San Juan Weekly - Print Edition #85

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May 19 - 25, 2011

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Arecibo Observatory Finds Earth Like Planets and is Joined by Green Bank Telescope in Search for Life

Massive Pipeline Triggers Emotional Debate

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Ballet Ponce Museum of Art Nacional: Emphasis on the Classic P24

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May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

The Perched, the Frothy, the Fascinator

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Local News Mainland Pets Modern Love Wine Viewpoint Fashion & Beauty Kitchen Enigmatic

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Portfolio Health & Science International Local Travel Travel Business Games Horoscope Cartoons Sports

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Problems in 3 Nuclear Plants

Fashion & Beauty P15

Nazi Doctor Josef Mengele’s Brazilian Experiment Enigmatic P18

Supercomputers Alter Science Health & Science P20

U.N. Forecasts 10 Billion People at Century’s End

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When the Fur Doesn’t Fly

Twist on Bread & Breakfast in Wales

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Even in Real Life, There Were Screens Between Us

Job Openings Rise to Highest Level Since Sept. ‘08

Modern Love P11

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The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Massive Pipeline Triggers Emotional Debate

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uerto Rico’s governor is proposing to solve soaring energy prices on this oil-dependent island with a massive natural gas pipeline that would cross some of the most fragile ecosystems and archaeological sites.

Nearly 8,000 people have signed an online petition created by Casa Pueblo, a nonprofit environmental organization, to reject the pipeline, and organizers estimate nearly 30,000 people participated in a May 1, 2011 protest in the central town of Adjuntas to demand the project be scrapped. he $450 million project a central goal of his administration and he insists it is a safe, environment-friendly way to lower utility bills. Critics say the 92-mile (148-kilometer) pipeline will tear up lush green mountains and expose people living near it to deadly explosions.

The pipeline proposal, which Fortuno has dubbed “The Green Way,” also has sparked corruption allegations. The largest contract so far has gone to an engineering firm with no pipeline construction experience that is owned by a childhood friend of the governor. Fortuno has denied any conflicts of interest.

Puerto Rico has long struggled to overcome high power costs and rising

world oil prices have hit the territory especially hard; it depends on petroleum to generate nearly 70 percent of its power.

Electricity on the island costs about 21 cents per kilowatt hour, compared with an average of 10 cents per kilowatt hour on the U.S. mainland, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The last governor, Anibal Acevedo Vila, proposed a 42-mile (68-kilometer) natural gas pipeline along Puerto Rico’s southern coast, but the $54 million project was scrapped in mid-2009 amid heavy opposition. Fortuno, in the early months of his administration, helped defeat the plan.

This time around, Fortuno is promoting an even larger pipeline proposal, despite similar resistance from activists.

Even before he announced the project last August, his administration had awarded about $27 million in contracts — without public bids — for preliminary studies, according to documents filed with Puerto Rico’s Comptroller’s Office.

The documents show the largest contract, worth $9.6 million, went to Ray Engineers PSC, owned by a childhood friend of the governor, Pedro Ray Chacon.

Fortuno took a ski trip with Chacon before he became governor, said Ray spokesman

Jose Cruz.

While Fortuno has said contracts for preliminary research didn’t require an open bid, senators from the island’s main opposition party are demanding an investigation into how the contracts were awarded.

“This entire process raises serious concerns that lacerate the confidence that people have in their institutions,” Puerto Rico Sen. Cirilo Tirado said in a statement.

At least a dozen municipalities have approved resolutions supporting the project in concept, and it has also been touted by the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce and the local Association of Engineers and Surveyors.

“The failure to diversify energy sources has been the kiss of death for Puerto Rico,” said the engineers’ association president, Miguel Torres.

Despite all the political debates, the pipeline only needs final approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been awaiting studies from the island’s

energy authority and analysis from other federal agencies before making a ruling.

Government officials say cheaper natural gas brought by the pipeline would save $1 billion a year for the island of 4 million people. The pipeline would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 64 percent, they say.

Puerto Rico’s Electric Energy Authority estimates its customers will see a 30 percent drop in their bills if the pipeline is built.

“The Green Way project is an assured savings for Puerto Rico,” said Daniel Pagan, an engineer with the island’s power company and the project’s environmental consultant.

Controversy over the pipeline has erupted, however, in large part because of its sheer size.

The pipeline would originate in southern Puerto Rico, where billions of cubic feet of liquefied natural gas would be imported and regasified. The line would then bisect the island and veer east until it nearly reaches the capital of San Juan.

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May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Arecibo Observatory Finds EarthLike Planets and is Joined by Green Bank Telescope in Search for Life

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ASA has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers are aiming the Arecibo and the Green Bank radio telescopes at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.

Search is aided by the largest steerable radio telescope in the world which dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers.

The studies were initiated by the Arecibo Observatory and are now dramatically strenghtened by the Green Bank telescope.

For about five minutes it will stare at stars in the Kepler survey that have a candidate planet in the star’s habitable zone -- planet has a temperature liquid water could be maintained.

Werthimer leads a 30-year-old SETI project on the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo receiver in Puerto Rico, which feeds data to SETI@home for a detailed analysis that could only be done on the world’s largest distributed computer. He was involved in an early SETI project with the previous Green Bank telescope, which collapsed from structural failure in 1988, as well as with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which also conducted a broader search for intelligent signals from space run by the SETI Institute. The ATA went into hibernation mode after the SETI Institute ran out of money to operate it.

“With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our Sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals,” Werthimer said. “But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before.”

The radio dish was needed for the new search because the Arecibo dish cannot view the area of the northern sky on which Kepler focuses. SETI observations piggyback on other astronomical observations at Arecibo, and is limited in the wavelength range it can observe, which centers on the 21 centimeter (1420 MHz) line where hydrogen emits light.

These wavelengths easily pass through the dust clouds that obscure much of the galaxy.

“Searching for ET around the 21 centimeter line works if civilizations are broadcasting intentionally, but what if planets are leaking signals like ‘I Love Lucy’?” Werthimer said. “With a new data recorder on the Green

Bank telescope, we can scan a 800 megahertz range of frequencies simultaneously, which is 300 times the range we can get at Arecibo.”

Thus, one day on the Green Bank telescope provides as much data as one year’s worth of observations at Arecibo: about 60 terabytes (60,000 gigabytes) in all, Siemion said. If they recorded a similar chunk of the radio spectrum from Arecibo, SETI@home would be overwhelmed with data, since the Arecibo sky survey observes nearly full time for years on end.

The water hole is a relatively quiet region of the radio spectrum in the universe and a range of wavelengths not significantly absorbed by material between the stars and galaxies. The water hole is bounded on one end by the 21 cm emissions from neutral hydrogen and on the other by the 18 cm emissions from the hydroxyl ion (OH). Because life is presumed to require the existence of liquid water, and water is composed of hydrogen and hydroxyl, this range was dubbed the water hole and seen as a natural window in which water-based life forms would signal their existence. That makes the water hole a favorite of SETI projects.

“This is an interesting place, perhaps a beacon frequency, to look for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations,” Siemion added.

The 86 stars were chosen from the 1,235 candidate planetary systems -- called Kepler Objects of Interest, or KOIs. Targets include the 54 KOIs identified by the Kepler team as being in the habitable temperature range and with sizes ranging from Earth-size to larger than Jupiter; 10 KOIs not on the Kepler team’s habitable list but with orbits less than three times Earth’s orbit and orbital periods greater than 50 days; and all systems with four or more possible planets.

After the Arecibo Telescope and Green Bank telescope have targeted each star, Green Banks will scan the entire Kepler field for signals from planets other than the 86 targets.

A coarse analysis of the data by Werthimer and his team will be followed by a more thorough analysis by SETI@home users, who will be able to see whether they are analyzing Green Bank data as opposed to Arecibo data.

The complete analysis for intelligent signals could take a year, Werthimer said.

“If you extrapolate from the Kepler data, there could be 50 billion planets in the galaxy,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be able to look at this first batch of Earth-like planets.”

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Emphasis on the Classic!

T By: Max González

his is evident from the very begining, of the program, last Saturday night at Guaynabo Bellas Artes. To emphasize the slant, threeworks never before were seen in the island; Carnaval in Venice, the Past-de-Trois “Gulnara and the Merchant” from Le Corsair and Tha Fairy Doll Pas-de-Tois. All never performed locally. The balcony dedicated to the past glory of the period of classical ballet. Marena Pérez and Odemar Ocasio, Taliana Rodríguez, Daniel Ramírez and Lara Berrios, Elmer Pérez, Yannesis Marzán, Nilda López and Omar Román, magnificently traced the steps very much concerned of the style, revived that peculiar pertaining “preciosismo” quality, essence of the pure classic style. It is then dancers are tested in the rendition of the lexicon and vocabulary of ballet terms. It was like watching a master class; wonderful display of echappé, brisé volé, pas-de-cheval, double cabriole, entrechat, tour enhair, and many others; everything done with artistry and musicality.

As a ballet, Prokofievs Romeo and Juliet has never been my cup of tea, except the pas-de-deux of the Balcony Scene, that in this version of Ballet Nacio-

nal sparkled in the interpretation of Laura Valentín and José Rodríguez. Valentín is such a versatile dancer, you cannot name anything that she cannot do. Rodríguez showed he has matured enough to be as good interpreter as required for this role. The biggest attraction in the first part was the funny piece of “The Doll Pasde-Trois”. Originally this ballet in one act was the first seen at the Vienna Opera House in 1888. The story is set in a toy shop, where the leader of all the puppets is the doll. In 1817, Leonide Massine adapted the same plot for his ballet “La Boutique Fantastique”, for the American Ballet Theatre Company. This version of Ballet Nacional retains all the elements required as a pantomimic divertissement. Odemar Ocasio and Omar Román as the two clowns fighting over the doll’s preference. Were nothing but captivating; they got the biggest ovation from the public.

Two works by Rodney Rivera and one by Iván Santos, brought in the innovation, inspiration of contemporary dancing. “Donde Están”, is the title of Rivera’s first piece. It is based in the heroic personality of Azucena Villaflor and the political nuance of the sons of the Argentinian mothers that dissappeared during Peron’s regime. The story goes as a very tragic event

in the political background of persecution. Azucena after succeding in celebrating tha annual protest of the mothers in Plaza de Mayo againts the military oppression, was also vanished like all their sons. The music of Piazzola in tango rythm gives way to Azucena (Laura Valentín), Daniel Ramírez, Omar Román and Yennesis Marzán to dramatize the highly involving intense choreography that Rivera revives the event with inherent passion. His second work, “El Regreso”, to the music of Chopin’s Number one Piano Concerto is an abstraction from the quotation by the Spanish mystic San Juan de la Cruz, leading to the overwhelming love for God.

Two angels, laura Valentín and Marena Pérez are assisting daniel Ramírez in divine message.

Bethoven’s Sonata, is the motivation for Iván Santo’s work. In a neo-classical level the dancers in dim light atmosphere go from he slow Adagio to the last movement Presto Agitato in a conservative expressive innuando parallel to the very well measured music of Beethoven.

Ballet Nacional has everything that sets the road to a promising intentional goal to stay at the top company; good dancers, versatile choreographers and charming executed costumes. It deserves a red carpet.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

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Mainland 8

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Federal Retreat on Bigger Loans Rattles Housing

By DAVID STREITFELD

B

y summer’s end, buyers and sellers in some of the country’s most upscale housing markets are slated to lose one their biggest benefactors: the deep pockets of the federal government. In this seaside community of pricey homes, the dread of yet another housing shock is already spreading.

“We’re looking at more price drops, more foreclosures,” said Rick Del Pozzo, a loan broker. “This snowball that’s been rolling downhill is going to pick up some speed.”

For the last three years, federal agencies have backed new mortgages as large as $729,750 in desirable neighborhoods in high-cost states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Without the government covering the risk of default, many lenders would have refused to make the loans. With the economy in free fall, Congress broadened its traditionally generous support of housing to a substantial degree.

But now Democrats and Republicans agree that the taxpayer should no longer be responsible for homes valued well above the national average, and are about to turn a top slice of the housing market into a testing ground for whether the private mortgage market can once again go it alone. The result, analysts say, will be higher-cost loans and fewer potential buyers for more expensive homes.

Michael S. Barr, a former assistant Treasury secretary, said the federal government’s retrenchment would be painful for many communities. “There’s always going to be a line, and for the person just over it it’s always going to be an arbitrary line,” said Mr. Barr, who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “But there is no entitlement to living in a home that costs $750,000.”

As the housing market braces for more trouble, homeowners everywhere have been reduced to hoping things will someday stop getting worse. In some areas, foreclosures are the only thing selling. New home construction is nearly nonexistent. And CoreLogic, a data company, said Tuesday that house prices fell 7.5 percent over the last year.

The federal government last year backed nine out of 10 new mortgages nationwide, and losses from soured loans are still mounting. Fannie Mae, which buys mortgages from lenders and packages them for investors, said last week it needed an additional $6.2 billion in aid, bringing the cost of its rescue to nearly $100 billion.

Getting the government out of the mortgage business is proving much more difficult than doling out new benefits. As regulators prepare to drop the level they will guarantee loansthe level will drop by a third

to $483,000 — buyers and sellers are wondering why they should be punished simply for living in an expensive region.

Sellers worry the pool of potential buyers will shrink.

Buyers might face less competition in the fall but are likely to see more demands from lenders, including higher credit scores and larger down payments. Steve McNally, a hotel manager from Vancouver, said he had only about 20 percent to put down on a new home in Monterey County.

Even those who bought ahead of the changes, scheduled to take effect Sept. 30, worry about the effect on values. Greg Peterson recently purchased a house in Monterey for $700,000. “That doesn’t get you a palace”.

