NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ARTA Thermostat That's Clever, Not Clunky ... By DAVID POGUEThe Nest Learning Thermostat can save on heating and cooling costs for your home. It even looks pretty on your wall.===== notyetSteve Jobs may have transformed a bunch of industries, but his great skill wasn’t really inventing. Instead, he was the world’s greatest makeover wizard. He’d look at some industry, identify what had been wrong with it for years, and then figure out how to make it beautiful and simple and joyous.

Now that Steve’s gone, who will look around for worlds that need changing?

Well, how about Tony Fadell? He seems to have the pedigree. He helped design the iPod. He ran the iPod and iPhone divisions of Apple for years.

He’s got that spot-what’s-wrong-with-it gene.

With his new company, Nest, he has decided to reinvent a tech item that hasn’t seen much innovation in decades: the thermostat.

Don’t snicker. This isn’t trivial. According to Nest, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats in this country alone; 10 million more are bought each year.

Half of your home’s energy is controlled by this ugly, beige tool. Most people never even bother to program their programmable thermostats. As a result, their houses actually use more energy than homes without them. Two years ago, the federal government eliminated the entire programmable thermostat category from its Energy Star program.

The Nest Learning Thermostat ($250) doesn’t introduce just one radical rethinking of the thermostat;

it introduces four of them.

RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s nearby.

Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after all, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most beautiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.

RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s online. It can download software updates. You can program it on a Web site.

You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and change it — to warm up the house before you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vacation-home owners all over the world are wiping drool off their keyboards.)

RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for work, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)

Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidit

y were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.

RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $250 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in less than two years.

The mere act of having a correctly programmed thermostat is the big one, of course. Why should you waste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at work all day?

But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer other goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains two proximity sensors (near and far), which detect whether anybody is actually in a room. If the sensors decide that nobody’s home, they let the temperature drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.

This feature is useless, of course, if your thermostat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet or behind an open door. But often I’ll return from a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the heat, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest!

Nest says that turning down your thermostat by even a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy. To that end, it offers a little motivational logo: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a positive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effective than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater.

This all sounds spectacular, of course, and mostly, it is. But feathering my Nest wasn’t all smooth sailing.

First, of course, you have to install the thing. Nest goes to extraordinary lengths to help you out. The elegant package includes a screwdriver and the Nest itself has a built-in bubble level. YouTube how-to videos and tech support are available.

But in the end, replacing a thermostat is not a job for a novice. It involves cutting power to your existing thermostats (after figuring out which circuit breaker is responsible); removing your old thermostat (revealing an ugly, gaping maw in your wall); hooking up about four colored wires (nasty-looking and very short); covering up the gaping maw with the included rectangular base plate (necessary only if the maw is larger than the Nest, which is likely); and snapping the Nest into place.

Nest’s installer performed the surgery on my downstairs thermostat as I watched; I did the deed myself on the upstairs one. It took about half an hour to install each thermostat. If you don’t feel up to the task, Best Buy will send somebody to do it for you at $120 (plus $25 more for each additional Nest).

Second, my test Nests were cuckoo for the first couple of weeks. They’d decide for themselves to blast the heat to 73 degrees — at 4 a.m.

That was a little alarming. You know those sci-fi movies where our machines turn on their human overlords? Yeah, like that.

The company chalked my problems up to first-release bugs, and had me reset my thermostats. (The software is very iPod-like. You turn the barrel to choose from the colorful on-screen menus, and you click inward to make a selection.) After two such resets, the Nests are now working perfectly and saving me money.

The software has room to improve. For some reason,

the Nest’s own screen shows you a lot more about what’s going on with your thermostat than the Web site or the phone apps. For example, the Web and the app don’t show you when Auto Away kicked in or when you manually adjusted your thermostats. (The company says it will remedy that situation soon.)

The Web site is beautiful, but programming your Nests using its Schedule tab is clumsy and tedious. It takes too many unnecessary clicks to introduce a change in the schedule.

