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Obama on Status

Santurce Aspires to be Art Mecca

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Supreme Court Declines Canal Case AEE & AAA to Lose Tariff Authority P6

Cemi Museum A Window to Our Roots

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March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

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Santurce Aspires to Be Art Mecca By PAOLA SINGER

N a recent Friday night, the streets of Santurce in San Juan, were ﬁlled with a parade of 20-somethings wearing thick-rimmed reading glasses, retro hightops and limited-edition T-shirts. This style-conscious young crowd — drawn by a cultural festival — has become an increasingly common sight in this sleepy, mostly working-class neighborhood that in recent decades fell into disrepair. Just a 15-minute drive from the central, touristy areas like Old San Juan, Condado or Isla Verde, Santurce is still dotted with dilapidated low-rise buildings that sit next to modest shops and unhip old-school bars. But thanks to the abundance of affordable real estate and gritty charms, in recent years it began attracting exhibition spaces, music halls and design studios. These creative new residents are bestowing freshness on the neighborhood, which is beginning to rival Old San Juan as an arts district. The emerging cultural scene was on full display late last year as part of Santurce es Ley, a cultural festival that local gallery owners and artists put on every few months. A few steps from the grafﬁti-sprayed empty lot cum alternative-rock stage that was the center of the action was C787 Studios (Calle Cerra 734; c787studios.com). The space, dedicated to experimental design, had covered its walls with quirky T-shirts

March 24 - 30, 2011

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Exquisite Cuisine in an Oppulent Setting created by 17 artists from around the world. It was one of seven galleries that remained open well past midnight during the festival. “Santurce is an ideal place for creativity,” said Angel Alexis Bousquet, a founder of the festival and director of C787 Studios, which opened in late 2009. “We want to establish it as Puerto Rico’s art and design district.” Some of these art spaces have an offbeat style that’s more Lower East Side than Latin Caribbean. La Respuesta (1600 Avenida Fernandez Juncos; larespuestapr.com) is a bar decorated with music posters and stuffed superheroes that holds art exhibitions and shows by local indie bands like Campo-Formio, Tach.dé or Fantasmes, a psychedelic-rock quartet recently featured in NPR’s “Second Stage” program. Other ventures are more upscale, though no less creative. Espacio 1414 (1414 Avenida Fernandez Juncos; 787-725-3899; espacio1414.org) showcases the private collection of the Cuba-born couple Diana and Moisés Berezdivin, avid art collectors who have significantly contributed to the island’s visual arts. Housed in a spare three-level former warehouse, the collection includes thought-provoking works by emerging and wellknown contemporary artists, including the Argentine Guillermo Kuitca, whose poetic paintings are shown at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, a participant in the 2006 Whitney Biennial who is known for her socially charged installations. The first significant entrant into Santurce’s growing art scene was Petrus (726 Calle Hoare; 787-289-0505; petrusgallery.com), which has been at the forefront of contemporary Puerto Rican art since 2003. A distinctive sculpture by Carmen Inés Blondet — large steel spikes coming out of the ground — marks the entrance to its modern, white building. The owner, Sylvia Villafañe, said she chose the neighborhood because Old San Juan, which used to be the city’s art mecca, was becoming too expensive and constricted. “I love it that Santurce is more active now,” she said. “It’s great to see young artists arrive.”

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The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Supreme Court Declines Puerto Rico Canal Case By LAWRENCE HURLEY

he Supreme Court announced today it would not intervene in a dispute relating to the restoration of a canal and wetlands in San Juan. A public land trust called the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño

Martín Peña had sought and failed to prevent the land it oversaw from being returned to government ownership, as was required by a law passed by the Puerto Rican Legislature in 2009. The restoration plan, initially approved by the Legislature in 2004, was to include various en-

vironmental improvements to the Martín Peña Canal and surrounding wetlands. The project is due to include dredging and the creation of a conservation strip along the canal banks. The entire area has, since the mid-20th century, been inhabited by people moving to the city from rural areas. Wetlands and parts of the canal had been ﬁlled in and trash and sanitary waste discharged into the waterway, according to the Puerto Rican government’s brief in the case. To resolve the problem, the land trust was granted title to various properties previously owned by Puerto Rico and the city of San Juan. But in 2009, the Legislature decided to amend the law, making the policy decision that it was better for the government to retain ownership of various parcels of land. That left open the possibility of individual parcels being sold to private parties at a later date, which the land trust

objected to. One of the project goals was to minimize the displacement of people who lived on the land, the trust maintained. When the 2009 law was passed, the trust fought back, saying the transfer was an unlawful taking under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Both a federal district judge and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The legal question was whether the government can change its rationale for why a private property seizure had a “public purpose” after it was challenged in court. In its brief, the Puerto Rican government said that the 2009 law change had no bearing on the original goal of restoring the canal and surrounding land. The amendment “left intact all of the public purposes, projects and objectives which seek to eliminate conditions harmful to the public,” the brief stated.

The San Juan Weekly

Turandot P

roducciones Aquino and Teatro Ciclorama hit the jackpot with this outstanding production based on the opera by Puccini, “Turandot”, at the San Juan Bellas Artes. The most beautiful, accurately lavish costumes were displayed. This included make up, hair dressing and elaborate chinese masks pertaining to the period. All these items were fantastic. Only one ﬂaw. It should have been done at the Sala de Drama, instead of the limited space at sala Marichal. The two arias from the opera, “Signora Ascolta”, sung by Liu (Elizabeth Rodríguez,) and the popular “Nessum Dorma” sung by Calaf

March 24 - 30, 2011

(Pedro Fuente Mateo,) were both surprisingly rendered, a lot of feeling plus excellent voices. Where they came from? - no footnotes in the program. Mr. Aquino certainly did a superb job adapting the opera plot to a drama version. For those that never saw the opera this version is just as convincing. Puccini died before completing the work ﬁnished by his pupil Alfano. The ﬁrst production at the Scala in 1926; was a complete success. Most probably Mr. Aquino based his version in the original libretto to the opera by Adami and Simoni. It takes place in Peking, during the Ming Dynasty. Turandot is a cold blooded princess who offers to marry the suitor who can answer three riddles. If not succesful, the suitor will be beheaded. A Persian prince is

about to lose his head, when in disguise, Prince Calaf comes in recognizes his father and Liu his servant slave and guide. She has stayed with the old man because she is in love with Calaf. Turandot refuses to marry Calaf even when he answered the three riddles. She will not submit unless she ﬁnds out his name. The whole town won’t be able to sleep searching for the name of the stranger. Liu is tortured but she stabs herself to save the old man and Calaf. Finally he identiﬁes himself. Turandot is moved by

the force of love and goes to his arms. The acting, went well and was very convincing. The three comedians Ping, Pong and Pang brought laughter into the tragic atmosphere wearing outlandish constumes. Ricardo Robles as Calaf, Hannah Maldinado as Turandot, Juan García as Timur the father, Federico Rodríguez as the ancient emperor, were all very well portrayed. Quite an unexpected surprise, indeed. Free admission, is normally guarantee for such an extraordinary production.

Glaad Honors Ricky Martin By RACHEL LEE HARRIS

ussell Simmons and Ricky Martin were honored at the 22nd annual Glaad Media Awards presented by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in New York. Mr. Simmons, right, a co-founder of Def Jam Records, a fashion designer and the author of several self-help books, received the award for excellence in media. Mr. Simmons recently took part in advertisements for the Human Rights Campaign, along with other celebrities, to support the New Yorkers for Marriage Equality campaign. Mr. Martin, who announced on his Web site last March that he is gay, was given the Vito Russo Award for promoting equal rights. Mr. Martin’s appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to talk about his experience also won for outstanding talk show episode. Other honorees included Frank Rich, former columnist for The New York Times, for its coverage of the suicide of the Rutgers student Tyler Clementi; and CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” for an episode about the suicides of gay teenagers. The band the Scissor Sisters won for its album “Night Work” (Downtown Records), and Marvel Comics was recognized for its “X-Factor” comic series by Peter David.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Senator Hernández Mayoral Proposes New Alternative for Energy Saving S enator Juan Eugenio Hernández Mayoral introduced Senate Bill 2001, which aims to create a voluntary pilot program to Electric Power Authority subscribers to rent solar equipment and to pay for it in their monthly electricity bill. According to the legislator, it is a novel initiative in which PREPA would own the equipment and the responsibility to install, while the average residential customer would only pay a monthly installment by way of a reasonable return on the cost of equipment, installation and maintenance. The subscriber who wishes to participate in the pilot project must give written notice to PREPA who, in turn, will make a pre-qualiﬁcation for the subscriber and shall install the equipment within 90 days. Hernandez Mayoral said “excessive dependence on fossil fuels to generate electricity and the high cost of energy produced, offers little hope to Puerto Ricans who are eager to experience some relief on energy costs, so therefore we should explore other alternatives that will provide Puerto Ricans the opportunity to obtain

ternatives being offered to homeowners in the mainland. According to the preamble of the Bill, companies engaged in the sale of these products are still the owners of the systems and install them free of charge at the homes and then charge to lease them. He noted that “contrary to such private energy companies, whose aim is to generate proﬁts, the Commonwealth’s Power Authority is obliged to provide a service, so we

substantial savings in energy consumption without having to invest large sums of money on equipment.” While the senator recognizes that there have been incentives provided by the Government for the purchase of renewable energy products and that PREPA itself promotes the transition from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of generating energy, the fact is that, currently, available technologies for energy alternates are beyond the reach of the average consumer and the PREPA proposals are not entirely of renewable energy. He added that the idea of renting solar equipment comes from the al-

understand that it would be most useful to the client if this agency is the owner of the equipment that would be rented to consumers on reasonable terms.” “This measure will continue to pave the way towards a new energy era and will provide real relief to the Puerto Rican consumer’s pocket to guarantee one hundred percent renewable energy,” said Hernandez Mayoral.

AEE & AAA to Lose Tariff Authority T

he Fortuño administration is reorganizing the Public Service Commission and the Telecommuncations Regulatory Board. Both reorganizations are required in order to implement a law that withdraws authority from the Acqueduct & Sewer Authority and the Electric Company to set tariffs. All steps have been completed and only approval from the Federal Electric Agency remains. Fortuño is trying to avoid affec-

ting the bonds emitted by the Electric Company and tha Aqueduct & Sewer Authority. In the past the risk of affecting the bonds has been used to prevent undertaking the change. Fortuño claimed this would be the ﬁrst step to lower the cost of energy and water on our island. The Governor made these announcements after ordering the Electric Company not to impose additional charges on past due accounts.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

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March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

President Obama Comments on Status Report

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Mainland 10

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

E.P.A. Proposes New Emission Standards for Power Plants By JOHN M. BRODER and JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

he Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first national standard for emissions of mercury and other toxins from coal-burning power plants, a rule that could lead to the early closing of dozens of generating stations and is certain to be challenged by the utility industry and Republicans in Congress. Lisa P. Jackson, the agency’s administrator, unveiled the new rule with fanfare at agency headquarters, saying control of dozens of poisonous substances emitted by power plants was two decades overdue and would prevent thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of cases of disease a year. She pointedly included the head of the American Lung Association and two prominent doctors in her announcement to make the point that the regulations were designed to protect public health and not to penalize the utility industry. She estimated the total annual cost of compliance at about $10 billion, in line with some industry estimates (although some are much higher), and the health and environmental benefits at more than $100 billion a year. She said that households could expect to see their electric bills rise by $3 to $4 a month when the regulation is fully in force after 2015. “Today’s announcement is 20 years in the making and is a significant milestone in the Clean Air Act’s already unprecedented record of ensuring our children are protected from the damaging effects of

toxic air pollution,” she said. She invited a group of second graders from a nearby elementary school to attend the rule’s unveiling at her agency. Ms. Jackson said that mercury and the other emissions covered by the rule damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses, exacerbate asthma and cause lifelong health damage for hundreds of thousands of Americans. She said that installing and maintaining smokestack scrubbers and other control technology would create 31,000 short-term construction jobs and 9,000 permanent utility sector jobs. Even before the formal unveiling of the rule, utilities, business groups and Congressional Republicans cast it as the latest salvo in a regulatory war on American industry. They cited a number of recently issued E.P.A. rules, including one on industrial boilers and the ﬁrst of a series of regulations covering greenhouse gases, which they argue will impose huge costs on businesses and choke off economic recovery. “E.P.A. admits the pending proposal will cost at least $10 billion, making it one of the most expensive rules in the history of the agency,” a group of utilities said in a report this week. “Adaptation to all the proposed rules constitutes an extraordinary threat to the power sector — particularly the half of U.S. electricity derived from coal-ﬁred generation,” the group added. The group questioned Ms. Jackson’s assertion that the technology needed to reduce emissions of mercury, lead, arsenic,

chromium and other airborne toxins was readily available and reasonably inexpensive. The need to retroﬁt scores of plants in the same short period of time will tax resources and lead to delays, the industry group said. The National Association of Manufacturers said the proposed rule would lead to higher electricity prices and signiﬁcant job losses. “In addition, electric system reliability could be compromised by coal retirements and new environmental construction projects caused by this proposed rule and other E.P.A. regulations,” said Aric Newhouse, the group’s vice president for government relations. “Stringent, unrealistic regulations such as these will curb the recent economic growth we have seen.” Public health advocates countered that these were the same complaints that had delayed the rules for more than two decades, as utilities used the courts and Congress to block strong regulations on air pollution. The rule issued Wednesday was timed to meet a deadline set in 2008 by a federal court when it threw out a weaker set of regulations issued by the Bush administration. “If you think it’s expensive to put a scrubber on a smokestack, you should see how much it costs to treat a child over a lifetime with a birth defect,” said Dr. Marion Burton, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who stood with Ms. Jackson in announcing the rule. Roughly half of the nation’s more than 400 coal-burning plants have some form of control technology installed, and

about a third of states have set their own standards for mercury emissions. But the proposed rule issued Wednesday is the first national standard and will require all plants to come up to the standard of the best of the current plants. The new rules bring to a close a bitter legal and regulatory battle dating back to the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, which first directed the E.P.A. to identify and control major industrial sources of hazardous air emissions. By 1990, however, federal regulators had still not set standards for toxic emissions from power plants, and Congress, in the face of stiff resistance from utilities and coal interests, passed legislation directing the E.P.A. to develop a plan to regulate the industry. In 1998, the agency finally complied, delivering a comprehensive report to Congress detailing the health impacts of numerous pollutants, including mercury, which by then had been linked conclusively in numerous studies to serious cognitive harm to developing fetuses. In December 2000, in the final days of the Clinton administration, the E.P.A. finally listed power plants as a source of hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Yet under the Bush administration, the effort to control power plant emissions would again falter. The 2000 listing required E.P.A. to implement standards for mercury and other pollutants from the industry. But rather than comply, the agency made the controversial decision in 2005 to delist power plants as sources of hazardous pollution. Instead the E.P.A. created a cap-andtrade program for mercury, highly favored by industry, which it claimed would achieve virtually identical emissions reductions at lower cost. A coalition of environmentalists sued, arguing that the cap-and-trade program would not limit other toxic emissions like arsenic and would allow the dirtiest power plants to pay for the right to pollute, putting nearby communities at risk. In 2008 a federal judge ruled against the E.P.A., giving the agency three years to develop standards for mercury and other pollutants. The long delay in implementing regulations has meant that emissions of some key pollutants has not just held steady, but has grown in recent years. The E.P.A.’s most recent data shows that from 1999 to 2005, mercury emissions from power plants increased more than 8 percent, to 53 tons from 49 tons. Arsenic emissions grew even more, rising 31 percent, to 210 tons from 160 tons. The E.P.A. will take public comments for the next several months. It anticipates publishing a final rule at the end of the year or early next, with implementation three or four years later.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

N.R.A. Declines to Meet With Obama on Gun Policy By JACKIE CALMES

ore than two months after the Tucson shootings, the administration is calling together both the gun lobby and gun safety groups to find common ground. But President Obama has no plans to take the lead in proposing further gun control legislation, aides say, and the nation’s major gun rights group is snubbing the invitation. Officials at the Justice Department will meet with gun control advocates in the first of what will be a series of meetings over the next two weeks with people on different sides of the issue, including law enforcement, retailers and manufacturers, to seek agreement on possible legislative or administrative actions. The effort follows Mr. Obama’s call, in a column on Sunday in a Tucson newspaper, to put aside “stale policy debates” and begin “a new discussion” on ways to better enfor-

ce and strengthen existing laws to keep mentally unstable, violent and criminal people from getting guns. But the National Rifle Association, for decades the most formidable force against proposals to limit gun sales or ownership, is refusing to join the discussion — possibly dooming it from the start, given the lobby’s clout with both parties in Congress. Administration officials had indicated they expected that the group would be represented at a meeting, perhaps on Friday. “Why should I or the N.R.A. go sit down with a group of people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment in the United States?” said Wayne LaPierre, the longtime chief executive of the National Rifle Association. He named Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has almost no role in gun-related policies, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. “It shouldn’t be a dialogue

about guns; it really should be a dialogue about dangerous people,” Mr. LaPierre said, adding that his group has supported proposals to prevent gun sales to the mentally ill, strengthen a national system of background checks and spur states to provide needed data. Despite his opposition to joining the administration’s table, by his comments in an interview Mr. LaPierre sounded at times like the White House. For example, a White House adviser on Monday said Mr. Obama wanted to redeﬁne the gun debate to “focus on the people, not the guns.” The president, in his column, cited the same policy areas Mr. LaPierre mentioned as fertile ground for consensus. And Mr. Obama emphasized, “First, we should begin by enforcing laws that are already on the books” — a line long used by the gun lobby. Mr. Obama’s column in The Arizona Daily Star reﬂected his continued political caution toward an issue that for decades has polarized the country. In past weeks, aides had suggested he might give a public address expanding on his views about gun safety — an option that has now been put aside. Mr. Obama spoke at a memorial service in Tucson four days after a gunman on Jan. 8 killed six people and wounded 13, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. But gun safety advocates, including a group of mayors headed by Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, called on Mr. Obama to do more, including endorsing legislation to ban highcapacity magazines like those used in the Arizona attack. Several factors have inhibited him. With Republicans now a majority in the House, legislation restricting guns has little chance of passage. And many Democrats, including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, are opposed to stirring controversy and provoking the N.R.A.’s membership to oppose them. Also, the White House is focused on its economic message — when it is not consumed by events abroad — and likewise has little interest in distracting from that before the 2012 election season, aides say. In the op-ed article, Mr. Obama did not recommend particular legis-

lative remedies, including proposals that he had backed as a presidential candidate to reinstate a ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 and to close a loophole for gun-show sales in the federal law requiring background checks of purchasers. Instead, he emphasized his belief that the Constitution guarantees individuals’ right to bear arms and boasted that “my administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners — it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.” Mr. Obama is trying on many issues, including deficit reduction, to stake out a middle ground that appeals to independent voters. Aides said polls showed that the gun issue was not a big one for independents, but that they did abhor political fights and favored politicians who compromise. The president played to that sentiment in his oped article — and anticipated the rifle association’s rebuff. “Some will say nothing short of the most sweeping antigun legislation is a capitulation to the gun lobby,” he wrote. “Others will predictably cast any discussion as the opening salvo in a wild-eyed scheme to take away everybody’s guns.” “But,” he added, “I have more faith in the American people than that.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

13 Mainland

Government by the Week P

arents have begun arranging alternative child care for their preschoolers, uncertain of whether their Head Start program will be there when they need it. The Social Security Administration is unable to open new hearing ofﬁces to handle a backlog of appeals. The Pentagon has had to delay equipment repairs. There is chaos throughout the federal government because a riven Congress has forced agencies to operate on a week-by-week basis. Yet, the House passed another short-term spending bill. This one keeps things going for all of three weeks. The Senate will almost certainly join in shortly to avoid an impending shutdown, the result of the stopgap bill from two weeks ago. These slipshod exercises in governance were choreographed by House Republicans, who knew that neither the Senate nor President Obama would ever accept their original proposal to gut nonsecurity discretionary spending with $61 billion in cuts through September, including riders to end ﬁnancing for Planned Parenthood and the health care law. They had hoped to use the pressure of a potential shutdown to achieve much of their goal, but, so far, all they have ac-

complished is a cut of about $10 billion, mostly from earmarks or programs that the president himself proposed to cut. (The new bill cuts $6 billion.) House Republican leaders, who say they do not want a government shutdown, have, so far, held off their more fanatical freshmen, who want to slash everything in sight. But the leadership cannot do so forever, and the evidence of that was clear. More than 50 Republicans refused to go along with the threeweek resolution because it did not cut enough. Several speciﬁcally complained that it allowed ﬁnancing for Planned Parenthood and the health care law to continue. This is not a group that cares much for pragmatic compromise, and the three weeks are just a timeout. Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican who voted no on the new bill, spoke for many of his colleagues when he said the budget could not be resolved without a willingness to shut down government. “By giving liberals in the Senate another three weeks of negotiations,” he said, “we will only delay a confrontation that must come.” He is absolutely right about that. If Democrats, including the president, do

E.P.A. Offers Fuel-Economy Labels for Used Cars By STEPHEN WILLIAMS

ealizing that sellers and shoppers might want to see official data about a used vehicle’s fuel efficiency, the Environmental Protection Agency now offers an online tool to generate a do-it-yourself window sticker. At the agency’s Web site, a seller lists the year, make, model and enginetransmission configuration of the vehicle, which generates a printable PDF with the vehicle’s city, highway, combined fuel economy rating and a generic photo of the vehicle’ The label also displays a quick-response code that can be read by some smartphones to generate model literature and other data about the vehicle. “We have fuel economy data on about 30,000 light-duty vehicles — cars, mainly — dating back to 1984 models,” said Bo Salisbury in a telephone interview. Mr. Salisbury is a member of the research staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which operates under the auspices of the Energy Department. “We’ve been kicking around this idea for some time. What really got us going was the cash-for-clunkers program in 2009. With that, we started getting demand for labels like these.” For owners who might expect significant drops or increases in mileage figures, the E.P.A. suggests not to worry. According to a note on the Web site, “research shows that on average the fuel economy of a properly maintained vehicle will decline less than 2 percent over the 15 year life of a car.” A fringe benefit of the PDF is that it looks official. “If you’re selling a car,” said Mr. Salisbury, “we think prospective owners would rather see this data on a label, rather than being told it.”

not draw a clear line soon, making their priorities and their limits unmistakable, they will be harried by these kinds of votes for years. Even in the unlikely case that an agreement is reached in three weeks to finance the government through September, a different vote will be necessary just a few weeks from now to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans have already vowed to vote that down — even though it could be financially disastrous — if they do not get their way. And then there is the vote for the fiscal 2012 budget, which begins Oct. 1, and then the year after that.

At some point, Mr. Pence will get his confrontation. If Republicans continue to press for cuts of tens of billions from discretionary spending, setting back the economic recovery largely for ideological purposes, Democrats will have to say no, even if that results in a short-term shutdown. The American people will be able to figure out who is at fault. Responsible governing means agreeing quickly to a deal to finish out the fiscal year, and then starting a serious talk about entitlement programs and taxes — the real causes of a soaring deficit.

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The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Emotional Power Broker of the Modern Family

By BENEDICT CAREY

irst, he tore up his dog toys. Then shredded the furniture, clothes, schoolbooks — and, finally, any semblance of family unity. James, a chocolate-brown pointer mix, turned from adorable pet to problem child in a matter of weeks. “The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.” Psychologists long ago confirmed what most pet owners feel in their bones: that for some people bonds with animals are every bit as strong as those with other humans. And less complicated, for sure; a dog’s devotion is without detectable irony, a lap cat’s purring without artifice (if not disapproval). Yet the nature of individual human-pet relationships varies widely, and only now are scientists beginning to characterize those differences, and their impact on the family. Pets alter not only a family’s routines, after all, but also its hierarchy, its social rhythm, its web of relationships. Several new lines of research help explain why this overall effect can be so comforting in some families, and a source of tension in others. The answers have very little to do with the pet. “The word ‘pet’ does not really capture what these animals mean in a family, first of all,” said Froma Walsh, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. The prevalent term among researchers is now “companion animal,” she said, which is closer to the childlike role they so often play. “And in the way that children get caught up in the family system as peacekeepers, as go-betweens, as sources of disagreement, the same happens with pets.” People cast these roles in part based

on the sensations and memories associated with their first Princess or Scooter, psychologists say — echoing Freud’s idea of transference, in which early relationships provide a template for later ones. In many families, this means that Scruffy is the universal peacemaker, the fulcrum of shared affection. In a family interview reviewed by Dr. Walsh in a recent paper, one mother said that the best way to end an argument between siblings was to bark, “Stop fighting, you’re upsetting Barkley!” “This is always more effective than saying, ‘Stop hitting your brother,’ ” the mother said. (Barkley made no comment.) Animals often sense these expectations and act on them. In a video recording of another family discussed in the paper, the cat jumps on a woman’s lap when it senses an impending argument with her husband. “And it works,” Dr. Walsh said. “It reduces tension in both; you can see it happening.” “She’s my first child,” said Adrienne Woods, a cellist in Los Angeles, of Bella, the Husky puppy that she and her fiancé just got. “The biggest upside is this sense of inner peace. I feel like a grandma, like I have a companion I’ve been wanting for 30 years.” Yet pets can also raise tension, as millions of couples learn the hard way. The Animal Planet show “It’s Me or the Dog” is built on such cases. And Cesar Millan, a dog behavior specialist, has become a celebrity by helping people gain control over unruly hounds, bringing order into households with uncertain lines of authority. Perhaps more often, pets become a psychological wedge not from lack of boundaries but because family members have diverging views of what a pet should be. And those views are shaped by cultural inheritance, more so than people may realize. In a study of dog ownership, Elizabeth Terrien, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, conducted 90 in-depth interviews with families in Los Angeles, including Ms. Woods. One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside,

whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed. When asked to describe their pets without using the word “dog,” people in more affluent neighborhoods “came up with things like child, companion, little friend, teenage son, brother, or partner in crime,” Dr. Terrien said. In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse,” she said. Such differences often emerge only after a family has adopted a pet, and they can exacerbate the more mundane disagreements about pet care, like how much to spend on vet bills, how often to walk the dog, how the animal should interact with young children. The fallout from such conflicts isn’t hard to find: Most everyone knows of couples who have quarreled over pets, or even divorced, because her spaniel nipped at his Rottweiler. And there are countless single people out there all but married to some hairy Frida or Diego — banishing any potential partner who doesn’t fall quickly, and equally, in love. The reason these feelings run so deep is that they are ideologies, as well as cultural and psychological dispositions. In the summer of 2007, David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, South Bend, conducted extensive interviews with 35 dog owners around the state, chosen to represent a diverse mix of city, country and suburban dwellers. He found that, as a rule, people fall into one of three broad categories of beliefs concerning pets. Members of one group, which he labels “dominionists,” see pets as an appendage to the family, a useful helper ranking below humans that is beloved but, ultimately, replaceable. Many people from rural areas — like the immigrants Dr. Terrien interviewed — qualified. Another group of owners, labeled by