He qualified for government insurance, which meant he needed only a small down payment. If that option is not available in the future, he said, “home prices all around me will plummet.”

The National Association of Realtors, 8,000 of whom have gathered in Washington this week for their midyear legislative meeting, is making an extension of the loan guarantees a top lobbying priority.

“Reducing the limits will put more downward pressure on prices”. “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense.” In contrast to last year, when a one-year extension of the higher limits sailed through Congress, “there’s more resistance.”

Federal regulators acknowledge that mortgages will get more expensive in upscale neighborhoods but say the effect of the smaller guarantees on the overall housing market will be muted.

A Federal Housing Administration spokeswoman declined to comment but pointed to the Obama administration’s position paper on reforming the housing market.

“Larger loans for more expensive homes will once again be funded only through the private market,” it declares.

Brokers and agents here in Monterey said terms were much tougher for nonguaranteed loans since lenders were so wary.

Borrowers are required to come up with down payments of 30 percent or more while showing greater assets, higher credit ratings and lower debt-to-income ratios.

In the Federal Reserve’s quarterly survey of lenders, released last week, only two

of the 53 banks said their credit standards for prime residential mortgages had eased.

Another two said they had tightened. The other 49 said their standards were the same — tough.

The Mortgage Bankers Association has opposed letting the limits drop, although a spokesman said its members were studying the issue.

“I don’t want to sugarcoat this,” said Mr. Barr, the former Treasury official. “The housing finance system of the future will be one in which borrowers pay more.”

The loan limits were $417,000 everywhere in the country before the economy swooned in 2008. The new limits will be determined by various formulas, including the median price in the county, but will not fall

back to their precrisis levels. In many affected counties, the loan limit will fall about 15 percent, to $625,500.

Monterey County, however, will see a much greater drop. The county is really two housing markets: the farming city of Salinas and the more affluent Monterey and Carmel.

Real estate records show that 462 loans were made in Monterey County between the current limit and the new ceiling since the beginning of 2009. That was only about 1 percent of the loans made in the county. It was a much higher percentage for Monterey and Carmel — about a quarter of their sales.

Loans too large for a government guarantee currently carried interest rates of at least 6 percent, more than a point higher than government-backed loans.

President Obama at the Border P

resident Obama went to the border and delivered a speech on immigration reform. He didn’t present a bill or issue any executive orders or set deadlines for action.

The speech was right on its merits.

The immigration system is a shambles. Millions live here outside the law. Visa policies are too restrictive, cruelly separating families and driving away talented university graduates to other countries. As Mr. Obama dryly noted, “We train them to create jobs for our competition.”

He said our current laws stifle opportunity for exactly the people for whom this economy needs to recover: entrepreneurs, students and low-wage workers. Illegality feeds “a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor,” Mr. Obama said. This isn’t fair to American workers, or to the undocumented — “the overwhelming majority” of whom, he said, “are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families.”

Mr. Obama was also right when he said that the country has heard “a lot of blame and a lot of politics and a lot of ugly rhetoric around immigration.” After listing the many ways his administration has “gone above and beyond” what Republicans had demanded as their price for reform — flooding the border with troops and technology to seal it tighter than ever — he noted that the Republicans were still not satisfied.

“Maybe they’ll need a moat,” he joked. “Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.”

Mr. Obama’s description of the problem was accurate, and his prescription the right one: a “good-faith effort” by both parties to pass comprehensive measures that combine border security with assimilation,

not mass expulsion, for illegal immigrants who qualify.

To move things forward, Mr. Obama will have to do a lot more. He needs to outline legislation, push Congressional leaders — including those in his own party — to back it and make the case repeatedly to Americans.

The president also needs to get his own policies in order. For all his talk of supporting the hopes of the undocumented, his administration has been doubling down on the failed strategy of mass expulsion. It is pressing state and local police to join in an ill-conceived program called Secure Communities, which sends arrested people’s fingerprints through federal immigration databases, turning all local officers and jails into arms of the Department of Homeland Security.

Many lawmakers and police agencies say it erodes public safety by making immigrants, especially victims of domestic violence, afraid to report crimes. They worry about giving rogue officers a convenient tool for racial profiling. And they feel betrayed because what the administration once billed as a transparent, voluntary program aimed only at dangerous convicted criminals turns out to be none of those things.

The Homeland Security Department’s own data show that more than half of those deported under the program have no criminal records or committed only minor crimes.

Mr. Obama and the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, should heed the growing calls by lawmakers to abandon Secure Communities to preserve public safety.

As for immigration reform. If Mr. Obama is really committed to this it’s going to take a lot more.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Problems in 3 Nuclear Plants

By MATTHEW L. WALD

T

he Nuclear Regulatory Commission said a problem at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama was quite serious. There have been reports in recent days of engineers’ flubbing a basic calculation of reactor operation at two other plants.

The math errors and the Browns Ferry problem are not related to each other but come at a moment of heightened concern about reactor safety after the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan.

A valve stuck last October at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant., posed a safety threat that fell into the “red” category, the most serious on its four-color scale.

It is only the fifth time since the scale was established in 2001 that the commission has put a problem into that category.

Last week, operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant near Toms River, N.J., and Nine Mile Point 1, near Syracuse, reported General Electric, which supplies their reactors with fuel had made some math errors that could have resulted in the reactor fuel’s getting hotter than plant operators thought. General Electric notified the companies in time for them to make changes to their reactors.

Neither the miscalculation nor valve problem caused damage or injuries, but exposed flaws in the system.

The valve, at Browns Ferry Unit 1, is in the reactor’s heat removal system, which enables the reactor to cool after it shut down.

The failure was discovered when operators shut the reactor down for refueling, one of the few times the heat removal system is used. It would also be used if there were an accident that required the reactor to shut down.

The failure of the residual heat removal system is a cause of the meltdowns at

the Fukushima reactors, which are of a similar design to those at Browns Ferry, Oyster Creek and Nine Mile Point 1.

The valve consists of a flat metal disk that sits inside the pipe and is moved by a rod. The rod had disconnected from the disk, apparently weeks or months earlier. The residual heat removal system consists of two separate sets of pumps, valves and piping, and one set would not have worked.

“The public was never endangered,” the commission said. “The system is counted on for core cooling during certain accident scenarios, and the valve failure left it inoperable, which could have led to core damage.”

Such an accident would involve “a series of unlikely events”.

Tennessee Valley told the commission staff the valve had a manufacturing defect but it would still have opened if needed; the commission staff disagreed.

Other “code red” findings by the commission include the notorious case of the Davis-Besse reactor near Oak Harbor, Ohio, where an unnoticed leak allowed acid to flow onto the vessel head. Workers discovered in 2002 it had corroded away a thick stainless steel liner. A red finding triggers an extensive inspection; at Browns Ferry that will include equipment, management and procedures to see if anything else is wrong.

The fuel problem at the Oyster Creek and Nine Mile Point plants was odder. General Electric notified Oyster Creek on May 4 and Nine Mile Point on May 6 of four separate calculation errors made in determining peak cladding temperature of a new fuel the plants were using in their reactor cores.

In some cases the errors caused G.E. to underestimate the peak temperature, and in others, overestimate it. The calculation helps determine the maximum power level a reac-

tor can safely run.

The mistakes also involved the calculation of how much of the cladding would be damaged in an accident.

When the calculations were corrected, each was legal to operate but had less of a safety margin than the operators believed.

The operators can solve the problem by changing the power distribution within the reactor core with no loss of output.

Operators made changes in the software to assure the fuel was not overheated and to preserve safety margins.

Nine Mile Point got the notification be-

9 Mainland

fore it started up after a shutdown for refueling, but Oyster Creek did not; still operators of the latter said “this event is not significant to the health and safety of the public.’’

Both plants are the focus of petitions arguing the commission has not paid adequate attention to experimental data that shows how a reaction could occur if cooling water were lost.

Damage to the fuel cladding and production of hydrogen would occur faster than the commission assumes in its calculations, and that the peak temperature should be lowered. The commission has not ruled.

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The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

When the Fur Doesn’t Fly

By ELIZABETH OLSON

S

pacious rooms, plush bedding, spa treatments, a large swimming pool and a lively social scene. It sounds like a dream vacation. But these amenities are not for humans; they are for pets left behind when their owners take plane trips.

More than a dozen airports in the United States have pet-stay facilities nearby, and more are planned.

Such pet pampering, said Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Products Association, “coincided with the front end of the baby boomers.

They are still working, but their children have left home, so pets are their second generation of kids.”

And, like any doting parents, travelers want to be able to check at will on their pets through the increasingly popular webcam.

“When parents are away, they can check in on their babies,” said Saq Nadeem, who founded Paradise4Paws, which has locations at Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports. And, like other pet hotels, he specializes not only in the deluxe, but also in convenience, giving customers the option of 24/7 drop-off and pickup, along with discounted or free airport parking.

These pet hotels cater to business travelers like Susie McIntosh Hinson, who works for a global standards organization. She spends more than 50 percent of her time in the air, traveling

from her home base in Charlotte, N.C., to places as diverse as Brussels and Manila.

Finding a kennel for her two-yearold greyhound, Eldyrah, was difficult, Ms. Hinson said, because “every place was 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, and that didn’t work for me.”

When she saw an ad for the Charlotte airport’s newly opened Pet Paradise Resort, the convenience and easy access to the terminal persuaded her to try it. She now often leaves her dog at the resort because “they are geared around travelers.

“I give them my flight information so if there are delays or problems, there is no gap in care for her,” Ms. Hinson said. “It’s an extended home, like leaving the children with Grandma.”

The Charlotte facility is run by Fred Goldsmith — he calls himself the “chief pooper-scooper.” He decided to “create a Ritz-Carlton brand for dogs” after searching unsuccessfully for upscale lodging for his bichon frisé.

He set up the first Pet Paradise in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2005, and has since expanded to eight other locations in Florida as well as Charlotte, New Orleans and Houston.

“Our client can pull up, leave the pet and then take the bags on our van and go directly to the terminal,” Mr. Goldsmith said. The price is $34 to $37 a night, depending on the location — plus extras like special treats, flat-screen televisions, DVDs and pet massages.

Mr. Nadeem, who owns two dogs and two cats, drew up a pet-stay facility plan while he was a business school student at Northwestern. He wanted to meet the sometimes-unpredictable needs of people traveling for work and the growing sentiment among pet owners against crating or caging their pets while they are away.

“Travelers don’t want to add to their stress by dropping off their pet a day early or waiting a day later,” Mr. Nadeem said. His facility has pet suites, flat-screen TVs, large open spaces, a dog bone-shaped pool and real-time webcams. And cats stay in bungalows with window perches, aquariums to watch fish and access to special climbing trees.

Kristine Grudis, a sales manager

for a food processing company, boards her yellow Labrador, Leilah, there because of her energy level, which is so high it overwhelmed at-home sitters.

“Now she swims and plays all day,” said Ms. Grudis, who travels weekly for work and leaves Leilah at Paradise4Paws. “It probably costs as much as monthly day care for a child, but I get points for future stays or airline flights.”

Airport authorities welcome the revenue from on-site pet boarding.

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, which contracted for pet boarding services with the Animal Humane Society, a nonprofit animal welfare organization in the Midwest, earned $110,000 last year, almost four times the building’s previous rent, said Eric Johnson, director of commercial development for the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Additional proceeds from the facility, run by the society’s affiliate, Now Boarding Pets, support Animal Humane Society’s programs.

Even with enviable amenities, mixing unfamiliar dogs together can sometimes cause problems. So most pet facilities make a point of evaluating each animal to screen out aggressors or loners.

“There is always a degree of biting or aggression,” said Lisa Hinickle, the general manager of Now Boarding Pets. “Any facility that says otherwise isn’t being upfront.”

That is why touring a facility before boarding a pet is essential, said Susan Smith, who operates the Web site pettravel.com. “The conveniences are wonderful,” she said, “but you have to know the facility is able to accommodate the needs of your pet.”

San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

11

modern love

Even in Real Life, There Were Screens Between Us

By CAITLIN DEWEY

C

URLED up at the foot of my bed, my face inches from the laptop screen, I stared anxiously at the Google chat box. “Will is typing,” the box told me, helpfully.

I forced myself to read e-mail while I waited for his message. Then I refreshed my Twitter feed, scrolled through my blog posts and began brushing my teeth.

Still the box said, “Will is typing.”

“Don’t you dare get hurt by this,” I muttered around my toothpaste. “This was a stupid idea, and you knew that from the start.”

But recognizing the stupidity of falling for someone on the Internet does not prevent you from doing it. My friend Jeanette, a college radio D.J., chats constantly with some music blogger she met on Tumblr. My friend Tuan, who lives in Los Angeles, stays up until after 3 to talk to his London-based girlfriend.

And I had just driven nearly 1,100 miles round trip to visit Will, a guy I met in October at a Web journalism conference and got to know almost entirely on Skype.

I noticed him across the table at a noisy hotel bar. Will owns thick black-frame glasses but no hairbrush or comb, traits that lend him the look of a basement-bound hacker. If you have ever attended an Internet conference, you understand how pale skin, thick glasses and scruffy hair can be attractive; otherwise, I can’t explain it to you.

In either case, I liked Will’s weirdly overconfident smirk and his obsession with WordPress. He regaled me with the merits of plug-ins and PHP until I became tired and went to bed.

“I’ll find you on Twitter,” I joked when

I left.

I didn’t expect or even want to see Will again after that weekend. Since he lived three states away, further face time seemed unlikely. I followed his Twitter posts with detached curiosity; in January, he G-chatted me to complain about work. Then he got drunk and messaged me again, sometime near midnight, as I uploaded photos and otherwise wasted bandwidth.