I found some bugs, too. For example, if you have multiple Nests, just coming back home doesn’t disengage the Auto Away mode automatically; you have to click each thermostat’s screen within two minutes. (Bizarre.)

Fortunately, software is fixable.

Goodness knows there are cheaper thermostats. And there are other learning thermostats with color screens and Internet connections. But they don’t have the sensors that let them self-adjust. They don’t look like pieces of art. They’re sold and packaged for contractors, not humans.

And they actually cost more: for example, similar models of the Honeywell Prestige and Ecobee Smart Thermostat go for more than $300 on Amazon.com. (Can you imagine what the arrival of the Nest and its team of former Apple superstars must be doing to morale at those companies? The Friday beer blasts must be a bummer these days.)

The Nest is gorgeous, elegant and very, very smart. It will keep your house at the right temperature, save you money and do some good for the planet. Put another way, it can make you comfortable in more ways than one.

E-mail:pogue@nytimes.com

~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-120112 Things You Didn't Know Facebook Could Do ... By PAUL BOUTINThe social network has been adding functions to make it more useful, although many on the site are unaware of them.===== notyetThe designers and engineers who build Facebook are anything but complacent about their success. They face a constant threat from the career-centric LinkedIn, specialized upstarts like Instagram’s mobile photo network and now Google’s fast-growing Google+, an attempt to improve on Facebook’s core design that has picked up tens of millions of users in its first few weeks.

So Facebook has been adding features to make the reigning social network more useful and convenient.

As the number of features grows, though, so does a corresponding problem: Most of Facebook’s 750 million users don’t know these features exist. Some don’t know how to find them, some don’t go hunting for them in Facebook’s ever-growing interface of controls and many don’t even think of them in the first place. A few minutes of exploration can uncover functions that make Facebook not just an addiction but a pleasure to use.

EDIT LINK NAMES AND DESCRIPTIONS If you want to post a link to your Facebook page but don’t like the title or description that Facebook automatically pulls from the linked page, you can change it. Before you click the Share button, click on the title or description in your pending post. They will change into editing boxes, like those to rename a file on your computer desktop. When you’re done editing, press Enter to save your changes.

TAG FRIENDS IN UPDATES AND COMMENTS If you type th

e name of a Facebook friend while editing a status update or a comment, Facebook will automatically create a link to the friend’s page. In fact, it will pop up a list of possible completions for names like "John." Once you’ve entered a name, you can backspace over it to erase the last name for informality’s sake, or click in the middle to edit the first, turning "Kenneth Smith" into "Kenneth" or "Smith." Sorry, you can only shorten names — you can’t edit "Kenneth Smith" into "Snuggles."

POST A PLAYABLE MP3 If you paste a link that ends in ".mp3" into a status update, Facebook will create a player in the middle of the update that lets other users play the music file without having to click through to its host site.

MAKE A PHOTO YOUR PROFILE PICTURE Any photo on Facebook that has been tagged with your name includes an extra blue link at the lower-left corner of its page labeled Make Profile Picture. Click that, and Facebook pops up an editing page in which you can crop the photo to be just right for your profile.

CREATE A POLL Hiding in plain sight above the box to enter status updates is a Question button. Posting a question looks just like posting an update, except that it takes the first three answers from your friends and turns them into a poll to keep the discussion focused. You can also set up the poll with your own answers, or add more to those Facebook creates.

COLLABORATE ON A DOCUMENT Within a Group page, click on Docs at the top of the page and then the Create a Doc button on the right-hand side to create a text-only document that everyone in the group can edit. When you save the document, it will be posted to the group’s feed, just like a status update, with an Edit button in the upper-right corner. To see previous revisions, click Recent Changes.

INVITE NON-FACEBOOKERS TO AN EVENT When you are creating an event on Facebook, the Select Guests menu shows your existing friends, but it also lets you enter the e-mail addresses of people who do not have Facebook accounts. Type one or more e-mail address, separated by commas, into the Invite by E-mail Address box. Your invitees will receive a message with a link to your event page that, unfortunately, prompts them to sign up for Facebook before they can look at it.