Dr. Blouin as “humanists,” are the type who cherish their dog as a favored child or primary companion, to be pampered, allowed into bed, and mourned like a dying child at the end. These include the people who cook special meals for a pet, take it to exercise classes, to therapy — or leave it stock options in their will. The third, called “protectionists,” strive to be the animal’s advocate. These owners have strong views about animal welfare, but their views on how a pet should be treated — whether it sleeps inside or outside, when it should be put down — vary depending on what they think is “best” for the animal. Its members include people who will “save” a dog tied to tree outside a store, usually delivering it home with a lecture about how to care for an animal. “These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.” Up until, and including, the end: Couples may not only disagree over when to put an animal down but also have vastly different emotional reactions to the loss. “For someone who’s been treating the pet like a child, it can feel like the loss of a child — and of course children are not supposed to die before their parents,” Dr. Terrien said. It’s an end-of-life crisis, which often begins a lengthy period of grieving. Whereas for the partner who sees the pet differently, the death may bring relief. None of which is to say that a resourceful pet — using the combined power of cuteness, doleful stares and episodes of getting stuck in boxes or eating crayons — cannot bridge such opposing religions. But family therapists say that, usually, fourlegged diplomats need some help from the two-legged kind to succeed. “Families either ﬁgure it out and manage these differences,” Dr. Terrien said, “or they give up the pet — which happens far more often than people think.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Pets Aid in Easing Therapy By JANE E. BRODY

e’ve all seen guide dogs that can direct blind people around obstacles and tell them when it is safe to cross the street. Perhaps you also know of guide dogs for the deaf, which can alert people to a ringing phone, a doorbell or a smoke alarm, or dogs that can warn people with epilepsy of an incipient seizure, giving them time to get to a safe place before they lose consciousness. Dr. Marty Becker, veterinarian and author (with Danelle Morton) of “The Healing Power of Pets” (Hyperion, 2002), tells of a golden retriever named Dakota, who was able to warn his master, Mike Lingenfelter, that a heart attack was imminent and alert Mr. Lingenfelter to the need to leave a stressful situation and take preventive medication. “This dog is leading me through life,” Mr. Lingenfelter told Dr. Becker. “All I’m doing is following the dog.” In recent decades, there have been countless such stories of animals helping to improve and even preserve the lives of children and adults with all manner of diseases and disabilities. Trained dogs are being used to help keep children with autism safe and to break the “freeze” that can afﬂict people with Parkinson’s disease when they try to walk. And dogs, cats, bunnies and birds are often brought to schools and institutions, as well as to hospitals and nursing homes, where they help to relax and inspire residents and distract patients from their health problems. But the use of animals to enhance health can go well beyond individual cases and group settings. A growing

number of psychotherapists are using therapy animals to facilitate treatment, especially treatment of children with emotional, social and even physical problems. Among the pioneers is Aubrey H. Fine, psychotherapist and professor at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, whose extensive successful use of therapy animals in treating children is documented in “The Handbook on Animal Assisted Therapy” (Elsevier/Academic Press, 2010). As Dr. Fine describes one of his ﬁrst and most inspiring cases, 5-yearold Diane was brought to him because she recoiled in fright from strangers, and though she spoke at home, she refused to speak to anyone else, including her kindergarten teacher. A trained therapy dog named Puppy eventually broke the back of her selective mutism. Diane was petting Puppy, smiling and content, when Dr. Fine gave the dog a signal to walk away. Diane was crestfallen, and seeing the girl’s distress, Dr. Fine told her that all she had to do to get the dog back was to say, “Puppy, come.” Softly, the child said, “Puppy, come, please come, Puppy.” That incident became the bridge Dr. Fine needed to help the child overcome her socially disabling problem. He tells of another troubled child who ﬁnally began to speak about being physically abused when Dr. Fine told him that the misshapen therapy animal he was playing with had been rescued from an abusive home where it had been seriously injured. In another case in which a child was told where — and where not — to touch the therapy animal, the child opened up about

being inappropriately touched, sexually abused, by a family member. “Children are more likely to reveal inner thoughts to the therapist because the animal is right next to them and helps them express themselves,” Dr. Fine said in an interview. In early work in a social skills program for hyperactive children, Dr. Fine found that they could be more easily taught how to behave calmly if allowed to handle his pet gerbil. “I realized this approach can have a tremendous impact in teaching because it helps to change how we relate to other beings,” he said. Although the field of animal-assisted therapy has grown a lot in the last four decades, experts readily acknowledge that it suffers from a lack of well-designed research that can establish guidelines for safety and effectiveness in various situations. For example, although using dolphins to treat autistic children has received considerable media attention, at least two studies found no evidence of benefit and considerable risk of harm to the animals and to the children, said James A. Griffin of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations insists that members limit service and therapy animals to domestic species trained for the job. And the Delta Society, which provides training programs for the animals, will not certify wild or exotic animals like snakes, ferrets, lizards and wolf-hybrids. However, the Delta Society says it “is constantly expanding the range of species

included in the Pet Partners program” when there is adequate research to document the safety of their use. To help give the field a firmer scientific footing, the Mars company, a leading producer of pet foods, initiated a research partnership with the national institute branch of which Dr. Griffin is deputy director. Among continuing studies: The effects of therapeutic horseback riding on children and adolescents with autism. If safe and effective, riding is less invasive than medications used to treat common symptoms like irritability and hyperactivity. A large epidemiological study to document the overall public health effects on children and adolescents of living with dogs and cats. A study to determine whether therapy animals can help children with behavior disturbances attributed to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder develop better self-regulation, selfesteem and social behavior. Studies using survey and genetic tools to help select the most effective cats or cat breeds to work with autistic children. Dr. Griffin acknowledged in an interview how difficult it can be to design a scientifically valid study using animals because “it can’t be a blind study — you know if the patient has a therapy dog.” But he described one recent study in which the patient, a young boy with autism, served as his own control. When he was with the therapy dog, levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the child dropped; the levels rose when the dog was taken away, and dropped again when the dog was returned. The next step would be to coordinate biochemical changes with behavioral effects — is the child calmer and easier to handle when with a therapy animal? Dr. Fine emphasized the challenges of working with therapy animals as well as documenting its effectiveness. He said, “You can’t just bring in any animal to a therapy setting. The animal has to be very well trained, reliable, obedient and have the right temperament. It can’t be overly anxious or easily startled. And the therapist has to know how to use it as a therapy adjunct, in combination with good psychotherapy. The animal is there to help support what I’m doing, to act as a catalyst and not a distraction. And, of course, animal-assisted interventions have to be safe for everyone involved — the patient and the animal.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

ART

This Museum Has a Lived-In Look By RANDY KENNEDY

educed to its bare particulars, it can sound like one of the strangest museums in the world. It holds no special exhibitions in-house. It has no Web site of its own. Admission to the public is free, but it can take as long as six months to get in. For those who succeed, there are treasures on the order of John Singer Sargent, Asher B. Durand and Jacob Lawrence to be seen. But works by two of the most famous artists in the collection — Cézanne (a still life and a handful of landscapes) and Monet (a gauzy view of the Seine) — are kept out of public view. For a few years the collection’s lone Grandma Moses painting was seen almost exclusively by a preteenage girl from Georgia named Amy and her friends. Add to all this the longstanding tradition that privileged guests are allowed to use some of the historical artifacts as desks and to eat off of others, and it can be a curator’s nightmare. But it is never boring, caring for the collection of the 210-year-old museum that one of its residents, Thomas Jefferson, described as palatial enough for “two emperors, one pope and the Grand Lama,” and a later one, Harry S. Truman, bemoaned as “a great white jail.” “It is a museum but it’s also the White House, and so it’s a working house,” said William G. Allman, who has worked in the curator’s ofﬁce here for 35 years, and has been chief curator since 2002. “There are times when you run screaming, telling somebody, ‘You can’t put those hot television lights up against the portrait of Washington.’ You worry about someone spilling a drink on something. Sometimes somebody breaks a piece of furniture. But it’s the nature of it. It’s a place where people actually live.” As if to underscore his point a blackand-white blur — Bo, the Obamas’ Portuguese water dog — could be seen through the window, racing across the South Lawn,

for the moment not posing his own threat to the art in the house that has become his own. Like most of his six predecessors since the office of the White House curator was created by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961, Mr. Allman has worked almost as hard at keeping a low profile as he does at overseeing the 50,000 objects that are cataloged as part of the house’s permanent collection, from the fish forks in the state silver service to the 1938 Steinway grand piano with heroic gold-leafed eagles for legs. “The residence staff here prides itself on being behind the

scenes,” he said. But this year marks the 50th anniversary of both the curator’s office and the White House Historical Association, the nonprofit organization that supports the acquisition and conservation of White House art and artifacts. And so Mr. Allman was recently persuaded by Obama staffers to emerge from the relative anonymity of his office — in a windowless former servants’ dining room, near the White House bowling alley on the ground floor — and to talk about the role he has played in shaping

the house’s art and décor through seven administrations (which explains how he remembers that Grandma Moses’s pastoral scene “July Fourth” once graced Amy Carter’s bedroom). On a recent sunny afternoon he showed a visitor around the hushed and largely deserted ground floor and first floor of the house, through the historic public rooms — Blue, Green, Red, East — that are the nation’s domestic patrimony and the curator’s primary responsibility.

Continues on page 18

ART

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Comes from page 17 The second and third floors, the first family’s residence, are less his domain, though he advises on its art and décor. And especially since 2009, when the Obamas made headlines for borrowing pieces by the kind of adventurous contemporary artists — Ed Ruscha, Glenn Ligon, Susan Rothenberg — who had never been seen before in the White House, the dialogue between the upper and lower levels of the house has begun to change aesthetic assumptions here in ways that Mr. Allman said he had never experienced before. It has, for example, led to a thorough modernization of the wish list that the White House Historical Association and the curator’s office keep — along with the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, appointed by the president — to guide their purchases of works by American artists not yet represented in the house’s permanent collection. Before the Obama administration the list had not yet made its way, art-historically, up to Abstract Expressionism. It included Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and other lyrical 20th century realists, and, in the work of Arthur Dove, it dipped one toe tentatively into abstraction. (There are no purely abstract works in the collection now, though a Georgia O’Keeffe donated in 1998 plays with it.) “We realized as we came into an administration that had more of an affection for abstract art that we really needed to update our list,” Mr. Allman said. So now that list is longer, about 50 artists, and includes New York School names like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, along with others like Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. The change has prompted Mr. Allman, 58, whose main expertise lies mostly in silver and furniture, to survey the 18thand 19th-century portraits and landscapes on the house’s walls and for the first time to try envisioning something like Franz Kline’s volcanic black-on-white slashes hanging in

their august company. “Do we think those things are going to go together?” he said. “Hmm. Maybe not now, but that’s the nice thing about the kind of place this is that maybe someday it will.” Mr. Allman, whose job requires a phenomenal breadth of historical knowledge, much of it having little to do with art — Was beer ever brewed in the White House? (No records of such.) When did the annual Easter egg roll begin? (The late 19th century.) — concedes that he has never had to focus much on American art made during his lifetime. He recounted an exchange with Michael Smith, the California decorator who advises the Obamas and who helped them pick the art for their living spaces. “Michael said to me, ‘Now you’re a modern art expert,’ ” he recalled. “And I said, ‘How did that happen?’ ” But while there might be gaps in his expertise, many who have worked with him over the years say that Mr. Allman, a boyish-faced man with an unabashedly folksy manner, has mastered a kind of diplomatic dexterity that may be more important to his job. In a historic house that is continuously inhabited — and always under political scrutiny — art decisions are never just aesthetic. When President Obama requested that a portrait of Truman replace one of Dwight D, Eisenhower in the Cabinet Room, he was in essence reversing a Bush administration policy (one that had also been the policy of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush White Houses).

When the first lady changed her mind in 2009 about hanging a painting by the African-American artist Alma W. Thomas in her office, some critics accused her of giving in to conservative commentators who criticized the painting as a fraud because it reworked and paid homage to a famous Matisse collage. The first lady’s office took great pains to say that the removal had nothing to do with politics; the painting just didn’t fit the space where it had been intended to hang. Leslie Greene Bowman, a former member of the White House preservation committee and president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, recounted a reupholstery crisis several years ago involving the red Empire chairs in the second-floor Cross Hall in the White House, a frequent stage for televised events. The historically accurate red chosen for the fabric looked practically nuclear on camera. So Mr. Allman quietly managed to find a

shade that would horrify neither historians nor network producers. “It’s the kind of situation where lots of curators would have put their foot down, but Bill has a sense of humor about these things,” she said. “It was color theory in action.” “These are the kinds of challenges that curators never have to face in a regular museum,” she said. Mr. Allman likes to point out that while it might not be a regular museum, the White House is indeed a museum under federal legislation, Public Law 87-286, passed in 1961. And in 1988 it was even accredited by the American Association of Museums. “Now I think that in the process they conceded that we didn’t meet some of their standards,” he said, smiling. “Most museums have all these complicated long-range plans. Our long-range plan? It’s pretty much just to make it through the next inauguration.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

New York Times Editorials Let Kids Rule the School By SUSAN ENGEL

N a speech last week, President Obama said it was unacceptable that “as many as a quarter of American students are not ﬁnishing high school.” But our current educational approach doesn’t just fail to prepare teenagers for graduation or for college academics; it fails to prepare them, in a profound way, for adult life. We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development. That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself. I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the Independent Project. Their guidance counselor was their adviser, consulting with them when the group ﬂagged in energy or encountered

an obstacle. Though they sought advice from English, math and science teachers, they were responsible for monitoring one another’s work and giving one another feedback. There were no grades, but at the end of the semester, the students wrote evaluations of their classmates. The students also designed their own curriculum, deciding to split their September-to-January term into two halves. During the ﬁrst half, they formulated and then answered questions about the natural and social world, including “Are the plant cells at the bottom of a nearby mountain different than those at the top of the mountain?” and “Why we do we cry?” They not only critiqued one another’s queries, but also the answers they came up with. Along the way, they acquired essential tools of inquiry, like how to devise good methods for gathering various kinds of data. During the second half, the group practiced what they called “the literary and mathematical arts.” They chose eight novels — including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner and Oscar Wilde — to read in eight weeks. That is more than the school’s A.P. English class reads in an entire year. Meanwhile, each of them focused on speciﬁc mathematical topics, from quadratic equations to the numbers behind poker. They sought the help of full-time math tea-

Pay Teachers More By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

rom the debates about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid. That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession. Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did beneﬁt America’s children. These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The ﬁgure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.” Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a

newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law ﬁrm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found. We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my ﬁfth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past. One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the blackwhite achievement gap. Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average. A teacher better than 93 percent of

chers, consulted books and online sources and, whenever possible, taught one another. They also each undertook an “individual endeavor,” learning to play the piano or to cook, writing a novel or making a podcast about domestic violence. At the end of the term, they performed these new skills in front of the entire student body and faculty. Finally, they embarked on a collective endeavor, which they agreed had to have social signiﬁcance. Because they felt the whole experience had been so life-changing, they ended up making a ﬁlm showing how other students could start and run their own schools. The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn’t bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn’t want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, “Yeah, I think that’s what they call learning.” One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: “I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing.” They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the se-

niors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges. The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship. Schools everywhere could initiate an Independent Project. All it takes are serious, committed students and a supportive faculty. These projects might not be exactly alike: students might apportion their time differently, or add another discipline to the mix. But if the Independent Project students are any indication, participants will end up more accomplished, more engaged and more knowledgeable than they would have been taking regular courses. We have tried making the school day longer and blanketing students with standardized tests. But perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education.

other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found. Look, I’m not a fan of teachers’ unions. They used their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers. Teaching work rules are often inflexible, benefits are generous relative to salaries, and it is difficult or impossible to dismiss teachers who are ineffective. But none of this means that teachers are overpaid. And if governments nibble away at pensions and reduce job security, then they must pay more in wages to stay even. Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them. Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found. “We’re not going to get better teachers unless we pay them more,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an education

reform organization. Likewise, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform says, “We’re the first people to say, throw them $100,000, throw them whatever it takes.” Both Ms. Wilkins and Ms. Allen add in the next breath that pay should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation. That makes sense to me. Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in highneeds schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain. Indeed, it makes sense to cut corners elsewhere to boost teacher salaries. Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacherstudent ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers. Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It’s a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of aboveaverage teachers our above-average children deserve.

20 March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS Cross Your Fingers “Western Wind Energy Corp. (“Western Wind”) is pleased to announce that it has signed a 30 MW solar photovoltaic power purchase agreement with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (“PREPA”) for a term of 20 years commencing the Commercial Operations Date. Western Wind also executed a 40-year land lease with the Puerto Rico Land Authority for a (401) acre parcel located within the Municipality of Yabucoa, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico..........Anticipated completed costs of the Yabacoa Solar Project is up to US $150 million, to be financed by project tax equity and project debt.” Not too bad for a company that is profiled by Yahooofinance as having 2 full time employees. I hope that means more jobs for Yabucoans. Hmmm. Ed Martinez, San Juan

Where else? * Where else is Disney World the top choice for honeymooners? * Where else is Harry Potter a favorite among adults, but not among children? * Where else do people vote for politicians they hate? * Where else does bureaucracy operate according to the principles of malignant tumors? * Where else do men and women delight is tormenting each other to the extreme we’re number two on earth in domestic violence? * Where else do police commit more crimes than they solve? * Where else do Christian zealots not know the Ten Commandments? * Where else are dogs sacred, but people expendable? * Where else are children dressed up like fashion models, while parents look like gutter derelicts? * Where else does everybody get the car a full cover, while buying two cars and holding on to one as a spare would be much cheaper because car theft is a virtual certainty? * Where else is it thorough and consistent government policy to keep the population as dumb as possible? * Where else is mooching on another country something to be proud of? * Where else is an epidemic that’s snuffed 25,000 lives unimportant, while this year’s flu has everybody in a panic because it’s killed 25? * Where else does a politician figure he’ll make a better impression in Barrio Obrero wearing a $4,000 suit? * Where else is the flag lowered a month when a soap-opera star dies, but not when a

freedom ﬁghter does? * Where else did people not notice the explosive spread of heterosexual AIDS because they were spooked over the Chupacabras. * Where else is murder tolerable, but pornography not? * Where else is it okay to kill people, but not fetuses? * Where else do politicians recycle the same lies every four years because nobody remembers that long having been lied to? * Where else are prison gangs allowed to control the penitentiaries because they do a better job at it? * Where else do motorists never, ever signal turns, always block pedestrian walks at intersections for no reason at all and honk their horns like maniacs. * Where else does loyalty to political party trump love of country? * Where else do people routinely lie rather that admit they don’t know? * Where else may condoms not be used even to save the lives of thousands? Rocco Sastre, Ponce

Run For Your Life Call me a dreamer, but I posit a physician is a priest. Or he should be. When the human soul is in your care you ordain that nothing else matters, and you take a vow of poverty, the State grants churches exemption from tax responsibility, a rare priviledge. Your body is perhaps not your transcendental instrument of salvation, but certainly it’s its vehicle. When was the last time a soul was born without a body? Not even Jesus attempted that one. Isn’t life itself as consumer ware an obscenity? Not to mention impractical. The inﬁrm hardly ﬁt Adam Smith’s idealization of the market dynamic. If pols here were conscientious leaders rather than unprincipled opportunists, they’d legislate health care into a veritable religion and bring the medical profession within the reach of a whole generation, not just rich kids. Our lives are precious, they’re not plantains and they’re not used cars. Rocco Sastre, Ponce

Abridged History When they teach you history in high school you don’t see the holes in the plot. Nor do your teachers. Britain and France were allies of Poland and when Germany and the Russians invaded Poland they declared war on Germany but not on Russia. It seems nobody noticed the inconsistency.

And after the war Albert Speer, Hitler’s Obras Públicas man, was handed down a 20-year sentence at Nuremberg and Rudolf Hess, der Führer’s executive secretary, who proofread Mein Kampf, got life. Meanwhile, Werner von Braun, the engineer who brainchilded the V-1 cruise missiles and the V-2 guided missiles that killed thousands of allied troops and British and Dutch civilians, emerged from the conflict a veritable hero. All because he was going to help us beat the Russians in ICBMs and to the moon in ‘69. Truman proclaimed the Japs were beat, that they had nothing left to fight with and not much to eat even so we were going in. But Stalin got there first, moving the Red Army swiftly via the Siberian railway. One thing stopped him though. The slaughter of 200,000 civilians, women and children at Hiroshima/Nagasaki terrorized the Emperor into instant surrender. So Japan did not become a people’s republic after all. Then came the whopper. We’d done that to save lives. Even so, the Russians managed to grab the Kuril Islands. And they’re still there. Now why can’t history books tell the truth and why are we, teachers and students, not bright enough to notice how obviously we’re being misled? Rocco Sastre, Ponce

More Politician Rot To Eduardo Bhatia: You’d make us even more af a police state. You want cops to pull public-school kids out of their homes if they’ve been absent a few days running. Just like they do in Dorado, you rant. You surely realize absenteeism and desertion are the symptoms and that the disease is public education itself---teachers never there themselves, when they are, sitting at their desks doing nothing while kids must write endlessly on the board, ﬁlthy johns, drugs, ﬁghts, AIDS. In fact, a kid who refuses to show up at such a place, well, he must be a bright fellow. Or gal. And you send your offspring to private school. don’t you? Lisa Bay, Caparra Heights

The San Juan Weekly Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:

sanjuanweeklypr@gmail.com Telephones: (787) 743-3346 · (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 · Fax (787) 743-5500

The San Juan Weeekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

21 EDUCATION

Loan Study on Students Goes Beyond Default Rates By TAMAR LEWIN

or each student who defaults on a loan, at least two more fall behind in payments on their student debt, a new study has found. The Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization, said in a report that two out of five student loan borrowers were delinquent at some point in the first five years after they started repaying their loans. Almost a quarter of the borrowers used an option to postpone payments to avoid delinquency. The institute said the goal of its study was to develop a fuller picture of the debt burden that students face by compiling data on students who have trouble repaying their loans, but do not

default. “We want to get beyond the dichotomy of people who default on their loans and everyone else,” Alisa Cunningham, the institute’s vice president for research and programs, said. The study, based on data from ﬁve of the nation’s largest student-loan agencies, found that only 37 percent of student borrowers who started repaying their loans in 2005 were able to fully pay them back on time. And that percentage is probably decreasing, given the high unemployment rate of recent years, Ms. Cunningham said. With tuition rising more rapidly than inﬂation or family incomes, student borrowing has been growing. College seniors who graduated in 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student loan debt, up 6 percent from

2008, according to an annual report from the Project on Student Debt. Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of Finaid.org and Fastweb.com, estimates total student debt at about $896 billion — more than the nation’s creditcard debt. Meanwhile, default rates have been rising, to 7 percent, for the 2008 fiscal year, the latest period for which data is available, from 5.2 percent in the 2006 fiscal year. Students who did not graduate were more likely to become deliquent or default. The new numbers are likely to be used in the Congressional debate over for-profit colleges. Those colleges’ students make up about 12 percent of the nation’s college enrollment, and get a quarter of all federal stu-

dent aid — but they account for almost half of all students who default. The Department of Education has proposed regulations that would cut off federal aid to programs whose students graduate with high debt-to-income ratios. But an intense lobbying effort is under way to prevent those regulations from being put into effect. According to the new study, the majority of student borrowers at both two- and fouryear for-proﬁt schools went into deliquency or default. The majority of student borrowers at community colleges also went into delinquency or default. But because community college tuition is far lower than that of for-proﬁt institutions, most communitycollege students do not take out loans.

Kitchen

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Carrots and Lentils in Olive Oil By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

his is an adaptation of a Turkish recipe, a sweet and savory combination of lentils, onions and carrots that can be served hot or at room temperature, as a main dish or a side. 1 cup brown, green or black lentils, rinsed 3 cups water 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 onion, halved lengthwise, then sliced thin across the grain 1 teaspoon coriander seeds 4 garlic cloves, minced 1 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and sliced thin (about 4 cups sliced) 1 tablespoon tomato paste dissolved in 1 cup water 1 teaspoon sugar Salt to taste 1/2 cup chopped fresh mint 1. Combine the lentils with 3 cups water in a saucepan, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Set

a strainer over a bowl, and drain. 2. Heat the oil over medium heat in a heavy casserole or skillet. Add the onion and coriander seeds. Cook, stirring, until the onion is tender, about ďŹ ve minutes. Add the garlic and carrots and salt to taste. Cook, stirring, for two to three minutes until the carrots begin to soften. Stir in the dissolved tomato paste, sugar and lentils. Add 1 to 1 1/2 cups of the cooking water from the lentils (enough to cover the lentils), salt to taste and half the mint. Bring to a simmer, and simmer uncovered for 15 to 20 minutes until the lentils are tender and much of the liquid has evaporated. Taste and adjust salt. Remove from the heat, sprinkle on the remaining mint and serve, or allow to cool and serve at room temperature with cooked whole grains, like bulgur or quinoa. Yield: Serves four to six. Advance preparation: This will keep for three to four days in the refrigerator. The dish is delicious served at room temperature.

Nutritional information per serving (four servings): 380 calories; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 10 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 51 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams dietary ďŹ ber; 140 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 15 grams protein

Nutritional information per serving (six servings): 253 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 1 gram polyunsaturated fat; 7 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 12 grams dietary ďŹ ber; 93 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 10 grams protein

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Kitchen

Whole Grain Goodness, Straight From the Oven By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

he mufﬁns available in most coffee shops and cafes are like oversize, unfrosted cupcakes: too sweet and too big. But mufﬁns don’t have to be cloying — a bit of natural sweetener is all that’s required to make them taste like a treat. And they don’t have to be calorie-laden confections.

This week, you’ll find it’s possible to make muffins with a number of nutritious ingredients, particularly whole grains. Muffins made with buckwheat or cornmeal offer great taste and nourishment — without the feeling that you’re chewing on rocks. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a baker, take a stab at this week’s recipes. They’re easy and come together quickly.

Carrot Cake Muffins

Buckwheat and Amaranth Muffins

f all the mufﬁns I make, these have the most distinctive ﬂavor.

3/4 cup whole-wheat flour 3/4 cup buckwheat flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup amaranth flour (you can make this by blending the amaranth in a spice mill; it does not have to be finely ground) 2 eggs 1/3 cup honey 1 1/2 cups buttermilk 1/3 cup canola oil 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup blackberries tossed with 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour 1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees with the rack moved to the upper third of the oven. Oil or butter muffin tins. Sift together the whole-wheat and buckwheat flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir in the amaranth flour.

2. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, honey, buttermilk, canola oil and vanilla extract. Using a whisk or a spatula, stir in the dry ingredients. Mix until well combined, but do not beat -- a few lumps are fine, but make sure there is no flour at the bottom of the bowl. Fold in the blackberries. 3. Spoon into muffin cups, filling them to just below the top (about 4/5 full). Place in the oven, and bake 25 minutes until lightly browned and well risen. Yield: Twelve muffins or so, depending on the size of your tins. Advance preparation: These muffins keep for a couple of days out of the refrigerator, for a few more days in the refrigerator, and for a few months in the freezer. Nutritional information per muffin (based on a 12-muffin yield): 182 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams monounsaturated fat; 32 milligrams cholesterol; 24 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 314 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

hese spicy whole grain muffins are just sweet enough, unlike most cloying carrot cakes. And these are packed with carrots. 2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1/2 cup raw brown (turbinado) sugar 1/3 cup canola oil 1 1/3 cups buttermilk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2/3 cup golden raisins tossed with 1 teaspoon unbleached all purpose flour, or 2/3 cup chopped pecans 1 1/2 cups grated carrots 1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees with the rack in the upper third of the space. Oil or butter muffin tins.

2. Sift together the whole wheat pastry flour, baking powder, baking soda spices and salt. 3. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, sugar, oil, buttermilk and vanilla. Using a whisk or a spatula, stir in the dry ingredients and mix until well combined. Do not beat; a few lumps are fine, but make sure there is no flour at the bottom of the bowl. Fold in the raisins or pecans and the carrots. 4. Spoon into muffin cups, filling them to just below the top (about 4/5th full). Place in the oven, and bake 25 minutes until lightly browned and well risen. Yield: Twelve muffins, depending on the size of the muffin tins. Advance preparation: These keep for a couple of days out of the refrigerator, for a few more days in the refrigerator and for a few months in the freezer. Nutritional information per muffin (based on 12-muffin yield): 239 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams monounsaturated fat; 32 milligrams cholesterol; 38 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 323 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

Kitchen

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Steel-Cut Oatmeal and Blueberry Muffins By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

ake more oatmeal than you need for breakfast, and use the leftovers in these moist, nourishing muffins. 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour 1 cup all-purpose flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 1/3 cups buttermilk 1/4 cup canola oil 1/4 cup maple syrup 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup cooked steel-cut oats 1 cup blueberries tossed with 1 teaspoon flour 1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees with the rack positioned in the upper third. Oil, spray or butter 12 muffin cups. 2. Sift together the flours, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In another bowl, beat together the eggs, buttermilk (or yogurt and milk), canola oil, maple syrup and vanilla. Quickly stir in the dry ingredients with a whisk or a spatula. Do not beat, just mix, stirring up from the bottom until you can no longer see flour. A few lumps are okay. Fold in the cooked oats and the blueberries. 3. Spoon into muffin cups, filling them to just below the top. Place in the the oven, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes until nicely browned. Remove from the heat, and allow to cool for 10 minutes before unmolding. Cool on a rack, or serve warm. Yield: Twelve muffins, depending on the size of your muffin tins. Advance preparation: These keep for a couple of days out of the refrigerator, for a few more days in the refrigerator, and for a few months in the freezer.

Nutritional information per mufﬁn (based on 12 mufﬁn yield): 197 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams

monounsaturated fat; 32 milligrams cholesterol; 30 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary ﬁber; 310 milligrams sodium; 6 grams protein

Savory Cornbread Muffins With Jalapeños and Corn By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

ornbread bakes nicely in a mufﬁn tin. I’ve added corn, chiles and cheese to this cornbread. With soup and a salad, it makes a great lunchtime mufﬁn. 1 cup yellow cornmeal, preferably organic stone ground

1 cup whole wheat ﬂour 3/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 tablespoon ﬁnely chopped fresh sage or 1 teaspoon rubbed sage 2 eggs 1 1/2 cups buttermilk 1/4 cup canola oil

1 tablespoon honey 1 cup corn kernels 2 tablespoons minced jalapeños 1/2 cup grated cheddar or Monterey Jack (optional) 1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees with the rack positioned in the upper third. Oil or butter muffin tins. 2. Place the cornmeal in a bowl, and sift in the flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda. Stir in the sage. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, buttermilk, oil and honey. Whisk or stir the cornmeal mixture into the liquid mixture. Do not beat; a few lumps are fine, but make sure there is no flour at the bottom of the bowl. Fold in the corn kernels, minced jalapeño and optional cheese. 3. Spoon into muffin cups, filling them to just below the top (about 4/5th full). Place in the oven, and bake 20 to 25 minutes until lightly browned and well risen. Yield: Twelve muffins, depending on the size of your muffin tins. Advance preparation: These keep for a couple of days out of the refrigerator, for a few more days in the refrigerator, and for a few months in the freezer. Nutritional information per muffin (based on 12-muffin yield; does not include optional cheese): 161 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 3 grams monounsaturated fat; 32 milligrams cholesterol; 23 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 362 milligrams sodium; 5 grams protein

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Shaka, Zulu

A King With Incredible Brutality

man with incredible vision Shaka, Zulu King. The estimated year of Shaka’s birth was 1785. He was born to Nandi, daughter of a previous chief of the eLangeni tribe. His father, Senzangakona was the chief of the then small Zulu tribe. The marriage of his parents, after his conception, did not last, and although Nandi returned to her tribe, she was made to feel unwelcome. She returned to the

Zulus, who tolerated her, but was nevertheless not treated well. Shaka was teased and ridiculed and made to feel like an outsider. He understandably grew up to be bitter and angry, hating his tormentors and listening carefully to his mother’s tales about his royal blood on both sides. He was a young man in his early twenties when he became a warrior for the Mtetwa tribe, fighting for his people and for six years he proved to be an outstanding soldier. He firmly believed in being the conqueror, never the conquered and would hate it when another, weaker tribe surrendered before war could take place. He created a dangerous weapon called the iKlwa. Dingiswayo, the chief of the Mtetwas saw Shaka’s potential and decided to train him as a future chief of the Zulus, a tribe that the Mtetwas had conquered during Shaka’s first battle. Dingiswayo reasoned that Shaka and the Zulus would act as a buffer against invading forces. Shaka rose through the ranks of the Mtetwa army and soon became the leader. He carefully and meticulously planned and formatted brilliant battle strategies and altered, where needed, the weapons used during battle. When the Zulu chief, Senzangakona died, Shaka became the new chief.