With obvious sarcasm, he wrote, “Do you have that Skype thing kids talk about these days?”

I’ve read that 90 percent of human communication is nonverbal. Skype captures that 90 percent on a low-resolution video camera, compresses it, funnels it to a node computer and reproduces it on a screen anywhere in the world. Skype eliminates distance; that’s why it works.

And that’s exactly what it did for us.

With my Skype screen open and my webcam on, I viscerally felt that Will was sitting a foot away on my bed. Ignoring the times the picture froze or his voice cut out, I thought he looked and sounded exactly as he had in person. Sometimes, when he leaned into the computer to read an article I had sent him, I could see the pores of his face.

We started video chatting for hours every night — he from an ascetic all-white bedroom, me from the cupcake-print corner of my studio apartment. I learned that he ate take-out for every meal, slept in a series of identical white V-neck T-shirts and smirked with one side of his mouth when I said something clever. I knew his preferred coding languages, his least favorite content management system, and his general hatred of dancing, small talk and girls in bars.

One night, when we talked too late, I fell asleep with my laptop open and woke

up seven hours later, tangled in cords. He was still there, asleep in the light from an open window, pale and young and pixelated.

Eventually he stirred, blinked at the camera and said, “Hey, you.”

“Hey,” I said easily. “How did you sleep?”

As the weeks went on, I told Will about my last boyfriend, a guy I had met in psychology class and dated for almost two years. He listened quietly, his glasses reflecting my image from his computer, and gave good, clear-eyed advice about letting go.

I couldn’t remember the last time I met somebody that smart and talented in ways I certainly wasn’t. He told me about his ex-girlfriend, who never appreciated his work. I texted him from classes when I was frustrated or bored.

In the safety of my apartment, I could see Will, but I couldn’t touch him. I could summon him when I wanted to talk, but I never knew him in any light other than the one from his bedside lamp. This phenomenon worked in my favor as well. I could call him after a few drinks, when I felt sufficiently talkative and social; I could avoid him if I had videos to edit or blog posts to write. I could say whatever I wanted and risk awkwardness, because at the end of the conversation, one click of the mouse would shut him out of my room.

THE irony is that we flock to the Internet for this type of safe, sanitized intimacy, but we want something entirely different.

“In real life,” or IRL, is a popular term in online parlance. At Internet conferences like the one where I met Will, Twitter explodes with people celebrating IRL meetings: “So nice to finally see @so-and-so IRL.” “Hey @ so-and-so, I can’t believe we hadn’t met IRL yet!”

The Internet brings these people together with hash tags and message boards, but it never satisfies them. No matter how much you love someone’s blog or Twitter feed, it isn’t their posts you actually want.

And so — slowly, cautiously — Will and I began circling the question of what it all meant.

“I really like you,” he said one night, after getting home from the bar.

“I really like you too,” I said. “I don’t know what that means.”

I wanted to find out. So in early March I rented a car, begged my professors to let me out of class a day early, and drove 540 miles to spend a long weekend in the midsize city where Will lives. When I got close, I called my friend Tuan from a rest stop, where I fixed my makeup and chewed gum and generally tried to calm down.

“What if it’s terrible?” I demanded.

“What if he’s nothing like I expect?”

In fact, Will was almost exactly as I expected: thin lips, straight nose, small hazel eyes, glasses. He stood waiting at the side of the street while I parked my car — going forward and back, forward and back, until I nervously got within two feet of the curb.

We kissed on the cold, blustery sidewalk as the wind whipped my thoughts around.

Mostly, I felt relieved. I thought: “This works in real life. This means something.”

But after we kissed and ate pizza and went back to his house, we struggled for things to talk about. In real life, Will stared off at nothing while I talked. In real life, he had no questions about the drive or my work or the stuff that waited for me when I went back to school.

He took me out for dinner and read his e-mail while we waited for our food. He apologized profusely, but still checked his Web site’s traffic stats while we sat in his living room.

He took me to a party at his friend’s house where they proceeded to argue for hours about Web design while I sat on a futon and stared at the ceiling, drunk and bored and terribly concerned that I looked thinner online. At points, he grabbed my hand and gave me small, apologetic smiles.

It seemed like a strategy game: a constant dance of reaching for me and pulling back, of intimacy and distance, of real life and Internet make-believe.

On the last day of my visit, Will overslept. He rushed around the apartment with his hair wet and his tie untied, looking for his laptop. According to the plan we made the night before, he would go to work and I would leave when it suited me, dropping his spare keys in the mailbox.

In the front hallway, where I stood rubbing my eyes, Will hugged me goodbye and told me to drive safely. He struggled for a closing statement.

“It was great to see you,” he said at last.

I didn’t leave right away. After I showered and packed and studied the books near his fireplace, I sat for a long time at his kitchen counter, trying to work out what happened. I didn’t like being surrounded by his things. I felt more comfortable in my room, with my things, and with his presence confined to a laptop screen.

I wrote him a note before I left: “Dear Will: Thank you so much for having me this weekend. It meant a lot to me to spend time with you in person.”

I signed my name and left it on the counter. Then, willing myself not to cry, I dropped his keys in the mailbox and gunned it home. In real life, getting there took nine hours.

Wine

12 May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

An Irresistible Austrian Riesling Beckons

By ERIC ASIMOV

wines came from overlooked regions, and poor ones came from exalted regions. In the end, the most crucial consideration was the producer.

L

ET me immediately declare my bias: I love Austrian rieslings. I say that knowing I’m speaking very generally, but don’t we always about wine?

Of course we do, because we are speaking about ideals, born of experience and nurtured on realized potential. In discussing wine passions, we say, “I love Barolos,” or, “I love Napa cabernets.” But when we apply critical judgment to particular wines, a clearer picture emerges. We don’t love all Napa cabs or all Barolos. In fact, we don’t like quite a few of them. The ones we like best meet internal standards that have developed over time.

So when I say I love Austrian rieslings, I suppose it would be more accurate to say I love the idea of Austrian rieslings, an idea that has developed as I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy many of them. Naturally, you might ask what exactly is my idea of Austrian rieslings.

I’m so glad you asked me that. When I think of Austrian rieslings, I think of dry, structured wines with stony, pure, shimmering mineral flavors that dominate the palate, yet are never heavy or out of balance. I think of green and yellow fruits, and complex flavors etched with laserlike precision. Finally, I think of wines that are phenomenally refreshing, tangy and energetic with textures that feel so good in the mouth that you simply do not want to stop drinking the wines.

I’ve been wondering about the distinction between general notions and particular bottles in the wake of the wine panel’s recent tasting of 20 Austrian rieslings from recent vintages. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Raj Vaidya, the head sommelier at Daniel, and Laura Maniec, the founder of Corkbuzz Wine Studio, a wine education and events space.

While we found many wines that we liked, we also felt confused by how hard that was to do. Despite how I feel about Austrian rieslings, I was disappointed after the tasting, a feeling shared by my colleagues. Too many wines lacked the definition, focus and precision that characterize not only good Austrian rieslings but rieslings in general. They lacked energy and what I could think of only as completeness; that is, the myriad qualities that, together, make a balanced, complete wine but that stand out mostly when they are lacking.

I was nonplussed, as well. How could I like the category so much but find so many of the wines lacking? The answers came later as we learned the details of the variables in the blind tasting. Six different regions were represented, but the differen-

Tasting Report

ces between regions were less important than the fact that the tasting was roughly divided between the 2009 and 2008 vintages, with two from 2007 thrown in for good measure.

Many in the Austrian wine trade regarded the 2009 vintage as difficult yet superb. The weather was a combination of extremes — very warm, very cool, very rainy, very dry — that gave some winemakers trouble but that in the end resulted in opulent, full-bodied rieslings with plenty of tropical fruit. By contrast, the cooler 2008 vintage was not considered to be as good for rieslings, while 2007 was thought to be in the middle between 2008 and 2009.

Paradoxically, we much preferred the ’08s over the ’09s. Of the 10 wines from 2008 in our tasting, six of them made our Top 10, along with one from 2007 and three from 2009. What’s more, our Top 4 included three from 2008 and the one from 2007.

The three 2009s that did make our Top 10 all came from superb producers who were skilled enough to transcend the issues faced by some of the others. Then again, possibly we have different standards from those of the trade.

To put it another way, the disappointment we felt about wines lacking acidity, definition and balance applied largely to the 2009s in our tasting. If you like big, ripe rieslings that display power and rich fruit, than perhaps the ’09s are for you, but if your definition of Austrian rieslings aligns with mine, then most likely you will prefer the ’08s.

Our favorite was the 2008 Graf Hardegg vom Schloss, the only wine in the tasting designated Niederösterreich. It’s a vague, generic appellation that applies to the wine because its region, Weinviertel, officially permits only grüner veltliner among white wines. Well. This unsanctioned wine was exactly the sort of exciting, inspiring, refreshing, mineral-laden wine that comes to mind when I think of Austrian rieslings.

It was also, at $19, our best value.

Right behind it were three wines, including the structured, complex 2007 smaragd from Kartäuserhof in the Wachau, Austria’s most prestigious white wine region, and the gentle, well-balanced 2008 federspiel from F. X. Pichler, also from the Wachau. Incidentally, don’t let the avalanche of German wine terminology drive you off, complex as it may sound. Smaragd and federspiel are merely ripeness designations, used only in the Wachau, with smaragd representing exceptionally ripe grapes, and federspiel representing classically ripe grapes.

Our No. 4 wine is surprisingly from Wien, or Vienna, the only great metropolis in the world to have its own appellation.

Yes, Vienna is a historic grape-growing region, with almost 2,000 acres of vines within its city limits. The 2008 Jutta Ambrositsch offered a deliciously powerful minerality along with flavors of flowers and herbs.

As for the three from 2009 in our Top 10, they come from Nikolaihof, Nigl and Bründlmayer, three of Austria’s top producers, and while they all appropriately reflected their vintage, they were each nonetheless complete, balanced wines, unlike some of the ’09s that we rejected.

The Nikolaihof vom Stein federspiel from the Wachau was rich and fleshy, juicy and complex, while the Nigl Privat Senftenberger Pellingen, from the Kremstal, was ripe and perfumed with flavors of tropical fruit. The Bründlmayer Steinmassel, from the Kamptal, was not quite up to the other two ’09s, with its odd combination of brininess and almost candied flavors.

Looking back on the tasting, I was relieved to find that our disappointment was not just because of overly high expectations, as Laura had initially suggested. It wasn’t only a matter of vintages — we preferred the ’08s but didn’t love all of them.

And it wasn’t about location — some good

BEST VALUE Graf Hardegg Niederösterreich, $19, ✩✩✩ ½ Riesling vom Schloss 2008 Tangy, energetic and plain delicious, with ripe fruit and stony mineral flavors. (Monika Caha Selections/Frederick Wildman & Sons, New York) Kartäuserhof Wachau Riesling, $40, ✩✩✩ Achleiten Smaragd 2007 Taut and refreshing with good structure and complex flavors of minerals and flowers. (Metrowine, Stamford, Conn.)

F.X. Pichler Wachau Riesling, $42, ✩✩✩ Federspiel Urgestein Terrassen 2008 Well balanced with pleasing flavors of citrus and herbs and a gentle minerality.

(Weygandt-Metzler, Unionville, Pa.) Jutta Ambrositsch Wien Riesling, $35, ✩✩✩ Nussberg Ried Preussen 2008 Mineral, mineral, mineral, along with flavors of flowers and herbs. (Darcy & Huber Selections, Mount Vernon, N.Y.) Nikolaihof Wachau Riesling, $29, ✩✩ ½ Vom Stein Federspiel 2009 Rich and fleshy, juicy and complex, with a nutlike quality. (Terry Theise Estate Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.) Emmerich Knoll Wachau Riesling, $65, ✩✩ ½ Smaragd Kellerberg Durnsteiner 2008 Lively and energetic, with bright citrus, herbal, earth and melon flavors. (deGrazia Imports, Winston-Salem, N.C.) Nigl Kremstal Riesling, $45, ✩✩ ½ Privat Senftenberger Pellingen 2009 Ripe and perfumed with tangy, lingering flavors of tropical fruit and herbs. (Terry Theise Estate Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.) Bründlmayer Kamptal Riesling, $29, ✩✩ Steinmassel 2009 Creamy and earthy, with an unusual combination of briny and candied flavors. (Terry Theise Estate Selections/Michael Skurnik Wines, Syosset, N.Y.) Sepp Moser Kremstal Riesling, $26, ✩✩ Von den Terrassen 2008 Direct and straightforward with fresh, tangy mineral flavors. (Martin Scott Wines, Lake Success, N.Y.) Josef Schmid Kremstal Riesling, $26, ✩✩ Reserve Sunogein 2008 Fresh and light-bodied, with floral and apple flavors. (Vias Imports, New York)

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

13

14

The San Juan Weeekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

LETTERS Island of Undemocracy “...the accused shall enjoy the right...to be informed of the nature and cause of the charge, to be confronted with the witnesses against him...”

United States Constitution VIth Amendment An American right, not available in Puerto Rico.

Up to the point you actually land in court, by which time there’s little left of you.

It’s the “confidentiality policy.” It operates at all Commonwealth agencies that might mess with you, from the Police to the Dept. of the Family to the UPR if you study there. It means you get investigated, questioned, harassed and intimidated, but told absolutely nothing of what it’s all about. Just like medieval England, in the infamous Star Chamber law students are told all about in the beginning pages of their Constitutional law textbooks.