GET THE TICKER OUT OF YOUR WAY Facebook recently added a constantly scrolling window on the right side of the screen that shows your friends’ updates as they come in. Fun for some, agitating for others. You can’t turn it off entirely, but you can make the moving ticker as small as possible. Using your cursor, grab the bar that separates the Ticker from your Facebook Chat window. Drag it upward until the Ticker is as small as possible — the size of two status updates. That will reduce the level of unwanted distraction it causes while you’re trying to read the rest of the page, while still letting you see new updates.

ADD A CALENDAR TO YOUR PAGE If you’re a business owner, a team coach or a performer who wants to keep everyone on Facebook apprised of your coming events, simply creating separate Facebook events for each one can be ineffective. These can get lost in the stream of events, making it hard for people to check for, say, your next game. As an alternative, use the Social Calendar app, which was not developed by Facebook. Go to facebook.com/SocialCalendar and click the Add to My Page link in the lower left corner. That will pop up a menu of pages you manage. Click Add to Page next to one or more pages, then click Close. Those pages will now include a Calendar link in their upper left corner, just below Wall, Info and Photos. Social Calendar is pretty smart — it will autocomplete the names of events you’ve already created, and if you type in an A

ddress field, it will add a map link to the location on the calendar. But for maximum attendance, you should still post status updates announcing an event.

TRACK YOUR PAGE’S SUCCESS On any page you own, whether it is for your business or your clog-dancing club, click View Insights in the upper right corner. Facebook will display charts of user information and page interactions. Beyond the number of Likes and comments, it will plot a graph of page views and user feedback, plus a breakdown of which Web domains are sending traffic to your page, and the demographics of your visitors. If you want to do your own number-crunching, you can export the data into an Excel-compatible file.

KEEP A BIRTHDAY PARTY A SECRET Do you want to let everyone except one or two people know what you’re up to? Edit a status update as usual, but before you post, click the lock icon below the editing box. That will pop up a menu with options for specifying who can see your update. By default, it’s set to Everyone. Choose Customize instead, and in the dialog box that pops up, enter one or more names in the box near the bottom that says Hide This From. There’s another button to make this your default setting for future updates, so you needn’t worry about accidental oversharing.

BLOCK ANNOYING COMMENTERS Do you have a friend who constantly posts inappropriate comments on your updates but whom you can’t bring yourself to unfriend? In the uppermost right corner of Facebook, click Account and choose Privacy Settings. That will take you to a page labeled Choose Your Privacy Settings. Near the bottom is a section labeled Sharing on Facebook. Hiding at the bottom of that section is a link labeled Customize Settings. Scroll down to Things Others Share. There’s a setting for "Permission to comment on your posts." It works just like the filter for sharing status updates: click Customize, and enter names of people to keep Face

book from presenting them with comment features when they look at your posts. Maybe they’ll get the hint.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1201Brilliant and Bold, in Any Language ... By DAVID WALDSTEINWhat makes Bobby Valentine's selection as Boston's new manager so intriguing is his curiosity and his daring, best exemplified by his time spent managing in Japan.===== notyet (2 pages)Early in his tenure as manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan, Bobby Valentine decided to run a drill to practice pickoff moves at second base. He instructed his pitchers to throw behind the runner, but for some reason they refused to do as he asked.

As Valentine grew frustrated over the inability of his pitchers to follow his instructions, Satoru Komiyama, a veteran who had played for Valentine when he managed the Mets, came forward to offer an explanation.

"We will be happy to do it in games," he told Valentine. "But in practice we don’t want to injure our teammates by throwing the ball at their behinds."

It was not the first problem with translation that Valentine encountered in Japan, nor would it be his last. But he would eventually learn 2,042 kanji characters out of an instructional book, practicing them in the dirt with the toe of his cleats during practice, and by the time he made his tearful goodbye speech to the team’s fans in 2009, he did so in Japanese.

"There’s a lot of guys who go over there just looking to get a paycheck," said the current Mets manager Terry Collins, who managed the Orix Buffaloes for two seasons in Japan and competed there agains

t Valentine. "Bobby completely embraced everything about it and had the mind-set to succeed there. I wish I had listened to him more."