The era of Shaka, Zulu king had started. Shaka started to build up a mighty army of Zulu warriors. He demanded total loyalty and obedience. Death was the reward for those who hesitated in carrying out his commands. He drilled his warriors, ﬁne-tuning them into a slick warring machine. He devised new, unheard of till then, battle tactics. He built up

divisions within his army - certain divisions concentrated on making weapons. He was one of the warriors, living as they did without the trappings that he was entitled to as a chief. Shaka, king of the Zulus and his warriors, called “impis” were invincible. He believed in total anni

Continues on page 26

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Comes from page 25 hilation and only spared those tribes and people who had shown kindness to Nandi, his mother and the young Shaka. He never married but had over 1200 concubines. In 1817 Shaka and Dingiswayo decided to move in the Southeast of Africa. Dingiswayo died and the different tribes warred against each other to dominate the Mtetwa Empire. Shaka Zulu won the battles and was king of all the territories in Natal and Southeast Africa in 1820. The white man arrived in Natal in 1824 and immediately sought out Shaka who held them in high regard - they had treated him medically after an enemy had stabbed him. To show his gratitude he signed over land for next to nothing - the Europeans had tricked him, although he was unaware of it. They helped him conquer other parts of South Africa. It was during a hunt with the white man that he received a message that Nandi, his mother, was dying.

Shaka was demented with grief and ordered a few thousand people executed in memory of his mother. Somehow 7000 people were slaughtered. He furthermore, demanded that his tribe go on a fast to commemorate Nandi and only after three months, when many were near to death, did he lift the fast. Madness seemed to take hold of

Shaka and his impis started to lose ground. On 22 September 1828 Shaka, king of the Zulus was murdered by two half brothers on his father side. The one half brother was Dingaan

who immediately claimed kingship. Shaka the Zulu king had a mystic about him that still lives on today. His brilliant battle tactics were revolutionary for those days and his thirst for revenge frightening. He is one of the most famous South Africans ever to have lived.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Target in Libya Is Clear; Intent Is Not

By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER

ll the deliberations over what military action to take against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya have failed to answer the most fundamental question: Is it merely to protect the Libyan population from the government, or is it intended to fulfill President Obama’s objective declared two weeks ago that Colonel Qaddafi “must leave”? “We are not going after Qaddafi,” Vice Adm. William E. Gortney said at the Pentagon on Sunday afternoon, even as reports from Tripoli described a loud explosion and billowing smoke at the Qaddafi compound, suggesting that military units or a command post there might have been a target. That was a vivid sign that whatever their declared intentions, the military strikes by Britain, France and the United States that began on Saturday may threaten the government itself. But there is also the risk that Colonel Qaddafi may not be dislodged by air power alone. That leaves the question of whether the United States and its allies are committing enough resources to win the fight. The delay in starting the onslaught complicated the path toward its end. It took 22 days from the time that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces first opened fire on protesters in Libya for the United Nations-backed military assault to begin. By the time American cruise missiles reached Libyan targets on Saturday, Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, reinforced by mercenaries, had pushed Libyan rebels from the edge of Tripoli in western Libya all the way back to Benghazi in the east, and were on the verge of overtaking that last rebel stronghold. But the strike, when it came, landed hard, turning the government force outside Benghazi into wreckage and encoura-

ging the rebels to regroup. “I hope it’s not too late,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on the CNN program “State of the Union” Sunday. “Obviously, if we had taken this step a couple of weeks ago, a no-fly zone would probably have been enough,” he said. “Now a no-fly zone is not enough. There needs to be other efforts made.” Experts on the region, and even a few administration officials, acknowledge that the job of getting Colonel Qaddafi to step down might have been easier if the international assault had begun when rebels seemed to have held the upper hand, rather than when the anti-Qaddafi rebellion was compressed into Benghazi and its environs. For Mr. Obama, who has explicitly said that Colonel Qaddafi has lost any right to govern, the conundrum is that the United Nations mandate does not authorize his removal. So Mr. Obama now says the goal is limited: to use force to protect the Libyan people and allow humanitarian aid to get through. On Sunday, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC that regime change was not the point of the military assault. “Certainly the goals of this campaign right now, again, are limited, and it isn’t about seeing him go,” Admiral Mullen said, referring to Colonel Qaddafi. “It’s about supporting the United Nations resolution, which talked to limiting or eliminating his ability to kill his own people as well as support the humanitarian effort.” Asked if the military mission could be accomplished and Colonel Qaddafi still remain in power, Admiral Mullen replied: “That’s certainly potentially one outcome.” At the same time, he said, the allies would like the government forces to return to their garrisons, but he said no-

thing about what the rebels should do under the alliance’s protective umbrella. House Republican leaders were quick to point out on Sunday that the objective of the operation was being left unclear. “The president is the commander in chief, but the administration has a responsibility to define for the American people, the Congress, and our troops what the mission in Libya is, better explain what America’s role is in achieving that mission, and make clear how it will be accomplished,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, asked: “Are our goals aimed at protecting civilians in Libya, or the removal of Muammar Qaddafi from power? In either case, to what extent and for how long will military resources be utilized?” Even some allies, including members of the Arab League, appeared to be wondering that. Whatever the overt objectives, the damage to Colonel Qaddafi’s grip on power is already significant. The backbone of his air defense network is in ruins, his air force is effectively grounded, his ground forces in the east were pummeled, and Admiral Mullen said his logistical supply lines were about to be cut. And while Colonel Qaddafi was not a target, Admiral Gortney said, “If he happens to be in a place, if he’s inspecting a surface-to-air missile site, and we don’t have any idea if he’s there or not, then. ...” He did not complete the sentence. If Colonel Qaddafi manages to remain in power, that will leave the United States and the United Nations-backed mission looking like a failure, foreign policy experts from all sides of the political spec-

trum said. “Barack Obama told Qaddafi to go; if Qaddafi doesn’t go, America will look diminished in the eyes of the world,” said Steven Clemons, senior fellow at the New American Foundation. Stephen J. Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush and an architect of the 2003 Iraq invasion, said at a forum in San Francisco on Saturday that he feared the limited approach “could set us up for failure.” “I don’t quite see what is behind the strategy in Libya,” Mr. Hadley said, speaking while a small clutch of protesters — mostly yelling chants about Iraq — were on the streets below. “We are now in a situation where we have a mismatch of what the president said we want to do as a nation, what the U.N. Security Council authorizes, and what we are actually ready to commit in resources.” Mr. Obama, he said, “wants Qaddafi to go, but the U.N. Security Council resolution says we want to prevent a humanitarian disaster and attacks on civilians, and in terms of resources, the U.S. has been very reluctant to get involved militarily.” Even many of Mr. Obama’s allies say that had the administration acted earlier — say 10 days earlier, before forces loyal to the Libyan leader took back so much territory — the process of ousting him would have been much easier. Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, among others, urged a quicker response. The administration argued that its hands had been tied until the Arab League and the Security Council acted — and that it is not too late now. Supported by the coalition air strikes, administration officials say, the rebel forces will most likely have the ability to regain momentum.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Allies Target Qaddaﬁ’s Ground Forces as Libyan Rebels Regroup By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ELISABETH BUMILLER

merican and European militaries intensified their barrage of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces by air and sea on Sunday, as the mission moved beyond taking away his ability to use Libyan airspace, to obliterating his hold on the ground as well, allied officials said. Rebel forces, battered and routed by loyalist fighters just the day before, began to regroup in the east as allied warplanes destroyed dozens of government armored vehicles near the rebel capital, Benghazi, leaving a field of burned wreckage along the coastal road to the city. By nightfall, the rebels had pressed almost 40 miles back west toward the strategic crossroads city of Ajdabiya, witnesses and rebel forces said. And they seemed to consolidate control of Benghazi despite heavy fighting there against loyalist forces on Saturday. There was evidence, too, that the allies were striking more targets in and around Tripoli, the capital. More explosions could be seen or heard near the city center, where an international press corps was kept under tight security constraints. Recurring bursts of antiaircraft guns and a prolonged shower of tracers arced over the capital on Sunday night. A day after a summit meeting in Paris set the military operation in motion, a vital Arab participant in the agreement expressed unhappiness with the way the strikes were unfolding. The former chairman of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, told Egyptian state media that he was calling for an emergency league meeting to discuss the situation in the Arab world, and particularly Libya. “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” he said, referring to Libyan government claims that allied bombardment had killed dozens of civilians. But reporters seeking proof have been offered none to account for even part of that number. Around 10 p.m., an explosion thundered from Colonel Qaddafi’s personal compound in Tripoli, and a column of smoke rose above it, suggesting that the allied forces had struck either his residence there or the nearby barracks of his personal guards. A group of foreign journalists were bused to the compound early on Monday morning and shown a building partially destroyed by a bomb. But those who attended reported no evidence of casualties. Asked about the explosion, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney said in a Washington news conference that the United States was not trying to kill the Libyan leader. “At this particular point I can guarantee that he’s not on a targeting list,” he said, saying that the United States military was working to weaken his military capacity rather than removing him.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, also focused on those goals, talking about how allied forces had grounded Colonel Qaddafi’s aircraft and worked to protect civilians — both objectives stated by the United Nations Security Council in approving the military mission. “We hit a lot of targets, focused on his command and control, focused on his air defense, and actually attacked some of his forces on the ground in the vicinity of Benghazi,” Admiral Mullen told Fox News. But the campaign may be balancing multiple goals. President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and British and French leaders have also talked of a broader policy objective — that Colonel Qaddafi must leave power. In his comments on Sunday, Admiral Mullen suggested that objective lay outside the bounds of the military campaign, saying on NBC that Colonel Qaddafi’s remaining in power after the United States military accomplished its mission was “potentially one outcome.” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, on a flight to Russia, said he was concerned about that possible result. Though he praised the mission’s “successful start,” he cautioned that a partitioned Libya, with rebels holding the east and Colonel Qaddafi the West, could bring trouble. “I think all countries probably would like to see Libya remain a unified state,” Mr. Gates said. “Having states in the region begin to break up because of internal differences is a formula for real instability in the future.” Gen. Carter F. Ham, who as the head of the United States Africa Command is overseeing the operation, said in an e-mail on Sunday that “the initial strikes have had, generally, the effects we sought. Fixed air defense sites, particularly the longer-range systems, appear to no longer be operating.” He said that “some ground forces in the vicinity of Bengazi were destroyed. Some appear to be at least static, if not moving back south and west.” He said there were few signs of fighting in the city itself. The general praised the coordination with Britain, France and other coalition partners,

and said he expected additional countries to join the operation “in the coming days.” The American and French militaries both said that Qatar would join the military operation, which would be the first Arab military force to explicitly sign on. But there were no details on what role the Qatar forces would take. The Americans, working with the British, French and others, flew a wider array of missions than the day before, when Navy cruise missile barrages were their main weapons. They deployed B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets and Harrier attack jets flown by the Marine Corps striking at Libyan ground forces, air defenses and airfields. Navy electronic warplanes, EA-18G Growlers, jammed Libyan radar and communications. British pilots flew many of the bombing missions, and French, British and American planes all conducted ground attacks near Benghazi, American commanders said. Admiral Gortney said that allied strikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had been “very effective.” But he warned that coalition forces had not hit Libyan mobile surface-to-air missile batteries and that shoulder-launched missiles, called ManPortable Air-Defense Systems, or Manpads, also remained. “There are quite a few of those out there,” he said. Near Misurata, the last major Western city held by the rebels, B-2 bombers destroyed aircraft shelters at an airfield, the admiral said. And a rebel spokesman within the besieged city, giving his name as Muhammad, said allied airstrikes had destroyed a military convoy coming to reinforce the troops encircling the city. But he said that Saturday night’s strikes had done little to stop the Qaddafi forces from shelling the city and its port, blowing up two power stations. A rebel who said he was a doctor said seven had died and the city was without water or power. Still, he remained confident that the new help could help turn the momentum toward his fighters. “If the international community takes care of the supply lines,”

he said, “I assurre you that we can take care of whatever is inside of Misurata.” “Tripoli will rise up,” he predicted. “If they see his power bases crumbling I am sure they will rise up. We want the international community to go all the way to bomb this bloody dictator into submission.” Earlier Sunday, Colonel Qaddafi delivered a fresh and defiant tirade against the allied military action, pledging retaliation and saying his forces would fight a long war to victory. He was speaking in a telephone call to state television, which, apparently for security reasons, did not disclose his whereabouts. The Libyan leader has not been seen in public since the United States and European countries began their strikes. “We will fight you if you continue your attacks on us,” Mr. Qaddafi said. “Those who are on the land will win the battle,” he declared, warning without explanation that “oil will not be left to the United States, France and Britain.” Libyan officials and state television have said that dozens of Libyan civilians were killed in the air attacks. But an Indonesian newscaster, Andini Effendi, reported Sunday that she was able to visit two Tripoli hospitals after the airstrikes early on Sunday and found no influx of casualties, only empty ambulances. State television did not show any scenes of destruction, and Libyan officials declined to show any to visiting journalists either. Instead, they promised Sunday to bring foreign journalists to a funeral for civilians killed in the attacks. But the funeral turned out to be more of a pro-Qaddafi political rally, and the true number of dead remained a mystery. On the way to the funeral a bus full of journalists was parked waiting for about 25 minutes near a waterfront cemetery, until the arrival of several truckloads of hundreds of Qaddafi supporters waving green flags and wearing green headscarves. Then, when journalists entered the cemetery amid gunfire in the air and pro-Qaddafi chants, they found three freshly covered graves and 24 empty cinderblock holes. One of the recent burials was said to have died of causes unrelated to the attacks. Another was said to belong to a 3-monthold baby girl, Siham Atabeeb, who was said to have been killed when a bomb hit her home. But neither of her parents nor any siblings were there, and people who said they were more distant relatives told conflicting stories about whether her mother was also wounded and whether she had any siblings. People around the other fresh grave also said they were relatives, but people gave conflicting descriptions of the deceased — he was 25 or 29; he was killed in his home, driving by a military base, or walking in a neighborhood near the Qaddafi compound; he was a taxi driver, unemployed, or in some other profession.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Japan Faces Potential Nuclear Disaster as Radiation Levels Rise

By HIROKO TABUCHI, DAVID E. SANGER and KEITH BRADSHER

apan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe after an explosion damaged the vessel containing the nuclear core at one reactor and a fire at another spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to the statements of Japanese government and industry officials. In a brief address to the nation at 11 a.m. Tokyo time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm, but warned that radiation had already spread from the crippled reactors and there was “a very high risk” of further leakage. Fortunately, the prevailing winds were sweeping most of the plume of radioactivity out into the Pacific Ocean, rather than over populated areas. The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another — the third in four days at the plant — already made the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago. It diminished hopes earlier in the day that engineers at the plant, working at tremendous personal risk, might yet succeed in cooling down the most damaged of the reactors, No. 2, by pumping in sea water. According to government statements, most of the 800 workers at the plant had been withdrawn, leaving 50 or so workers in a desperate effort to keep the cores of three stricken reactors cooled with seawater pumped by firefighting equipment, while the same crews battled to put out the fire at the No. 4 reactor, which they claimed to have done just after noon on Tuesday. That fourth reactor had been turned off and was under refurbishment for months before the earthquake and tsunami hit the plant on Friday. But the plant contains spent fuel rods that were removed from the reactor, and experts guessed that the pool containing those rods had run dry, allowing the rods to overheat and catch fire. That is almost as dangerous as the fuel in working reactors melting down, becau-

se the spent fuel can also spew radioactivity into the atmosphere. After an emergency cabinet meeting, the Japanese government told people living with 30 kilometers, about 18 miles, of the Daiichi plant to stay indoors, keep their windows closed and stop using air conditioning. Mr. Kan, whose government was extraordinarily weak before the sequence of calamities struck the nation, told the Japanese people that “although this incident is of great concern, I ask you to react very calmly.” And in fact, there seemed to be little panic, but huge apprehension in a country where the drift of radioactivity brings up memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the haunting images of post-war Japan. The two critical questions over the next day or so are how much radioactive material is spewed into the atmosphere, and where the winds carry it. Readings reported on Tuesday showed a spike of radioactivity around the plant that made the leakage categorically worse than in had been, with radiation levels measured at one point as high as 400 millisieverts an hour. Even 7 minutes of exposure at that level will reach the maximum annual dose that a worker at an American nuclear plant is allowed. And exposure for 75 minutes would likely lead to acute radiation sickness. The extent of the public health risk depends on how long such elevated levels persist — they may have declined after the fire at No. 4 reactor was extinguished — as well as how far and fast the radioactive materials spread, and whether the limited evacuation plan announced by the government proves sufficient. The succession of problems at Daiichi was initially difficult to interpret — with confusion compounded by incomplete and inconsistent information provided by government officials and executives of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power. But industry executives in close contact with officials in Japan expressed extreme concern that the authorities were close to losing control over the fuel melting that has been ongoing in three reactors at Daii-

chi, especially at the crippled No. 2 reactor where the containment has been damaged. Tokyo Electric Power said that after the explosion at the No. 2 reactor, pressure had dropped in the “suppression pool” — a section at the bottom of the reactor that converts steam to water and is part of the critical function of keeping the nuclear fuel protected. After that occurred, radiation levels outside No. 2 were reported to have risen sharply. “We are on the brink. We are now facing the worst-case scenario,” said Hiroaki Koide, a senior reactor engineering specialist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. “We can assume that the containment vessel at Reactor No. 2 is already breached. If there is heavy melting inside the reactor, large amounts of radiation will most definitely be released.” Another executive said the chain of events at Daiichi suggested that it would be difficult to maintain emergency seawater cooling operations for an extended period if the containment vessel at one reactor had been compromised because radiation levels could threaten the health of workers nearby. If all workers do in fact leave the plant, the nuclear fuel in all three reactors is likely to melt down, which would lead to wholesale releases of radioactive material — by far the largest accident of its kind since the Chernobyl. Even if a full meltdown is averted, Japanese officials have been facing unpalatable options. One was to continue flooding the reactors and venting the resulting steam, while hoping that the prevailing winds did not turn south toward Tokyo or west, across northern Japan to the Korean Peninsula. The other was to hope that the worst of the overheating was over, and that with the passage of a few more days the nuclear cores would cool enough to essentially entomb the radioactivity inside the plants, which clearly will never be used again. Both approaches carried huge risks.

While Japanese officials made no comparisons to past accidents, the release of an unknown quantity of radioactive gases and particles — all signs that the reactor cores were damaged from at least partial melting of fuel — added considerable tension to the effort to cool the reactors. “It’s way past Three Mile Island already,” said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. “The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.” The sharp deterioration came after a frantic day and night of rescue efforts focused largely on the No. 2 reactor. There, a malfunctioning valve prevented workers from manually venting the containment vessel to release pressure and allow fresh seawater to be injected into it. That meant that the extraordinary remedy emergency workers had jury-rigged to keep the nuclear fuel from overheating no longer worked. As a result, the nuclear fuel in that reactor was exposed for many hours, increasing the risk of a breach of the container vessel and more dangerous emissions of radioactive particles. By morning, Tokyo Electric Power said that it had fixed the valve and resumed seawater injections, but that it had detected possible leaks in the containment vessel that prevented water from fully covering the fuel rods. Then an explosion hit that reactor. After a series of conflicting reports about what level of damage was inflicted on the reactor after that blast, Mr. Edano said, “there is a very high probability that a portion of the container vessel was damaged.” The steel container vessels that protect nuclear fuel in reactors are considered crucial to maintain the integrity of the reactor and the safety of the fuel. Mr. Edano, however, said that the level of leaking at the No. 2 reactor remained small, raising the prospect that the container was sufficiently intact to protect the nuclear fuel inside.

The Japanese government told people living within 20 kilometers of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to evacuate, and people within 30 kilometers to stay indoors.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Japan’s Strict Building Codes Saved Lives

By JAMES GLANZ and NORIMITSU ONISHI

idden inside the skeletons of highrise towers, extra steel bracing, giant rubber pads and embedded hydraulic shock absorbers make modern Japanese buildings among the sturdiest in the world during a major earthquake. And all along the Japanese coast, tsunami warning signs, towering seawalls and well-marked escape routes offer some protection from walls of water. These precautions, along with earthquake and tsunami drills that are routine for every Japanese citizen, show why Japan is the best-prepared country in the world for the twin disasters of earthquake and tsunami — practices that undoubtedly saved lives, though the final death toll is unknown. In Japan, where earthquakes are far more common than they are in the United States, the building codes have long been much more stringent on specific matters like how much a building may sway during a quake. After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, which killed about 6,000 people and injured 26,000, Japan also put enormous resources into new research on protecting structures, as well as retrofitting the country’s older and more vulnerable structures. Japan has spent billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against earthquakes and tsunamis. Japan has gone much further than the United States in outfitting new buildings with advanced devices called base isolation pads and energy dissipation units to dampen the ground’s shaking during an earthquake. The isolation devices are essentially giant rubber-and-steel pads that are installed at the very bottom of the excavation for a building, which then simply sits on

top of the pads. The dissipation units are built into a building’s structural skeleton. They are hydraulic cylinders that elongate and contract as the building sways, sapping the motion of energy. Of course, nothing is entirely foolproof. Structural engineers monitoring the events from a distance cautioned that the death toll was likely to rise as more information became available. Dr. Jack Moehle, a structural engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, said that video of the disaster seemed to show that some older buildings had indeed collapsed. The country that gave the world the word tsunami, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, built concrete seawalls in many communities, some as high as 40 feet, which amounted to its ﬁrst line of defense against the water. In some coastal towns, in the event of an earthquake, networks of sensors are set up to set off alarms in individual residences and automatically shut down ﬂoodgates to prevent waves from surging upriver. Critics of the seawalls say they are eyesores and bad for the environment. The seawalls, they say, can instill a false sense of security among coastal residents and discourage them from participating in regular evacuation drills. Moreover, by literally cutting residents’ visibility of the ocean, the seawalls reduce their ability to understand the sea by observing wave patterns, critics say. Waves from Friday’s tsunami spilled over some seawalls in the affected areas. “The tsunami roared over embankments in Sendai city, washing cars, houses and farm equipment inland before reversing directions and carrying them out to sea,” according to a statement by a Japanese engineer, Kit Miyamoto, circulated by the American Society of Civil Engineers. “Flames shot from some of the houses, probably because of burst gas pipes.”

But Japan’s “massive public education program” could in the end have saved the most lives, said Rich Eisner, a retired tsunami preparedness expert who was attending a conference on the topic at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., on Friday. In one town, Ofunato, which was struck by a major tsunami in 1960, dozens of signs in Japanese and English mark escape routes, and emergency sirens are tested three times a day, Mr. Eisner said. Initial reports from Ofunato on Friday suggested that hundreds of homes had been swept away; the death toll was not yet known. But Matthew Francis of URS Corporation and a member of the civil engineering society’s tsunami subcommittee, said that education may have been the critical factor. “For a trained population, a matter of 5 or 10 minutes is all you may need to get to high ground,” Mr. Francis said. That would be in contrast to the much less experienced Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast. Reports in the Japanese news media indicate that people originally listed as missing in remote areas have been turning up in schools and community centers, suggesting that tsunami education and evacuation drills were indeed effective. Unlike Haiti, where shoddy construction vastly increased the death toll last year, or China, where failure to follow construction codes worsened the death toll in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Japan enforces some of the world’s most stringent building codes. Japanese buildings tend to be much stiffer and stouter than similar structures in earthquake-prone areas in California as well, said Mr. Moehle, the Berkeley engineer: Japan’s building code allows for roughly half as much sway back and forth at the top of a high rise during a major quake. The difference, Mr. Moehle said, comes about because the United States standard is focused on preventing collapse, while in Japan — with many more earthquakes — the goal is to prevent any major damage to the buildings because of the swaying. New apartment and office developments in Japan flaunt their seismic resistance as a marketing technique, a fact that has accelerated the use of the latest technologies, said Ronald O. Hamburger, a structural engineer in the civil engineering society and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a San Francisco engineering firm. “You can increase the rents by providing a sort of warranty — ‘If you locate here you’ll be safe,’ ” Mr. Hamburger said. Although many older buildings in Japan have been retrofitted with new bra-

cing since the Kobe quake, there are many rural residences of older construction that are made of very light wood that would be highly vulnerable to damage. The fate of many of those residences is still unknown. Mr. Miyamoto, the Japanese engineer, described a nation in chaos as the quake also damaged or disabled many elements of the transportation system. He said that he and his family were on a train near the Ikebukuro station when the earthquake struck. Writing at 1:30 a.m., he said that “we are still not far from where the train stopped.” “Japan Railway actually closed down the stations and sent out all commuters into the cold night,” he said. “They announced that they are concerned about structural safety. Continuous aftershocks make me feel like car sickness as my family and I walk on the train tracks.”

San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

FASHION & BEAUTY

Picking Winners in the Horse Race showed them, with soft black skirts and black jodhpur boots. But I my favorites in the collection were the black georgette dresses with wide leather cuffs and lapels, an exposed zipper up the front. Mr. Watanabe beefed up the georgette by adding subtle panels of black wool felt. I loved the slight 1930s attitude in the shapes. Those are the looks that remained on my mental short list for the duration of the shows. I might mention a few others: the glamorous day dresses and coats at Miu Miu (not just for young customers, either); Balenciaga’s draped front silk-print dresses; Fendi’s chic ver-

By CATHY HORYN

t helps to see a lot of clothes over the years to know the ones you like in a new season. That’s what I say when people ask how editors and writers can remember what they have seen over nearly a month of shows. I essentially keep two mental lists, one for the clothes I personally love and the other for looks I think will be relevant. Inevitably, there is some overlap. For this, I want to talk about the things I loved from the fall collections, my favorite individual looks from New

York, Milan and Paris. And I want to limit the list to three or four picks because it’s more interesting that way. The Cathy Challenge! I anticipate that some of you will be disappointed by my choices and will say, head-scratching: “Is that it? Is that the best you could pick from all those incredible shows?” Yup. And now tell me your favorites. The first entry on the mental list was Proenza Schouler’s wool jacquard trousers based on the patterns and colors of Native American blankets. I liked this collection, over all, but I thought the pants offered a completely different look — great silhouette with an oversize black jacket or half-tucked Western-style suede shirt, an update of a traditional pattern that reflects the digital age. The designers, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, struck the right balance between simple design and complex fabrics. I also loved the ski looks at Jil Sander. After Raf Simons’s couture-influenced spring show in Milan, with its buoyant shapes and electric colors, I thought the ski theme added a sleek sportswear dynamic to the label. The wool trousers come in several flattering shapes, with or without stirrups, and I liked that Mr. Simons showed them with trim-fitting hooded sweaters or loose-back wool jackets that continued his couture story. To me, the sleekness of the Sander collection — and that of Céline as well — cut like an arrow through the cluttered style of many other shows. Numerous editors loved Junya Watanabe’s collection in Paris, and I did, too. The black leather jackets and capes evoked the shape of a Stockman dress form, and yet they were completely contemporary in the way that Mr. Watanabe

sion of track pants; the board-stiff sailor pants at Marc Jacobs, with his creamy polyester blouses; Thakoon’s lanky, asymmetrical jacket in mustard tweed with a side-draped skirt, and the new, almost runny-looking silhouette at Chanel, based on a cropped jacket or cardigan over a charcoal blazer with soft wool pants and work boots.

FASHION & BEAUTY

March 24 - 30, 2011

San Juan Weekly

Shopping Surf’s Up

By MADISON SHIMODA

“

horts just past the knee somehow felt new and freeing for spring,” says Erin Beatty, one of the designers at Suno. “It’s time to move past all that was short and tight and into something looser, longer and a bit less overtly sexy.” Baggy slackettes may be more similar to men’s board shorts than conventional women’s shorts, but this season is no stranger to men’swear-inspired women’s wear. If you can wear your boyfriend’s brogues, why not his swimwear? While board shorts may evoke images of Venice Beach grunge, the runway counterparts are more metropolitan than boardwalk. Wear a drapey silk blouse and a clunky pair of heels with Stella McCartney’s denim shorts or elongate your silhouette by donning a longer cotton blazer with the brightly hued Diane von Furstenberg bottoms to tap in on sportstreet culture’s graphic and carefree essence. “Surf style never really changes because we don’t wear a lot of clothes to begin with,” says the professional surfer Malia Jones. “But to see variations of shore style on the runway takes us beyond the beach, and I love that!”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Ana Isabelle By: Daniel Morales Pomales

010, provided great satisfaction with some of her dreams as well as some professional and sentimental disappointments for Ana Isabelle. ‘This year she started with enthusiasm and dynamism, proclaiming that “La vida es bella”, (title of her first theme) in promoting her third album which she is finishing in Miami. In an exclusive interview for the SAN JUAN WEEKLY, the singer gave us a preview of what this recording might be like a cameo in a colombian soapopera in Colombia, about which we will see and hear before the new album release. “I have no secrecy about production title, but I have really wanted to put the name of the first single” La vida es bella’. I have other options if the decision is in conjunction with the label.