You refuse to answer questions, you’re arrested for “obstruction of justice,” rather roughly, unless you’re wealthy and your lawyer’s there with you. Talking back earns you “breach of the peace.” At which time---surreally---you’re read your Miranda rights from a crumpled piece of cardboard.

This all means we don’t actually live under rule of law nor protected by any constitution. Government here, in all its whim, partisanship and meanness, exercises totalitarian subjection upon us all, again, except for the moneyed, whose lawyers fight it out for them.

And not only may we get picked on by government.

You’re fair game for an disgruntled ex, a neurotic neighbor, just about anybody who doesn’t like you, who can play musical agencies and just go on filing complaint after complaint after complaint against you because you’re never told who’s doing it nor is any track kept on how many times he/she does, it’s different cops/case workers/bureaucrats every time. It goes without saying your life might thereby become very uncomfortable, even if you didn’t do any of all the stuff complained against you about and you can prove so.

Needless to say, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on the mainland. Where you’re told what you’re up against as a matter of course, like the Bill of Rights means something over there. It truly obscene that Uncle Sam’s abject sycophants here so outrageously defile American values.

And you get the same cloak-and-dagger treatment when you show up at a Commonwealth agency to apply for anything, say food coupons, a health card, Workmen’s Comp, home caring for the infirm/aged. At such an agency in the States, the walls are decked with brochures telling you what you’re entitled to in detail. Here none are printed. Not only that, but if you ask a bureaucrat he’ll refuse in your face to tell you. You have to just apply. That the agency won’t let people know what lies to tell, you’re hissed if you insist.

In a democracy, we’re told as children, we may speak up for our rights. But how can you do that if you’ll never know what they are? So you chase after the unlikely constellation of documents---like a medical certificate that

88-year-old Grandma doesn’t have AIDS to qualify her for home caring---no joke, they do require this. An outrageous waste of your time and theirs. Most applicants don’t qualify, it took you two weeks to gather up the endless paperwork only to learn Grandma won’t get home care because her Social Security is over $800. Now, why couldn’t they tell you this to begin with? To make sure you’ll never be back if you can help it.

Now I ask you, should Puerto Rico as we know it be welcomed into the American Republic? I believe not.

Ayla Bond, Miramar

Lot of the Pedestrian I J-walk all the time. Motorists holler at me. It would be safer to cross at intersections, only that traffic signals for pedestrians the boxy black ones that display the orange or white hand and that you press the button never, ever work. And just crossing the road you only have to watch for traffic in one direction. But in the midst of a bridge or two and various exits and hooded traffic lights with little green and red arrows that you can’t see unless you’re right in front of them, you’d better not cross there.

Might now-Sec’y of State Kenneth McClintock, who fancifully frets over light pollution and confusing street names, have them all fixed, and perhaps save a few dozen lives a year? Fat chance. Such a thing is too proletariat for him, too lumpen. And the car lobby might get upset.

Emilio Santiago, Summit Hills

What We’re All About Local Spanglish is more than simply Osterizing the two hapless languages together. For example, when we say police brutality is not an acceptable practice here, we’re not saying it shouldn’t be done. Heaven forbid! The riff-raff must be kept in their place. What we mean is you don’t talk of such things, particularly not with outsiders.

It’s called tapar el cielo con la mano, covering the sky with your hand. But because the sky is so much larger, you have to press your hand against your eye and then you can’t see anything.

ment reads: “You shall have no strange gods before me.”

Agustín Manzano , Santurce

The Pet in the Mirror It was late afternoon and I was strolling through the neighborhood and in front of a prettily kept home I spotted a gorgeous orange tabby with shiny coppery eyes. “Belleza, how come I’ve never seen you?” I asked him and he looked at me, approaching, then meowing. I patted him on the head and flanks and he meowed some more. Then a lady’s voice from the small balcony, “Señor, please hold him for me.” And shortly thereafter, the cat, eyeing her, moved away. Now it’s odd for a cat to approach a stranger, yet walk away from his master. “He knows I want to get him inside,” she went on. “I don’t let him out because he catches feas from the other cats and those collars and sprays don’t work.” They do actually, only the ones sold in Puerto Rico have been warehoused too long and have worn out chemically. You have to have somebody buy them for you in the States. And remember that you’re the pet and your cat’s the master.

Agustín Manzano , Santurce

Cancer Causes Smoking Right Wingers chortle that marihuana must be kept illegal because it’s a “gateway” to hard drugs. Why so? Because the pusher you buy your pot from often sells dope as well. How come. Well, because marihuana is illegal too.

Danilo Alvarez, Hato Rey

Great Blue Hope Dr. Rosselló got blamed that his underlings all turned out crooks and worse, but so did those of Jesus, in the long run.

Now he proposes to socialize health care here, something for which the history books would trumpet his glory for all time, if any anybody read them. Doctors and hospital moneypeople must want his head on a platter though.

Danilo Alvarez, Hato Rey

Agustín Manzano, Guaynabo

Back to the Sabbath We hardly know what time to keep holy. The Fourth Commandment mandates the Sabbath, that goes from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. But when Emperor Constantine was negotiating his conversion to Christianity with the Church, he pointed out that he already worshiped the Egyptian sun god Ra on Sundays and he wasn’t about to give that up and that there was no way he could manage a whole weekend of worship. So they changed it to Sunday just for him. To be sure, the First Command-

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

San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

15

FASHION & BEAUTY

The Perched, the Frothy, the Fascinator

By AUSTIN CONSIDINE

N

EVER has a hat stirred such a squall.

Moments after the royal wedding, images of Princess Beatrice’s spiraling Band-Aid-hued headpiece had gone viral.

Tina Brown compared it to “entwined prawn-colored entrails.” Others described it variously as fallopian tubes, an octopus and a giant pretzel that accidentally became caught in the princess’s hair.

A Facebook page titled “Princess Beatrice’s ridiculous Royal Wedding hat” had at least 134,000 fans.

Any accessory that draws such disparate, yet equally apt, comparisons was bound to incite attention. But though the Philip Treacy creation was the wedding’s most outlandish headpiece, it wasn’t the only one being noticed. Victoria Beckham (hers seemed to feature a pair of black swizzle sticks) and the British TV celebrity Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (a blue canoe) were just a few whose foreheads sprouted similarly gravity-defying appendages.

British commentators had a name for such headpieces: fascinators. American au-

diences wondered: What’s a fascinator?

Fascinators vary widely in size and design, but generally they have a small base and affix to the hair with hidden clips or headbands instead of fitting over the skull as traditional hats do. Most notably, they regularly incorporate plumage, literal or figurative. As Patricia Underwood, a Britishborn milliner based in New York, noted, what unifies them most is that they, well, fascinate. “There used to be a term for a little veiling piece that one wore, and it was called a ‘whimsy,’ ” she said. “It was sort of fun and alluring. So, you know, a fascinator is the grandchild of the whimsy.”

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the first known use of the term was in 1750, to describe a lightweight woman’s head scarf, often of crochet or lace. Stephen Jones, a London-based milliner, said the contemporary incarnation goes back to at least the early 1960s, when women clipped them atop bouffant hairdos. “It actually was a really New York hat,” he said. “If you think of Audrey Hepburn with a bit of a beehive, or Zsa Zsa Gabor, that was exactly what they used to wear.”

Still, there’s something very British about the fascinator. Like the ascot, the name itself (crisp, prim, almost robotic) just sounds better in the Queen’s English.

So, could the royal hype spawn a trend stateside? Ms. Underwood predicted that the Kentucky Derby could be an indicator.

Fascinators work where a floppy hat never could. Mr. Jones pointed to Yoko Ono, who wore a fascinator of his (a white little number with a frothy veil) with an evening suit last week at the Costume Institute gala.

“What is really good is a fascinator works very, very well with a cocktail dress or an evening dress,” he said.

Mr. Jones thinks there is a “strong possibility” that fascinators could catch on here because of their versatility. Sarah Jessica Parker and Paris Hilton have worn them.

And Lady Gaga sports them frequently, including one made of raw meat.

Kitchen

16

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Cherishing the Turkey, All Year Round Roast Turkey Breast With Fig-Olive Tapenade Time: 1 hour 45 minutes 1/2 cup dried figs, trimmed 1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice 2 small garlic cloves, coarsely chopped 2 anchovy fillets 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil 1 boneless, skinless turkey breast, 2 to 2 1/2 pounds 1/2 teaspoon coarse kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper Mayonnaise, for serving, optional.

By MELISSA CLARK

F

OR one or two nights a year, turkey reigns supreme. A burnished bird, presented in all its Norman Rockwell perfection, is the focal point of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners across the country.

The rest of the year? Well, let’s just say that it’s a long fall from grace to club sandwiches at the diner and joyless lowfat burgers.

There is no reason for this sad neglect. Just because we don’t think to make it the star of a meal in May doesn’t mean turkey won’t taste as good as it did in November.

With this in mind, I spent a week finding new ways to enjoy it.

This meant no roasted whole birds.

Instead, I concentrated on turkey parts, which are usually a good bargain all

year long. In addition to ground meat and thinly sliced scallops, I found whole breasts tied into handsome boneless roasts. There were medieval-looking drumsticks begging to be roasted and eaten with bare hands, accompanied by tankards of ale. Even meaty, tender turkey necks could be excavated from my butcher’s deep freezer when I asked.

Cooking the parts separately eliminated the familiar Thanksgiving stress of overdone breast meat and underdone thighs.

A couple of legs basted with a lightly sweet marinade of soy sauce, honey and star anise, roasted to perfection by themselves, although I confess that I ate them with a fork and knife.

I hacked the turkey necks into pieces with a cleaver and braised them slowly, osso buco style, until the flesh

1. Place the figs in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Let sit for 5 minutes, then drain and coarsely chop.

In a food processor, combine the figs, olives, lemon juice, garlic and anchovies. With the motor running, slowly drizzle in the oil, and process until the mixture becomes a paste.

2. If the breast is tied up, untie it and pat dry; season with salt and pepper. Coat it with half the paste (reserve the remaining paste for serving).

Roll up the turkey and secure it with kitchen twine. Let it rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature or up to 24 hours, covered, in the refrigerator. fell away from the bones in tender, silky strands. The necks were a lot more economical than veal shanks, although you might miss spooning translucent lumps

Roasted Turkey Drumsticks With Star Anise and Soy Sauce Time: 2 hours 3/4 cup tamari or soy sauce 1/2 cup honey 1/2 cup dry sherry 1/2 cup chopped scallions (white and green parts) 3 tablespoons peeled, grated fresh ginger 8 whole star anise 8 garlic cloves, smashed and peelwed 5 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil 4 large turkey drumsticks (about 6 pounds)

1 1/4 teaspoons coarse kosher salt 1 teaspoon black pepper.

1. In a small saucepan, combine 1/2 cup water, soy sauce, honey, sherry, scallions, ginger, star anise and garlic.

Simmer over low heat for 10 minutes.

Whisk in the oil. Reserve 1/4 cup of the marinade.

2. Line a large baking sheet with aluminum foil. Pat the drumsticks dry; season with salt and pepper and place on prepared pan. Brush turkey all over with half the remaining marina-

3. When you are ready to cook, heat the oven to 375 degrees. Place on a foil-lined baking sheet. Roast, turning once halfway through, until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the turkey reads 160 degrees, 45 minutes to 1 hour (it will continue to cook as it cools). Let stand 10 minutes before untying and slicing.

Serve with remaining tapenade and mayonnaise on the side.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

de (leave as much of the solids in the saucepan as possible). Scatter star anise over drumsticks (some will fall on baking pan, and that’s fine). Marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes.

3. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Roast drumsticks, turning and basting with more of the marinade occasionally, until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the meat registers 165 degrees, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Drizzle with reserved marinade before serving.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

of marrow from the bone.

For the ground turkey, I sought out dark meat, which is more flavorful and richer than ground breast. It wasn’t hard to find, though in a pinch you could grind your own from drumstick meat pulsed in the food processor. Wanting a departure from the obvious (burgers, chili and meatloaf), I simmered the meat with pancetta into a rich and hearty ragù for whole-wheat pasta.

Lastly, I smeared a whole breast with a dried-fig tapenade, then roasted it until the meat was just cooked but still moist, a far cry from most roast turkey breasts I’ve endured.

The sweet and tangy tapenade was vaguely reminiscent of cranberry sauce, so I mixed it with mayonnaise for turkey sandwiches the next day. It was the perfect meal of leftovers, without any of the usual holiday fuss and mess.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

17

Kitchen

Smoked Trout Frittatas

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

T

here isn’t much in the way of food that tart, citric, sometimes spicy and often refreshing Austrian rieslings can’t handle with aplomb. Spring’s challenges, like artichokes, asparagus and salads, would not daunt them. Nor would eggs. In fact, the whiff of sulfur up front in some of the wines suggested eggs.

Here’s a simple brunch or lunch preparation suited to entertaining. Individual frittatalike mixtures, inspired by the Spanish tortilla of eggs, potatoes and onions, with the addition of smoked trout, are baked, not fried. They can be made up to an hour in advance and reheated or even served just warm. A salad is all that’s needed alongside, and do not hesitate to toss in some asparagus or artichokes.

Smoked Trout Frittatas Time: 45 minutes 2 1/2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 pound Yukon gold potatoes, peeled, in 1/2-inch dice Salt 1 cup finely chopped onion 1 ounce speck, finely chopped 1 smoked trout, skin and bones removed

2 tablespoons minced fresh dill 7 large eggs, beaten Ground black pepper 1 cup sour cream 1. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a 10-inch skillet. Add potatoes and cook on medium-low for about 10 minutes, until they start to soften. Sprinkle with salt. Add onion, increase heat to me-

dium and cook about 5 minutes longer, until onion and potatoes are tender. Stir in speck and sauté another minute. Stir in trout and half the dill. Transfer to a bowl and allow to cool 10 minutes.

2. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Use remaining oil to grease 6 large (8-ounce) muffin tins. Fold eggs into trout mixture.

Season generously with pepper and add additional salt if needed. Spoon mixture into tins. Place in oven and bake 15 minutes. Fold remaining dill into sour cream and place in a serving dish.

3. Unmold frittatas and serve with sour cream alongside.

Yield: 6 servings.

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May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

The Twins from Brazil: Did Nazi Doctor Mengele - the Angel of Death - Cause Twin Surge in South American Town?

By Caroline Grant

N

azi doctor Josef Mengele is behind the high proportion of blond-haired, blue-eyed twins in a Brazilian town, according to a new book A notorious Nazi doctor known as the ‘Angel of Death’ is behind an alarming number of twins born in a small Brazilian town, a historian has claimed.

Josef Mengele was an SS physician in Auschwitz concentration camp where in a bid to create a master race for Adolf Hitler he carried out genetic experiments to find the key to producing twins.

The aim was to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate.

In 1945 he fled the advancing Red Army and made his way to South America.

It is there that the medic, who is believed to have been responsible for up to 400,000 deaths in medical experiments at Auschwitz, may have succeeded in his mission.

Baffled scientists had been struggling to come up with a reason for the high proportion twins in the tiny Brazilian town of Candido Godoi - most of them blondhaired and blue-eyed.

A staggering one in five pregnancies there have resulted in the birth of twins the usual rate is one in 80.

Argentine historian Jorge Camara-

sa has now come up with an astonishing theory.

In a new book, Mengele: The Angel Of Death In South America, he has pieced together the Nazi doctor’s later years after his flight in the face of the Red Army advance.

The Russian forces liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

The residents of the Brazilian town claim Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s.

He first claimed to be a vet but then offered medical treatment to the women, providing them with strange potions and tablets and asking for blood samples.

After spending time in Argentina and Paraguay, in 1963 Mengele started making regular trips to the predominantly German farming community in Brazil.

Mr Camarasa claims it was soon after that the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

‘I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele’s laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans,’ he said.

‘There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins.’

The town’s official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a ‘Farming Community And Land Of The Twins’.

There is also a museum, the House

Of The Twins.

In a bid to solve the mystery, former mayor and town doctor Anencia Flores da Silva spoke to hundreds of people.

There was one name that kept recurring in their stories - a medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: ‘He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him.

‘Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood.’

Mengele lived in freedom in Brazil for 18 years. He drowned in a swimming accident there in 1979 when he was 68.

Genetic tests were carried out on the remains to prove Mengele died thereby bringing to an end decades of rumours that he was still alive with reported sighting from places as far apart as Portugal and the U.S. The 1978 feature film The Boys From Brazil had as its plot Mengele hiding in South America with plans to begin a Fourth Reich with other Nazi sympathisers.

The plan of Mengele, played by Gregory Peck, is to recreate the childhood of Hitler for the 95 young boys he cloned from the Nazi leader.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

19

of the charts all over ove America, Latin America and in S Spain, leaving us classics like Algo d de mí (Something of me) (1972), Amor...Amar (Love..

Am to be Loved) (1972), (1972) Melina (1975), a song about Melina Mercouri, M ¿Quieres ¿Q Quieres ser mi amante? (Do you yo ou want to be my lover?)

(1974), (1974), Jamás (Never) (1975), Ell Amor de mi m Vida (The Love off my Life ) (1 (1978), Perdóname (Forgive (F Forgive me) (1981), the latter

Sesto created many hit songs and a great fortune, and almost every song came from his sole inspiration

C

amilo Sesto is the stage name of Camilo Blanes Cortés, songwriter, producer and spanish composer of romantic ballads, pop and rock.

He is one of the singers insignia from Spain, extending his popularity to other countries being recognized in America, Europe and Asia.

He has also sung in other languages, including Spanish, english, italian, valencia, portuguese and german.

His well known for his roles in the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar”, which he produced (in North America he is presented as the “Spanish Sinatra”) and elsewhere as “Camilo Superstar.” It has the world record for the largest number of “Number 1’s” in the world: a total of 52 and 18 in “Top 40” and 175 million albums sold worldwide.

In 2010 he performed two concerts in Madrid, to say “goodbye forever” and likely will be fired from other countries. Born in a humble family.

His parents were Eliseo Blanes and Joaquina Cortés (deceased). The mother tongues of Camilo Sesto are valencian and spanish.

His first steps as a singer’s given in his school choir in Alcoy. But it really became interested in music at

the age of 16.

Camilo Blanes Cortés born September 16, 1946 better known as Camilo Sesto, singer, composer and producer who enjoyed fame during the 1970s and the 1980s. Probably the most prominent male voice of Spanish pop music at that time, he became famous for his powerful, carefully arranged ballads, pop and rock.

Camilo Sesto was born in Alcoi, a city located in the province of Alicante on September 16, 1946. Sesto sang in two pop bands during the 1960s and won a contest in a Madrid TV show. He also played a part in the Spanish filming of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Later, he teamed up with singer and producer Juan Pardo.

Camilo Sesto took a rest in 1987 to take care of his newborn son. Camilo has or had homes in Torrelodones, near Madrid and Coconut Grove (Miami area), Florida.

In 1970, Sesto moved to Los Angeles and started to learn English. He’s an independent artist and manage other artists. After successfully starring in the Spanish version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar in 1975, Sesto began to gain fame as a singer and composer. Year after year, he reached the top

being his most successful hit be and an other as Donde estés, con quien estés, Amor de mujer qu (1984) and the classic Amor mio ¿que me has hecho? (My love, what have you done to me?) (1991), number one in the Billboard magazine, plus several hits around the whole world.

During the 70s,80s Sesto created many hit songs and a great fortune, and almost every song came from his sole inspiration, being the author, interpreter, composer, and producer of all of his works. They catapulted him as a consummate multi-talented artist. With an extraordinary reputationDoes not adhere to Wikipedia NPOV policy between the years 1980 and 1991 he composed the song and sang the theme for Colorina with Lucía Méndez. Being Colorina one of the most successful telenovelas in the 80s, he also produces for it a pop ballad hit album named Cerca de ti.

It was a smash hit.

His reputation penetrates the borders and reaches the apex of the success in countries as The United States, Japan, Germany, Latin América, Italy, Portugal and everywhere in Europe where the quality of his shows are classified by the critics as majesticCitation needed, from this moment the world already acclaims it like “Camilo Sesto Superstar”(source needed).

During the last decades Sesto recorded some beautiful ballads.

Camilo sings mostly in castilian, spanish, but has also recorded songs in catalan - valencian, english, italian and portuguese as well. He has also recorded some albums in English.

After recovering from a liver transplant, in 2003 he managed to make a successful comeback with his album Alma, surprising the audience with the song “Mola mazo” (“It rules”) in an exercise of self-assertion. The Alma CD includes some songs in English: Selections from The Phantom of the Opera and a duet with Andrea Bronston. Camilo Sesto returned to the scenario back in 2004 in to the Viña del Mar International Song Festival in Chile.

His old fans and new ones cheered the great Spaniard as he sang songs from his catalog. By the end of the festival Sesto left Viña del Mar 2004 with many awards.

His last musical work was the singing of Bujalance football team hymn (a Spanish football team). To this day, Camilo Sesto has sold more than 175 million albums worldwide.

On September 2009 he announced that he will play his retirement shows where he will say goodbye to his fans.

He toured America, (U.S., Mexico, Perú, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and other). In October 2010, he gave his last two concerts in Madrid, which were recorded to be released as his first (and last) live album.

Next May 26 Puerto Rico will see for the last time at Camilo Sesto in San Juan at the Coliseo of Puerto Rico, Camilo Sesto in his Grand Farewell Tour. For tickets: 787.294.0001 TickepPop

SCIENCE / TECH 20

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science

By JOHN MARKOFF

I

nside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.

The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and plunges into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.

There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation showing at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, relies on computer animation techniques, on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.

The planetarium show is a spectacular demonstration of computer power transforming the sciences, giving tools as important to research as the microscope and telescope.

Their use accompanies a change in the material scientists study. Individual specimens, whether fossils, living organisms or cells, were once the substrate of discovery. Now, to an ever greater extent, researchers work with immense collections of digital data, and mastery of mountains of information depends on computing power.

The technology of scientific research is still here — electron microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders — but are now inseparable from computing power, and computers let scientists find order and patterns in the raw information physical tools gather.

Computer power not only aids research, it defines the nature of that research: what can be studied, what new questions can be asked, and answered.

Morrison Planetarium system is powered by three separate parallel computing systems which store so much data the system is both telescope and microscope. From incomprehensibly small to unimaginably large, the computerized planetarium moves seamlessly over 12 orders of magnitude in objects. It can shift “from subatomic to the large-scale structure of the universe”.

A new class of computer-based scientific instruments to which the new planetarium’s virtual and physical machine belongs. Composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences have such powerful and flexible software programs they become a complete scientific workbench that can be reconfigured by mixing and matching aspects of the software to tackle specific research problems.

The planetarium’s macroscope designed for education, could be for research. Its essence is its capacity for huge databases.

“Macroscopes provide a ‘vision of the who-

le,’ “helping us ‘synthesize’ related elements and detect patterns, trends and outliers while granting access to myriad details.’ ” Software-based scientific instruments are making it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that have been, “too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.”

Computing is reshaping scientific research, independent scientists have given way to research teams as cited by scientific papers in the field of high-energy physics that routinely have hundreds or even thousands of authors. It is unsurprising since the Web was invented as a collaboration tool for the high-energy physics community at CERN, the European nuclear research laboratory.

Research teams in all scientific disciplines are increasingly both interdisciplinary and widely distributed geographically.

Web 2.0 software made it easier to share research findings, has led to an explosion of collaborative efforts. It accelerated the range of cross-disciplinary projects as it has become easier to repurpose and combine software-based techniques ranging from analytical tools to utilities for exporting and importing data.

More than a decade ago Dr. Smarr began building a distributed supercomputing capability he called the OptIPuter, because it used the fiber-optic links among the nation’s supercomputer centers to make it possible to divide computing problems as well as digital data so that larger scientific computing loads

could be shared.

The advent of high-performance computing systems, created a bottleneck for scientists. “Over the past decade computers have become a thousand times faster and the ability to store information has gone up roughly 10,000 times, while the number of pixels is only a factor of two different”.

To make it possible for visualization to catch up with accelerating computing capacity, researchers have begun designing display systems called OptIPortals that offer better ways of representing scientific data.

Recently, researchers have begun building scaled-down versions called OptIPortables, which are smaller display systems that can be fashioned like Lego blocks from just a handful of displays, rather than dozens or hundreds. The OptIPortable displays can be set up and moved, and Dr. DeFanti said his lab was at capacity assembling systems for research groups around the world.

Within scientific fields software-based instruments adding functions as open-source systems make it possible for small groups or individuals to add features that permit customization.

Cytoscape is a bioinformatics software tool set that evolved, beginning in 2001, from research in the laboratory.

As complex as gene sequencing is, charting the multiplicity of interactions possible among roughly 30,000 genes that make up the human chromosome is more complex.

It has led to the emergence of the field of

network biology as biologists begin to build computer-aided models of cellular and disease processes.

The project picked up collaborators as other researchers decided to contribute to it rather than develop independent tools. The project picked up even more speed because the software was designed so that new modules could be contributed by independent researchers who wanted to tailor it for specific tasks.

Tools like Cytoscape have a symbiotic relationship with immense databases that have grown to support the activities of scientists who are studying newer fields like genomics and proteomics. Gene sequencing led to the creation of Genbank, which is now maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. With a growing array of digital data streams, other databases are being curated the European Bioinformatics Institute, has begun to build an array of new databases for functions like protein interactions. Cytoscape helps transform the disparate databases into a federated whole with the aid of plug-ins that allow a scientist to pick and chose from different sources.

For Dr. Börner, the Cytoscape model is a powerful one that builds on the sharing mechanism that is the foundation of the Internet.

The idea, she said, is inspired by witnessing the power and impact of the sharing inherent in Web services like Flickr and YouTube.

Moreover, it has the potential of being rapidly replicated across many scientific disciplines.

Census Data Reveals a Shift in Patterns of Childbearing

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

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ollege-educated women are waiting longer to have children than those without a college education, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

In 2000, the portion of women with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 34 who had children was 42 percent, according to the data. Ten years later, the same group of women, now ages 35 to 44 — representing about three million Americans — were far more likely to be mothers: About 76 percent had children, according to the data.

In contrast, women who did not finish high school were more likely to have children earlier. In 2000, about 83 percent of women ages 25 to 34 who did not have a high school diploma had children. The percentage rose to 88 percent by 2010.

The trend of educated women having children later accelerated in the 1980s, along with the rise in women’s educational attainment, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

“College-educated women are following a different path to having children,” Mr. Cherlin said. “They wait until they’ve graduated from college, gotten married and started a career, before having a child.”

Childbearing and fertility patterns have changed greatly since the 1970s.

There are far more women in their 40s without children now than there were in past decades. In 1976, just 10 percent of all women ages 40 to 44 had no children. That percentage had jumped to 19 percent by 2010.

White women in their 40s were more likely to be childless than Hispanics. Just 12 percent of Hispanic women from 40 to 44 were childless, compared with 20 percent of whites, 17 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Asians.

In 1976, the earliest year in Monday’s data release, more women had three children than had two, but that has shifted over the years, with far more women having two children than three.