When the Boston Red Sox began courting Valentine in early November to replace Terry Francona as their next manager, he was cited for his baseball brilliance. Valentine is indeed smart and observant, but so are some other people in major league dugouts.

What sets Valentine apart from his peers, what makes his selection as Boston’s new manager so intriguing, is his curiosity. And maybe his daring. And those traits are probably best exemplified by his willingness to not just manage in Japan, but to plunge headfirst into its culture, both accepting and challenging it all at once.

"There is no question that he is more worldly than other managers," said Steve Phillips, who was Valentine’s former boss with the Mets, went to the World Series with him and now accepts responsibility for the friction in their relationship.

"It’s not even close," Phillips added of Valentine’s one-of-a-kind approach. "His enthusiasm for new concepts, new ideas is unparalleled, and he wants them to succeed."

Valentine became an adored figure in Japan, which will not be an easy feat to duplicate in Boston, where the baseball culture is intense and entrenched, where the current roster contains a lot of veteran players, not all of whom may want to do things any differently.

But that is unlikely to deter Valentine, or inhibit him. He took on Japan. Why not Beantown?

"I think he’ll be great in Boston," said John Blake, a longtime Texas Rangers executive who was with Valentine when he managed that team and who has a

lso worked for the Red Sox.

"Bobby brings incredible passion and energy," Blake said. "In Boston, the Red Sox are such a religion. He will revel in that, and the fans will pick up on it."

The Red Sox will go into spring training trying to shake off their historic collapse in September. It is a talented team with leftover issues — including players consuming beer and chicken during games — and Valentine will have plenty to deal with right from the start.

As was the case in Japan. Having already managed the Marines in Japan’s Pacific League for one year in 1995, Valentine knew what would greet him when he arrived there for his second stint in 2004 — a lethargic fan base, a team expecting to again finish dead last. Faced with that challenge, Valentine over the next six years transformed the club, its stadium and, to some extent, Japanese baseball.

By the time he left, the Marines had won their first championship in 31 years, he had become the first foreign recipient of the prestigious Shoriki Award for service to Japanese baseball, and attendance at Marine Stadium had grown 400 percent.

When traditional Japanese baseball strategies worked, Valentine left them alone. "He told me, don’t mess with relays, they know how to do it," Collins said.

But Valentine also shortened workouts, told players to wear shorts during batting practice in hot months and instituted a day off every fourth day in spring training — all unheard of in a baseball environment where hard work is the bare minimum. He encouraged players to grow their hair longer if they wished and even pose a little bit after a home run. Have some fun.

"Bobby is a baseball genius," said Matt Franco, the former Met who played for Valentine in Queens and in Japan. "Sometimes that gets under people’s skin. But the players loved him. They could see he was out for them."

Before he made any changes in Japan, Valentine would first take on what he wanted to alter, particularly the rigorous workouts. He fielded so many ground balls he felt his arm was going to fall off. "It has to be right," he would say to his bench coach, Frank Rampen, as he thought about what to change.

Valentine wasn’t always right, though. He instituted changes with the team draft that sometimes backfired, and offended others with the new uniforms he helped design. But he kept going.

In 2005, when the young third baseman Toshiaki Imae asked for three days off to be with his wife as she gave birth, Valentine’s Japanese coaches said it was out of the question. Valentine gave him the three days, and when Imae returned he went on a hitting tear and was eventually named the most valuable player of the Japan Series.

Perhaps the biggest change that Valentine brought about involved the fans’ access to the players. He insisted that the eight-foot chicken-wire fences that extended from foul pole to foul pole and separated the fans from the players should come down. He wanted his players to sign autographs. According to Larry Rocca, a former sportswriter who became a Marines executive, Valentine’s reasoning wasn’t only about building good will. When Valentine first returned in 2004, the players were lacking in self-esteem. Why would anyone want their autographs? The team was no good. But Valentine reasoned that if the players saw fans asking for autographs, their confidence might get a boost and so might the

ir performances on the field.