34 It is too early to decide, because the record would come out in August she opens in Colombia for the great opportunity to participate in the novel ‘Chepe Fortuna’ of RCN, which is in early position and start in Latin markets and United States including Puerto Rico where it will be transmitted on Mega TV, “she said. The involvement arose through his friend Sonia Guzmán, Executive Communications at Turner, who saw Anas at the Via el Sueño broadcast by Univision.” Ana, who says she is grateful for the warm welcome in Colombia and because they valued her talent will act in a scene with her new song “La Vida es bella.” For the Puerto Rican singer is new and a unique opportunity, since it is her ﬁrst time in this country. “I have a bit of nerves, emotion, but rather positive because when you try something different is when things take an unexpected turn, and that’s what I hope happens with this soapopera,”. In the scene I will be alone, but the song was written with Nacho, Venezuelan reggaeton duo Nacho Chino and g one it have several versions, including with the duo. Emerge as she and team work expect to happen, make it a success, the singer did not hesitate to ensure that it would be integrated into the duo’s current tour around the world. Venezuelans have been very successful. Last year they were recipients of a Grammy ®, and she just won a Premio Lo Nuestro. “The creation of songs and thee composition is not easy, but in thee ng process I wanted to write a song ly called ‘La vida es bella’, and curiously lls Nacho calls me one latenight and tells im me ‘I have the issue, I sent it for him to hear it. “ When i saw, the song and ame herd it, i loved, it was the same name aith i wrote days ago. I have so much faith

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

in it, it gives me good vibrations“. On her second album ‘Mi Sueño’, Ana Isabelle said she by her nature and as an artistic human being she would have wanted more. “It was great, I can not complain, you always want more, I would have liked to come to other markets. I’m really pleased that the United States and Puerto Rico, made good numbers. “ The singer felt having hits of other artists on that record, was not as satisfying as having included unreleased tracks of her own, something that this new album will have. Topics of her life, many personal experiences, and songs by great composers in the industry, such as the Puerto Rican Joel Enriquez, who has written for Melina León, Juan Velez and Héctor Acosta “El Torito”, among others, Claudia Brant who created tracks for Ricky Martin, Luis Fonsi and others, the Colombian author Mauricio Asca, Jorge Villamizar, Bacilos and former member of the group Alex, George and Lena, and Jorge Luis Piloto, creator of great success for Chayanne, Ednita Nazario, Jerry Rivera, Lourdes Robles, Celia Cruz and José José, among many others.

“I think the music and the world is changing, I think people like to hear different things, artists with original concepts. ‘Mi Sueño’ worked because it had a good design and concept. Some mistakes were made, and will be amended with the launch of my third album, I break the mold and reach further. It would be more cheerful, positive and with latin rythms, it put aside ballads which I identiﬁed in the past “. Ana Isabelle injects fun and energy, with a positive message in ‘La vida es bella’, production has been working over the past seven months and which shape her experiences, even her disappointments in love. “I think to translate into the album my very essence, is quite pleasant to people. The composition has give me relief from the recent experiences, the

succe I experienced sudsuccess denly denly, after my concert at Bella Artes in Santurce, I Bellas was to now start again from scra scratch, as we say with a new albu and there will have album, w to work harder to achieve mo success than the last. more w be dynamic. I take a It will me message and identify with c good causes, so the ﬁrst single v is called ‘La vida es bella’, with an m inspirational message, which will put positive which can be danced people positive, in many places. Pop-merger is tropical, and I want to make different versions, merengue, disco etc. Among the topics that come up will include ‘Agradecida’ written with the Venezuelan Juan Carlos Perez Soto, creator of some hits of Ricardo Montaner and Luis Fonsi, ‘Cuando estes solo’, the authorship of Villamizar and ‘Sobrevivire’ with Inés Gaviria Mexican, in which both Ana and Agnes went through a separation and love in the process, discussions arose of how to survive the pain and start from scratch when you separate yourself from that special person. “The album has many issues on which people will be portrayed and so many issues of daily life that at some point wyou’ll identify. Everyone at some point

came up to me and vent through the composition and the gift to my people through music. “ The artist will participate as a juror in a Carolina Talent Festival this Friday, March 25 and March 26 at a concert in Santa Isabel. Then immersed in rehearsals preparing for their participation in the great concert with tenor Placido Domingo on April 17, where the tenor would celebrate the 40th anniversary of his debut in Puerto Rico. Ana Isabelle plays seven songs in total, including the tango ‘A media luz’, two duets with Placido:’ Volver, Volver ‘(with Mariachi), and’ Tú solo tú. “ Besides singing with Placido and Ana Maria Martinez Gardel’s classic “El día que me quieras ‘, and interpret ’Yo te recuerdo‘ with the Symphony. The singer said sheis very honored at the invitation of the tenor. “The biggest aim is always to do a duet with Placido, imagine that privilege in such a short time in my career and how to refuse to be with him on stage for his own invitation of that great exponent of classical music,” she said excitedly . Revealed that the wording is very familiar with the history of the ﬂedgling singer and great success since I graduated from “Viva el Sueño” by Univision, which catapulted her to be one of the young stars today.

March 24 - 30, 2011

San Juan Weekly

modern love

Casting Call: Bit Player, Male By ANNA BRESLAW

Y aunt is 44 and lives alone in Manhattan in the same rentcontrolled apartment she grew up in. For years I thought she’d never really been with a man, but it turns out she was once, in the ’80s. When you ask her about it, she says, “I’m glad I did it, but I wouldn’t do it again.” She pours much of her free time into maintaining her extensive VHS collection. This aversion seems to run in our genes. My extended family consists almost entirely of fatherless, brotherless and husbandless women. We’re skinny and bright, with a capacity for imagination that lends itself to paranoia and social anxiety. We all possess an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema from the classic to the terrible. Acquiring this knowledge is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is possess a terror of actual male interaction. My aunt’s VHS tapes are relics of my childhood. Most of them are rated “R” for violence, drugs, sex and other mistakes grown-ups make. Half are classics, and half are pulpy psychosexual dramas with the kind of morally questionable guys that fascinate and scare the elder generation of women in my family. When I was little, the inappropriate content was always fast-forwarded through at my mother’s request, leading me to believe that “Saturday Night Fever” was 20 minutes long. One of my ﬁrst memories (I was probably 7) is of sitting on the ﬂoor of my aunt’s apartment watching “Never Talk to Strangers.” This was right after she’d had a bad experience with an actual man, and my mother and I thought we should be there for her. She was talking quietly with my mother on the sofa. “He’s not just mean, he’s a sociopath,” my aunt said. “A total sociopath.” I didn’t know then (and don’t know now) whether she was referring to the real man in her life or to Antonio Banderas’s treatment of Rebecca De Mornay in the movie. This confusion was invariable, and also basically the point. Romantically, the guys in our lives are tertiary characters at best, antagonists at worst. If my aunt was the Blanche, then my mother was the Stella, swept off her feet by my father at 18 and eventually deposited in New Jersey alone with three daughters. He’s at his best in crumbling old Polaroids from the 1970s, a dead ringer for Al Pacino. It’s no mystery why my aunt’s tape of “The Godfather” is crackly and discolored and sometimes needs to be ejected around the Sicilian wedding scene; the damage was from us repeatedly rewin-

ding the scene in which Michael Corleone, with his windblown hair, whirls his new Italian wife around in a dance. Due to the noticeable absence of men in my family, for years the men in my aunt’s VHS collection were the only men I knew, the tumultuous romances and cathartic, hard-earned endings the only relationships I saw. I recently heard a story about scientists raising a chimpanzee as a human from infancy and ending up with this humanoid animal that was stranded in some awkward netherworld between chimpanzee and girl, a primate that wore dresses and, understandably, mixed herself drinks. I’m like that chimp, accidentally conditioned to reject nice men and kiss someone passionately only if my city is burning in the background. But I am also not delusional or stupid enough to think this is rational, which strands me in some awkward netherworld between hopeless romantic and self-aware realist. (I also wear dresses and mix myself drinks.) My early exposure to movies and their larger-than-life male characters led to an adolescence spent chasing outsize and disinterested boys. I didn’t want Brian Goldkrantz from social studies class. I wanted Henry Hill from “Goodfellas.” I wanted Danny Ocean from either version of “Ocean’s Eleven.” My childhood best friend just got engaged, and while going through our fifth-grade notes for anything speechworthy, I found a list of traits I desired in a boyfriend at age 12: •Gray eyes. •Bigger than me. •Speaks more than one language (not a boring one). •Not too nice. •Doesn’t raise his hand but knows all the answers. The final bullet point is scratched out, as if — in a “Back to the Future” way — my fifth-grade self wished to save me from disappointment after she discovered there wasn’t anyone in school who spoke Afrikaans. The “not too nice” part followed me to college and film school and morphed into Mr. Darcy Syndrome, the endless pursuit of a jerk in the hopes of being able to peel back the layers to discover his secret, gooey, nice-guy center. But inside I’d just find more layers of jerk, smaller and smaller, like Russian nesting dolls. At college I observed stable, longterm relationships between real-life people for the first time. Some of them seemed so effortless, lukewarm even, that it shocked me. The rules of movies were as deeply ingrained in me as the

laws of physics or the pledge of allegiance, and they went something like this: The best relationships aren’t easy. Without conflict, you can’t have a happy ending. If a guy doesn’t hurt you so badly that he has to perform some grand and cinematic gesture (typically with pop song accompaniment) to win you back, then who cares? I have friends who are guys. Presumably I possess the ability to go out and meet more guys. But actually doing so feels about as natural to me as speaking Esperanto. Or, more accurately, it feels as if I’m in a movie about a girl going out and meeting guys, one that may or may not end like “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Thanks in part to the commitmentphobic culture of young Manhattan and in part to my lifelong instinct to flee from anyone with a Y-chromosome who actually wants to go out with me, formal dates are rare. Those I’ve gone on could be assembled into a montage of forgettable dinners before the protagonist stumbles into the right person. I would like to say I’m the protagonist of this montage, but it’s probably the guys, who did their part to dress nicely, tell funny stories and pay the check while I was chugging wine and trying to decide whether I’d rather sleep with them or go home and watch “Hoarders.” Maybe it was karmic when, after college, I had my heart broken by someone who was ambivalent about me and who believed the ambivalence was mutual. I was about as ambivalent as a Civil War re-enactor so determined to avoid anachronism that he drives 3,000 miles to find the correct epaulets. My aunt sympathized, as I knew she would. I went to her immediately, and we had dinner in front of the TV as the uber-mustached cad Monte Beragon seduced Joan Crawford’s daughter in “Mildred Pierce.” Then we jumped decades ahead to watch Tom Cruise redeem the same type of cad in “Jerry Maguire.”

At the end of the movie, one of us said something like, “He’s still a cad.” The other laughed, maybe pantomimed stabbing a fork into her eye. Nothing else needed to be discussed. As I get older I’ve started acknowledging in tangible ways that while the longing for a cinematic relationship is universal and, obviously, keeps Hollywood romantic comedies in business, the hardest relationship isn’t always the best. If a guy acts mean, it’s O.K. to assume he’s just a mean guy and move on without assigning him any unmerited appeal or hidden depth. Any conflict with that guy is rarely resolved with a satisfying bang. More often it ends with a whimper: rumors, misunderstandings, general pain or just unfinished business that robs you of an ending. This knowledge is probably intuitive to most people, but not to a third grader who could quote every line of “Malice.” Maybe I understand this now because I went to film school and saw behind the curtain. But more likely this is just my coming-of-age character arc, an embarrassingly late bloomer compared with girls who grew up with normal fathers and brothers and uncles and high school boyfriends and probably learned this lesson harder and faster. Or they never had to learn it at all. Either way, I’ve been making significant efforts to be a normal chimp. My aunt’s VCR broke a few months ago, rendering her tape collection obsolete. She’s slowly rebuilding it on DVD, one disc at a time. Maybe by the time she finishes, I won’t be surprised to find that some boy in my bed isn’t an archetype (a sociopath, jerk or “nice guy”), but a reallife person with three dimensions and a beating heart. And that our relationship has all the mess and unpredictability of real life. As long as he, at some point, takes a cue from John Cusack and tries to win me by holding up a boombox outside my bedroom window.

36 March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Supremacy of a Social Network By NICHOLAS WADE

very time some human attribute is said to be unique, whether tool-making or language or warfare, biologists soon find some plausible precursor in animals that makes the ability less distinctive. Still, humans are vastly different from other animals, however hard the difference may be to define. A cascade of events, some the work of natural selection, some just plain accidents, propelled the human lineage far from the destiny of being just another ape, down an unexpected evolutionary path to become perhaps the strangest blossom on the ample tree of life. And what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies. Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement. “Humans are not special because of their big brains,” says Kim Hill, a social anthropologist at Arizona State University. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.” The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in Dr. Hill’s view, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate — in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other — and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. A large social network can generate knowledge and adopt innovations far more easily than a cluster of small, hostile groups constantly at war with each other, the default state of chimpanzee society. If a shift in social behavior was the critical development in human evolution, then the answer to how humans became unique lies in exploring how human societies first split away from those of apes. Paleoanthropologists often assume that chimp societies are a reasonably good stand-in for the ancestral ape society that gave rise to the chimp and

human lineages. Living hunter-gatherers may reflect those of long ago, since humans always lived this way until the first settled societies of 15,000 years ago. The two species’ social structure could scarcely be more different. Chimp society consists of a male hierarchy, dominated by the alpha male and his allies, and a female hierarchy beneath it. The alpha male scores most of the paternities, cutting his allies in on others. The females try to mate with every male around, so each may think he’s the father and spare her child. How did a chimplike society ever give rise to the egalitarian, largely monogamous structure of hunter-gatherer groups? A new and comprehensive answer to this question has been developed by Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal. Dr. Chapais is a primatologist who has spent 25 years studying monkey and ape societies. Recently he devoted four years to reading the literature of social anthropology with the goal of defining the transition between nonprimate and human societies. His book, “Primeval Kinship,” was published in 2008. Dr. Chapais sees the transition as a series of accidents, each of which let natural selection exploit new opportunities. Early humans began to walk on two legs because it was a more efficient way of getting around than knuckle-walking, the chimps’ method. But that happened to leave the hands free. Now they could gesture, or make tools. It was a tool, in the form of a weapon, that made human society possible, in Dr. Chapais’s view. Among chimps, alpha males are physically dominant and can overpower any ri-

val. But weapons are great equalizers. As soon as all males were armed, the cost of monopolizing a large number of females became a lot higher. In the incipient hominid society, females became allocated to males more equally. General polygyny became the rule, then general monogamy. This trend led to the emergence of a critical change in sexual behavior: the replacement of the apes’ orgiastic promiscuity with the pair bond between male and female. With only one mate, for the most part, a male had an incentive to guard her from other males to protect his paternity. The pair bond was the pivotal event that opened the way to hominid evolution, in Dr. Chapais’s view. On the physiological level, having two parents around allowed the infants to be dependent for longer, a requirement for continued brain growth after birth. Through this archway, natural selection was able to drive up the volume of the human brain until it eventually reached three times that of a chimpanzee. On the social level, the presence of both parents revealed the genealogical structure of the family, which is at least half hidden in chimp societies. A chimp knows who its mother and siblings are, because it grows up with them, but not its father or father’s relatives. So the neighboring bands to which female chimps disperse at puberty, avoiding incest, are perceived as full of strange males and treated with unremitting hostility. In the incipient hominid line, males could recognize their sisters and daughters in neighboring bands. They could also ﬁgure out that the daughter’s or sister’s mate shared a common genetic interest in the welfare of the woman’s children. The neighboring males were no longer foes to be killed in sight — they were the inlaws. The presence of female relatives in neighboring bands became for the ﬁrst time a bridge between them. It also created a new and more complex social structure. The bands who exchanged women with each other learned to cooperate, forming a group or tribe that would protect its territory from other tribes. Though cooperation became the norm within a tribe, tribes would wage warfare just as relentlessly as chimpanzee bands. “There is no single pressure that made us human,” Dr. Chapais said in an interview. He sees human evolu-

tion as having progressed through a series of accidents. “The fact that you can recognize patrilineal kin was not selected for, but as soon as you had that you could move forward and establish peaceful relations with other groups,” he said. The new social structure would have induced the development of different social behaviors. “I personally am hung up on cooperation as being what really differentiates humans from nonhuman apes,” said Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. A system of cooperative bands “provides the kind of social infrastructure that can really get things going,” he said. In a series of experiments comparing human and chimpanzee infants, Dr. Tomasello has shown that very young children have an urge to help others. One of these skills is what he calls shared intentionality, the ability to form a plan with others for accomplishing a joint endeavor. Children, but not chimps, will point at things to convey information, they will intuit others’ intentions from the direction of their gaze, and they will help others achieve a goal. Early humans venturing out into the savannah from the apes’ ancestral forest refuge would have been surrounded by predators and in fierce competition for food. Cooperation may have been forced on them as a condition of existence. “Humans were put under some kind of collective pressure to collaborate in their gathering of food — they became obligate collaborators — in a way that their closest primate relatives were not,” Dr. Tomasello writes in a recent book, “Why We Cooperate.” Humans wear the mark of their shared intentionality, he notes, in a small but significant feature — the whites of their eyes, which are three times larger than those of any other primate, presumably to help others follow the direction of gaze. Indeed, chimps infer the direction of gaze by looking at another’s head, but infants do so by watching the eyes. So if ever a visiting Martian biologist should ask you what made your species the master of its planet, point first to your mother and all her relatives, then to the whites of your eyes, and only lastly to your prominent forehead.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

The Blind Luck of Cancer Trials

By PETER B. BACH, M.D.

research study assistant slid the informed consent document for the clinical trial across the desk to us. My wife, Ruth, sitting next to me, signed it. She was in treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where I am also a doctor and cancer researcher. Ruth had ﬂipped through page after page of the informed consent forms. They were peppered with frightening words like “death” and “cancer recurrence,” and caveats discussing horrifying reactions to the experimental treatment. I winced each time I saw a scary term go by. The clinical trial she was joining would test a new treatment for her breast cancer. Some women in the study would get it, while others would get the old standard. But during the trial, none of us, not even the doctors conducting the research, would know who was getting which drug. This hard reality of cancer research is often tucked away out of view, but we both sensed it every time her nurse hung the mystery bag in the chemo suite. It might be the study treatment, or maybe it’s just saltwater. And then it would start dripping in. Ruth woke me one night with a rhetorical barrage about the reasons for randomization in clinical trial research. “Why do they need to randomize patients so some people get the new treatment

but others only get the standard?” she said. “Don’t you guys know after all these years what happens so you could just do a study where everyone gets the new treatment and see if they do better? Aren’t you wasting time not just using it?” Even half asleep I could explain that randomized trials are the best way of determining if one treatment is better than another. But as I began talking, I realized she had drifted back to sleep, just as my medical students do in class. Her chest rose and fell with her breathing. The scar from her cancer surgery was fully healed. The skin on her face was relaxed. The truth is that even though we always expect the new treatment to be better, sometimes it is not. If there are beneﬁts, they are usually so small that they are perceptible only when added up over hundreds or sometimes even thousands of patients carefully compared with similar patients getting the standard treatment. This depressing fact meant that even if Ruth was getting the new treatment, and it proved to be effective, it would probably be only a hair better. Not enough to really matter much. And in clinical trials, the new treatment sometimes proves worse. Every time this happens people are surprised and some doubt the results, even though it happens regularly. For instance, thousands of women with breast cancer were subjected

to complications, and some killed, because doctors were sure that high-dose chemotherapy followed by bone marrow transplant would be more effective than conventional chemotherapy approaches. Randomized trials showed the opposite. Most doctors know by rote some of the other examples of treatments that failed: an operation that removed diseased parts of the lung and left the healthy part behind, a drug that made the heart rhythm look better after a heart attack, a monitor placed inside the lung vessels that helped monitor patients who were critically ill. Each time we were sure we were doing the right thing for patients, until randomized trials showed we were killing people. Scientists call our progress in cancer treatment a gradual accretion of knowledge, but put in regular English it is a slow, grueling slog guided by a poorly functioning compass. Most randomized trials like the one Ruth joined don’t even ask particularly novel questions, and their findings are not breakthroughs worthy of newspaper headlines. The studies tweak what we do as doctors, sometimes finding a little more benefit achieved with a little less harm. More often than not, they just find out that the new approach did not work out. Of course this reality — this arduous slog — doesn’t match how cancer research is presented to the public, which sees flashy

headlines using words like “breakthrough” and “new hope.” As I watched Ruth sleep, I thought about the hundreds of thousands of women who had volunteered over decades for clinical trials, those who did well and those who didn’t. Their privacy protected by laws, the depth of their experiences reduced by statisticians to just a few numbers and ﬁgures in the pages of a medical journal. Each study was a small contribution, paving the way a few feet forward or shutting down a detour that went in the wrong direction. Over time, what they contributed has helped us get a little better each year at treating breast cancer. Signing up for a clinical trial is a remarkable act of bravery. The day before Ruth’s diagnosis she did not think of herself as a patient. She had no doctor in her life except me. And yet, when Ruth’s oncologist asked for her to sign up to be randomized, to let Lady Luck have yet another go at her, she did so. He was asking her to do for others even when she was overwhelmed by what was happening to her, to us. But it was the obvious choice, and she made it without hesitation, just as hundreds of thousands of women have before her. As she slept another ﬁtful night, she was helping to answer a question that would not matter to her, but would someday matter to a woman she would never meet.

Rear-Facing Car Seats Advised for Older Toddlers By MADONNA BEHEN

oddlers are usually switched from rear-facing to forward-facing car seats right after their first birthday many parents celebrate as a kind of milestone. But in a new policy statement, the nation’s leading pediatricians’ group says that is a year too soon. The advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics is based primarily on a 2007 study finding that children under 2 are 75 percent less likely to suffer severe or fatal injuries in a crash if they are facing the rear. “A baby’s head is relatively large in proportion to the rest of his body, and the bones of his neck are structurally immature,” said the statement’s lead author, Dr. Dennis R. Durbin, scientific co-director of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “If he’s rear-facing, his entire body is better supported by the shell of the car seat. When he’s forwardfacing, his shoulders and trunk may be well restrained, but in a violent crash, his head and neck can fly forward.” The new policy statement also advises that older children should ride in a belt-positioning booster seat until they are 4 feet 9 inches tall, and 8 to 12 years old. A booster seat allows the vehicle’s lap and shoulder seat belt to fit properly, meaning the lap portion of the belt fits low across the hips and pelvis, and the shoulder portion fits across the middle of the shoulder and chest. “Our recommendations are meant to help parents move away from gospel-held notions that are based on a child’s age,” Dr. Durbin said. “We want them to recognize that with each transition they make, from rear-facing to forward-facing, to booster seats, there is a decline in the

safety of their child. That’s why we are urging parents to delay these transitions for as long as possible.” Safety advocates applaud the new policy, but say the transition from rear- to forward-facing is usually the one that parents are least willing to delay. “People cheer when they turn their kid around at one year, but hopefully some day they’ll cheer at how long they were able to keep their child rear-facing,” said Debbi Baer, a labor and delivery nurse in Baltimore who has been a car safety advocate for children for more than 30 years. The academy’s previous policy, from 2002, said it was safest for infants and toddlers to ride facing the rear, and cited 12 months and 20 pounds as the minimum requirements for turning the car seat forward. But Ms. Baer, a certified child passenger safety technician, said parents tended to take that as a hard and fast rule. “A lot of parents consider turning the car seat around as another developmental milestone that shows how brilliant and advanced their child is,” she said, “and they don’t realize that it’s making their child less safe.” Ms. Baer says the evidence from other countries is compelling: Sweden, for instance, where children face the rear until age 4, has the world’s lowest highway fatality rate for children under 6. Seven years ago, Ed Weissberg and his wife, Edda, of Baltimore, took Ms. Baer’s advice, and say it saved their daughter Renana’s life. The couple and their three children were traveling north on Interstate 95 when they were broadsided by a car that had had a blowout. Their minivan flipped into the air, sailed over three lanes of traffic and landed on the shoulder, upside down.

“The E.M.T.’s told me later that as soon as they saw our car, they were ready to take out our bodies,” said Mr. Weissberg, who now lives in Israel with his family. Instead, they found the entire family nearly unscathed, with all three children suspended upside down, still securely strapped in their car seats. “People thought we were crazy for keeping our 2-year-old rear-facing, but if she had been facing forward, she wouldn’t be alive today,” he said. Most car seats that could be turned to face the rear did not accommodate children weighing more than 20 pounds. Today, however, the limits are closer to 30 to 35 pounds, and a few go to 45 pounds. Dr. Baer felt if a parent wants to install a forward-facing seat for a child younger than 2, ‘If you really want to make a stupid decision for your child, you can do it.

38 March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Is Fitness All in the Genes?

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

hy do some people respond to an aerobic workout routine by becoming incredibly fit, whereas others who exercise just as hard for months end up no fitter than when they began? That question has bedeviled countless people who’ve started exercise programs. It has also motivated a major new study of the genetics of fitness. Scientists long have known that when any given group of people faithfully follows the same aerobic workout routine, some increase their cardiorespiratory fitness substantially, while an unfortunate few seem to get no benefits at all. But what, beyond the fundamental unfairness of life, makes one person’s body receptive to exercise and another’s resistant? According to the new study, which will soon be published in The Journal of Applied Physiology, part of the answer may depend on the state of specific genes. For the study, researchers from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and other institutions examined the genomes of 473 healthy white volunteers. All were part of the Heritage Family Study, an ongoing (and multiethnic) examination of exercise genetics that already has provided reams of epidemiological information about whether various exercise traits tend to run in families. (It turns out that many do, including the basic drive to exercise at all.) But neither the Heritage Study nor any other experiment to date had identified the specific genes that might be associated with a person’s physical response to exercise. The new study is what’s known as a genomewide association study, generally

considered the gold standard of genetic science, and it’s the first study of this type to look at any aspect of exercise. It brings “exercise genetic research” into “the genomics era,” an accompanying editorial states. In such studies, researchers examine virtually the entire genome of people with various traits, often diseases. The aim is to discern whether tiny segments of DNA called single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”), recur frequently in those with the traits. The presence of particular SNPs suggests that a particular snippet of the genome affects susceptibility to a disease or, in this case, exercise. The researchers looked at 324,611 individual snippets over all. Each of the volunteers had already completed a carefully supervised five-month exercise program, during which participants pedaled stationary bicycles three times a week, at controlled and identical intensities. Some wound up much fitter, as determined by the increase in the amount of oxygen their bodies consumed during intense exercise, a measure called maximal oxygen capacity, or VO2 max. In others, VO2 max had barely budged. No obvious, consistent differences in age, gender, body mass or commitment marked those who responded well and those who continued to huff and struggle during their workouts, even after five months. But there was a divergence in their genomes. The researchers identified 21 specific SNPs, out of the more than 300,000 examined, that differed consistently between the two groups. SNPs come in pairs, since each of us receives one paternal copy and one maternal copy. So there were 42 different individual versions of the 21 SNPs. Those exercisers who had

19 or more of these SNPs improved their cardiorespiratory fitness three times as much as those who had nine or fewer. One SNP in particular, located on a gene known as ACSL1, seemed especially potent, possibly accounting for as much as 6 percent of the difference in response among people, a high percentage by the standards of genomewide association studies. This gene already has been shown to play a role in how the body metabolizes fats, which might partly explain why it also affects exercise response. But, said Claude Bouchard, who holds the John W. Barton Sr. Endowed Chair in Genetics and Nutrition at Pennington and was lead author of the study, “far more research is needed before we can say” just how any particular gene influences the body’s response to aerobic exercise, let alone what additional genes might be involved in that response. “There are bound to be” others, Dr. Bouchard said. There also may be differences based on ethnicity. When he tried to replicate his findings in a subset of African-American participants in the Heritage Study, only a few of the 21 SNPs played a role in that group’s exercise response. Still, the findings, preliminary or not, raise several intriguing concerns. How, for one, can any of us tell if we harbor the ideal SNPs for a robust aerobic response to endurance exercise? And if it turns out that we don’t carry those advantageous snippets of genes, can we take to the couch, since our fitness levels won’t budge much even if we dutifully

pedal or run? “It will be years, if ever,” said Dr. Bouchard, before gene tests exist that can reliably separate high and low responders. Even if and when such tests become available, he continued, the results will not constitute an excuse for skipping workouts. “There are countless other benefits provided by exercise,” he said, apart from whether it raises your VO2 max. “Exercise can reduce blood pressure and improve lipid profiles,” he said. It can better your health, even if, by certain measures, it does not render you more aerobically fit. More fundamentally, Dr. Bouchard said, elements of the interplay of genetics, environment, the human body and resolve probably always will remain mysterious and stubbornly individualized, no matter how much science disentangles the genome. People who don’t have an ideal version of the ACSL1 gene to prompt aerobic improvements from exercise, for instance, might harbor a different, unidentified gene that just makes exercise feel enjoyable, regardless. So, too, might someone whose body is genetically predisposed not to respond aerobically to running blossom during weight training sessions. “There are many reasons to be excited” by the advances in the study of the genetics of exercise, Dr. Bouchard said. “But there are also many reasons to be cautious.” Genetics, no matter how sophisticated it becomes in looking at the body’s response to exercise, he said, “will never explain everything.”