And it is more likely for a woman who has never married to have a child now than it was in the 1970s. Just 3 percent of women who had never been married had a child in 1976. Now the number is about 21 percent, up sharply even from 2008, when it was 15 percent.

About 55 percent of women who had a child in the last year were in the job market, according to the data: about 34 percent were working full time, 14 percent were working part time, and 7 percent were unemployed.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

21 HEALTH & SCIENCE

Hip Makers Told to Study More Data

By BARRY MEIER

I

n an unusual move, the Food and Drug Administration has ordered all producers of a popular category of artificial hip to undertake studies of the implants, which have been linked to high early failure rates and severe health effects in some patients.

Under the order, producers of “metalon-metal” hips will have to conduct studies of patients who received the device to determine, among other things, whether the implants are shedding high levels of metallic debris. Some patients have encountered that problem, including soft tissue damage that has disabled them.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Dr. William H. Maisel, the deputy director for science at the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said the order marks the broadest use of the agency’s authority to conduct studies of devices after approval for sale. He also said that the F.D.A. wanted information about the

entire category of implants, not any single manufacturer’s device.

“Our concern is the product, not about a manufacturer,” said Dr. Maisel.

The F.D.A. told about 20 manufacturers in a letter issued Friday that it was invoking a rule requiring postmarket studies in cases where an implant’s failure could have serious consequences.

The agency’s action could also prompt increased scrutiny of regulatory policies that allow implants like metal-on-metal hips to be approved for sale with little, if any, clinical testing in patients. In addition, the F.D.A.’s oversight of hip implants has lagged that in other countries where registries follow the failure rate of orthopedic implants in patients.

Metal-on-metal hips, in which the ball-and-socket components are made from metals like cobalt and chromium, accounted until relatively recently for about onethird of the estimated 250,000 hip replacement procedures preformed annually in the United States.

But over the last two years, the use of the implants has fallen off in part amid reports that they were prone to early failure and that some patients had developed serious health problems related to particles of metallic debris that are shed by the devices as they wear.

In March, for example, the British Orthopaedic Association, a professional medical group, reported that one model of all-metal hip made by a unit of Johnson & Johnson was projected to fail in one-half of the patients who received it within six years after implant. The company no longer sells the device, which was known as the ASR. The British medical group also estimated, based on hospital data, that the early failure rate for all-metal hips made by other manufacturers was higher than expected, ranging from 12 to 15 percent within five years after implant. Artificial hips are designed to last for 15 years or more.

The British group said that the problems in the troubled devices were related to how certain components were joined.

Dr. Maisel, the F.D.A. official, said that the agency believed that all-metal hips provided benefits to patients. However, he added that there were significant enough medical concerns to warrant a broad review.

Dr. Maisel said that it was up to each manufacturer to determine how to conduct its studies. Under the agency rule, producers have 30 days to file a proposed plan with the F.D.A. He also said companies would be expected to collect information from patients who received the devices, including taking blood samples to determine the levels of metallic ion in their systems.

The companies are also being asked to determined how frequently the devices are failing.

“This is the largest group of studies that we have asked for,” for an approved class of devices, said Dr. Maisel.

Along with the DePuy division of Johnson & Johnson, other major producers of hip implants include Zimmer, Stryker, Biomet and Wright Medical.

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May 19 - 22, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End

By JUSTIN GILLIS and CELIA W. DUGGER

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he population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above nine billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday morning.

Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.

The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century, the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.

“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, an advocacy group in New York. “Is it the end of the world?

No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”

The projections were made by the United Nations population division, which has a track record of fairly accurate forecasts going back to the 1950s. In the new report, the division also raised its forecast for the year 2050, estimating that the world would likely have 9.3 billion people then, an increase of 156 million over the previous estimate for that year, published in 2008.

Among the factors behind the upward revisions is that fertility is not declining as rapidly as expected in some of the world’s poorest countries, and has shown a slight uptick in some wealthier countries.

The director of the United Nations population division, Hania Zlotnik, said the world’s fastest-growing countries, and the wealthy Western nations that help to finance their development, face a choice about whether to renew their emphasis on programs that encourage family planning. Though they were a major focus of development policy in the 1970s and 1980s, such programs have stagnated in many parts of the world, partly because they got caught up in ideological battles over abortion, sex education and the role of women in society.

Over the past decade, foreign aid to pay for contraceptive commodities — $238 million in 2009 — has barely budged, according to United Nations estimates.

The United States has long been the biggest donor for such programs, but the budget compromise in Congress last month reduced support for such efforts.

“The need has grown, but the availability of family planning services has not,” said Rachel Nugent, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, a research group that monitors such issues.

Dr. Zlotnik said in an interview that the new numbers were based on an extensive revision of the methodology her division uses in its forecasts, incorporating new computer techniques and the latest demographic trends.

She said that while her division was confident in the new approach, she cautioned that any forecast looking 90 years into the future comes with a slew of caveats.

That is particularly so for some fast-growing coun-

tries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East whose populations are projected to skyrocket over the next century.

For instance, Yemen, a country whose population has quintupled since 1950 to 25 million, would see its numbers quadruple again, to 100 million, by century’s end, if the reports projections proved accurate. Yemen is heavily dependent on food imports and facing a critical shortage of water, and many experts do not believe its fast population growth can be sustained.

In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, the report projects that population will rise from today’s 162 million to a whopping 730 million by 2100. Malawi, a small country of 15 million people today, could grow to 129 million, the report projected.

The implicit, and possibly questionable, assumption behind these numbers is that food and water will be available for the tens of millions yet unborn, and that potential catastrophes ranging from climate change to wars to epidemics will not serve as a brake on population growth. Yet attempts to raise agricultural output in African countries have been highly uneven, ground water is being pumped at unsustainable rates in some countries of Asia, and this century, rising sea levels from global warming are expected to displace millions.

The projections “represent what would happen if today’s recipe continues to apply,” Dr. Zlotnik said. “But it is quite possible for several of these countries that are smallish and have fewer resources, these numbers are just not sustainable.”

Despite the lack of focus on population policy, ample proof has become available that well-designed programs can bring down growth rates even in the poorest countries, and can do so without the kind of restrictive policies put into place in China. Providing women with information and voluntary access to birth-control methods has contributed to their having fewer children in societies as diverse as Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Mexico and Thailand.

One message from the new report is that the AIDS epidemic, devastating as it has been in many parts of the world, has not been the demographic disaster that was once predicted. Prevalence estimates and projections for the human immunodeficiency virus made for Africa in the 1990s turned out to be too high, and in many populations, treatment with new drug regimens has cut the death rate from the disease.

But the survival of millions of people with AIDS who would have died without treatment, and falling rates of infant and child mortality on the continent — both heartening trends — also mean that fertility rates for women need to fall faster to curb population growth, demographers said.

Numerous other factors have slowed change in Africa, experts said. They include women’s lack of power in their relationships with men, traditions such as early marriage and polygamy, and a dearth of political leadership. “In many African countries, the leaders there are not convinced that they have an issue with population,” Dr. Zlotnik said.

While about three-quarters of married American women use a modern contraceptive during their childbearing years, the comparable proportions were only at a quarter of women in East Africa, one in 10 in West Africa, and a mere 7 percent in Central Africa, according to United Nations statistics.

“West and central Africa are the two big regions of the world where the fertility transition is happening, but at a snail’s pace,” said John F. May, a World Bank demographer.

And some studies suggest that providing easy, affordable access to contraceptives is not always sufficient to bring about a significant reduction in unwanted births. A randomized trial conducted by Harvard researchers in Lusaka, Zambia found that only when women had greater autonomy to decide whether to use contraceptives did they have significantly fewer children.

Other studies have found that general education for girls plays a critical role in that literate young women are simply more likely to understand that family size is a choice.

The report also highlighted a converse problem that is beginning to plague some developed countries: populations that are stagnant or even falling. Fertility has fallen below replacement level in many of the world’s rich countries and unless they open their borders to extensive immigration, some face a future with too few young workers to pay the carrying costs for retirees.

The new report suggests that China, once plagued by runaway population growth, could soon enter the ranks of countries with declining populations. The report projects that the Chinese population will peak at 1.4 billion in the next couple of decades, then begin falling, declining to 941 million by 2100. India would become the world’s largest country by mid-century, with a 2050 population projected at 1.7 billion, up from today’s 1.2 billion.

Whether the Chinese population actually peaks that early will likely depend, in part, on whether that country lifts its one-child-per-family policy. Many demographers expect the government to lift the policy entirely in the next few years.

The United States is growing faster than many of the world’s other rich countries, largely because of high immigration and a higher fertility rate among Hispanic immigrants. The new report projects that the United States population will continue to grow throughout this century, rising from today’s 313 million to reach 403 million by 2050 and 478 million by 2100.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

23

India Puts Pakistani Army Officers on ‘Most Wanted’ List I ndia has named five Pakistani army officers in a list of 50 criminals it wants extradited to stand trial on terror charges, the first time India has directly accused serving Pakistani military

officers of being involved with militancy.

The “most-wanted” list was handed to Pakistan in March, but its contents have only just been released. The timing

Continuing Questions About Chernobyl

I

t has been 25 years since the worst nuclear power accident in history at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, and we still aren’t certain what health damage it may ultimately cause. That gap needs to be filled by a vigorous research program — both to improve readiness to cope with another bad nuclear accident and to enhance understanding of the long-term effects of low doses of radiation.

Although Chernobyl is rightly synonymous with disaster, international health authorities have found the damage from fallout downwind to be far less than originally feared. The latest evaluation — a United Nations committee in 2008 — concludes that emergency workers who struggled to bring the plant under control suffered great harm but the wider public was barely affected.

In the three countries hit with the most fallout — Belarus, Ukraine and parts of the Russian Federation — the committee found that the only significant harm was several thousand cases

of highly curable thyroid cancer among people who were exposed as children, mostly by drinking contaminated milk.

Only a handful have died.

Critics have long contended that such estimates downplayed the dangers. Now a panel of experts assembled at the request of the European Commission is also calling for a wider look. It cited scattered reports, many appearing in leading scientific journals, suggesting that Chernobyl’s radiation might be increasing the risk of breast cancer, various other cancers, and immunological abnormalities, among other effects.

The panel suggested that a research foundation be established to conduct long-term studies much as a foundation in Japan has been studying the longterm effects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a very good idea.

The continuing uncertainties should be a warning to Japanese authorities to begin studies of the health effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident while the evidence trail is still fresh.

of the release coincides with increasing pressure on Pakistan over claims it harboured Osama bin Laden.

Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai presented the list to his Pakistani counterpart, Qamar Zaman Choudhary, during a meeting in March, a senior government official with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

New Delhi has long accused Pakistan of harbouring militants such as the those behind the Mumbai attacks in 2008 that killed 166 people, who it says were supported by the country’s military intelligence agency, the ISI. In addition to five serving majors in the Pakistan army, the list includes accused underworld leader Dawood Ibrahim, and suspected members of militant groups al Qaeda, Lakshar-e-Toiba and Jasih-e-Mohammed.

U.S. special forces killed bin Laden at his home in a military town 50 km (30

miles) from Islamabad this month, leading to accusations that security agencies were either incompetent or sheltering the word’s most wanted man.

Nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan have gone to war three times since 1947. The two sides have been making tentative moves to revive a sluggish 2004 peace process that was broken off by New Delhi following the Mumbai attacks.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will visit Afghanistan “in the near future” to discuss security and development, a senior government official said on Wednesday, amid regional uncertainty following bin Laden’s death.

Any quickening of the endgame in Afghanistan is a concern for India, which fears a U.S. withdrawal would leave it exposed to an unfriendly, Pakistan-dominated neighbourhood and unfettered militancy in its backyard.

24 May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Exceptional Works at Ponce Museum of Art A lso known as the ‘Museo de Arte de Ponce’, the Ponce Museum of Art is an extraordinary art museum. Located at 2325 Las Américas Avenue, the museum covers various artistic fields over a period of five centuries. Most of the art is western and there are currently well over 850 paintings, 800 sculptures and 500 prints on display in the museum – altogether there are more than 3000 pieces in the museum. The museum is well noted as being one of the largest and most renowned museums, not only in Puerto Rico, but in the entire Caribbean. Even the building in which

it is housed is a visual treat. It was designed by Edward Durrel Stone and has roughly fourteen galleries in which the art is displayed.

The Ponce Art Museum was inaugurated in 1965 after being founded by Luis A. Ferré. Ferré actually started his museum project in 1956 when he traveled to Europe. There he bought a number of masterpieces that inspired him to make further purchases – notably a collection of 71 paintings which he purchased at an auction in New York. Just three years later he decided to open a small art museum in Ponce. The small house in Cristina Street was a

perfect choice for his still relatively small collection and the museum was well-received by the public.

However Ferré had a vision and he saw fit to pursue it until it became a reality. A few years later he purchased a section of land in Las Americas Avenue where he would eventually build his dream gallery. He hired Edward Durrel Stone to design the beautiful museum. Stone’s design features hexagonally shaped galleries that allow natural light to illuminate the art inside. While the concept was given shape by Stone, it was Ferré who came up with the idea. When the building was completed it had 14 galleries, two gardens and even an amphitheater. Currently the museum is undergoing a renovation and expansion project that should ultimately increase the size of the building.

You will find that the Ponce Museum of Art features Italian Baroque, Spanish Golden Age, British Pre-Raphaelite and contemporary Latin-American artworks. Most of the artwork was created between the

14th and 20th centuries and the museum frequently holds exhibitions of art done by the world’s greatest artists. Many of Ferré’s initial pieces have been replaced by more notable artworks, although some of his original purchases can still be found in the museum. The ‘Flaming June’

by Frederic Leighton’ is seen as the crowning glory of the museum and it was also Ferré’s favorite. There is an admission fee to pay if you wish to visit the museum but this small and definitely worthwhile.