He encountered resistance. At first a slit was cut into the fence, for fans to pass papers to the players to sign. Only after two years did the fences come down.

But Valentine had made his point. A year after he returned, the Marines won the championship, with the young players he promoted leading the way. Valentine’s popularity soared. A beer, Bobeer, would be named after him, as well as a street in Chiba, Valentine Way.

But by 2009 the adventure was over as the front office said it could no longer afford his high salary. The fans organized large in-game protests and collected thousands of signatures on a petition. Their pleas went unanswered.

At the airport the day he left, hundreds of fans assembled to see him off, waving flags with his likeness on them and singing the "Bobby" song they wrote for him. As his plane taxied down the runway, they ran out on a roof after it, waving their flags and shouting his name as a tearful Valentine watched from the plane.

This time, nothing was lost in translation.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1201Judy Lewis, Secret Daughter of Hollywood, Dies at 76 ... By PAUL VITELLOMs. Lewis, the daughter of an unwed Loretta Young and Clark Gable, was 31 before she confronted her mother and learned the truth of her upbringing.===== notyetHer mother was Loretta Young. Her father was Clark Gable.

Yet Judy Lewis spent her first 19 months in hideaw

ays and orphanages, and the rest of her early life untangling a web of lies spun by a young mother hungry for stardom but unwilling to end her unwed pregnancy.

Loretta Young’s deception was contrived to protect her budding movie career and the box-office power of the matinee idol Gable, who was married to someone else when they conceived their child in snowed-in Washington State. They were on location, shooting the 1935 film "The Call of the Wild," fictional lovers in front of the camera and actual lovers outside its range.

Ms. Lewis, a former actress who died on Friday at the age of 76, was 31 before she discerned the scope of the falsehoods that cast her, a daughter of Hollywood royalty, into what she later described as a Cinderella-like childhood. Confronted by Ms. Lewis, Young finally made a tearful confession in 1966 at her sprawling home in Palm Springs, Calif.

Young was 22 and unmarried when she and Gable, 34 and married to Maria Langham, had their brief affair. She spent most of her pregnancy in Europe to avoid Hollywood gossip. Ms. Lewis was born on Nov. 6, 1935, in a rented house in Venice, Calif. Soon she was turned over to a series of caretakers, including St. Elizabeth’s Infants Hospital in San Francisco, so that Young could return to stardom.

When Ms. Lewis was 19 months old, her mother brought her back home and announced through the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she had adopted the child.

Ms. Lewis grew up in Los Angeles, cushioned in the luxury of her mother’s movie-star lifestyle even as she endured what she later described as an outsider’s isolation within her family and the teasing of children at school.

They teased her about her ears: they stuck out like Dumbo’s. Or, as Hollywood rumors had it, they stuck out like Clark Gable’s. Ms. Lewis’s mother dressed her in bonnets to hide them. When Ms. Lewis was 7 her ears were surgically altered to make them less prominent.

Until Ms. Lewis, as an adult, confronted her years later, Young did not acknowledge that Ms. Lewis was her biological daughter, or that Gable was Ms. Lewis’s father. When Young married and had two children with Tom Lewis, a radio producer, Judy took his name but remained the family’s "adopted" daughter.

And though conceding the story privately to her daughter — and later to the rest of her family — Young remained mum publicly all her life, agreeing to acknowledge the facts only in her authorized biography, "Forever Young," and only on the condition that it be published after her death. She died in 2000.

But Ms. Lewis revealed the story of her parentage in her own memoir, "Uncommon Knowledge," in 1994. She described feeling a powerful sense of alienation as a child. "It was very difficult for me as a little girl not to be accepted or acknowledged by my mother, who, to this day, will not publicly acknowledge that I am her biological child," she said in an interview that year.

After Ms. Lewis released the memoir, her mother refused to speak to her for three years.