The French Diet You’ve Never Heard Of

By TARA PARKER-POPE

popular French diet is crossing the Atlantic. Pierre Dukan has been called the Dr. Atkins of France. Well over a million people there have tried the 69-year-old doctor’s program, a method that promises — like countless diets before and since — no hunger, no calorie counting, instant weight loss and lifelong weight maintenance. The original Dukan diet book sold 3.5 million copies in French and has been translated into 14 languages. Next month, the diet will make its American debut when Crown Publishing rolls out the North American edition of “The Dukan Diet,” its cover featuring a plate with two Eiffel Towers

and the words, “The Real Reason the French Stay Thin.” The diet’s high-protein, lowfat approach is organized into four phases, the ﬁrst of which encourages dieters to eat as much as they want of non-fatty, protein-rich foods, including oat bran — a key component — washed down with oceans of water. The second stage introduces vegetables, but no fruit; the third brings with it two slices of bread, a serving of cheese and fruit and two servings of carbohydrates a day, with two weekly “celebration” meals with wine and dessert (the diet is French, after all); and the ﬁnal stage — six days a week of “anything goes” and one day of reversion to strict stage one.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

39 SCIENCE / TECH

For Whom the Cell Mutates: The Origins of Genetic Quirks By SEAN B. CARROLL

here was very little that was safe or conventional in Ernest Hemingway’s life. The great writer hurled himself into danger in three wars, managed to survive two plane crashes on the same big-game safari in remote Africa, and precipitated many domestic dramas with a variety of love affairs in the course of his four marriages. “Moderation” appears to have been one word lacking from his otherwise superb vocabulary, even when it came to cats. The image of the macho big-game hunter and marlin fisherman is hard to reconcile with that of a pet-hoarder, but Hemingway surrounded himself with felines. The author loved the animals and took in so many strays that at one point his house in Cuba, Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm), had 57 cats. Every animal had a name, including such unmasculine monikers as Princessa, Furhouse, and Littless Kitty. Hemingway loved their company when writing, especially when he was alone for lengths of time on the island. He incorporated many favorite pets into his short stories and novels. His loyal, longtime companion Boise merited 35 pages in “Islands in the Stream,” including this autobiographical passage: “That night, when he had sat in the big chair reading with Boise at his side in the chair, he had thought that he did not know what he would do if Boise should be killed. He thought, from his actions and desperation, that the cat felt the same way about the man.” But of all the cats in Hemingway’s life, the most famous are those that have taken up residence at his former home in Key West, Fla. In late 1931, Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, moved into a two-story house on Whitfield Street. It was in Key West that Hemingway established a routine of writing in the morning, and then spending the hot afternoons fishing from the bridges, docks or a boat, or relaxing with friends. It was an extremely productive lifestyle. Over a 12-year span in Key West, he worked on or completed “A Farewell to Arms,” “Green Hills of Africa,” “Death in the Afternoon,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “To Have or Have Not,” and the short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The house in Key West, which the author owned until his death 50 years ago this summer, is now a museum and a permanent home to about 50 cats. But of course, such an extraordinary man would not be associated with just ordinary cats; about half of the animals bear extra toes, typically on their forepaws. Most cats are, like humans, pentadactyls. That is, they have five digits on their forepaws. The so-called Hemingway cats have six digits, with the extra digit the homolog of the human thumb, which gives the paw a mittenlike appearance. When found in felines, the condition, formally

known as preaxial polydactyly, is now commonly referred to as a “Hemingway cat.” The origins of the cats on the Hemingway grounds are shrouded in legend, and it remains difficult to sort out facts from tall tales in many matters concerning the famous writer. One version of the cat story offered today is that Hemingway was given a six-toed tomcat, Snowball, by a ship’s captain in the mid-1930s, and that all of the six-toed residents are descended from this founding father. Another account is that Hemingway had no housepets at the time and that the six-toed cats are descended from strays that came onto the property from time to time and took up residence after the writer was gone. Cats have long been present in Key West for controlling the rodent populations, and sixtoed cats were popular with ship captains and sailors for the same purpose, as well as being considered good luck on voyages. While the origins of the Hemingway House cats remains murky, the cause of their polydactyly is no longer a mystery. Researchers have recently pinpointed the precise mutation in the cats’ DNA responsible for the formation of the extra digit. The story of the origin of Hemingway’s cats is one of finding deep genetic connections among very different animals — from fruit flies to chickens, mice, cats, and yes, even humans. In the late 1970s, one of the most challenging puzzles in all of biology was that of embryonic development — how a complex creature formed from a single fertilized egg cell. Two researchers, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus, led a bold undertaking to identify all of the genes that were responsible for the process in fruit flies, then and now one of the main workhorses of basic genetic research. They identified scores of genes that played roles in building the fruit fly body and its body parts, work that led to their sharing of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with the late Edward B. Lewis, another pioneer fruit fly geneticist. One of the reasons for that honor was the discovery that, contrary to all biologists’ expectations, similar sets of genes to those involved in building fruit flies were also involved in building the bodies of such different animals as mice, frogs and other vertebrates, including humans. Indeed, by the 1990s, one common strategy for discovering genes involved in building vertebrate bodies, organs or body parts was to look for the counterparts of fruit fly genes in those vertebrates. That was the approach taken by one team led by Prof. Cliff Tabin at Harvard Medical School that was eager to find the genes responsible for the formation and patterning of vertebrate limbs. Decades of research on the chicken wing had shown that the formation of the pattern of digits across the entire structure depended on some signal produced by cells in the most posterior part of the developing embryo’s wing bud. Professor

Tabin’s team sought to identify that signal by isolating the chicken’s counterparts of certain fruit fly genes. They isolated a chicken homolog of a fruit fly gene called “hedgehog.” The name had been given by Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard and Dr. Wieschaus because mutations in the fly gene caused the fruit fly larva to be covered with fine hairs, like a hedgehog. Professor Tabin’s team was stunned and delighted to find that the chicken gene, dubbed “Sonic hedgehog” after the video game character, was turned on in the posterior of the limb bud, right where the digitpatterning activity was also located. They then found that the Sonic hedgehog protein was indeed the long-sought digit-patterning signal. For instance, they demonstrated that turning Sonic hedgehog on in the anterior part of the limb bud had the same effect as transplanting posterior tissue to the anterior part of the limb — it caused the formation of extra digits. The induction of polydactyly by Sonic hedgehog in laboratory experiments raised the possibility that inherited cases of polydactyly might be caused by mutations in the Sonic hedgehog gene. Polydactyly is well known in mice and in humans, as well as cats, and sure enough, cats, mice and humans all have Sonic hedgehog genes. But inspection of the Sonic hedgehog genes of polydactyl individuals did not reveal any mutations that would cause the Sonic hedgehog signal to be defective. So what role, then, does Sonic hedgehog play in the syndrome? It turns out that polydactyly is not due to disruptions of Sonic hedgehog function, but of its regulation. In order to make the proper five-digit, pinky-to-thumb pattern, the production of the Sonic hedgehog protein must be restricted to posterior cells. The pattern of the digits depends upon the relative concentration of Sonic hedgehog, which is greatest in the posterior (where the pinky will form) and lowest in the anterior where the thumb will form. Mutations that disrupt Sonic hedgehog regulation such that some protein is made in the anterior of the limb bud cause the formation of an extra thumb. These mutations were difficult to find

in DNA at first because they were not located in the part of the gene that encodes the protein. Rather, they occurred far away in a stretch of DNA sequence that acts like a switch to turn Sonic hedgehog on in the posterior part of the limb bud and to keep the gene off in cells in the anterior part of the limb bud. A team led by Robert Hill of the Medical Research Council Human Genetics Unit in Edinburgh showed that the Sonic hedgehog switch that controls gene activity in the limb is located about one million base pairs from the part of the gene encoding the Sonic hedgehog signal. On the scale of DNA, finding the mutations so far away from the gene was much like looking for one’s car in a parking lot, and eventually finding it in a vacant field in another town. Mutations that scramble the switch are responsible for polydactyly in mice and humans. But further work has shown that even slight mutations substituting just a single letter of the DNA sequence can also cause the syndrome, not only in mice and humans, but in Hemingway’s cats. Mr. Hill’s team analyzed one line of affected Key West cats and found a perfect association between polydactyly and a substitution at one position in the cat Sonic hedgehog gene switch. They also examined other unrelated polydactylous North American cats and found the same substitution, which indicates that all North American polydactylous cats may be descended from one polydactylous ancestor. If that is indeed the case, that ancestor may date back as early as pre-Revolutionary times in New England, and its descendants probably reached Key West by ship long before Hemingway did. Like Hemingway’s cats and the writer himself, we all have our quirks, some more visible than others. Genetics has made huge strides in understanding the basis of many physical characteristics, like extra toes and fingers. In time, we can look forward to learning more about the genetics of deeper mysteries, like the cause of the profound depression that overtook Hemingway and many of his close relatives or, on the brighter side, perhaps some insights into the source of his great talent.

SCIENCE / TECH 40 March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

From Single Cells, a Vast Kingdom Arose By CARL ZIMMER

urking in the blood of tropical snails is a single-celled creature called Capsaspora owczarzaki. This tentacled, amoebalike species is so obscure no one noticed it until 2002. Yet, in just a few years it has moved from anonymity to the scientific spotlight. It turns out to be one of the closest relatives to animals. As improbable as it might seem, our ancestors a billion years ago probably were a lot like Capsaspora. The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From singlecelled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution. Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs. The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. The intermediate species that might show how that transition took place have become extinct. Scientists are peering into the genomes of animals and their relatives like Capsaspora, to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of animals and their closest relatives. Surprisingly, they’ve found that a lot of the genetic equipment for building an animal was in place long before the animal kingdom even existed. Only in the past few years scientists got a firm notion of what the closest relatives to animals actually are. In 2007, the National Human Genome Research Institute started a project to compare DNA from different species and draw a family tree. The cousins of animals turn out to be a motley crew. Along with the snail-dwelling Capsaspora, our close relatives include choanoflagellates, amoebalike creatures that dwell in fresh water, where they hunt for bacteria. Plants and fungi evolved from singlecelled ancestors, from brown algae seaweed to slime molds. Primitive multicellularity may have been easy to evolve. “All that has to happen is the products of cell division stick together”. Once single-celled organisms shifted to colonies, they start specializing on different tasks. This division of labor made the colonies more efficient. They grow faster than less specialized colonies. Eventually, this division of labor could have led many cells in proto-animals to give

up their ability to reproduce. Only a small group of cells still made the proteins required to produce offspring. The cells in the rest of the body could then focus on tasks like gathering food and fighting off disease. Yet multicellularity also threw some new challenges at the ancestors of animals. “When cells die in a group, they can poison each other,” said Dr. Michod. In animals, cells die in an orderly fashion, so that they release relatively few poisons. Instead, the dying cells can be recycled by their living brethren. Another danger posed by multicellularity is the ability for a single cell to grow at the expense of others. Today that danger still looms large: cancer is the result of some cells refusing to play by the same rules as the other cells in our body. Even simple multicellular organisms have evolved defenses to these cheaters. A group of green algae called volvox have evolved a limit to the number of times any cell can divide. “That helps reduce the potential for cells to become renegades,” said Dr. Michod. To figure out the solutions that animals evolved, researchers are now sequencing the genomes of their single-celled relatives. They’re discovering a wealth of genes that were once thought to exist only in animals. Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo of the University of Barcelona and his colleagues searched Capsaspora’s genome for an important group of genes that encode proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors switch other genes on and off, and some of them are vital for turning a fertilized egg into a complex animal body. In the current issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Dr. Ruiz-Trillo and his colleagues report that Capsaspora shares a number of transcription factors that were once thought to be unique to animals. For example, they found a gene in Capsaspora that’s nearly identical to the animal gene brachyury. In humans and many other animal species, brachyury is essential for embryos to develop, marking a layer of cells that will become the skeleton and muscles. Dr. Ruiz-Trillo and his colleagues have no idea what Capsaspora is doing with a brachyury gene. They’re now doing experiments to find out; in the meantime, Dr. Ruiz-Trillo speculates that single-celled relatives of animals use the brachyury gene, along with other transcription factors, to switch genes on for other tasks. “They have to check out their environment,” said Dr. Ruiz-Trillo. “They have to mate with other organisms. They have to eat prey.” Studies by other scientists point to the same conclusion: a lot of the genes once thought to be unique to the animal kingdom were present in the single-celled ancestors of animals. “The origin of animals depended on genes that were already in place,” Dr. King said. In the transition to full-blown ani-

mals, Dr. King argues, these genes were coopted for controlling a multicellular body. Old genes began to take on new functions, like producing the glue for sticking cells together and guarding against runaway cells that could become tumors. Paleontologists have searched for decades for the fossils that chronicle this transition to the earliest animals. Last year, Adam Maloof of Princeton and his colleagues published details of what they suggest are the oldest animal fossils yet found. The remains, found in Australia, date back 650 million years. They contain networks of pores inside of them, similar to the channels inside living sponges. Sponges may have also left behind other ancient traces. Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues have drilled down into deposits of oil in Australia dating back at least 635 million years. In the stew of hydrocarbons they’ve brought up, they have found cholesterol-like molecules that are produced today only by one group of sponges. The fact that sponges show up so early in the fossil record is probably no coincidence. Recent studies on animal genomes indicate that sponges are among the oldest lineages of living animals — if not the oldest. Sponges are also relatively simple compared with most other animals. They have no brains, stomachs or blood vessels. Despite their seeming simplicity, sponges are card-carrying members of the animal kingdom. Like other animals, sponges can produce eggs and sperm, which can then produce embryos. Sponge larvae swim through the water to ﬁnd their way to a good spot where they can settle down for a sedentary life and grow into adults. Their development is an exquisitely sophisticated process, with stem cells giving rise to several different cell types. The ﬁrst sponge genome was only published in August. It offered scientists an opportunity to compare the DNA of

sponges to that of other animals as well as to Capsaspora and other single-celled relatives. The researchers looked at each gene in the sponge genome and tried to match it to related groups of genes in other species, known as gene families. All told, they were able to find 1,268 gene families shared by all animals — including sponges — but not by other species. Those genes were presumably passed down to living animals from a common ancestor that lived 800 million years ago. And by surveying this catalog, scientists can infer some things about what that ancestor was like. “It wasn’t just an amorphous blob of cells,” said Bernard M. Degnan of the University of Queensland. Instead, it was already setting aside eggs and sperm. It could produce embryos, and it could lay down complicated patterns in its body. Animals didn’t just evolve multicellular bodies, however. They also appear to have evolved new ways of generating different kinds of bodies. Animals are more prone to mutations that shuffle sections of their proteins into new arrangements, a process called domain shuffling. “Domain shuffling seems to be a critical thing,” Dr. Degnan said. Dr. Degnan and his colleagues have found another source of innovation in animals in a molecule called microRNA. When cells produce proteins from genes, they first make a copy of the gene in a molecule called RNA. But animal cells also make microRNAs that can attack RNA molecules and destroy them before they have a chance to make proteins. Thus they can act as another kind of switch to control gene activity. MicroRNAs don’t seem to exist in single-celled relatives of animals. Sponges have eight microRNAs. Animals with more cell types that evolved later also evolved more microRNAs. Humans have 677. MicroRNAs and domain shuffling gave animals a powerful new source of versatility. They had the means to evolve new ways of reshaping their embryos to produce a wide range of forms — from big predators to burrowing mud-feeders. That versatility may have allowed early animals to take advantage of changes unfolding all around them. 700 million years ago, Earth emerged from the grips of a worldwide ice age. Evidence in rocks of that age for a sudden influx of phosphorus into the oceans at the same time. As glaciers melted, phosphorus was washed from the exposed land into the sea. The phosphorus may have acted as a pulse of fertilizer, stimulating algae growth. That may have been responsible for the rapid rise of oxygen in the ocean at the same time. Animals may have been prepared to use the extra oxygen to fuel large bodies and to use those bodies to devour other species. “It was a niche to be occupied,” said Dr. Ruiz-Trillo, “and it was occupied as soon as the molecular machinery was in place.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

41 SCIENCE / TECH

The Allure of a Man’s Uncertainty By PAMELA PAUL

OR those single women suffering angst over “Will he call or won’t he?” it seems counterintuitive to think that such uncertainty could possibly hold any appeal. And to think that not knowing actually makes women like men more: Are we really such masochists? Pretty much, says a new study by Erin R. Whitchurch and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard. According to their paper, published in Psychological Science and based on an experiment conducted with undergraduates, women find men who may like them more appealing than men who definitely do. A group of female students at the University of Virginia were told they were evaluating whether Facebook could work as an online dating site; 47 women learned that male students from the University of Michigan and U.C.L.A. had viewed their profiles as well as those of 15 to 20 others. The women were then shown Facebook profiles of four “likeable, attractive” men. (The profiles were fake.) One group of women was told that these four men

were those who liked them the most, a second group heard that these men rated them as average and a third group was left in the unsettling position of thinking that the men might like them either the most or an average amount. Not surprisingly, women were more attracted to men who found them attractive than men who rated them average. This is called the “reciprocity principle,” which holds that a woman should like a man less if he doesn’t like her much, and reﬂects earlier research. The shocker was that the women who found the men most attractive of all were those who weren’t sure just how much the men liked them. The authors believe psychologists have underestimated the effects of a woman’s obsessing: When a prospective beau’s feelings are unknown, a woman thinks about him incessantly, mulling over whether he will ask her for coffee or ask out her best friend instead. “If you’re thinking a lot about someone, you assume you like him,” said the lead author, Dr. Whitchurch, who wrote the study as part of her dissertation. “It’s really about the process of the way our minds work.” There is a catch: Women in the study were uncertain about whether a man liked them a lot or an average amount

— without the possibility that he found her utterly repulsive or ridiculous. In cases where the uncertainty includes a possible negative outcome, women are not pleased by ambiguity. Furthermore, the behavior of a bunch of college students in a controlled experiment may not hold true to life. Still, there could be something to playing hard to get. Perhaps “The Rules” should apply to men, too.

Poker Bots Invade Online Gambling By GABRIEL DANCE

ryan Taylor, 36, could not shake the feeling that something funny was going on. Three of his most frequent opponents on an online poker site were acting oddly, playing in ways that were so similar it was suspicious. Mr. Taylor, who started playing poker professionally in 2008, suspected that he was competing against computers — specifically bots, short for robots — that had been programmed to play poker and beat the odds. And he was right. After an investigation, the site Mr. Taylor frequented, PokerStars, determined that his opponents had been computers masquerading as people and shut them down. Poker bots are not new, but until recently they were not very good. Humans were better at the nuances of the game — at bluffing, for instance — and could routinely beat the machines. But artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years, far enough that poker bots are now good enough to win tens of thousands of dollars on major game sites, which are clamping down on them. The bots that Mr. Taylor identified on PokerStars were shut down in July. In October, another large poker site, Full Tilt, informed customers that it had taken action to limit the proliferation of bots, including freezing some accounts. (Internet gambling is illegal in the United States, but online casinos operate offshore.) “PokerStars is continuing to invest substantial resources to combat bots,” Michael Josem, a security manager at the site, said in an interview conducted via e-

mail. “When a player is identified as a bot, PokerStars removes them from our games as soon as possible.” Their winnings are confiscated, he said, and the company will “provide compensation to players when appropriate.” Yet poker bots are openly for sale online. Shanky Technologies sells licenses for the Holdem Poker Bot — the target of Full Tilt’s crackdown in October — for $129 per year. Brian Jetter, a co-founder of Shanky, said in an e-mail interview that more than 400 of his customers had been banned from Full Tilt. (Full Tilt did not respond to requests for comment.) Mr. Jetter said that Full Tilt had seized more than $50,000 of his customers’ money, a figure that he called a “conservative estimate.” He added that the gaming site was forgoing at least $70,000 per month in revenue by shutting down his customers’ bots. “They really must have wanted us gone,” Mr. Jetter said. “We don’t think the other poker rooms we support will make a similar financial decision.” According to the Web site PokerScout. com, which bills itself as an Internet poker clearinghouse, there are more than 600 Web sites where people can play online. Mr. Jetter says that while Shanky does not have any “official relationships with the poker rooms,” some of them look the other way when bots play. The science of poker bots is still in its infancy, which may be one reason that some gambling sites do not crack down on them. Unlike Watson, the I.B.M. computer that won on “Jeopardy!,” poker bots are not stellar players. But they are getting better, thanks to advances in the way computer

scientists program software to play games. “The large majority of bots are very bad,” said Darse Billings, a consultant to PokerStars and Full Tilt and the former chief of data analytics at Full Tilt. “More than 90 percent are losing money.” It turns out to be a lot easier to build a perfect chess player than a poker whiz. Chess is a perfect information game: if you look at a chessboard, you know the exact state of the game from both players’ perspectives. And the rules of the game are not affected by chance, like the drawing of a card. But in poker, an imperfect information game, there are many unknown variables. A player does not know his opponents’ cards and may not know their style of play — how aggressive they tend to be, for instance, or how often they bluff. Unlike a chess bot, a poker bot does most of its work before the match, running millions of simulations before the ﬁrst card is dealt. But even with the large amounts of memory available with today’s computers, storing — or even computing — information for every possible scenario would be implausible. The best poker bots in the world include those from the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, which is nearly 20 years old. Professor Michael Bowling, who has led the group since 2005, says the breakthrough came in 2003, when researchers decided to change their approach, shifting away from the methodology used to build chess bots. In 2006, the inaugural Annual Computer Poker Competition created more interest in poker-playing computers and established a friendly rivalry between the

University of Alberta and Professor Tuomas W. Sandholm’s poker research group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Today, Professor Sandholm said, poker bots “can rival good players, but not the best — yet.” Many of the poker bots available on the Internet were built by programmers as a personal exercise or hobby. Some buyers think they can make money with the bots, but others use them in intellectual exercises, Mr. Jetter said. Buyers can program their bots to use different decision-making strategies in various circumstances, and then observe which outcomes are more successful when applied in real-world games. “Using a poker bot is in fact a natural extension of the game of online poker,” said Mr. Jetter, who added that Shanky has sold 5,000 copies of its Holdem Bot software since it was introduced in early 2008. “Creating your own playing proﬁle is a fun challenge that many players enjoy.” That argument does not go over well at sites like PokerStars. Last year, after it was tipped off by Mr. Taylor, the company found 10 bots and returned more than $57,000 to players who had lost money to them. The poker bots’ arrival may be just another sign of an emerging world where humans, knowingly or unknowingly, encounter robots on an everyday basis. People already talk with computers when they call customer service centers or drive their cars. As for Mr. Taylor, his cleverness in spotting bots won him a job. He now works full time for PokerStars, where “he is helping to protect the integrity of our games,” Mr. Josem said. And so the human wins — this time.

SCIENCE / TECH 42 March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

No Face, but Plants Like Life Too

By CAROL KAESUK YOON

everal years ago, after having to drive for too long behind a truck full of stinking, squealing pigs being delivered for slaughter, I gave up eating meat. I’d been harboring a growing distaste for the ugliness that can be industrial agriculture, but the real issue was a long-suppressed sympathy for its — or really, my — victims. Even screaming, reeking pigs, or maybe especially screaming, reeking pigs, can evoke stark pity as they tumble along in a truck to their deaths. If you think about it, and it’s much simpler not to, it can be hard to justify other beings suffering pain, fear and death so that we can enjoy their ﬂesh. In particular, given our many connections to animals, not least of all the fact that we are ourselves animals, it can give a person pause to realize that our most frequent contact with these kin might just be the devouring of them. My entry into what seemed the moral high ground, though, was surprisingly unpleasant. I felt embattled not only by a bizarrely intense lust for chicken but nightmares in which I would be eating a gorgeous, rare steak — I could distinctly taste the savory drippings — from which I awoke in a panic, until I realized that I had been carnivorous only in my imagination. Temptations and trials were everywhere. The most surprising turned out to be the realization that I couldn’t actually explain to myself or anyone else why killing an animal was any worse than killing the many plants I was now eating. Surely, I’d thought, science can defend the obvious, that slaughterhouse carnage is wrong in a way that harvesting a ﬁeld of lettuces or, say, mowing the

lawn is not. But instead, it began to seem that formulating a truly rational rationale for not eating animals, at least while consuming all sorts of other organisms, was difficult, maybe even impossible. Before you hit “send” on your hate mail, let me say this. Different people have different reasons for the choices they make about what to kill or have killed for them to eat. Perhaps there isn’t any choice more personal or less subject to rationality or the judgment of others. It’s just that as far as I was concerned, if eating a tofu dog was as much a crime against life as eating bratwurst, then pass the bratwurst, please. So what really are the differences between animals and plants? There are plenty. The cells of plants, and not animals, for example, harbor chloroplasts, tiny green organelles that can turn the energy of light into sugar. Almost none of these differences, however, seem to matter to any of us trying to figure out what to eat. The differences that do seem to matter are things like the fact that plants don’t have nerves or brains. They cannot, we therefore conclude, feel pain. In other words, the differences that matter are those that prove that plants do not suffer as we do. Here the lack of a face on plants becomes important, too, faces being requisite to humans as proof not only that one is dealing with an actual individual being, but that it is an individual capable of suffering. Animals, on the other hand — and not just close evolutionary relations like chimps and gorillas, but species further afield, mammals like cows and pigs — can experience what pretty much anyone would agree is pain and suffering. If attacked, these animals will look agonized, scream, struggle and run as fast as they can. Obviously, if we don’t kill any

of these animals to eat them, all that suffering is avoided. Meanwhile, whether you pluck a leaf or slice a trunk, a plant neither grimaces nor cries out. Plants don’t seem to mind being killed, at least as far as we can see. But that may be exactly the difﬁculty. Unlike a lowing, running cow, a plant’s reactions to attack are much harder for us to detect. But just like a chicken running around without its head, the body of a corn plant torn from the soil or sliced into pieces struggles to save itself, just as vigorously and just as uselessly, if much less obviously to the human ear and eye. When a plant is wounded, its body immediately kicks into protection mode. It releases a bouquet of volatile chemicals, which in some cases have been shown to induce neighboring plants to pre-emptively step up their own chemical defenses and in other cases to lure in predators of the beasts that may be causing the damage to the plants. Inside the plant, repair systems are engaged and defenses are mounted, the molecular details of which scientists are still working out, but which involve signaling molecules coursing through the body to rally the cellular troops, even the enlisting of the genome itself, which begins churning out defenserelated proteins. Plants don’t just react to attacks, though. They stand forever at the ready. Witness the endless thorns, stinging hairs and deadly poisons with which they are armed. If all this effort doesn’t look like an organism trying to survive, then I’m not sure what would. Plants are not the inert pantries of sustenance we might wish them to be. If a plant’s myriad efforts to keep from being eaten aren’t enough to stop you from heedlessly laying into that quinoa salad, then maybe knowing that plants can do any number of things that we typically think of as animal-like would. They move, for one thing, carrying out activities that could only be called behaving, if at a pace visible only via time-lapse photography. Not too long ago, scientists even reported evidence that plants could detect and grow differently depending on whether they were in the presence of close relatives, a level of behavioral sophistication most animals have not yet been found to show. To make matters more confusing, animals are not always the deep wells of sensitivity that we might imagine. Sponges are animals, but like plants they lack nerves or a brain. Jellyﬁsh, meanwhile, which can be really tasty when cut into julienne and pickled, have no brains, only a simple net of nerves, arguably a less sophisticated setup than the signaling systems coordinating the lives of many plants. How do we decide how much sensitivity and what sort matters?

For those hoping to escape these quandaries with an all-mushroom diet, forget it. In nearly every way that you might choose to compare, fungi are likely to be more similar to us than are plants, as fungi are our closer evolutionary relations. If you think about it, though, why would we expect any organism to lie down and die for our dinner? Organisms have evolved to do everything in their power to avoid being extinguished. How long would any lineage be likely to last if its members effectively didn’t care if you killed them? Maybe the real problem with the argument that it’s O.K. to kill plants because they don’t feel exactly as we do, though, is that it’s the same argument used to justify what we now view as unforgivable wrongs. Slavery and genocide have been justified by the assertion that some kinds of people do not feel pain, do not feel love — are not truly human — in the same way as others. The same thinking has led to other practices less drastic but still appalling. For example, physicians once withheld anesthetics from infants during surgery because it was believed that these not-quite-yet-humans did not feel pain (smiles were gas, remember). Yet even as we shake our heads over the past, we continue to fight about where to draw the line around our tribe of those deemed truly human. We argue over whether those who love others of the same gender deserve full human rights. We ask the same about fetal humans. The dinner menu pushes us further still. Do other species of animal deserve our consideration? Do plants? Fungi? Microbes? Maybe this seems all nonsense to you. Perhaps you’re having trouble equating a radish to a lamb to a person whose politics you hate to your beloved firstborn. It’s not surprising. It is reliably difficult for us to accept new members into our tribe, the more so the less like us they seem. It can be infinitely inconvenient to take the part of every individual we come across, to share with it that most precious of commodities: compassion. What should we have for dinner tonight? Who knows? Human beings survive by eating other living things. I really want not only to eat, but to survive. Yet a nakedly logical way to judge the value of one kind of organism over another — the rightness of a plant’s death versus an animal’s — seems, to me, out of reach. My efforts to forgo meat didn’t last more than a couple of years. Still, I wonder what our great-grandchildren will think of us. Will we have trouble explaining to them why we killed animals or perhaps even plants for food? And if so, what on Earth will we be eating?