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

25

A Twist on the B&B in Wales

By ANNA McDONALD

T

HERE are a few constants on the Peny-Wyrlod farm in southeast Wales: the sheep, the rain, the mud, the Black Mountains. And at the top of a small hill, beyond an unmarked gate, across from a medieval church, a Gypsy caravan barely large enough to hold a bed, a wood-burning stove and a paying guest — me.

A caravan on a soggy sheep farm is not as unlikely a place to spend a vacation as it might seem. But it is among hundreds of such alternative accommodations in Wales — shepherd’s huts, old circus wagons, converted wool mills and train cars — that have long been popular as destinations for field trips for English students because they provide a clear departure from home.

Looking for the same, I set out from New York City at the tail end of winter to visit two nontraditional lodging spots, the caravan and a 16th-century chapel.

The first was the caravan, on a farm in Monmouthshire county, a hilly, Arcadian, green and wet place. I found it through a company called Under the Thatch (underthethatch.co.uk), which is owned by a low-impact-travel-minded architectural historian.

Though seemingly off the grid, it was simple to get to — I took a train from Paddington Station in London and then a taxi, arriving in the afternoon. I familiarized myself with my lodgings for the evening: a little wagon that resembled a Victorian dollhouse with wheels. Once I climbed the tiny ladder that led to the door, I entered to find a little bed with heavy wool blankets and a miniature wood stove.

In the solar-powered shed next door, there was room for my baggage. The proprietors, Nick Miller and Sarah Dickins, had also left me a spare, elegant welcome: four eggs, one loaf of homemade bread and one carton of milk. This system — selfcatering — meant that I could bring my own food, cook the eggs laid that morning by the hen outside or walk a mile to the Walnut Tree, one of four Michelin-starred restaurants in Wales. (I chose the walk and was rewarded at the end of it with a prix fixe lunch — £18, or about $29 at $1.64 to the pound — that included ale and salmon,

perfectly poached in duck fat.)

Nick and Sarah decided to restore and rent the caravan last June, out of a desire to make use of the fallow field. At the moment, the caravan is booked nearly every day until mid-July. The rates are not bargain-basement: the cost varies with the season but my stay was £83. The couple live on the property in a farmhouse that was built in parts over three centuries, starting in the 15th. They seem as comfortable with country life as with city pursuits. Sarah is a host and independent producer for the BBC (working on a documentary about a Welsh punk club), and Nick is an environmental consultant who also restores 18thcentury English furniture; a wind turbine at the top of the hill powers his office.

As pastoral as Pen-y-Wyrlod is, it is a working farm. Every April, the couple help deliver and nurse new lambs, which eventually go to the abattoir, and are then delivered to a couple of restaurants, including the Walnut Tree. They have never tasted this product of their farm: they were vegetarians before becoming farmers.

Guests experience little of farm life beyond a view of livestock on the undulating landscape. The main attraction, the seemingly never-ending countryside, is best explored through walking. Nick and Sarah mapped out a hike for me that would lead me across a few fields and a few sunken lanes, and end at an abandoned farmhouse.

It was a vigorous, hilly hike for this tenderfoot traveler: I skirted the turbine and a row of brambles, got lost, hopped over a few fences, was called after by hundreds of sheep, was overcome by an almost supernatural sense of peace, then got hungry, and ran into an American walking her dog in a deep, remote valley, who led me to a rescue road I likely would never have found. I didn’t make it to the farmhouse,

but on the way home I stopped to talk to a brick mason about the American country song playing on his portable radio (“The Night Hank Williams Came to Town”).

With the end of my hike came the end of my stay. Sarah washed off my boots and gave me a lift to the station in the nearby town of Abergavenny, where I caught a train due north to my next destination, a converted 16th-century chapel on an estate called Pennant, also rented through Under the Thatch. The striking upland farm property includes the chapel, a manor house, a barn, a baking house, and a horse stable, all overlooking the Ceiriog (pronounced carry-ogg) Valley. Not to mention the view of rocky glens, wooded slopes and bare mountain summits.

The chapel was much less rustic than the caravan. There’s a kind of perfection to the place — the walls are perfectly limeplastered; the art (Renaissance inspired) right in context; the insulation ship-shape; the bell up at the top right where it should be; the on and off light switches the really simple brass kind. I would have the run of the 900-square-foot space for my twonight stay. This place was self-catered, too, and my welcome package included wine and local cheese.

Pennant is owned by Nick Davies, who is the chief historic buildings inspector for Cadw (cad-oo), the government guardian of Welsh heritage. After buying the estate from a family called the Myddletons, who had owned much of the land in the area since 1565, he painstakingly restored it over 14 years. The restoration involved doing away with the estate’s concrete add-ons, plastic windows, dirty carpet and sad peachy walls. And adding features like mullioned windows, a three-story porch and cornices made to match the one surviving original. The barn and baking house,

also converted rentals, have been featured in British design magazines.

The thing to see here, too, is the unpeopled countryside. My friend Will joined me for this leg of the journey, and hadn’t brought the right shoes for long walks.

But he borrowed Wellingtons from Nick’s companion, Derek. Our walk was less ambitious than mine back in Monmouthshire — it was more as if we roamed. We roughed around the hills amid the sheep, trying to find the highest place, fog descending upon us. We wandered aimlessly, stopping to ponder a dead fox by the side of the road.

Later, Nick gave us a lift to a pub called the Hand, 15 minutes away by car, where we spent the afternoon observing stouthearted Welsh regulars pass the time with the Sunday paper as they drank ale by the fire.

Over the course of the weekend, we managed to do a lot of small things: we spent time talking with Nick and Derek, who gave us a tour of the big house that included a discussion of its plank floors, antique paint pigments and four-poster beds. We spent hours figuring out how to light the wood stove, ate a lot of chicken liver pâté (a gift from Nick and Sarah), and spent one night chewing Norwegian snuff and reading Mexican poetry. We made a basil frittata in the morning, along with a few pots of overbrewed Welsh breakfast tea, and, when it rained, we nested on plush upholstery and read Welsh folklore and travel books.

It may have been an aimless weekend, but it had proven to me that all those field trips had followed the right path.

Wales is a great place to get muddy and lost when nobody is watching. A lot like you did, or imagine you had, when you were a child.

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The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

For Microsoft, Skype Opens Vast New Market in Telecom

By STEVE LOHR

M

icrosoft has peered into the future, and placed a bet that people the world over want to stay in touch with someone anytime and anywhere — preferably at no cost.

In agreeing Tuesday to pay $8.5 billion to buy Skype, the pioneer in Internet phone calls, Microsoft is embracing a technology that is transforming the way people communicate at home and at work. And by stitching Skype technology into Microsoft products, used by hundreds of millions of people, the software giant could hasten the mainstream adoption of video communications, especially in businesses.

Microsoft, although rich and powerful, lags in new fields like smartphone software.

Skype could help it better compete with the new giants of technology, like Google and Apple.

“Skype has been a forerunner, and this deal is Microsoft trying to become relevant in this new age of Internet communications,” said Berge Ayvazian, a telecommunications consultant. “It could really change things for Microsoft and accelerate the spread of this new technology.”

The future of communications, industry analysts and executives say, will be animated

by Internet technology and rests increasingly on video calls, as well as voice and text messages. Skype started on personal computers less than a decade ago, but is now beginning to make its way onto smartphones. As it heads for living rooms with applications like at-home videoconferencing on digital televisions, it could change the way people make even the most routine calls.

This next generation of communications is both a threat and an opportunity to telecommunications and technology companies — a focus of energy, investment and anxiety for

corporations including AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Google and Facebook.

Microsoft is betting that Skype can help change its fortunes. Skype is a leader in Internet voice and video communications, with 170 million users each month connected for more than 100 minutes on average. In the last year or two, video use has surged, now accounting for 40 percent of Skype’s traffic.

That large and active community of users represents a major asset, said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “It’s an amazing customer footprint,” Mr. Ballmer said in an interview. “And Skype is a verb, as they say.”

Mr. Ballmer never mentioned Google, Microsoft’s archrival whose name is used as a verb for Internet search. In that market, Microsoft is spending heavily to try to catch Google, and making some progress with its Bing engine, but at great financial cost.

Google, like Skype, has a free Internet phone call and video messaging service. So Microsoft, analysts say, is taking a bold step to grab a leadership position instead of risking falling behind Google in a crucial market and then facing the difficult task of trying to catch up.

“Skype gives Microsoft instant size and scale in this emerging market,” said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The merger with Skype, if successful, could give Microsoft a leading consumer Internet service — something it has lacked — and help lift its other businesses, like smartphone software, Office productivity programs and Xbox video game consoles, analysts say.

In doing so, Microsoft aims to keep people seamlessly connected at work or at home. “We want to enable communications across people’s lives,” Mr. Ballmer said in a press conference in San Francisco.

Job Openings Rise to Highest Level Since Sept. ‘08 C

ompanies in March advertised the most jobs since the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, a sign that hiring is likely to remain healthy in the months ahead.

The Labor Department says job openings rose by 99,000 to 3.1 million in March. That’s the highest level of openings since September 2008 and the second straight monthly increase.

The number of available jobs plummeted to 2.1 million in July 2009, one month after the recession ended. But March’s total is still significantly below the 4.4 million openings recorded in December 2007, when the recession began.

Even with the increase, there were 4.3 unemployed people, on average, competing for each available job in March. That’s still higher than the ratio of 2 to 1 that economists consider healthy.

By buying Skype, Microsoft would immediately become a leader in online voice and video calls.

Skype, founded in 2003, is a creation of the new technology that is transforming telecommunications. “For some time, it has been clear that telecommunications is going to move to all-digital Internet technology,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a former official at the Federal Communications Commission. “Skype shows what can be done.”

Skype was founded by two entrepreneurs, one Swedish and one Danish, with software developed by a small team of programmers in Estonia. They deployed a version of peer-topeer software, initially associated with illegal file-sharing of pirated music and movies. The voice and video travel over the Internet rather than dedicated phone landlines or cell tower networks.

Skype has had a bumpy ride as a business. EBay bought it for $2.6 billion in 2005, and then sold most of it to a private investors’ group in 2009, after eBay could not figure out how to make money on Skype.

Despite changes in ownership and management, Skype was a hit with users, offering mostly free calling between Skype users, while charging for some services to corporate users and for calls to traditional phone numbers. It also now sells advertisements.

Skype, based in Luxembourg, has recently made steady progress as a business. Its revenue rose 20 percent last year, to $860 million, and operating profit climbed to $264 million, though it had a net loss of $7 million after making its debt payments.

Skype also has built a formidable technical prowess. Most of its software programmers are in Tallinn, Estonia. “The secret sauce of Skype is its engineering team,” said Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape, which made

the first commercial Internet browser, and one of the private investors in Skype. “These are world-class guys, every bit as good as anyone in Silicon Valley.”

Mr. Ballmer emphasized that Microsoft planned to expand Skype’s offerings and increase investment, and not cut back free offerings. Skype technology, he added, will help enhance Microsoft products. Mr. Ballmer said the Xbox Kinect, a game device with gesturerecognition features, could add Skype to become an at-home videoconferencing system.

And Skype can also be linked to Microsoft’s business software including Office productivity programs and Lync, multimedia software for workers collaborating on projects.

Microsoft, whose growth has been lagging, could find a lucrative revenue stream in selling the service to companies. It might also benefit from placing advertisements on Skype.

“There are a lot of great opportunities to optimize Skype services in Microsoft products,” Mr. Ballmer said.

Skype, analysts say, is evidence of the recent pattern of innovations coming first to the freewheeling consumer market — like instant messaging, social networks and video chat — and then cascading to businesses. “This deal is another sign of the consumerization of information technology,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research.

The Microsoft-Skype deal, analysts suggest, also points to a rising wave of digital disruption in the telecommunications industry, as low-cost Internet-based communications put pressure on traditional carriers, especially their landline phone service. Says Mark R. Anderson, chief executive of the Strategic News Service, a technology newsletter, “The computer guys are going to teach the telecom carriers about the future of communications.”

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

27

China Cracks Door for U.S. Asset Managers C

hina’s decision to open the country to U.S. mutual fund sales could be an important new avenue for growth for a mature industry.

American companies lobbied heavily for the change in the hope China’s rising middle class would want to invest with established asset managers, said Geoff Bobroff, an industry consultant in Rhode Island.

In coming years China “is clearly where the growth is going to be,” he said in an interview.

The U.S. asset management business is fiercely competitive. Growing in developed markets outside the United States is also difficult for U.S. fund managers, because so many of those markets have their own asset managers with local brands.

But China and other developing markets have fewer domestic financial competitors.

Access to Chinese customers for

U.S. mutual fund products was one of a number of steps China has agreed to take to open its markets, U.S. Treasury officials said on Tuesday.

U.S. asset managers such as closely-held Fidelity Investments of Boston, T Rowe Price Group Inc of Baltimore and Franklin Resources Inc of San Mateo, California, have made a point of expanding overseas, often with local partners.

Another firm, Affiliated Managers Group Inc of Boston, began a new effort in January to work with institutional investors in China.

At the end of 2009, China accounted for just $381 billion of the $22.9 trillion held in mutual funds and similar vehicles, according to data from U.S. trade group the Investment Company Institute.

To date, a large share of the foreign assets flowing into U.S. fund companies have come through vehicles called “Un-

dertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities,” or UCITS. Many are copies of traditional U.S. mutual funds, but their structures make it easier to hold nontraditional securities sought by foreign investors such as alternative assets and hedge funds. These holdings can be more profitable, but also more risky than standard funds are allowed.