The lightning bolt that gave Ms. Lewis the first hint about her parentage came during an identity crisis before her wedding day. Two weeks before her marriage in 1958, Ms. Lewis told her fiance, Tom Tinney, that she did not understand her confusing relationship with her mother and that she did not know who her father was. "I can’t marry you," she s

aid she told him. "I don’t know anything about myself."

Mr. Tinney could offer little guidance about her mother, she wrote, but about her father’s identity he was clear.

"It’s common knowledge, Judy," he said. "Your father is Clark Gable."

She had no inkling, she wrote.

In interviews after her book was published, Ms. Lewis was philosophical about the secrecy in which she grew up. If Young and Gable had acknowledged her in 1935, she said, "both of them would have lost their careers."

Much of Ms. Lewis’s account was painful to recall, she said. She quoted Young as saying, "And why shouldn’t I be unhappy?," explaining her decision to give birth. "Wouldn’t you be if you were a movie star and the father of your child was a movie star and you couldn’t have an abortion because it was a mortal sin?"

Young was a Roman Catholic.

After graduating from Marymount, a girls’ Catholic school, Ms. Lewis left Los Angeles to pursue acting in New York. She was a regular on one soap opera, "The Secret Storm," from 1964 to 1971, and had featured parts on numerous others. She appeared in several Broadway plays, produced television shows, and in her mid-40s decided to return to school. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and became a licensed family and child counselor in 1992.

Ms. Lewis, who was a clinical psychologist specializing in foster care and marriage therapy, died of

lymphoma at her home in Gladwyne, Pa., her daughter, Maria Tinney Dagit, said.

Besides her daughter, Ms. Lewis is survived by two grandsons and her half-brothers, Christopher and Peter Lewis. Her marriage to Mr. Tinney ended in divorce.

In a 2001 interview on CNN with Larry King, Ms. Lewis recalled speaking to her mother about her early life.

"I was also asking her about being adopted," she said, "as adopted children do. They say, ‘Where are my ... ‘’ "

Mr. King interjected, " ‘Who’s my mother?’ "

"Yes," Ms. Lewis said. " ‘Who’s my mother? Who’s my father?’ And she would answer it very easily by saying, ‘I couldn’t love you any more than if you were my own child,’ which, of course, didn’t answer the question, but it said, ‘Don’t ask the question.’ "

But at that point Ms. Lewis was wistful about her past. "Call of the Wild," she said, was one of her favorite movies. The love scenes between her parents, she said, "show the love they feel for each other."

Mr. King asked if she ever fantasized about the life she might have had if her parents had married and brought her up.

"I would have liked them to have," she replied. "But that is just my dream, you know. Life is very strange. Doesn’t give us what we want."~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1202

Sneaking Up on Defenses, Until He's Past Them ... By PAT BORZITwo weeks ago, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers offered a theory on why receiver Jordy Nelson wasn't drawing double coverage: because Nelson is white.===== notyetGREEN BAY — Eleven games into his breakout season, Green Bay Packers receiver Jordy Nelson did not need a calculator or even his fingers to count the number of times that he had faced double coverage this year.

"I would say never," he said this week. "Not that I know of."

It seems improbable. Nelson, remember, had nine catches for 140 yards and a touchdown in Green Bay’s Super Bowl victory last season. His 21 postseason catches earned him a share of the franchise record with Greg Jennings. This season, Nelson has developed into a serious threat for the undefeated Packers, with more receiving touchdowns (nine) than in his previous three seasons combined (six). Two have gone for more than 80 yards.

So why are opposing defenses not focusing on him more?

Two weeks ago, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers offered a frank theory on his Tuesday afternoon radio show: because Nelson is white.

Rodgers recounted a conversation he had with Packers cornerback Charles Woodson, who is black, after Nelson’s two touchdown catches in a 45-7 win over Minnesota on Nov. 14.

"I was talking to Wood in the fourth quarter and he said: ‘When you see Jordy out there, you think, oh well, he’s a white wide receiver. He won’t be very athletic,’ " Rodgers said on his radio show. "But Jordy sort of breaks all those stereotypes. I’

m not sure why he keeps sneaking up on guys."