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The San Juan Weekly

PEOPLE

The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson

By DAPHNE MERKIN

he gold caps on his teeth are gone, as are the frenzied trappings of celebrity: the nonstop partying, the cars, the jewelry, the pet tiger, the liters of Cristal. Mike Tyson — who was once addicted, by his own account, “to everything” — now lives in what might be described as a controlled environment of his own making, a clean, well-lighted but very clearly demarcated place. The 44-year-old ex-heavyweight champion is in bed by 8 and often up as early as 2 in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the gated compound in the Las Vegas suburb where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy and psychology), watching karate movies or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage, until 6, when his wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), gets up. The two of them go to a spa nearby where they work out and often get a massage before settling into the daily routine of caring for a 2-year-old daughter, Milan, and a newborn son, Morocco; they also run Tyrannic, a production company they own. It is a willfully low-key life, one in which Tyson’s wilder impulses are held in check by his inner solid citizen. The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. It is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indeﬁnitely, whether you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will, but there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation. He spends some of his time involved in domestic activities, accompanying Kiki and Milan to classes at Gymboree and doctors’ appo-

intments or running errands, and some of his time furthering his post-boxing career, doing autograph signings, conferring with his agent and publicist about new opportunities. Although he no longer gets lucrative endorsement deals, Tyson earns fees for personal appearances in America and “meet and greet” dinner tours in Europe. He made a brief but memorable cameo in the blockbuster film “The Hangover” and will play a bit part in “The Hangover Part II.” He’s hoping to nab more acting roles — genuine ones, in which he gets to play someone other than himself. “I want to entertain people,” he tells me, smiling broadly. “I want a Tony award.” As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened. . . . I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.” The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons. He has been raising them since he was a picked-on fat little kid with glasses growing up in some of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods — first Bedford Stuyvesant, then Brownsville — with an alcoholic, promiscuous mother given to violent outbursts, which included scalding a boyfriend

with boiling water. (“He had a tough mother,” recalls David Malone, a childhood friend. “We knew to stay away from her.”) Although he has turned down requests to do a reality show, Tyson agreed to participate in a six-part docudrama about his pigeons called “Taking On Tyson,” that started being shown on Animal Planet on March 6. The young Tyson turned to birds as both a hobby and as an escape; it was in defense of his pigeons that the timid kid who was called “sissy” and “faggy boy” got into his first fist-fight. When he was released from prison in 1995 after serving three years for the rape of Desiree Washington, he went to visit his coops in the Catskills. “The birds were there before boxing,” says Mario Costa, who owns the Ringside Gym in Jersey City and has known Tyson since the early ’80s. “He feels peaceful around them.” Tyson keeps coops in Las Vegas, Jersey City and Bushwick, and to this day he seeks out the birds when one of his “bad spells,” as Kiki calls them, strikes and his mood turns dark and agitated. “The first thing I ever loved in my life was a pigeon,” Tyson says. “It’s a constant with my sanity in a weird way.” I have never been particularly drawn to boxing, but there was something about the younger Mike Tyson — his way of seeming larger than the sport itself, of playing out impulses that seemed all the more authentic for being so unmediated, whether it was his desperate bid for Robin Givens’s heart or his desperate biting of Evander Holyfield’s ear — that caught my attention. He seemed like a man in huge conflict with himself as well as with the forces around him — the media, the celebrity machine with its perks and dangers — in a way that suggested that he was both vulnerable to manipulation and leery of being manipulated. In preparation for my visit to Las Vegas at the beginning of March, I communicated through e-mail with Kiki, who manages Tyson’s affairs, and the plan was kept loose: we were to meet at his house for several days of conversation, with no definite times fixed. I called the film director James Toback, who made an acclaimed 2009 documentary about Tyson and has known him since they met on the set of Toback’s “PickUp Artist” in 1986, to find out what I could about a man who came across in the film as both very present and elusive, weepy one minute and matter-of-fact the next, capable of self-insight but also hidden to himself. Toback told me that Tyson was unpredictable, given to sudden psychological discon-

nections that Toback referred to as “clickouts.” It was entirely possible, Toback said, that Tyson would back out of the interviews altogether. “Everything is contingent on the state of mind he’s in at the moment,” the director observed. According to Toback, he and Tyson shared experiences of temporary insanity — of “losing the I” — and “people who don’t understand madness can’t understand him. He’s quicker, smarter, sharper than almost anyone he’s talking to.” He went on to say that making the movie had been an “exhilarating” experience for both of them and that he senses that Tyson is happier now, that he doesn’t have “the same degree of doom” he had before he met Kiki. Toback recalled their “late-night conversations about sex, love, madness and death” and then, lest I think I might intuit something about the ex-ﬁghter that had escaped others, Toback suddenly issued a pronouncement: “No one gets him. You can’t get him if you haven’t been where he’s been.” The ﬁrst object that caught my eye in Tyson’s double-storied, sparely furnished living room was a plush, purple Disney child’s car seat, perched on a chair near the screen doors that led out to a swimming pool. There was also a child-size table and chairs, and a cluster of Mylar balloons tied to a bar stool in celebration of the birth of the Tysons’ week-old son, Morocco, who had a touch of jaundice as well as his father’s narrow eyes. The white stucco house is located in a gated community called Seven Hills, which has the hushed, slightly vacant aura of gated communities everywhere. The entanceway features a koi pond under Plexiglas, and the expansive, open interior is decorated in a style that could be described as utilitarian (the color scheme is plum, beige and brown) with rococo touches — there is a huge contemporary

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44 March 24 - 30, 2011

Comes from page 43 chandelier as well as two gilded brass mirrors over a glassed-in fireplace that match the ironwork frieze on the front doors. Tyson bought the place from a friend, the N.B.A. player Jalen Rose, in the down market of early 2007. (The property was originally valued at $3 million; Tyson paid around $1.7 million for it.) It was built, he says, as a party house, but he and Kiki have been pushing it in the direction of a more traditional family home, with clearly defined living areas and childproofed touches, like the Plexiglas panels on the stair railing. Tyson mentioned that he bought the house because it reminded him of a New York loft, despite the fact that he says there’s little he misses about his hometown aside from the pigeon competitions and seeing people from his old stomping grounds. “I have a big affinity with the guys in my neighborhood . . . the guys with the broken English and stuff . . . and then the pigeon world, it’s not like there’s a glass ceiling, the pigeon world keeps evolving with time. There are new diseases, there have to be serums for the new diseases,” he said, sounding momentarily like a biochemist, albeit one with an endearing lisp. “Antibodies.” Tyson and I sat diagonally across from each other on black leather couches; in front of us was a glass coffee table on a Persian rug. He sipped from a cup of tea with honey and snacked on a banana. Kiki and her mother, who lives down the street and does a lot of baby-sitting, were upstairs with the children. Tyson’s assistant, Farid (also known as David), had picked me up at my hotel and had taken me to the house in a maroon Cadillac Escalade S.U.V.; Farid is a genial former I.T. consultant whom Tyson met in jail, although Tyson is at pains to point out that Farid was never a criminal type, just a geek trying to make some extra money on the sly. In person, Tyson’s voice is deeper and raspier than it sounds in TV interviews, and he cuts a much slighter, trimmer figure than you would expect. He wore a T-shirt that said TYSON on the back and very white running shoes. His head was shaved, and the left side of his face bears the dramatic tattoo of the New Zealand Maori warrior that he got in the beginning of 2003, but he seemed more shy than ferocious, more of an introvert than someone out to create a stir. As the hours passed, Tyson grew less wary and more at ease about saying what was on his mind. An autodidact, he likes to discuss characters he’s read about, ranging from Alexander the Great to Constantine to Tom Sawyer, and he harbors a special fondness for Machiavelli. He knows the history of boxing inside out, watches films of Muhammad Ali and other boxers (including himself) most every evening, returning again and again to “Raging Bull.” He’s also something of a homegrown philosopher, peppering our conversation with hard-knock truths: “The biggest tough guy wants to be likable,” he observed. But there are also whole areas of his life he keeps firmly cor-

doned off, especially the raging Kid Dynamite days: “I think I was insane for a great period of my life. I think I was really insane. . . . It was just too quick. I didn’t understand the dynamics then. I just knew how to get on top, I didn’t know what to do once I got there.” He seemed to be edging closer to a deeper revelation, so I asked him if he had any regrets. He answered with rare snappishness: “I’m too young for regrets. I’m not in the grave yet.” The first big change in Tyson’s convulsive life came when he went from being a ghetto kid whose world consisted of “a reformatory and welfare and rats and roaches” to being a rising boxing star living in a 14-room, antiques-filled Victorian mansion on 15 acres in the Catskills as one of the charges of Cus D’Amato, the legendary boxing trainer cum life coach. D’Amato, who was 70 then, was known for his stern credo of excellence, his ability to mold young talent and his eccentric, somewhat paranoid views; his protégés included Floyd Patterson and José Torres. The adolescent Tyson was introduced to “this old white guy” who didn’t know him “from a can of paint” by Bobby Stewart, a counselor at the Tryon School for Boys, the juvenile detention center where Tyson was sent after racking up a police record of street crimes. D’Amato saw Olympic potential in the surly, antisocial boy who could barely read or write. “He said, ‘Can you handle the job that’s at hand?’ And I say, ‘Sure, I can, I can do it,’ ” Tyson recalled. “But I really didn’t know if I could do anything.” The young Tyson began training with D’Amato and his staff at the Catskill Boxing Club on passes from Tryon; in 1980, while still a ward of the state, he moved into what was a kind of boarding house run by D’Amato and his companion, Camille Ewald. Camille served as materfamilias to the group of troubled boys — there were no more than 4 to 6 fighters in residence at any one time — teaching them manners and how to do laundry. (Tyson remained in touch with Ewald, helping to support her and sending her flowers on her birthday, until her death in 2001.) D’Amato, meanwhile, devised a master plan whereby Tyson would be reprogrammed from street thug to warrior in the ring. “Cus was an amazing influence,” says Tom Patti, another D’Amato protégé, who lived with Tyson at

The San Juan Weekly the boarding house and played the role of big brother in his life. “He engineered his fighters and their success.” To hone Tyson’s physical skills, D’Amato taught him the two boxing techniques that he himself had developed and that were now his signatures — holding the gloves in a tight defensive position at ear level, and maintaining a consistent head motion before and after punching. As for psychological conditioning, Tyson’s ego was inflated nonstop: “They were telling me how great I am, telling me how I can do this if I really try,” Tyson explained, sounding decidedly of mixed minds when looking back on this approach. “They kept it in my head. It had me form a different psychological opinion of myself. No one could say anything negative about me. I always had to have the supreme confidence that I’m a god and superior to everybody else, which is just sick and crazy. But it had its uses.” After Tyson’s mother, Lorna, died of cancer in the fall of 1982, D’Amato became his legal guardian and continued to oversee Tyson’s training until his death in 1985. On Nov. 22, 1986, D’Amato’s tireless mentoring paid off big-time when Mike Tyson defeated Trevor Berbick and became the new world heavyweight champion (and, at age 20, the youngest in history), exactly as D’Amato had predicted he would. Tyson lives less than half an hour from the raucous, 24-hour universe of the Las Vegas Strip, but it was preternaturally quiet in his house. The phone didn’t ring, and the silence during conversational pauses was broken only by an occasional crying bout of Morocco’s or some chatter of Milan’s that trickled down from the second floor. “It’s like a funeral home here,” Tyson said softly, as if he were thinking aloud. It was one of the few times he alluded to what appears to be the deliberate curtailment of his life, the lengths he and Kiki have gone to in order to keep his habitat free of too much stimuli or pressure, the better to preserve his somewhat fragile equanimity. At one point, Milan came into the living room and

reached for a tiny handful of pretzels from a bowl. He picked up the toddler and hugged her tightly, then put his face in her hair. When he put her down, she stood against the couch across from him, and he kept his eye on her as she ate her pretzels. “Chew,” he said gently. “Milan, you’ve got to chew.” Tyson has six biological children, who range in age from newborn to 20, born of three different women. A seventh child, a daughter named Exodus, died at age 4 in May 2009 at her mother’s home in Phoenix; she was strangled when her neck was caught in a cord hanging from a treadmill. Tyson caught a plane immediately upon receiving a call from Sol Xochitl, Exodus’s mother, about the accident, but by the time he arrived at the hospital, the little girl was already brain-dead. The loss of his daughter critically altered his once-tentative grasp on his own accountability. To this day, he blames himself for not being there. “It made me feel very irresponsible,” he says simply. “I wish she were here to hang out with Milan.” The effects of the tragedy reverberated throughout Tyson’s extended family: “The kids were very close to Exodus, and when she died we were all devastated,” says Monica Turner, his second wife. “I think that changed Mike forever.” Tyson refers to Exodus repeatedly during our conversations with evident sadness and insists on keeping her memory alive by counting her among his living children. Tyson has been married three times; the ﬁrst was to the TV actress Robin Givens when he was 21, after a fevered courtship. The yearlong marriage proved disastrous, culminating in an infamous 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, in which Givens described the marriage as “pure hell” — while he sat passively beside her, drugged on manic-depression medication. (“I’m tripolar,” he tells me laughingly when I ask him how he’d diagnose his condition today.) He went on to have two children with Turner; he also considers himself a father to Turner’s daughter Gena. Turner, who is on friendly

March 24 - 30, 2011

The San Juan Weekly terms with Tyson, filed for divorce in 2002, citing adultery. Along the way, Tyson, a notorious womanizer, sired two more children — 8-year-old Miguel and Exodus — with Xochitl. Tyson keeps in touch with all of his brood, speaking especially proudly of his oldest son, 13-year-old Amir, who is six feet tall. “He’s just nervous and afraid of life,” he says, sounding an apprehensive note. “But he’s doing so well. . . . There are no bad influences. I have so many hopes for him.” Tyson knows from bad influences, if only because he has been susceptible to so many of them since the death of his mentor and his own emergence as a sports superstar. Following a brief glory period in the late ’80s, when he was arguably the most popular athlete in the world, asked to do endorsements for Pepsi, Nintendo and Kodak, and hired by the New York City Police Department to boost recruitment as well as by the F.B.I. to do public service announcements to keep kids off drugs, Tyson began spiraling out of control. His self-destructive patterns, which had been refocused by D’Amato, came to the surface once again, aided and abetted by the boxing promoter Don King, who successfully wooed Tyson in the wake of his split from Robin Givens. (Tyson filed a lawsuit against King in 1998, claiming that the promoter stole millions from him.) Once a money-making machine worth $400 million at his height, Tyson was reduced to filing for personal bankruptcy in 2003; he was $27 million in debt. In late December 2006 he was arrested in Arizona on charges of drug possession and drunken driving, and in February 2007 he checked himself into the Wonderland Center, a rehab facility in the Hollywood Hills, for the treatment of various addictions. Carole Raymond, a warm-sounding woman with a thick Yorkshire accent who worked as a staff member at Wonderland during Tyson’s stay, remembers that he had trouble finding a facility that would take him and that he came to them a “beaten down” man. Still, she remembers him as funny, “very humble” and eager to embrace the program’s ethos. “People who come from fame or money have a hard time grasping the idea of recovery. He wanted to be emotionally better than the Mike Tyson who was always boxing.” Tyson, in turn, credits the “life skills” he learned in rehab with coming to his rescue when a crisis hits: “You don’t know where they came from, but you’re on the top of your game. You’re suited up and ready to work.” When I asked him why he stayed at Wonderland for as long as he did — more than a year — he leaned over as if to emphasize what he was about to say. “I felt safe.” As befits someone who has been alternately idolized and demonized by the press, Tyson is leery of the public’s continuing interest in his saga. He says he believes that celebrity made him “delusional” and that it has taken nothing less than a “paradigm shift” for him to come down to earth: “We have to stick to what we are. I always stay in my

slot. I know my place.” He asked me outright, “Why do you want to know about me as a person?” and at one point, anxious that he might be boring me, he got up to show me photographs from the glory days in which he is posing with other boxers (Ali, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta) and with big names like Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand. Underneath his deliberate calmness and considerable charm, there is something bewildered and lost-seeming about Tyson. Indeed, he refers to himself as a “little boy” who “never had a chance to develop,” and it is in part this conception of himself as missing out on a crucial period of maturation that fuels his present focus. “This is what the deal is,” he said. “People just wait for you to grow up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for you to participate in the improvement of your life as a human being. When are you going to do it?” The most important and sustaining influence in Tyson’s current incarnation as an introspective mensch rather than the Baddest Man on the Planet is the presence of his wife, Kiki, whom he has known since she was about 16 (they met through her father, who did some boxing promotions); they exchanged their first kiss when she was 19 and had an on-and-off romance for more than a decade. They tried living together in Kiki’s apartment in Manhattan in 2002 after Tyson’s defeat at the hands of Lennox Lewis, but it was, she says, “a disaster.” “He was used to juggling a lot of women.” They remained friends even though the relationship didn’t work out, had another fling in 2004, lost touch again when Tyson was in rehab and then reconnected when Tyson called her after he got out. Their daughter, Milan, was born on Christmas 2008, and they married on June 6, 2009. “We know all of each other’s secret stuff,” she says. “He told me everything, and I told him everything. We fight hard, but I’m very much in love with him.” Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.” Perhaps because she has known Tyson for so long, she’s cleareyed about his failings. “He slept with every kind of woman you can think of,” she says. “Now he wants someone who knows him and can be good to him. We’re rebuilding our lives together on a positive note.” Ty-

son, meanwhile, seems continually struck by his good fortune in having Kiki, whom he addresses as “my love,” by his side. “I never thought we’d be together,” he told me. “I thought we’d be sex partners. I told her not marry me.” A few seconds later he adds: “I want to die with her.” Despite their cushy lifestyle, there isn’t money to throw around as there once was. But Kiki, for one, seems indifferent to the sort of lavish expenditures that Tyson’s former fortune once enabled him to make: “Mike always says he’s broke, but it’s relative. That type of stuff isn’t important to us. We want to build a nest egg for our kids’ accounts. I’m not impressed with money like that.” Meanwhile, although Tyson still owes a substantial amount —“a few million” is how Kiki puts it — in back taxes, he is adhering to a payment plan. He has a ﬁnancial planner who negotiated a deal with the I.R.S. regarding the purchase of his house, which was paid for in full. If Tyson misses his highrolling days, he isn’t letting on: “If you make a lot of money, you end up being around people you don’t want to be around,” he says. “Guys on allowance. It takes years to gather the audacity to get rid of them.” On the Saturday before the premiere of “Taking On Tyson,” Mike Tyson was in New York with Kiki and their two children, doing publicity for the show. I met him in Bushwick, in front of the rundown row house where he had gone to see his birds. Kiki had taken Milan to the American Girl store to meet a friend. Tyson was with Farid and his friend Dave Malone, who tends to the Brooklyn coops. On the drive back to the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, where he was staying, I found Tyson to be in a contemplative mood. Or maybe he was feeling remorseful; he had just come through one of his bad spells — what Toback alluded to as his “click-outs” — in which he feels alternately so low that he wants to jump out the window and so angry that he wants to crack someone’s head open with a pipe. “They come on you,” he told me, “out of the blue.” The birds helped him regain his footing, as

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they always do, but these bouts must take a toll on him (not to mention Kiki), opening up the ﬂoodgates of the past. Driving through Brooklyn, we passed a bunch of kids playing handball, and he reminisced: “When I was poor, I used to play handball. That’s how we all start.” He called Kiki to check how the play date was going, sounding sweetly affectionate, and then on the way into the hotel posed patiently for a photographer with an excited bride and groom who spotted him coming in. In his hotel suite, Tyson was excited to tell me about a book he was reading — “A Natural History of Human Emotions,” by Stuart Walton — and asked me to read aloud a chapter on jealousy. We discussed the difference between jealousy and envy, and when I asked whether he ever envies his children getting the sort of parental love he never had, he said, “How did you know that?” I asked him whether he misses the glamour of his old life, and he answered, “That’s not who I am anymore.” Around 5:30, Kiki returned with Milan, who triumphantly marched in, carrying a new American Girl doll aloft. Tyson and his wife kissed each other, and he said, “I’m sorry if I upset you.” She answered serenely, “That’s O.K., honey,” as she went to get ready for their night out. A cynic might wonder whether the kinder, gentler Tyson is merely another act, a construction every bit as deliberate as he claims his invincible Iron Mike persona was — “a vicious tiger,” as he describes it, “out there to kill somebody.” And there is indeed, something of the actor about Tyson, warming to his new role as a humbled rogue, a gentle giant with his delicate birds. But there is also a kind of heroism in his effort to construct a more accountable self, a reaching across the decades of excess back to the more disciplined days in the Catskills with Cus D’Amato. Now, however, the focus is not on invincibility or greatness, but on the perhaps more elusive goal of keeping his furies at bay and trying to master his unrulier impulses rather than letting them control him. It’s sure to be one hell of a match.

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The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Spaniards of Distinction From Priorat I felt it lacked structure, and I especially thought the wine was overpowered by new oak flavors. Some of the less expensive wines in the tasting showed very well. The 2006 Parmí L’Infant de Porrera, at $28, was burly and forceful, with an attractive blend of red fruit and spicy mineral flavors, while the 2006 Ferrer Bobet, $35, was concentrated and smooth with darker fruit flavors. The 2007 Cesca Vicent, $22, was plummy and earthy, though perhaps the alcohol was a bit too obvious. Meanwhile, the 2008 Camins del Priorat from Alvaro Palacios, with flavors of plums, minerals and licorice, was our best value, at $24. I will be fascinated to see how things play out in Priorat. My guess is that the wines will continue to get better and better, particularly as the intricacies of the various terroirs become better understood. How do the wines from Scala Dei, the hamlet where the ancient priory was situated, differ from those from the Porrera area, for example, or from Gratallops? Might not be a bad idea to start learning some Catalan.

By ERIC ASIMOV

PAIN is awash in ancient wine regions rejuvenating themselves for the modern age, but none of these historic lands has demonstrated its innate potential as well as Priorat. Twenty-five years ago, this isolated territory high in the hills of Catalonia was virtually unknown to most of the wine-drinking world. Today, Priorats command some of the highest prices of any Spanish wines. This seems a remarkable journey in such a short time, especially given the calm, creeping, seasonal pace of viticulture. Yet the commercial end of the wine business speeds by so quickly that some consumers have already concluded Priorat is something of a hasbeen, another generic, international-style wine built largely on hype. Don’t be fooled. The wines of Priorat are the real thing, distinctive and powerful expressions of a highly unusual terroir. Ever since the 12th century, when monks established the Priorato de Scala Dei, the priory of Scala Dei, vines have been grown on the craggy hillsides of Priorat, the Catalan term for Priorato. Indeed, the old stone terraces carved into treacherously steep hillsides testify to the indomitable human thirst for wine. Many of those terraces were left to crumble in the late 19th century, after phylloxera ravaged Priorat, along with most European vineyards. And, while some of the vineyards were replanted, largely with garnacha and cariñena, or grenache and carignan, many were later abandoned as farmers left to find work in cities in the mid-20th century. Only when a group of intrepid Spanish producers arrived in Priorat in the 1970s, believing in the region’s promise, did a recovery truly commence. Terraces were rebuilt, vineyards were revived or planted anew, and winemaking facilities were constructed. Recognition for the wines began to arrive in the late 1990s. While old stands of garnacha and cariñena are still the most important grapes in Priorat, some internationalization was perhaps inevitable. Cabernet sauvignon, merlot and syrah have also been planted, though they are largely added as blending grapes. French oak barrels are widely used for aging, further fueling suspicions of homogenization, and, to seal the deal, the wines are powerful and concentrated, leading to thoughts that they are made to appeal to American palates. This, I believe, is a thorough misunderstanding of Priorat, a feeling affirmed recently when the wine panel tasted 20 bottles from recent vintages that, as always, we bought in various retail outlets. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Kerin Auth, an owner of Tinto Fino, a Spanish wine shop in the East Village, and Victoria Levin, general manager of the Tangled Vine, a wine bar on the Upper West Side. Yes, these are big, dense wines. Indeed, the wines we tasted were all listed at 14 percent to 15.5 percent alcohol. That is the nature of garnacha. The wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, also dominated by grenache, offer a ready parallel in terms of size and power. Yet where the best Châteauneufs show indisputable evidence of Provence, with their dense, earthy, herbal wildness, the best Priorats we tasted were juicy, succulent and full of distinctive mineral flavors not at all

Tasting Report

like Châteauneufs. “These wines are big, and they’re strong, but they seduce,” Victoria said. “You taste it, you feel it, you want to touch it. It’s very visceral to me.” Priorat performs the rare feat of seeming to bridge the prevailing critical divide, with wines that are big, bold, sometimes jammy and high in power and concentration, but also structured, balanced and distinctively of a place. I don’t think it would be going too far to say that some of these huge wines were quite elegant as well. Our No. 1 wine was the 2005 Mas La Mola, one of the less expensive bottles in our tasting, at $36, dense and structured with rich fruit as well as savory, almost saline mineral flavors. Close behind was the 2007 Clos Mogador, one of the great names of Priorat, another well-balanced wine that offered both plenty of fruit and rocky, earthy flavors. The Clos Mogador was $77. As I said, Priorats are among the more expensive wines from Spain. Partly, this is because the hilly region is highly labor intensive and difficult to farm. The wines are made in small quantities and have been in demand, which, of course, is a recipe for high prices. Our No. 3 bottle, the 2008 Nit de Nin Porrera Mas d’En Caçador, at $85, and our No. 5, the 2006 Partida Bellvisos Gratallops, at $95, were two of the most expensive bottles in the tasting. The Nit de Nin was noteworthy for its lively energy, while the Partida Bellvisos was deliciously complex, with long, lingering flavors of jammy fruit leavened with minerals. In some of the wines that did not make the cut, the jamminess seemed out of hand. The most expensive bottle in the tasting, the 2005 La Creu Alta from Mas Alta, at $100, divided the panel. Florence and Victoria appreciated its explosively sweet fruit, but Kerin and

Mas La Mola, $36, *** Priorat 2005 Dense, rich fruit flavors yet savory with lingering meaty, mineral flavors. (Parador Selections, Berkeley Heights, N.J.) Clos Mogador, $77, *** Priorat 2007 Well balanced with rich fruit underlying flavors of licorice, earth and minerals. (Europvin U.S.A., Van Nuys, Calif.) Nit de Nin Priorat Porrera, $85, ** ½ Mas d’En Caçador 2008 Powerful yet lively with savory mineral and dark fruit flavors. (Eric Solomon Selections, Charlotte, N.C.) Parmí, $28, ** ½ Priorat L’Infant de Porrera 2006 Burly and forceful with spicy flavors of red fruit and minerals. (Small Vineyards, Seattle) Partida Bellvisos, $95, ** ½ Priorat Gratallops 2006 Jammy fruit with long-lasting mineral and earth flavors that add complexity. (Domaine Select Wine Estates, New York) Ferrer Bobet, $35, ** ½ Priorat 2006 Big, powerful and concentrated with smooth black fruit flavors. (Vintus Wines, Pleasantville, N.Y.) BEST VALUE Alvaro Palacios Priorat, $24, ** ½ Camins del Priorat 2008 Big and tannic with flavors of plums, mineral and licorice. (The Rare Wine Company, Vineburg, Calif.) Cesca Vicent, $22, ** ½ Priorat 2007 Concentrated, jammy flavors of fruit and earth; a bit hot. (T. Edward Wines, New York) Clos I Terrasses, $43, ** Priorat Laurel 2008 Voluptuous, intense fruit flavors but a trifle soft. (Eric Solomon Selections) Pasanau, $59, ** Priorat El Vell Coster 2006 Saturated dark fruit flavors with a touch of oak. (Classical Wines, Seattle)

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Cemi Museum A Window to Our Roots

he town of Jayuya seems to be loaded with the traces of the ancient Taino Indian culture. It could be because the

Tainos, and other indigenous cultures in Puerto Rico, appeared to have a preference of living and/or gathering together for ceremonies

in the mountains in the central part of the island. The Cemi Museum (Museo El Cemi, in Spanish) in Jayuya is a visitor center for the area and a showcase of Taino artifacts. Archaeological digs and large rocks with shapes carved into them (petroglyphs) prove that pre-Columbian cultures lived in this area. The leaders of Jayuya

wanted to preserve and educate about the Taino culture, so they opened this odd-shaped museum in 1989.

What is a Cemi? According to Taino tradition, a cemi is a god, spirit or ancestor. It is also the name given to the religious symbol that is the physical representation of a god. The most common shape for cemis in Puerto Rico is a form with three â&#x20AC;&#x153;pointsâ&#x20AC;? carved in stone or wood. These idols have carved representations of both humans and animals. The scholars who study this culture are not sure if the shape of the cemi was meant to mimic Continues on page 48

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muwseum is itself in the shape of a cemi. The museum is small, the shape of the nearby mountain but it is nice. It has pieces of potrange (Tres Picachos), but is sure tery, some tools and other artifacts looks similar. from daily Taino life. There is a mural Tainos and other indigenous culwith examples of the petroglyphs tures. Those petroglyphs have The Museum The building that houses the that have been attributed to the been found on rocks and caves all around the island, including Jayuya, Arecibo and Las Piedras. The signs and informational placards in the museum are in both Spanish and English. The ﬁrst thing to see at the museum is a video (about 20 minutes) of all the things the town of Jayuya has to offer. There is no audio track, but it does have subtitles (only in Spanish). The video helps you know what to look for during your visit to Jayuya. After the video, you’re free to wander through the museum — which takes all of 10 minutes. Comes from page 47

What Else is Nearby? Casa Canales located adjacent to the Cemi Museum. Dona Juana Waterfall is about 15 minutes away. Not far up the road is the Hacienda Coffee, that offers tours

on Friday – Sunday. Piedra Escrita (which is a big rock covered with petroglyphs in the middle of the river) is a short drive away. It is possible to make a day out of exploring the area in and around Jayuya. If you do head to this area, keep in mind that the roads are mountainous and twisty, so plan accordingly so you can get back to “ﬂat ground” before sunset.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

36 Hours in São Paulo, Brazil By SETH KUGEL

CITY of high-rises and traffic jams in a country of rain forests and beaches, São Paulo, South America’s biggest metropolis, is a Brazilian freak of nature, except without the nature. But the city’s flaws — high prices, street crime, incessant drizzle — are no match for its strengths — artistic and business energy, relentless night life. Sometimes, it even manages to turn its flaws into assets, as when celebrated architects take ugly concrete and create post-Brutalist masterpieces, like Isay Weinfeld’s sleek bookstore Livraria da Vila on Alameda Lorena. São Paulo’s 11 million-plus inhabitants do their part by infusing the din with

contagious Brazilian energy; those ﬂashing smiles and thumbs-up signs are among the few things the city shares with the rest of the vast country whose booming economy it anchors.

Friday 3 p.m. 1) GRIMY GLORY The elite may snap up luxury apartments as far from the heart of the city as possible, but São Paulo’s historic center still bustles with government employees and other ofﬁce workers who have a nice secret on their hands. Sure, parts of the center could use a rinse in a giant urban bathtub, but much of the former glory is intact, including the city’s most beautiful art museum, the Pinacoteca (Praça da Luz, 2; 55-11-3324-1000;

pinacoteca.org.br), housed in a former high school. Don’t miss the adjacent sculpture garden before hopping a subway to São Bento to get lost in the busy street commerce on Rua 25 de Março (25demarco.com.br) and stroll the pedestrian-only streets near the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (Rua Álvares Penteado, 112; 55-11-3113-3600; bb.com.br/cultura), a glorious old bank building turned exhibition space, where “Islam: Art and Civilization” is currently showing.

6 p.m. 2) COCKTAILS OR CAFFEINE? When the business bustle dies down, make your way past the grand old Teatro Municipal (Rua Líbero Badaró, 377) toward one of the classic works by Brazil’s best-known architect, Oscar Niemeyer: the marvelously undulating 38-story Copan apartment building (Avenida Ipiranga, 200; www.copansp.com.br), now home to a diverse community of residents. Choose your pick-me-up at the ground ﬂoor shopping center: a creamy espresso at the old-school, standing-room-only Café Floresta, or a creative caipirinha cocktail at the classy and ballyhooed two-year-old Bar da Dona Onça (55-11-3257-2016; www.bardadonaonca.com.br).

