were by no means dance specialists. Choreography as a term does not suffice to define her work, which frequently used the spoken word and relied on elaborate scenic effects. Anyone who saw her pieces will recall how the women of her “Rite of Spring” covered themselves in earth; how in “1980” the stage was a lawn; how “Carnations” (“Nelken”) began as a field of, yes, carnations (gradually trampled as the work proceeded); and how “Palermo Palermo” began with the coup de théâtre of a tall wall, across the stage, toppling forward and falling apart. 

Even if you objected to much of Ms. Bausch’s work — I did — it was a shock to hear of her death on Tuesday at 68. To recollect those and other images is to remember the strange courage of her vision. Who else put such worlds onstage? How much of her choreography, if any, can survive her? Plenty of it has been filmed. (Parts of “Café Müller” and “Masurca Fogo” looked very appealing in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2002 movie “Hable con Ella.”) But mainly, as they say, you had to be there. A wall falling over on film is one thing. But when a wall falls over onto the stage not far from you, the impact is of another order.

What is scarcely diminished by Ms. Bausch’s death is the art of dance. There were good dance moments in her work, but they were usually of secondary interest and choreographically of no lasting import. Her big-scale dance episodes were mainly wild and vehement forms of not quite coherent expressionism. The women’s anger and suffering in “Rite of Spring” and “Iphigénie en Tauride” were both memorable and vague. The pieces’ lack of dance precision was part of their point, as was the way they seemed to flaunt a kind of unfocused and unrigorous intensity that in almost any academic-dance classroom would be considered bad style.

But there were several kinds of dance in Ms. Bausch’s theater pieces. Several of her epics included arch little routines (sometimes with the cast coming into the auditorium, and usually performed with women wearing red lipstick) involving a small social-dance-like step pattern, smart upper-body gestures and — here the Bausch style was always at its most precise — sophisticated facial expressions. The dichotomy between this social ego and the incoherent flailings of the anguished id was central to much of her work.

Another strange component of Ms. Bausch’s dance style was bad ballet. The way her performers would make a point of forcing themselves to do adagios, turns and jumps — drawing to your attention all the muscular, stylistic and technical imperfections that obviously flawed the dancers as ballet technicians — was part of the extraordinary masochism she often placed onstage.

Masochism was a recurrent feature in Bausch theater: you would see not only dancers tormenting another dancer (holding cigarette lighters to the soles of feet, for example, or pelting a face with tomatoes) but also the degree to which the victim was complicit in his or (usually) her suffering. Unusual among non-ballet artists of recent decades, there was little or no gender neutrality in her work: the differences between men and women were central and a subject for drama. 

No single label will do. Ms. Bausch was not just a green artist protesting the desecration of the environment (though that was a powerful element in her works) or a feminist depicting the opposition between women’s pain and their social conformism (though that was evident) or an expressionist emitting rage at aspects of the socio-political status quo (though the intensity of that feeling was unmistakable). In some of her pieces she seemed to be celebrating the charm of the world, not just mourning its erosion. And she was often funny.

Her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, must be remembered for its many extraordinary performers, who would open themselves up onstage to the audience in startling ways: with alarming directness, wicked slyness, exaggerated elegance and manic fervor. “You know them better than you know your best friends,” one critic remarked in the 1980s.

She was a theater poet. Whether the images added up to successful poetry became part of the debate. I have used the word incoherent about her: it applied most obviously to the structure of most of her works. Yet that incoherence wasn’t quite a flaw. To me, most of her pieces expressed the inner landscape of the depressed mind, here obsessed and there rambling, often compelling. But she was at pains to elude definition.

In thinking of the Bausch works that might have been, you imagine aspects of beauty, humor, big-scale visual imagination, as well as darkness, sarcasm and intensity. And the simplest way to feel her loss is to reflect that now there will be no more Bausch pieces for us to argue about. The scene is smaller without her.