The next day, Nelson went along with Rodgers’s assessment. So did Jennings. The subsequent commotion, with people from ESPN analysts to Rush Limbaugh weighing in, embarrassed Nelson, and neither Rodgers nor Jennings chose to revisit the issue this week.

"He’s a hard worker, he practices well, he’s a professional," Rodgers said. "And for some reason or another, he’s just not respected, maybe, as some of our other pass-catching threats.

"When you put a third or fourth corner on him, we like that matchup. He’s been consistently getting open and making the plays when they present themselves."

The rugged Nelson, a middle child of Kansas farmers, goes into Sunday’s game against the Giants ranked third in the N.F.L. with an average of 17.8 yards a catch. Among Packers receivers, only Jennings exceeds Nelson’s 44 catches for a career-high 782 yards. Nelson’s growing rapport with Rodgers, who is having one of those seasons where he can seemingly hit a bumblebee in the thorax from 50 yards, has played a big part in his production.

Beginning with the penultimate regular-season game last year, Nelson caught three touchdown passes of more than 80 yards in an eight-game stretch — the only player to do so since the 1970 merger, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. All this from a former college walk-on with a crew cut who bears a resemblance to Yankee outfielder Brett Gardner.

Packers receivers coach Edgar Bennett, who is black, smiled at the suggestion of race but declined to cite that with Nelson. "He’s a good player, bottom line," he said.

Instead, Bennett said Nelson benefitted from defenses respecting the playmaking abilities of Jennings and tight end Jermichael Finley. The 6-3, 217-pound Nelson often draws a smaller, less-skilled defensive back, especially in multiple receiver sets.

"With those two guys on the field, that certainly helps the situation," Bennett said of Jennings and Finley. "And I think he’s been able to continue to improve and get better and take advantage of those one-on-one situations."

Nelson’s family raised and bred cattle near Manhattan, Kan., and as a child, he helped out with all the chores, even the much less glamorous ones. When Packer wideouts Jennings, James Jones and Brett Swain visited the farm with their wives two summers ago, Nelson demonstrated how to artificially inseminate a cow. All three then took a turn at it.

A quarterback and defensive back in high school, Nelson walked on at Kansas State as a safety but switched to wide receiver as a sophomore. He led the team in receptions that season. When he was a senior, Nelson broke the team record with 122 catches and was one of three finalists for the Biletnikoff Award, which goes to the nation’s top receiver.

"He killed us my last year at Texas," Finley said, referring to a 41-21 Wildcats upset of the Longhorns in 2007. Nelson caught 12 passes for 116 yards with one score, and returned a punt 89 yards for another touchdown. The Packers drafted him in the second round in 2008.

"He’s been doing what he does since he got here, and he did it before he got here," Packers General Manager Ted Thompson said. "He runs. He gets open. He’s got quickness. I just think sometimes people tend to take him for granted."

Why?

"I don’t know," Thompson said. "He doesn’t beat his chest a lot. Or try to get out in front."

Finley does not understand it, either. In describing why opponents underestimated Nelson, Finley seemed to feel the need to invent a new word.

"People downlook him, but he’s the strongest, most underrated receiver in the league," Finley said. "That’s why you see him getting plays like that, because guys look down on him, and A-Rod just keeps feeding him."

Greg Bishop contributed reporting.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1202: ART REVIEWUnfurling a Thousand Years of Gods, Demons and Romance ... By ROBERTA SMITH"Storytelling in Japanese Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals the narrative side of Japanese art in a lavish assortment of hand scrolls, hanging scrolls, screens and books.===== notyet"Storytelling in Japanese Art," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a captivating combination of show and tell, read and look. Curatorially speaking, the exhibition takes us gently in hand and, through text panels, captions and diagrams, reveals the narrative side of Japanese art with memorable clarity.

It has been organized by Masako Watanabe, a senior research associate in the Met’s Asian art department, and while installed in the museum’s Japanese permanent-collection galleries, it is a temporary show full of significant loans. Illuminating the tales played out in a lavish assortment of hand scrolls, hanging scrolls, screens and books, the exhibition, with its explications and elucidations, gives didacticism a good name. It deserves return vi

sits, especially for its second rotation, starting Feb. 8, when, due to fragility, several hand scrolls will be wound to different scenes and five screens will be replaced by others.