8 p.m. 3) VERTICAL JUNGLE Enough grime. Find the nearest ponto de táxi (taxi stand) and ﬂee to upscale Vila Olímpia to dine with the elite at Kaá (Avenida Juscelino Kubitschek, 279; 55-11-3045-0043; kaarestaurante.com.br). Stepping through the barely marked entrance into the Arthur Casas-designed restaurant is like entering an alternative universe. The showstopper is the 4,300-square-foot vertical garden, a wall draped in plant species from

the Mata Atlântica — the rapidly disappearing rain forest São Paulo used to be a part of. The contemporary menu — Brie tortellini with ﬁg jam in sage butter, squid stuffed with crayﬁsh and black risotto — is worth the steep price. (Dinner for two with drinks and dessert can approach 300 reais, about $185 at 1.63 reais to the dollar.)

11 p.m. 4) HOUSE PARTY In Vila Olímpia, high-end nightclubs come and go, but the conspicuously consuming playboys and the surgically enhanced women they buy Champagne for are, alas, forever. Instead, head to Casa 92 (Rua Cristovão Gonçalves, 92, Largo da Batata; 55-11-3032-0371; casa92. blogspot.com), a new nightspot in what surely must have been the home of someone’s grandmother. As you wander from room to room and through the pleasant outdoor spaces, you might ﬁnd yourself crashing a birthday party, striking up a caipirinha-fueled conversation or hitting the upstairs dance ﬂoor where recently formed couples make out.

Saturday 4 a.m. or 9 a.m. 5) BREAKFAST AND BED Ending a long night on the town or starting a big day on the town at a padoca (the informal term for bakery) are two mutually exclusive São Paulo traditions. You can do either at Bella Paulista (Rua Haddock Lobo, 354; 55-11-3214-3347; bellapaulista. com), a padoca on steroids where the late-night crowd feasts on everything from pastries (very good) to oversize hot sandwiches (good) to salads (decent) to pizza (not so much). Starting at 7 a.m., there’s also a 26.90-real

Continues on page 50

Comes from page 49 breakfast buffet, with breads and pastries, fruit, eggs and cold cuts. For a cheaper option, ask your hotel for directions to a neighborhood padoca and order fresh orange juice and a pão na chapa, a roll buttered and grilled until crisp.

11 a.m. 6) ART RUN Plan a tour through São Paulo’s energetic gallery scene using the widely available, excellent Mapa das Artes. You might start at funky Choque Cultural (Rua João Moura, 997; 55-11-3061-4051; choquecultural. com.br), a crumbling old house that always has something surprising or provocative, then walk to the slick sixmonth-old Zipper Galeria (Rua Estados Unidos, 1494; 55-11-4306-4306; zippergaleria.com.br), which features 23 young Brazilian artists. A step up in class is Nara Roesler (Avenida Europa, 655; 55-11-3063-2344; nararoesler.com.br). Then hop a taxi just across the Pinheiros River to Galeria Leme (Rua Agostinho Cantu, 88; 55-11-3814-8184; galerialeme.com), housed in a contemporary São Paulo structure designed by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Note: those prostitutes hanging out on the nearby street corner are not a performance art installation.

2 p.m. 7) BIA AWAITS Saturday is for feijoada, the classic Brazilian dish of black bean stew

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March 24 - 30, 2011

brimming with every part of a pig you can imagine. Feijoada da Bia (Rua Lopes Chaves, 105; 55-11-3663-0433) is hidden away in a homey setting in the Barra Funda neighborhood (but within walking distance of the Marechal Deodoro subway stop). It’s 62 reais for all you can eat — not cheap, but that includes an easygoing chorinho band, and possibly even free booze: recently, the owner, Bia Braga, has been doling out samples of her new house cachaça, produced by a family distillery in Minas Gerais state.

8 p.m. 8) THEATER SCENE The language barrier may make seeing a play untenable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t dive into the hip alternative theater scene around Praça Roosevelt. Mingle with the pre- and post-theater crowd at nearby bars like Rose Velt (Praça Franklin Roosevelt, 124; 55-11-3129-5498; rosevelt.com.br), a cozy spot with quirky décor, like the patch of tiled São Paulo sidewalk on one wall. It carries Colorado-brand pale ale (brewed in São Paulo state), a nice change when the corporate swill you’ll get at most bars around town grows old.

Sunday 10 a.m. 9) ALL’S FAIR Weekends bring out lovers of all things vintage to antiques fairs. One of the best starts at 8 a.m. on Sundays at Praça Dom Orione in the Italian neighborhood of Bixiga. It attracts a São Paulo mishmash of gay and

straight, old and young, families and couples, all checking out old-fashioned cameras, antique walking canes and posters, and rummaging through piles of bossa nova LPs and vintage clothes. Several antiques stores also line the park to satisfy indefatigable shoppers.

12:30 p.m. 10) ARTFUL CUISINE From afar, the red-striped skyscraper known as the Instituto Tomie Ohtake (Avenida Faria Lima, 201; 55-11-2245-1900; institutotomieohtake.org.br) resembles a contemporary tribute to the candy cane, though from street level, its oddball curves and colors become mesmerizing. And the creative range of exhibits inside — including paintings by the nonagenarian Brazilian-Japanese

Ms. Ohtake herself — are well worth the trip. But the nearly 10-year-old institute just scored a game-changer: Santinho, a restaurant from the wellregarded chef Morena Leite. Ms. Leite, whose Capim Santo (capimsanto. com.br) has long been a stop for upscale Brazilian cuisine, has put together a super-fresh lunch buffet of gorgeous salads and cold dishes (from quinoa to banana and raisin to tuna tartare mixed with tapioca pearls), main courses (wild duck in blackberry sauce, the Brazilian classic dried beef with abóbora squash) and such desserts as crepe-like tapioca ﬁlled with the decadent cocoa-and-condensed-milk dessert called brigadeiro. It’s pricey (58.50 reais on Sundays), but the art is free. IF YOU GO Stay away from business hotels in South Zone neighborhoods like Vila Olímpia or Brooklin — they’re too far from the excitement. Big spenders will be taken care of at the Emiliano (Rua Oscar Freire, 384; 55-11-3069-4369; emiliano.com.br), a top boutique hotel, on luxurious Oscar Freire Street, home to some of the city’s best restaurants and shops. Rooms start at $570 — and there’s that convenient roof helipad. An unconventional choice for those wanting to stay near the city center (but in a safe neighborhood) is the Hotel Pergamon (Rua Frei Caneca, 80; 55-11-3123-2021; pergamon.com.br), in Baixo Augusta. Pergamon, originally a boutique hotel, has morphed into a spot for small-scale business conferences. But its DNA is unspoiled: the lobby features Brazilian art mostly by artists from the northeast; the rooms have stylish touches, and many have skyline views; and the restaurant serves traditional dishes. Doubles start at 260 reais (about $160).

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Advertising

Harnessing the Power of the Mom Blogger By PRADNYA JOSHI

HE latest advice on child-rearing, baby products and prenatal yoga stretches is not being found in conversations over the picket fence but rather in Twitter messages, blog rolls and on Facebook walls. To that end, marketers have been increasingly harnessing the power of mothers online to reach their intended audiences for products. Whether it’s building brand awareness or promoting television shows, advertising industry experts say that they are ﬁnding that the mother blogger niche is active, loyal and deeply involved with spreading its messages. And, the wealth of demographic information available about online users allows for better directed campaigns, marketers say. The mother bloggers can become “ambassadors of brands,” said Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president for emerging media and brand strategy at 360i, a digital agency owned by Dentsu, the Japanese advertising agency. “These mom bloggers have tremendous personality and tremendous opinions.” The analysis ﬁrm eMarketer estimated that in 2010, there were more than 3.9 million women with children who were bloggers. In a recent report, eMarketer said

that mothers were more likely to visit blogs than users in general, particularly to seek advice on parenting issues, and that the popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook was helping to drive trafﬁc to their postings. “Advertisers are extremely interested in integrating ‘social’ into advertising campaigns, and for certain brands, it can work really well,” said Megan Calhoun, a mother of two and founder of SocialMoms, a 30,000-member community of mother bloggers, which previously was called Twitter Moms. Many marketers have discovered, harnessing mothers who blog for their campaigns is not as simple as asking them to encourage their followers to “buy this product.” After trial and error, marketers realized the public can react negatively to overt marketing messages in social media settings. The Federal Trade Commission has now imposed full-disclosure conditions on marketers online. Advertisers are ﬁnding subtle approaches work better on campaigns. “It’s not just about pushing a brand out there, but to get a two-way conversation going,” said Thomas Donovan, interactive manager with Haworth Media. Haworth, an independent agency, conducted a brand-awareness campaign for Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day products, owned

by a subsidiary of S. C. Johnson & Son. It worked with Mrs. Meyer’s, which makes environmentally friendly cleaning products sold in stores like Target, to increase the brand’s visibility among consumers. The agency devoted 52 percent of its initial introduction budget to online media, and a big part involved the SocialMoms network. The site, under its previous name Twitter Moms, put out a call for submissions to its network, asking bloggers for their best ideas for a “cleaner, greener home.” The bloggers didn’t need to mention a single Mrs. Meyer’s product in their posts or messages. Many of the ideas were ageold conventional remedies. One advised readers to use baking soda to clean pet stains on carpets, while the mother who runs the Canning With Kids blog sent a message suggesting readers “decorate with plants that clean the air.” Twitter messages all carried the #mrsmeyers hashtag, which allowed the company to track what messages were going where. “People were re-tweeting things that they found useful; green tips are points of passion for people,” said Jim Calhoun, creative director at SocialMoms and Ms. Calhoun’s husband. The 53 bloggers in the campaign were given $50 Target gift cards. They in turn had an average of 1,762 Twitter followers.

One-month campaign resulted in 7.68 million Twitter views as well as millions more through blog rolls and display ads. Other campaigns involving the SocialMoms network recently included promotions for the juice Simply Orange, inviting mother bloggers to talk about “simple changes” they want to make in their lives. A current campaign on the site is for the Hershey Company, which started a promotion soliciting blog posts of 400 words or more on “ways you share happiness with those around you” as part of a tie-in for a new product called Hershey’s Drops. “We are believers in paying moms for writing a blog post on a topic of discussion,” Megan Calhoun said, adding the SocialMoms network required participants to follow the F.T.C. disclosure rules. As many campaigns found Twitter is a great word-of-mouth strategy, other avenues of social media like Facebook are becoming more important, Ms. Calhoun said. Video blogs, display ads and online surveys are integral parts of promotions on the sites. “Brands are really mixed on Twitter,” Ms. Calhoun said, because of the 140-character limit on posts. “Facebook is safer for brands because it gives a lot of control”. Marketers are hoping that by getting consumers via social media, they will engage their audience and tailor their messages.

Marketers Celebrate Glimmers of Recovery By TANZINA VEGA

FTER a few years of struggling, the advertising industry is ﬁnally willing to believe some good news. Nancy Hill, chief executive of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, or the Four A’s, kicked off the group’s annual conference here bearing what she called “hard-core, positive, yes-our-industry-hassurvived-and-is-robust news.” The statistics Ms. Hill provided were probably enough to inspire more than a few advertisers to get back to the planning board. According to Nielsen, in February 111 million people watched the Super Bowl — one of the largest opportunities for advertisers. Ms. Hill said that chief marketing ofﬁcers were seeing revenue gains, with brands like Procter & Gamble and Kraft increasing spending. She said a 30-second ad slot during the Oscars telecast this year was the most expensive in the history of the awards. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” she said. “Maybe Charlie Sheen should take a note from us.” It is advertising, it would appear from Ms. Hill’s remarks, and not Mr. Sheen who is in fact winning. Here are some highlights from the conference. KINKY LAUGHS The second morning of the conference began with off-color

comedic relief from the author, musician, sometime politician and longtime Texan Kinky Friedman. After earning a few muffled laughs from the crowd, many of whom were still grabbing cups of coffee, yogurt and pastries, Mr. Friedman offered to sign copies of one of his books. “I’ll sign anything but bad legislation,” said Mr. Friedman, who ran for governor of Texas in 2006. DATA RULES Content may be king in media, but in advertising it is data. Most of the vendor booths at the event were focused on data analytics, media management and back-office technology for advertisers. The technologies can help advertisers track consumers on the Web and understand which ads are most effective for certain audiences. Other technologies were geared to helping agencies buy digital advertising or manage their accounts online more efficiently. PRIVACY All of that digital data comes at a price. A theme echoing throughout the conference was data privacy. In her opening remarks Ms. Hill urged the audience “to actively participate in this discussion, because without self-regulation our creativity will be increasingly threatened.” In recent months, the Federal Trade Commission and the Commerce Department have both issued reports about online privacy and digital advertising, while industry groups like

the Interactive Advertising Bureau have supported self-regulation. David Vladeck, the F.T.C.’s director of consumer protection, was at the event to help explain the commission’s proposal for a “do-not-track” mechanism that would allow consumers to opt out of being tracked by advertisers and shown targeted advertising. Mr. Vladeck said that the commission recognized the benefits of behavioral advertising for consumers — they see more useful and relevant ads — but that data collection still raised “serious privacy concerns.” Mr. Vladeck added that while the commission did not recommend legislation and was encouraged by some of the recent progress made in self-regulation by industry groups, there was more to be done. “It’s not just the F.T.C. looking over your shoulder, folks,” he said. “So is Congress.” The day after Mr. Vladeck spoke, a panel of advertising agency representatives tackled the issue of privacy and responded to Mr. Vladeck’s speech and to the overall issues affecting the industry. Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, said the industry was “gratified” by Mr. Vladeck’s remarks but expressed concern about what it considered mixed messages by the F.T.C., including the lack of a clear definition of tracking, collection or first-party marketing.

Carla Michelotti, executive vice president and chief legal, government and corporate affairs ofﬁcer at Leo Burnett Worldwide, part of the Publicis Groupe, said Mr. Vladeck’s remarks were a sign that the commission was “extending an olive branch after a very harsh approach in the report.” All of the panelists encouraged advertisers, agencies and publishers to regulate themselves or risk being regulated by the government. HELP WANTED Agencies are taking a close look at their hiring practices. A starstudded panel of advertising executives underscored the challenges they faced in recruiting a diverse staff, being more aggressive in recruiting talent, and rewarding and training current employees. “No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You know what? I want to be in the advertising business,’ ” said Michael I. Roth, chief executive of the Interpublic Group of Companies. “The real issue is getting new talent interested in our industry, and frankly we do a lousy job at it.” Martin Sorrell, chief of WPP, said, “The criminal neglect in our industry is we do not recruit good people consistently.” John D. Wren, chief executive of the Omnicom Group, added: “It’s neglect. We’ve gotten a lot more comfortable poaching, if you will, our own people.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Crises in Japan Ripple Across the Global Economy By MICHAEL POWELL

n the wake of Japan’s cascading disasters, signs of economic loss can be found in many corners of the globe, from Sendai, on the battered Japanese coast, to Paris to Marion, Ark. Container ships sit in the Pacific or at docks in Japan, wary of unloading tons of pork and steak because of that nation’s fractured electric grid. Any break in the “cold chain” of refrigeration can spoil meat. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the luxury goods maker based in Paris, shut more than 50 of its stores in Tokyo and northern Japan. And Volvo, the Swedish carmaker, was working with a 10-day supply left of Japanese-built navigation and climate control systems. “It’s hour-by-hour work to get a grip on the situation,” said Per-Ake Froberg, chief spokesman for Volvo, as it girds for a production halt. The uncertain economic picture has mirrored the churning developments in Japan as it tries to recover from the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck it 10 days ago. On Sunday, even as workers made some progress in stabilizing the situation at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the government said there were new signs of radioactive contamination in some agricultural produce and livestock. Uncertainty hangs like a cloud over the future of the global and American economy. Only weeks ago, many economists foresaw a quickening of the recovery. Now tsunamis, radioactive plumes, Middle East revolutions, a new round of the European debt crisis and a still weakened United States economy could derail a tenuous bounceback in the United States, Europe and Japan. Some global ills, like the spike in oil and food prices, can be quantified. But a clearer picture depends on indicators yet to come, like the March unemployment numbers and trade numbers. “The problem is not Japan alone — it’s that Japan reinforces all the negative repercussions and our own weak recovery,” said Stephen S. Roach, nonexecutive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and a professor at Yale. “It’s difficult to know the tipping point for the global economy, but there are difficult headwinds now.” Only a few weeks ago, economic forecasters suggested first-quarter growth in the United States would exceed 4 percent, and similar estimates edged toward 5 percent for global growth. Those estimates now seem in danger of being outdated. Morgan Stanley’s tracking estimate for the United States’ growth in the first quarter has slipped in the last month to

2.9 percent from 4.5 percent, and that was before the troubles in Japan. Goldman Sachs in a report Friday suggested that global uncertainty might shave a half point off American gross domestic product for 2011, which its economists view as a flesh wound rather than a dire blow. But other economists point to the uncertainty created by Reactors No. 1, 2, 3, and 4 at the stricken power station in Japan and say it adds to a sense of global foreboding. In Libya, American missiles are flying and the oil wells stand silent. Saudi troops have marched into Bahrain, across the Persian Gulf from Iran. In Europe, finance ministers warn that hundreds of banks still carry billions of dollars in bad loans. A recent survey of prominent global economists by The International Economy magazine found that a majority view it as likely that some combination of Greece, Ireland and Portugal will default on debt and force bond investors to take heavy losses. Oil prices have risen nearly 11 percent this year. Japan already is the largest importer of liquefied natural gas, and as it searches for energy to replace a fractured nuclear grid, analysts expect these prices to rise as well. Finally, there is the United States, an economic colossus burdened by a foreclosure crisis and the worst long-term unemployment situation in nearly a century. If Japanese companies and investors retrench, selling some Treasuries and investing fewer yen overseas, the pain here could grow. Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist with The Economic Outlook Group, was until recently quite the economic bull. No more. “The uprisings, the Persian Gulf, Japan: It’s very likely that the global economic impact will be larger than most people currently imagine,” Mr. Baumohl said. “Electricity and gasoline prices will stay high and consumers are nervous. Guess what, that’s not an atmosphere conducive to corporations wanting to hire workers.” There are some more optimistic fo-

recasts. A report by the World Bank to be released Monday predicts that growth in Japan and its East Asian neighbors would pick up in the second half of this year. The country’s past experience, the report said “suggests an accelerated reconstruction effort” that will limit the short-term impact. Indeed, some disruptions, even in Japan, could prove of short duration. Nissan said on Sunday it would reopen ﬁve of six plants in Japan this week, and Toyota and Honda are also in various stages of resuming production. Analysts expect Japan to cobble together a workable energy grid in the next few weeks. That will allow dockworkers to unload those pallets of pork and steak, not to mention bags of corn and soybean. Japan’s appetite for American meat is considerable. It consumes 30 percent of American pork exports. “American hog prices took a real fall here this week,” said David Miller, research director for the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation. “But supermarket shelves are pretty empty in Japan; we could see a surge in demand soon.” The global economy remains an adaptive animal. But the speed and efﬁciency of this adaptation is easily overstated. Japanese electronics, auto adhesives, and siliconproduction facility require highly skilled labor and cannot take root overnight in another southeast Asian nation. Nor is the speed of the global economy, and its intricate interlacing, necessarily a comfort. General Motors last week announced that it would suspend product at its 923-employee factory in Shreveport, La., which manufactures Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon models, because it has already run short of Japanese made parts. The human face of this disaster presents its own challenge. Many European and American companies in Tokyo dealt last week with a double emergency: They tried to cobble together supply chains even as they evacuated native-born workers to southern Japan, and repatriated

foreign workers to their homelands. Volvo, the Swedish automaker, is the most reliant of the European car companies on Japanese parts — seven of its suppliers are based in the region ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami, including one on the cusp of the radiation zone. Volvo managers are trying to determine how many parts already were loaded on ships. “We are preparing ourselves for a shortage,” Mr. Froberg added. “If we can’t build any cars, we can’t sell any cars.” Travel now half way around the world, to Marion, Ark., a city of 8,900 just west of the Mississippi River. As ofﬁcials in Japan try to stave off nuclear catastrophe, the fate of a 10-inch round gear might seem inconsequential. But the gear, manufactured in Japan and shipped to the Hino Motors Manufacturing plant in Marion, symbolizes the multitude of disruptions affecting supply chains. The plant employs 335 workers, who assemble rear axles for the Tundra pick-up truck as well as rear suspension parts for the Tacoma pick-up and Sequoia S.U.V. The factory imports about 20 percent of its parts from Japan. Even its suppliers in the United States purchase parts from smaller suppliers based in Japan. Some of those are in Sendai, the northern Japan city that was badly battered. Last Wwednesday, workers of forklifts zipped down the aisles of the 361,000-square-foot factory, ferrying parts to the assembly lines. Stacks of bright blue plastic crates stood on pallets labeled “Made in Japan.” Each crate held a ten-inch round gear and steel pinion that form an essential part of the Tundra rear axles. “We are monitoring everyday which suppliers actually have a problem,” said Shinichi Sato, treasurer and secretary of Hino’s United States operations. The company typically gets a shipment of gears from Japan every other day. For now, shipments continue to arrive, because many crates are stacked up in warehouses in Long Beach, Calif., where the components are unloaded from Japan. No one knows how long the boxes will keep coming. In Japan, the Hino plant is undergoing three-hour rolling blackouts. Its suppliers draw power from the now-disabled nuclear plants. And limited train service means many employees cannot get to work. Managers in Marion talk about searching elsewhere for parts. But that’s not a long-term solution. “Some parts are possible to get elsewhere, but our parts are very important parts,” noted Mr. Sato, who takes a quiet pride in the quality of the Japanese parts. “So it is not easy to ask other suppliers to produce them.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss

By ADAM BRYANT

N early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan codenamed Project Oxygen. Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app. They wanted to build better bosses. So, as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints. Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers. Now, brace yourself. Because the directives might seem so forehead-slappingly obvious — so, well, duh — it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out: “Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.” “Help your employees with career development.” “Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.” The list goes on, reading like a whiteboard gag from an episode of “The Office.” “My first reaction was, that’s it?” says Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for “people operations,” which is Googlespeak for human resources. But then, Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting. For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the

first place. But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. “In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.” Project Oxygen doesn’t fit neatly into the usual Google story line of hits (like its search engine) and misses (like the start last year of Buzz, its stab at social networking). Management is much squishier to analyze, after all, and the topic often feels a bit like golf. You can find thousands of tips and rules for how to become a better golfer, and just as many for how to become a better manager. Most of them seem to make perfect sense. Problems start when you try to keep all those rules in your head at the same time — thus the golf cliché, “paralysis by analysis.” In management, as in golf, the greats make it all look effortless, which only adds to the sense of mystery and frustration for those who struggle to get better. That caveat aside, Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field. H.R. has long run on gut instincts more than hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a datadriven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions. “Google is really at the leading edge

of that,” says Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who has a good perch to see what H.R. executives at more than 1,000 big companies are up to. Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom. Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters. “Most companies are better at exhorting you to be a great manager, rather than telling you how to be a great manager,” Mr. Safferstone says. PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions. People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. The first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses. Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found. “The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?” In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns. Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.

The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study. “People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.” GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels. “We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation. Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly. “We were able to have a statistically signiﬁcant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says. He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team. “He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls. Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved. “And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.” Mark Klenk, an engineering manager whom Google made available for an interview, said the Project Oxygen ﬁndings, and the subsequent training, helped him understand the importance of giving clear and direct feedback to the people he supervises. “There are cases with some personalities where they are not necessarily realizing they need a course correction,” Mr. Klenk says. “So it’s just about being really clear about saying, ‘O.K., I understand what you are doing here, but let’s talk about the results, and this is the goal.’ ” “I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.”

Continues on page 54

54 Comes from page 53 GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t. The traps can show up in areas like hiring. Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them. So Google compiles elaborate dossiers on candidates from the interview process, and hiring decisions are made by a group. “We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision,” Mr. Bock explains. A person with an opening on her team, for instance, may have short-term needs that aren’t aligned with the company’s long-term interests. “The metaphor is, if you need an administrative assistant, you’re going to be really picky the ﬁrst week, and at six months, you’re going to take anyone you can get,” Mr. Bock says. Google also tries to point out predictable traps in performance reviews, which are often done with input from a group. The company has compiled a list of “cognitive biases” for employees to keep handy during these discussions. For example, somebody may have just had a bad experience with the person being reviewed, and that one experience inevitably trumps recollections of all the good work that person has done in recent months. There’s also the “halo/ horns” effect, in which a single personality trait skews someone’s perception of a

colleague’s performance. Google even points out these kinds of biases in its cafeteria line. The company stacks smaller plates next to bigger ones at the front of the line, and it tells people that research shows that diners generally eat everything on their plate, even if they are full halfway through the meal. By using the smaller plate, Google says, they could drop 10 to 15 pounds in a year. “The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ” The true test of Google’s new management model, of course, is whether it will help its business performance of the long haul. Just a few hours after Mr. Bock was interviewed for this article in mid-January, Google surprised the world by announcing that Larry Page, one of its co-founders, was taking over as C.E.O. from Eric E. Schmidt. Though Mr. Schmidt explained the move on Twitter by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed,” the company made clear that the point was to speed up decision-making and to simplify management. Google clearly hopes to recapture some of the nimbleness and innovative spirit of its early years. But will Project Oxygen help a grown-up Google get its start-up mojo back? D. Scott DeRue, a management professor at the Ross School of Business at the Uni-

Another Inside Job By PAUL KRUGMAN

ount me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists. What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses. The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

recovery at risk. All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial. To get an idea of what we’re talking about here, look at the complaint filed by Nevada’s attorney general against Bank of America. The complaint charges the bank with luring families into its loan-modification program — supposedly to help them keep their homes — under false pretenses; with giving false information about the program’s requirements (for example, telling them that they had to default on their mortgages before receiving a modification); with stringing families along with promises of action, then “sending foreclosure notices, scheduling auction dates, and even selling consumers’ homes while they waited for decisions”; and, in general, with exploiting the program to enrich itself at those families’ expense. The end result, the complaint charges, was that “many Nevada consumers continued to make mortgage payments they could not afford, running through their savings, their retirement funds, or their children’s education funds. Additionally,

versity of Michigan, applauds Google for its data-driven method for management. That said, he noted that while Google’s approach might be unusual, its ﬁndings nevertheless echoed what other research had shown to be effective at other companies. And that, in itself, is a useful exercise. “Although people are always looking for the next new thing in leadership,” he said, “Google’s data suggest that not much has changed in terms of what makes for an effective leader.” Whether Google’s eight rules will still apply as the company evolves is anyone’s guess. They certainly aren’t chiseled in stone. Mr. Bock’s group is continuing to test them for effectiveness, watching for

results from all the training the company is doing to reinforce the behaviors. For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager. “You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”

due to Bank of America’s misleading assurances, consumers deferred short-sales and passed on other attempts to mitigate their losses. And they waited anxiously, month after month, calling Bank of America and submitting their paperwork again and again, not knowing whether or when they would lose their homes.” Still, things like this only happen to losers who can’t keep up their mortgage payments, right? Wrong. Recently Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about his own experience: a routine mortgage refinance with Citibank somehow turned into a nightmare of misquoted rates, improper interest charges, and frozen bank accounts. And all the evidence suggests that Mr. Milbank’s experience wasn’t unusual. Notice, by the way, that we’re not talking about the business practices of fly-bynight operators; we’re talking about two of our three largest financial companies, with roughly $2 trillion each in assets. Yet politicians would have you believe that any attempt to get these abusive banking giants to make modest restitution is a “shakedown.” The only real question is whether the proposed settlement lets them off far too lightly. What about the argument that placing any demand on the banks would endanger the recovery? There’s a lot to be said about

that argument, none of it good. But let me emphasize two points. First, the proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would produce a greater “net present value” than foreclosure — that is, for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors. The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees. How could ending this highway robbery be bad for the economy? Second, the biggest obstacle to recovery isn’t the financial condition of major banks, which were bailed out once and are now profiting from the widespread perception that they’ll be bailed out again if anything goes wrong. It is, instead, the overhang of household debt combined with paralysis in the housing market. Getting banks to clear up mortgage debts — instead of stringing families along to extract a few more dollars — would help, not hurt, the economy. In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Disaster in Japan Batters Suppliers By MIGUEL HELFT and NICK BUNKLEY

ast week, chips that store eight gigabytes of data — for digital cameras, smartphones and other devices — cost as little as $7.30 each on the spot market, where many manufacturers buy components. On Monday, the cost was around $10. That jump in price illustrates how the disaster in Japan has immediately affected the supply of all sorts of components used in myriad consumer electronics and other products. The earthquake and tsunami there have damaged factories and disrupted the country’s power and transportation infrastructure. Factory closures are already creating problems in the tech industry. Toshiba, which produces roughly a third of the world’s chips used to store data in cameras, smartphones and tablet computers, said on Monday that it had closed some factories and that its production would be affected. The daily spot market for those chips rose 10 to 27 percent, said Jim Handy, founder of Objective Analysis, a semiconductor manufacturing research firm in Silicon Valley, who has been tracking these prices. Analysts said small companies in Japan, China and other Asian countries would bear the brunt of those price increases, as larger companies tend to have long-term contracts for parts. But even giants like Apple could be affected. Over the last year, Apple has had a difficult time meeting demand for the iPad and the iPhone, and the new iPad 2, which went on sale Friday, sold out quickly. “Toshiba, which is one of their suppliers, has been impacted, and I think it will create more of a challenge in meeting their demand,” said Dale Ford, vice president for market intelligence at IHS iSuppli, a research firm. Apple declined to comment. At the same time, nearly all automakers, even those with no plants in Japan, could be forced to halt production of some models in the weeks ahead if Japanese suppliers are unable to quickly resume making electronics or other parts used in the vehicles, analysts said Monday. Toyota and other Japanese automakers said that they hoped to restart production at most of their domestic plants this week, but that they were still evaluating how much the disaster had damaged some factories and nearby roads, railroads and ports. If shipments cannot be made, dealerships in the United States could start to run short of some small cars, hybrids and luxury models. “In a couple of weeks we could start

feeling the effects,” said Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with the research firm IHS Automotive in Lexington, Mass. “It could be something that’s really pretty minor, but if it’s specific to that vehicle you’re not going to be able to produce that vehicle.” More immediately, Toyota will miss out on building 40,000 vehicles by keeping all of its plants in Japan closed through Wednesday. Plants that build the subcompact Yaris and two small cars for the company’s Scion brand are expected to be closed longer because they were closer to the epicenter. The overall impact of the unfolding crisis on the consumer electronics supply chain remained hard to assess, as companies gave few details about damage. The extent and duration of disruptions in electric power and transportation remained impossible to predict, as well. But Japan is a major global supplier of chips, flat-panel displays and other components used in devices like computers, tablets, digital cameras, Blu-ray players and televisions, as well as a major exporter of consumer electronics. Companies big and small are beginning to feel the pain. On Monday, Sony, Canon and Fujitsu — which, like Toshiba, supply parts as well as make finished products — also said they had shut some factories. Canon said its plant in Utsunomiya suffered extensive damage, including collapsed ceilings, electrical, gas and water damage, and breakdowns in water, electrical and gas supply, that will take some time to restore. The plant makes a variety of specialized lenses used in camcorders, office machines and other devices. Makers of chips and flat-panel displays may be among those most imme-

diately affected, said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research and consulting company in Seaford, N.Y., in part because the manufacturing of those products depends on lengthy, multistep processes that cannot be interrupted. “It is hard to have an interruption of power supply in the middle of the manufacturing process,” he said. While high-tech goods rely on a complex network of suppliers that help keep inventories of parts low, most manufacturers whose factories are still operating have enough parts to continue operating for some time. “There usually are buffers of several weeks,” Mr. Doherty said. “Unless there are rolling blackouts that last several weeks, the impact will be limited.” About 1.4 million, or 15 percent, of the vehicles sold in the United States last year were assembled in Japan, and nearly all cars and trucks contain some parts manufactured there, including computer chips and navigation systems. Hyundai and BMW are the only major carmakers that do not use Japanese-made electronics, according to the research ﬁrm IHS. The disaster occurred during the peak season for automotive production in Japan. Carmakers were scheduled to build about a million vehicles this month, and Ms. Lindland of IHS estimated that the stoppages could cut output by up to 250,000. Toyota ofﬁcials on Monday were unsure how much damage had occurred at one plant, operated in a joint venture with Panasonic, that builds battery packs

for the Toyota Prius hybrid car, although the plant that builds the Prius itself was not hit. Some American dealers have said they were running low on the Prius, whose sales have been surging as gasoline prices rise toward $4 a gallon. But a Toyota spokesman, Javier Moreno, said supplies would be sufficient unless shipments of the Prius were disrupted longer than expected. “The pipeline was full when this happened,” Mr. Moreno said. He added that it was too soon to know whether Toyota might have trouble obtaining parts for models built in North America, including the top-selling Camry and Corolla sedans, but “we’re hoping that the impact will be minimal.” Still, he said the company had canceled all overtime shifts indefinitely. Toyota is especially vulnerable, analysts said, because it builds more of its vehicles in Japan — 3.3 million last year, or 43 percent of its global output — than its rivals do. Its Lexus brand of luxury cars gets all but one model exclusively from Japan. In contrast, analysts said Honda should have fewer problems satisfying demand in the United States. Honda said it was keeping most of its Japanese plants closed through this Sunday. They build the Fit subcompact, all Honda hybrid cars and several Acura models, among others. Nissan said six of its plants had been damaged but they would reopen, it said supplies of most nameplates were sufficient but warned that “some Infiniti models and Nissan GTR and 370Z may experience delays in shipment.”