CHINA’S INVESTMENT CLASS So far, China has largely limited U.S. fund firms to operating as joint ventures with local partners, aiming to build up its own asset management industry in the same way it stoked other sectors.

It also has limited the ability of Chinese retail investors to put money overseas, partly to stimulate growth of its own economy. China will still face some who are skeptical that real reform is co-

ming.

“The Chinese will formally allow some mutual funds sales -- it’s just that they will rig the system so that it favors Chinese banks, which is the same thing they’ve always done in financial services,” said Derek Scissors, an economist for the politically conservative Heritage Foundation.

But others expect real changes to satisfy domestic demand. The Chinese public’s appetite to own foreign stocks is growing, said Daniel Enskat, senior managing director for New York consulting firm Strategic Insight.

For instance, he said when a few Chinese banks were allowed to sell special domestic products using external fund managers such as T Rowe Price, they took in $175 billion in 2007 alone -including $4 billion in the first morning they were available.

“People stood in line around the corner to get in,” he said.

Games

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May 19 - 25, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

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 29

29

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Wear your heart on your sleeve and show vulnerability. It is also important to listen to your intuition. When you just know something; do not doubt it! Your dreams and visions will give you important guidance and clues, so try not to dismiss spooky messages as mere coincidence. Forget that list of pros and cons.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Nip disagreements in the bud and do not let things go too far, before you kiss and make up.

You must get the balance right and take certain things more seriously. If you are disciplined and use spare time to get ahead with study and work commitments, you will have more leeway, when play time comes. Follow your intuition.

Embrace change and do not be afraid of the things you cannot control. Go with the flow and let your sense of adventure shine brightly.

Things will work out just perfectly, so do not fret or run around trying to please everyone.

Ditch guilt and stress about what you think you should be doing and take things one step at a time.

Scorpio

Gemini

Sagittarius

(May 22-June 21)

Keep your spirits up and use your imagination.

You are bound to be full of bright ideas. Appreciate your worth and stand up for what you believe in, however weird and wonderful it may be. Do not let anyone play you for a fool. This does not mean that you have to get nasty, but be on the lookout for dubious agendas!

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Do not worry unduly as there is a high possiTry to be constructive when you are restless or frustrated. Keep things sweet.

Get the balance right and do not let anyone walk all over you. Never mind the boredom, get on with what needs to be done and you will be more than pleased at how it all turns out. You must not take anything for granted.

Stick with all the good ideas you had last year.

You will be able to take things further without much effort.

Capricorn

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Get used to new circumstances. What happens is bound to be interesting and this time next year, your world will look completely different. Listen to even your wildest ideas and do not dismiss your dreams and visions. Okay, not everything you wish for will come about, but it is important to hold onto hope. Enjoy your thoughts.

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Be upbeat and enthusiastic, in order to attract interesting people. Follow through and be proactive. Do remember, there is more to life than a whole load of work. Get your priorities right, which includes remembering to have some fun now and again. People will not be able to see what is coming next, which is great.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Prepare to find new inspiration in unexpected places. Do not fret or panic about what you cannot control, as there will still be plenty you can influence. Be careful not to get carried away with flights of fancy. Objectify things and all will be well. Embrace the twists and turns of fate with an open mind. Roll with the changes.

Do not be afraid to say ‘no’ if it suits. Make it your resolution to have more faith and trust.

Avoid getting unnecessarily wound up and stressed. The things you worry about will naturally sort themselves out anyhow. Quality time is crucial to happy relationships, so make a great effort to get to know those you love even better.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Change makes you feel uncomfortable and you hate disruptions to your routine. You may also find that some situations fall by the wayside. Stuff happens! Indeed, things may never be the same again. Avoid the hot spots in your relationships.

Steer clear of subjects that always lead to an argument. There is no point dragging up the past.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

When did you last have a good old heart to heart? Ditch the time wasters amongst your acquaintances. Trust your judgement about who to trust and steer clear of malicious gossip. You will certainly have some weird and wonderful ideas! But remember to keep your feet on the ground with chores and commitments. Come up with a plan of action.

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 28

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May 19 - 25, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

The San Juan Weekly

Ziggi

The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

31

Sports

Like Magic, Great Sports Nicknames Are Disappearing

By JOHN BRANCH

T

oday’s baseball rosters are filled with names, not nicknames, not like the ones that used to be. The N.B.A. playoffs are equally devoid of onomastic pleasures, just cheap echoes of Magic and the Mailman, Tiny and Tree, Chief and Cornbread. The N.F.L. cannot match the treasured nicknames that evoke folk heroes like Night Train, Hacksaw and the Refrigerator.

A part of sports, somewhere near the soul, is slowly dying an unimaginative death. In an age of A-Rod and D-Wade, when nicknames rarely conjure imagery beyond a corporate logo, it can be easy to bemoan the loss of another slice of simpler times.

“There’s no substance there,” said the Hall of Fame basketball player Walt Frazier, also known as Clyde.

But sociologists and experts in onomastics, the study of names, said the diminishment of nicknames was not exclusive to famous athletes. Studies on the subject are few, but there is widespread agreement that the use of nicknames across American society has steadily slipped.

Less certain is why. Maybe it reflects a loss of intimacy and connectedness. Maybe it is because of the changing way we name children, or how we now deflect unflattering nicknames to shape our own identities. Maybe all the good nicknames are taken.

Whatever the case, the decline is most easily gauged in sports, where nicknames have long played a role in distinguishing and at times deifying athletes. They often arrived with a nickname given by family or school friends. (Such was the case for Lawrence Peter Berra, called Yogi by a boyhood friend for his apparent similarity to a film version of a Hindu yogi.)

Those who did not have one were frequently nicknamed by their teammates or coaches. (George Herman Ruth did not become Babe until he was signed by the Baltimore Orioles.)

Sportswriters, looking for imagery or lyrical alliteration in the age before cable television, made a habit of bestowing nicknames on athletes. Rams receiver Elroy Hirsch became Crazy Legs because of a Chicago newspaper reporter; decades later, a 15-year-old basketball player named Earvin Johnson was considered Magic by a reporter in Lansing, Mich.

Doc Rivers, the coach of the N.B.A.’s Boston Celtics, was simply Glenn as a boy in Chicago. But he was a big fan of Julius Erving, known as Dr. J, and wore an Erving shirt when he arrived to play at Marquette.

Al McGuire, the former Marquette coach, was there and nonchalantly called him Doc.

When Rivers played for the Atlanta Hawks in the mid-1980s, his teammates included Tree Rollins, Spud Webb and Dominique Wilkins, the Human Highlight Film.

Now Rivers coaches a perennial championship contender with big-name stars that is nearly devoid of memorable nicknames. Shaquille O’Neal continually nicknames himself — generally a no-no — but people still call him Shaq.

One exception is Glen Davis, the softmuscled Celtics forward. Everyone he knows — friends, coaches, his mother — has called him Big Baby since he was a big baby with a propensity for crying.

Now Davis is part of a dying legacy of great nicknames.

“That’s true,” he said. “Most people don’t even know my name. They just know Big Baby. That’s a good thing.”

There are a smattering of other presentday nicknames around the sports world, including the golfer Tiger Woods, the baseball player David (Big Papi) Ortiz and the basketball player Chris (Birdman) Andersen.

The San Francisco Giants, last year’s World Series winners, featured pitcher Tim (the Freak) Lincecum and third baseman Pablo Sandoval, known as Kung Fu Panda.

But most famous athletes are now best known by their given name. The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — ARod — has what passes for a nickname these days.

The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in

the 1950s.

Using a baseball encyclopedia listing all major league players from 1871 to 1968, Skipper found that 28.1 percent of players had nicknames not derived from their given names. (Lefty, Red and Doc were most popular.) No doubt the percentage has since dipped precipitously.

Chris Berman, and ESPN announcer, saw the void in the 1980s. He became well known for his creation and use of hundreds of colorful nicknames, based mostly on puns — Mike (Pepperoni) Piazza, Sammy (Say it Ain’t) Sosa and Bert (Be Home) Blyleven among them.

“I viewed it as reviving a lost art,” Berman said. “Why aren’t there nicknames now? Maybe everything is so literal. You can see everybody on the Internet, TV, YouTube, whatever it is. There’s very little left to the imagination.”

The Harlem Globetrotters, more than any other team, keep the nickname tradition alive. Every player on the roster has one.

“It’s more fun and easier to connect with — and emulate — Special K, Dizzy and Ant, than it is Kevin, Derick or Anthony. A nickname grants ethereal status to a player and elevates him to a platform where kids can aspire to be like them; it is a form of escapism and fantasy to want to be like Thunder or Hammer, and they are global in nature.”

In other words, the Globetrotters try to engineer a connection that generally does not exist today. Athletes are more famous and more disconnected from fans than ever, sociologists said.

“I think it represents a loss of intimacy and identification with the players,” said Ed Lawson, past president of the American Name Society. “I don’t know how you have the same level of affection when a guy makes $16 million a year.”

But nicknames rarely came from fans; they came from friends and family, teammates and reporters. None of those connections are as strong as they once were.

“With the communication age, everybody’s on the computer, the cellphones, there’s not a lot of communication,” said Frazier, who became Clyde four decades ago when his wide-brimmed hats reminded Knicks teammates of the movie “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“When we traveled, there were only three channels, and all during the day, there was nothing but soaps on,” Frazier added.

“So the guys spent a lot of time together, playing cards, talking, hanging around in the same places, traveling together on the bus or whatever it might be. There was a lot of camaraderie among the players.”

George Gmelch, a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and a former minor league baseball player, said the influx of international athletes could be a factor in the decline of nicknames. American players are less likely to give nicknames to Hispanic or Japanese players, he said.

He and others also suggested that nicknames were less useful, given the trend toward less-common names. After all, the N.B.A. player Joe Bryant was better known as Jellybean. His more famous son is simply Kobe.

According to the Social Security Administration, the 10 most popular baby names for boys in 1956 represented 31.1 percent of the total born. In 1986, around the time many of today’s athletes were born, the top 10 represented only 21.3 percent of the total. In 2010, the number dropped to 8.4 percent.

“Nicknames are less needed today because given names themselves are so much more varied than they used to be,” said Evans, the Bellevue psychology professor.

He also posited that nicknames are often “humorous or noncomplimentary, and we may live in a culture where people are less willing to accept names that are less complimentary.”

It is telling that few of today’s biggest stars have widely used nicknames. LeBron James is an exception, but he is better known as LeBron than as King, the lofty nickname used for commercial purposes. Michael Jordan never really had a nickname, lest those who wanted to “be like Mike” be distracted from buying Air Jordans.

“Their own names now act as brand names,” said Frank Neussel, editor of Names: A Journal of Onomastics, and a University of Louisville professor of modern language and linguistics. “Your identity is not your nickname. It’s your stats.”

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

May 19 - 25, 2011

PR Contenders Excel in US National Volleyball Championships

T

eams of 6 representing four different clubs in the San Juan metropolitan area reached the maximum classification volleyball tournament in the United States in the latest women’s event held in the city of Baltimore. The teams secured their participation in the 2011 USA Volleyball Girls’ Junior National Championships (GJNC) to be played from June 25 to July 4 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

The top team from this group was the renowned club located in Cupey Borinquen Coqui that dominated the

category undefeated Under 13 years.

Danny Perez, who played for several seasons on the Senior Men’s Volleyball is the leader of the group, which has an impressive streak of 100 straight wins in recent months.

The components of the team of 6, are José Rivera Assistant physician and Mattei Vázquez, Marta Vázquez, Maria Ayala Lopez, Bou Ivia Delgado, Cheryke Brian Garmo, Fabiola Vázquez Collazo, Kensley Hernández Cruz, Maria Fe Malavet Martinez, Kiara Rivera Alsina, Katerina Rocafort Fernandez, Viviana Rodríguez, Erika Latorre Ro-

lon, Leslie Raymond Vargas and Adriana Vega Panisse.

In its 2011 ASICS Northeast Qualifier, the Puerto Ricans played nine games and dominated all. Defeated their rivals in the following order, to Tampa Bay One 13 Black, MDJRS 13 Elite 13N Allyso Club South, Valley Forge 13 Blue, SC Midlands Performance 13, USA 13 National South, Carolina Islanders 13 and 13E in Cleveland Academy two straight to win the competition unbeaten.

Likewise was the set of Guaynabo Volleyball Academy (GVA), which dominated the 12 years division, winning nine games. The team led by Alexander Cintron won with scores of 25-16, 19-25, 15-6 to Skyline 12 RSB Royal.

Another team that excelled at the regional fair was 17del VB Rags coach Carlos Rivera, which ended in an honorable second place after falling in the final match against Wave17Brennan with partial 25-9, 20-25 and 15-11. Several injuries of the major boricua play-

ers prevented the team from obtaining the victory, but with the satisfaction of having built up a 9-2 mark in the tournament and qualifying for Atlanta in the summer.

The fourth team that won the national championship was the Queens club run by the fiery Richard Adorno.

The representatives of Toa Alta had to play a suicide game to define the third and final qualifying position more than 16 years to defeat in straight sets Jamba 16 Parker markers 25-23 and 25-20.

A fifth Puerto Rican team was not as lucky as confusion left it out of competition Borinquen Coqui at the age of 17 years after playing for 3-3 in the initial phase.

In addition to the 2011 USA Volleyball Girls ‘Junior National Championships (GJNC) in Atlanta, where other teams have qualified, also play the 2011 USA Volleyball Boys’ Junior National Championships (BJNC) at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minnesota from 29 June to 6 July this year.