Tata Chairman Says U.S. Car Will Cost ‘$7,000 or $8,000’ By JONATHAN SCHULTZ

ebastian Derungs/Agence FrancePresse — Getty Images Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors, and CarlPeter Forster, the brand’s chief executive, with the Tata Pixel concept at the Geneva auto show this month. Tata Motors struck headline gold in 2008 with the 100,000-rupee, or $2,172, price for its Nano city car. But if the Indian automaker succeeds in bringing a car to the United States, the car’s window sticker will sacriﬁce a good deal of its shock value. Last week, Ratan Tata, the Tata Group chairman, discussed sales and pricing prospects for a United States city car after a symposium at Cornell University’s College of Art, Architectu-

re and Planning. Mr. Tata is an alumnus. The symposium was held in conjunction with an exhibition that explored the design and development of the Nano. “It won’t be a $2,000 car; it will be a $7,000 or $8,000 car,” Mr. Tata said at the event. “But it will still be, in comparative terms, a car that the U.S. would accept.” The eventual car, he added, would be produced with “the same design philosophy” and “frugal engineering” that informed development of the Nano. Mr. Tata was not asked whether the Pixel, a scissor-door runabout that was shown in concept form at the Geneva auto show this month presaged an American Tata nor whether the company still intended to bring the Nano in some form to the American market.

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

House Hunting in ... Ecuador

The local downtown area is about a 10-minute walk. Shopping malls are nearby, as well as a small liberal arts college, the University of San Francisco de Quito, the listing agent said. Quito is about 20 minutes away, as is Mariscal Sucre International Airport.

MARKET OVERVIEW

By LISA KEYS

A FIVE-BEDROOM THREE-AND-A-HALF-BATH HOUSE IN GREATER QUITO $550,000

uilt on the side of a small hill nearly 20 years ago, the house got a new kitchen and bathrooms about eight years ago. Living space works out to 540 square meters (5,813 square feet, at 10.76 square feet

to the square meter). There are two sitting areas: a TV room and a formal living room with a terrace. The dining room has a small terrace with a seating area. The kitchen has granite countertops and a breakfast area with built-in seating. A maid’s room and bath are off the kitchen. The lower level has a bedroom with an en-suite bath and access to the garden at the back of the house. The other four bedrooms are on the upper level. Two share a bath; the

third has an en-suite bath; and the master bedroom, with its walk-in closet, has an en-suite bath with a Jacuzzi. This level also has a family room. The 1,380-square-meter property has a gazebo with a seating area, a built-in barbecue and bread oven, and views down into a gorge. There is covered parking for two cars. The property is in Cumbayá, an upscale suburb in the Tumbaco Valley, just outside of Quito.

The lower to middle end of Quito’s real estate market is very active at the moment, said Antonio Serrano, regional director of Re/Max Ecuador in Quito. This is largely because of government-sponsored programs subsidizing homeownership. The upper reaches of the market have been comparatively quiet, he added, with prices down 10 to 15 percent. The slump is one result of a reliance on cash deals. Prices vary widely. In northern Quito, which has high-rise buildings, the range is $600 to $1,000 a square meter, Mr. Serrano said; new construction runs from $700 to $1,400 a square meter. In the city center, renovated homes cost $750 to $800 a square meter; those in need of updating are much

The San Juan Weekly

cheaper: $100 to $400 a square meter, said Mathieu Guillory, director of Colonial Ecuador, a company in Quito that helps foreigners buy property. In Cumbayá, older homes typically cost $700 to $800 a square meter, said Luke McElhatton, an agent at Mancasas Real Estate in the neighborhood; new construction runs $1,000 a square meter. Mr. McElhatton noted that these prices do not factor in the value of the land. This property (both the house and its land) costs $1,019 a square meter, about average for the area, he said.

WHO BUYS IN ECUADOR

March 24 - 30, 2011

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

The country is a popular retirement destination for Americans and Europeans, Mr. Guillory said. Recently, he has seen a shift away from cities and in favor of smaller coastal and mountain towns. This is not to say foreigners aren’t moving to Quito, but they are typically executives and government workers, said David Workman, founder and manager of the Greater Ecuador Real Estate Investment Fund, now based in Maryland.

BUYING BASICS There are no restrictions on foreign ownership, but financing is nearly impossible to obtain, Mr. Workman said. Most foreigners pay in cash. Buyers should estimate about 4 percent of the assessed value (often significantly less than the sales price) for purchaseside costs, which include transfer taxes and notary, registration and lawyer fees, said Maria del Carmen Cevallos, a lawyer at MC Abogados, a Quito law firm.

TAXES AND FEES Property taxes are approximately $350 a year, Mr. McElhatton said.

LANGUAGES AND CURRENCY Spanish; United States dollar

CONTACT Luke McElhatton, Mancasas Real Estate, 011-593-2289-1318; mancasas.com

Sports

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Woods Sees Some Progress, but Others Are Looking for Victories By LARRY DORMAN

hen he dropped the idea of fixing his own swing and decided to take on a new teacher, his third since turning professional in 1996, Tiger Woods warned everyone who would listen: there is no quick fix. That was last August, and he was telling the truth. The process, as Woods calls the continuing work with Sean Foley, has been slow, even arduous. Some would say torturous. Some have said worse. Through it all, Woods has not wavered, has stayed on message and has stayed mired in a winless streak that has reached 16 months. As Woods prepares to bring his game to a course Thursday where he has won three times in seven starts, things have begun to heat up around him. On the Internet, it is getting hotter than the 83-degree morning on Wednesday at Doral Resort and Spa, where Woods stood sweating in a small tent. As his current teacher and former teacher took online shots at one another, Woods was talking about not winning and not playing all that well, but seeing small steps of progress where fans, some members of the news media and even some of his peers see none. “I still get asked a bunch of questions about winning,” Woods, 35, said on the eve of the first round of the W.G.C.Cadillac Championship. “Whether I was winning or not winning. Still got to do press conferences and everything is still the same. The only difference is I just haven’t won tournaments.” This would be a little bit like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant saying, Everything’s cool, but the difference is, I’m just not scoring any points. Woods has always been about winning. He said so in his first interview as a pro, using colorful language to express his opinion about second place to a shocked Curtis Strange. Woods might be loath to admit it, but second would not be terrible right now. He has not won in his last 19 tournaments. He threatened at Dubai in February, shooting a second-round 66 that was the best score of the day, pulling to within a stroke after three rounds and then fading to a tie for 20th. He has had one second place, when Graeme McDowell beat him with three consecutive one-putts, the last in a playoff, and won the limited-field Chevron Challenge in December. Two starts this year on the PGA

Tour have produced a tie for 44th at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines and a first-round loss to Thomas Bjorn in the W.G.C.-Accenture Match Play. Four days ago in Dallas, the Hall of Famer Lee Trevino said that Woods’s reliance on golf teachers was the reason for the drought and that Woods needed to look at old tapes from when he was winning and “get rid of these people.” Jack Nicklaus, who used to fix his own swing during the season when he was competing, said last week that his instructor, Jack Grout, never came on the practice range at a tournament as most other instructors do. But he added, as did Trevino, that he thought Woods would find his way out of the downturn and would break Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championship victories. Woods has 14. “It’s nice to have Jack say that,” Woods said. “That’s something that is very humbling. I respect the heck out of Jack, and what he’s done and the person he is. And for him to still believe that I can still play top-notch golf, it certainly is a confidence booster, there’s no doubt.” Woods undertook two previous major swing changes as a professional. The first was from the end of the 1998 season into 1999 with the famed instructor Butch Harmon. The second was from 2003 into 2004 with Hank Haney. He had slight performance downturns during those periods, followed by huge gains. Under Harmon, his best came in 2000, when Woods won three majors, into 2001, when he held all four major championship titles simultaneously, and had compiled a record 32.4 points in the Ernie Els, who played when Woods dominated golf, expects him to improve.

Tiger Woods, winless in the last 16 months, and his teacher, Sean Foley, at practice for last month’s Match Play Championship. World Golf Ranking — the equivalent of the Dow hitting 14,200. In his last 30 months with Haney, Woods won 44 percent of his tournaments and six majors. Now Woods is in his eighth month working with Foley, and critics, like NBC’s Johnny Miller, say he has never appeared as lost as he has recently. For a smoking gun, many, including Miller, have cited the poor tee shot Woods hit on the 19th hole of his loss to Bjorn at the Accenture two weeks ago, a miss way right of the fairway with his 3-wood that landed beneath a bush.“That is just not the kind of shot you have ever seen Tiger hit under pressure,” one tour player said at the Honda Classic last week, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his relationship. “I can’t say it’s all Foley. Who knows how much is just a function of the divorce and everything that caused it last year? I think Tiger will be back, but not as dominant as he was.” Miller compared Woods’s situation to that of Mike Tyson in 1990, after Tyson, the much-feared and undefeated heavyweight champion, was knocked out by the lightly regarded Buster Douglas in Japan. Foley, meantime, is working with Woods on a swing technique best described as a modiﬁed version of the stackand-tilt. It is similar to work he has done with his other tour players, Sean O’Hair, Justin Rose, Hunter Mahan and Stephen Ames. Foley has come under ﬁre from critics who question the soundness of his methods and who do not mind sending the critiques to Haney via Twitter, who then posts them and adds his own comments. A Q. and A. this week with Foley in Golf Magazine has provided much of the fodder for the barbed Haney-Foley

exchanges. In it, Foley said of Woods’s swing while under Haney’s tutelage: “There was nothing about what he was doing in his previous swing that made any sense to me.” Woods had about half his tournament victories during his years with Haney, which ended in May 2010 after a loud disagreement on the range at the Masters. Woods used his short game to salvage a tie for fourth and never spoke to Haney again. Count Ernie Els, 41, among the tour players who believe Woods will be back. He does not know when and at what level of proﬁciency, but he said he saw the best, has now seen the worst and smiles knowingly when asked if Woods is a lesser player. “I don’t know, man,” Els said. “I played for 10 years when that guy dominated, so it’s tough to get a different mindset on things. Tiger was the dominant player. He won 14 majors. Think about it, 14 majors, in such a short period of time. Who is ever going to do that again?” Els told reporters that players like himself, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Davis Love III and Fred Couples “took a beating, not only from him, but from you guys, too.” Bubba Watson watched Woods dominate and said he thought he might see that again. “I would say he would get back to No. 1,” said Watson, “but not to that many wins in that short a period of time. We’re learning how to practice, learning about training, learning about preparing yourself for a golf tournament. We’re getting better at understanding the game, so we’re gaining on him. “So he might only get 60 wins instead of 80. He’d still get a lot of wins. I think he’ll be back for sure.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Sports

On Perez and Castillo, Mets Keep Waiting and Seeing By MARK VIERA

ith roughly two weeks left before the start of a new season under new leadership, the Mets continue to hold on to two players who have come to symbolize all the miscalculations of recent years. The two players are pitcher Oliver Perez and second baseman Luis Castillo, who are owed a combined $18 million in the final seasons of their contracts with the Mets. There were questions about whether they would make it this far, but whether either will actually make it onto the 25-man roster to begin the season remains unclear. For now, the Mets are trying to reinvent Perez as a relief specialist against lefthanded batters. On Tuesday, in his second outing in three days, he fell behind on all three batters he faced, but recovered. Perez walked the first batter, struck out the second and induced a groundout from the third. “When you throw strikes, sometimes that’s going to happen,” Perez said of his early command issues. “You walk somebody, somebody gets a hit, you have to make the next guy out.” Meanwhile, the 35-year-old Castillo remains the incumbent starter, as shaky as his status may be, and he was in the starting lineup Tuesday in the Mets’ 5-2 win over the Washington Nationals. Castillo is trying to survive a fiveplayer competition for second base, but he did himself no favors in the second inning Tuesday when he was late covering

Luis Castillo, the incumbent second baseman, is trying to survive a five-man contest for the job. first base on what would have been an inning-ending double play with the bases loaded. The play began when the Nationals hitter, pitcher Tom Gorzelanny, hit a grounder to first baseman Ike Davis, who threw home to catcher Josh Thole for the force. Thole then threw back to first in an attempt to retire Gorzelanny for the third out, but Castillo was still several feet from first when he caught the ball and Gorzelanny was safe. The crowd booed. Castillo said he was perhaps too close to second base. But Manager Terry Collins defended him. “The second baseman could never get over on that,” Collins said of the circumstances. “He shouldn’t have to. I’ve

never seen that play, with the second baseman covering first.” Just hours earlier, Collins had been asked about a report in The New York Post that said he had already decided to make Luis Hernandez — best known for hitting a home run last September one pitch after breaking his foot — his starting second baseman. “I would say it was a little premature,” Collins said of the article. “But certainly there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t be the guy if that’s who we think will be the best for us.” Castillo has done nothing to dispel the notion that his range in the field is limited after repeated leg injuries. Still, as spring training has progressed, three of the other second-base contestants — Brad Emaus, Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner — have not been overly impressive, either. Sure enough, Collins nominated the 26-year-old Hernandez, who has just begun playing again after recovering from foot surgery, as a fifth candidate on Saturday. A day later, Hernandez hit a two-run triple. Collins said before he hoped to make a decision on a starting second baseman fairly soon so that the infield could develop some continuity as opening day approaches. Now healthy, Castillo said he relished the opportunity to prove that he could still play as he readies for a 16th season in the major leagues. A three-time Gold Glove winner, he has described competing for

a starting job, something he is not used to doing, as difﬁcult. No matter what, the Mets have to pay Castillo the $6 million he is owed this season. “Right now, I don’t want to think at all about what people say,” Castillo said. “I try to focus and play.” Collins acknowledged that he was aware of the fans’ displeasure with Castillo, but said he would not allow their sentiment to guide his decision. Not helping Castillo’s cause is that he cannot back up at shortstop, making him a limited bench player. As for Perez, he retired the only batter he faced on Sunday, and the Mets, who did not have an incumbent left-handed reliever in the bullpen, want to see if he can keep doing so. Collins said such a decision might not come until the end of spring training. If Perez stays on the team, he could become the only $12 million left-handed relief specialist in the history of baseball, but the Mets would least be getting something for their money. INSIDE PITCH Carlos Beltran, sidelined with tendinitis in his left knee, can participate in baseball activities starting Wednesday. He has played in just one game this spring training. ... Ike Davis was involved in a minor car accident Monday when a woman rear-ended his car. He was not injured and went 2 for 3 with three runs batted in. ... Starter Chris Young allowed only one run and four hits in ﬁve and a third innings.

Yankees Are Enthused About a Hard-Throwing Dominican Pitcher By TYLER KEPNER

he Yankees gave no players on the international market a $1 million bonus last season. That underscores just how highly they think of their investment in Juan Carlos Paniagua last week. Paniagua, a right-hander from the Dominican Republic who can throw 100 miles an hour, signed with the Yankees for $1.1 million. “Big fastball,” said Mark Newman, the Yankees’ senior vice president for baseball operations. “I’ve seen him several times, and it was 94 to 96, and he had a feel for it. He can throw a pretty good changeup now. Donny Rowland, who does our international scouting, saw him a couple of weeks ago at 96 to 98, and he touched 100. So it’s a big fastball. He’s 20 years old, built like Mariano — loose, quick, with velocity and spin. There’s a lot to like.” The amount the Yankees paid Paniagua is roughly the equivalent of a bonus for a draft choice late in the ﬁrst round. The Yankees forfeited their 2011 ﬁrst-round

pick to the Tampa Bay Rays as compensation for signing reliever Rafael Soriano, though Newman said the Yankees would still be aggressive in the draft. As for Paniagua, Newman said: “We’ve been looking at him for the last year or so. His stuff started to get better in the last year. When he signed, he wasn’t a high-proﬁle guy.” Newman was referring to Paniagua’s previous signing with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Baseball America reported that Paniagua, who is 6 feet 1 inch and 175 pounds, signed with Arizona for just $17,000 on May 8, 2009, when he was known as Juan Carlos Collado. Paniagua pitched 21 times for the Diamondbacks’ Dominican Summer League team before an investigation by Major League Baseball revealed a different identity, though his birthdate has remained April 4, 1990. He was suspended and became a free agent in March, and his apparent improvement as a prospect since his original deal has greatly enriched him. Newman said Paniagua would be

allowed to work out with the Yankees but could not pitch competitively in their farm system until Major League Baseball approves the contract. MATSUZAKA’S STRONG OUTING Daisuke Matsuzaka emerged from a spring training slump, throwing five shutout innings to help the Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 2-1, in 10 innings. Matsuzaka entered with an 11.42 earned run average in three games this spring training, but allowed only two hits and struck out five against the Tigers. Darnell McDonald homered in the 10th to win it for the Red Sox. Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera hit his second homer of the spring and boosted his average to .306 after a slow start. Justin Verlander pitched five and a third innings and allowed an earned run that raised his spring E.R.A. to 1.20. Before the game, Detroit Manager Jim Leyland said second baseman Carlos Guillen and reliever Joel Zumaya would not go north with the team when the Tigers break camp. Both are expected to be-

gin the season on the disabled list. GOOD NEWS FOR ORIOLES Baltimore Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts received encouraging news from a medical test on his ailing back, and pitcher Justin Duchscherer has learned there is no structural damage to his bothersome left hip. Roberts, who has been sidelined with back spasms, said that a magnetic resonance imaging test showed no damage. CARPENTER SET TO START The Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter is set to return from a hamstring injury that sidelined him for a couple weeks. He is scheduled to make his second spring training start Wednesday against Detroit. CLOSER HAS FOREARM STRAIN Tests revealed that Oakland closer Andrew Bailey has a strained forearm, news that came as a relief to the Athletics after they feared he had a serious elbow injury. There is no timetable for his return. SNELL RETIRES Pitcher Ian Snell decided to retire at age 29 after the St. Louis Cardinals optioned him to the minors.

Sports

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Baseball-Loving Japan Debates Delaying First Pitch By KEN BELSON

s bodies are still being pulled from the rubble, as the effects of a nuclear crisis spread, as many companies and schools remain closed if they are standing at all, is it time to play baseball? Just 10 days after an earthquake and a tsunami combined to upend Japan, the country is uneasily starting to debate how and when life will get back to normal, and whether it is appropriate to try so soon. And as the United States did in the days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Japanese are contemplating whether baseball can play a role in comforting a reeling nation. In a country where public disputes are muted and agreements are often choreographed behind closed doors, the dialogue has been uncharacteristically emotional and confrontational, with fans accusing teams of selﬁshness, owners publicly split, normally docile players challenging their bosses and government ministers bashing the overlords of the game. The six-team Central League, including the dominant Yomiuri Giants, favored opening the season on time. If nothing else, hundreds of stadium workers would continue to collect paychecks. Ryozo Kato, the commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball, invoked the palliative effects of the return of baseball to New York after the attacks, an analogy that irked sportswriters and led some fans to call for games to be boycotted. But while Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon were directly hit in 2001, the damage and disruption in Japan is far more extensive, and has occurred just before the start of the season, scheduled for Friday. Like the New Orleans Saints after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles from Sendai are now essentially homeless and appear destined to play games in Kobe, which suffered its own major earthquake in 1995. The Chiba Lotte Marines, outside Tokyo, may need to make repairs as well. Some foreign players have gone home, spooked by the potential fallout from disabled nuclear reactors in Fukushima. Japanese players from the hard-hit Tohoku region have relocated families or rushed back to help those still there. Even here in Tokyo, where damage was minimal, rolling blackouts to save energy have disrupted everyday life,

throwing into question whether fans will be able to attend games. “Honestly, I cannot think about encouraging people by playing baseball now,” Yusei Kikuchi, the Seibu Lions pitcher who grew up in Iwate Prefecture, told reporters. “The field I used to practice at, the beach I visited with my family, everything is gone now.” Players from the Seibu Lions, Yokohama Bay Stars and other teams have helped collect donations near train stations. There was talk of a player strike, a remote possibility, but a sign of how divisive the issue has become. After much public handwringing, the executives who run the game announced a solution on Saturday that spoke volumes about the art of compromise and sacrifice in Japan. The Central League will open its season on March 29, four days late. After being publicly chastised as insensitive wastrels, the teams will play only day games during the first week of the season; lights at stadiums in the affected areas will be dimmed at games played at night or indoors. All games will end after nine innings, which is sure to lead to a surge in unsatisfying tie scores. “We have not changed our feelings toward helping revitalize the community by showing you players who are working hard,” the Central League said in a letter to fans. But “baseball will be different this year. We hope that you will understand the changes we need to make to the games in order to conserve energy.” The less popular Pacific League, meanwhile, will start play on April 12. At Tohoku Rakuten’s stadium in Sendai, walls and walkways are cracked, lounges and suites are flooded and the ceilings in the team offices fell. Even if construction crews could be found, repairs would take weeks, if not months. “In some cases, we can’t get experts into the stadium to look at things to get a real estimate of how long it will take,” said Marty Kuehnert, an adviser to the Eagles who fled Sendai for Kyoto. Despite the obvious hardship ahead for the team, he and other baseball experts believe the Eagles could become the face of the nation’s renewal, especially to beleaguered residents in Tohoku. If the team ends up having a Cinderella season, “the roof will come off the place,” said Bob Whiting, the author of “You Gotta Have Wa,” a seminal book on Japanese baseball. “It would be an appropriate end to the season.” There is a precedent. In 1995, the

A baseball stadium in Minamisoma in Fukushima Prefecture the day after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Orix Blue Wave, the longtime second division club that plays in Kobe, surprised many by winning the Pacific League, leading grown men to cry in the streets. The team’s slogan that year was “Gambare Kobe,” or “Go Kobe,” to encourage fans. The team’s star player, Ichiro Suzuki, became a media sensation. Mr. Suzuki, now an outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, donated 100 million yen (about $1.2 million) to the Red Cross in Japan last week for relief efforts. “I was in Kobe when the big earthquake hit in 1995, and for the first time in my life I experienced the fear of death,” Mr. Suzuki told ESPN in 2008. “So 1995 was a very important year for me and the people of Kobe.” Despite jitters about resuming play in 2001, the first game in New York after the attacks turned out to be a galvani-

zing moment. Police officers, firefighters and others involved in the rescue effort at ground zero marched on the field. Bagpipes were played. The Mets wore hats with F.D.N.Y. and N.Y.P.D. logos. When Mike Piazza hit what turned out to be the game-winning home run, “it helped everyone realize that we could move on,” said Bobby Valentine, the Mets’ manager at the time. “It was the beginning of the road to recovery here in the States.” Still, Mr. Valentine, who went on to manage in Japan for six years, believes that the situation here is different. The level of destruction is greater, and uncertainty about the fate of the hobbled nuclear reactors remains. “Baseball, being such a central part of the Japanese character, has to help, but it has to help in a timely fashion.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Games

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty ﬁelds with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difﬁculty to play a new game

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Wordsearch

Answers on page 62

62 March 24 - 30, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

The grass is not always greener. Avoid the wrong conclusions and do not buy into illusion. Far horizons may be tempting, but they are a poor substitute for the lush greenery right under your nose! Do not overspend, but do pay special attention to your appearance and image. It will take you places if you give in to what is right.

Okay, you cannot totally prepare for bizarre, unexpected surprises, but you can be alert and on your guard and you are certainly going to have to be. Why bother with the silliness of jealous, when you can achieve great things over time and reach a great level of contentment? Do not restrict yourself or be held back by anything negative.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

Take up an unusual chance to shine as you mix business and pleasure in grand style. Some time alone, with your own thoughts, will help you plan a strategy. You have weathered major tests of late but kept your serenity intact. No -ne would have the ﬁrst idea of where you are really at, would they! Is it not the right time to speak up?

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Notice that life is generally running in your favour and do not be put off by the odd setback. It is all as it is meant to be. Notice a lingering look that may yet change your world. No, your eyes are not deceiving you! Do not discount anything as a mere coincidence. Everything is equally valid and contributes to our grand reality.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Tap into a renewed sense of wonder and magic. Trust what is happening, but do not try to force things along. You are in the middle of a transition phase and, as such, this is a process which needs to unfold. Special opportunities manifest romantically. Are you going to dither and so miss out? Do not question the ﬂow of your emotions.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

It is about time your true emotions had an outlet. If you are a singleton, keep your eyes peeled and if you are spoken for, be careful out there! Simply go along with what is happening and give it your all. Half- heartedness will not reap an abundant reward. Be brave and desist from burying your head in the sand. Renew established friendships.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Love action is highly likely, so be open and prepared to engage! In relationships, go along with the ups and downs. Be encouraged that things are turning around nicely. It is important to stay on track and honour what you have signed up for. Try to take all the angles of a situation into account. You may be missing something. Be watchful.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Never mind what anyone else is up to. Spend time with yourself and decide to be positive. Change is unsettling but ultimately worth embracing. Speak to someone you have had your eye on. Do draw on your natural charm and speed of wit to win a love match. Take a risk, why not! If you fail, then at least you tried. No doubt it will pay off.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Do not buckle under pressure; there is really no need. You are more than equal to the task in hand. Your powers of focus and concentration may not be at their best. Be patient with yourself and get your head around what you have to do. Approach things practically and do not get ﬂustered by the enormity of the task.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You are more than equal to what is coming. Give loved ones the beneﬁt of the doubt. They will need your support, come what may. Have you not been here before? Take things at face value and do not get too complex about what is going on. You will not be able to get to the bottom of it. Simply appreciate life’s beauty and form.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19) Give your psyche a rest and let things flow. This will unblock what you are waiting for, anyhow. Your fulfillment is assured. There is no point buying into upset. Steer clear of conflict and be formidable amidst adversity. It is all about perception, so look on the bright side and you will find the gift in current challenges.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Never mind that’ here we go again’ feeling. This time around things will be different. Embrace new relationships and nice surprises. However, be discerning with regard to whom you spend your precious time with. Get to the bottom of something, in a bid to help someone out. You can do whatever you set your sights on. Go for gold.

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Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 61

The San Juan Weekly

March 24 - 30, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

Ziggi

March 24 - 30, 2011

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