The show contains more than 100 works that span mostly from the 13th to the 19th centuries. At its core are some 20 hand scrolls, or emaki, an ingenious medium evolved from the illustrated sutras that began landing in Japan from China in the eighth century as part of the spread of Buddhism. While full of wonderfully observed natural details, Japanese hand scrolls, unlike their Chinese precedents, developed less as vehicles for pure landscape than as stages on which to unfurl human dramas of all kinds, in something like real time and space. In the hands of Japanese artists the scrolls were tantamount to primitive films. Their fluidity, emotional expressiveness and sense of action and lived experience give them an uncannily contemporary immediacy.

This is established at the start of the show with a masterpiece: the five scrolls known as the "Illustrated Legends of the Kitano Tenjin Shrine," a sublime example of Chinese-style ink painting highlighted with translucent washes of color from the 13th-century Kamakura period. Acquired in 1925, these scrolls constitute one of the Met’s great paintings, but they have never been exhibited together before, and this alone makes "Storytelling in Japanese Art" a must-see.

With seductive intimacy the scrolls recount the life and turbulent afterlife of Sugawara Michizane, a ninth-century poet-statesman said to have died of a broken heart after being unjustly slandered. The tale includes the destruction unleashed by his angry spirit (floods, fire, shattered buildings, some of it delivered by a magnificent black-clad thunder god) and the dangerous journey to hell and back by Nichizo, an intrepid acolyte sent to divine how to placate Michizane. (It takes a temple.)

Nichizo’s pictorially breathtaking odyssey involves help from both monks and demons, a pause to pray in a cave (dragon notwithstanding) and braving a fabulous fire-breathing monster with eight heads and nine tails who guards the fiery furnace that is hell. All this is played out in a sparsely limned landscape whose mutations from gentle to spiked to lunar make it a star in its own right.

A similarly spare, evocative landscape also figures in "A Long Tale for an Autumn Night," another ink-and-color painting from around 1400. Its anguished plot concerns an aspiring monk’s love for a beautiful boy and ends, as this genre usually did, with the death of the boy, who is revealed to be a manifestation of the bodhisattva Kannon.

"Storytelling in Japanese Art" is not a historically thorough survey. Its main goal is to follow the mingling of different narrative and pictorial genres and styles. Its arrangement is as much thematic as chronological, with groupings of different works from different centuries attesting to the continuing attraction that certain stories exerted on the imagination.

In the section devoted to "The Tale of Genji," the 12th-century novel that is among Japan’s greatest contributions to world literature, for example, modest books and hand scrolls are grouped around a pair of Edo-period screens by the 16th-century master Kano Soshu like small craft around a magnificent ocean liner.

And early in the exhibition En No Gyoja, the legendary founder of a mountain-based asceticism combining aspects of Shinto and Buddhist beliefs known as Shugendo, moves through several mediums, including intentional hanging scrolls and what might be called accidental ones, those made from fragments excised from hand scrolls and mounted on textiles,

as well as intact hand scrolls. He is especially appealing in a Kamakura-period hand scroll fragment about the history of the Jin’oji Temple. It shows him in a garden with low-flying clouds conversing with a local deity, while a visiting Korean god alights on the top of a pine tree, causing one of En No Gyoja’s loyal servant-demons to fall to his knees.

From there the show traces the pictorial life of various cherished narratives from medium to medium. Sacred tales about building temples or the spiritual evolution of semidivine beings give way to celebrations of rulers’ lives, epic military battles or endlessly triangulating romances whose female participants usually pay the price. In the late-16th-century hand scroll "The Tale of Gio" the title character, a dancer, generously allows another woman to perform for her patron in a green-carpeted pavilion, and of course her life ends up in ruins. Here, as in later works throughout the show, free-hand ink painting gives way to stiffer figuration and bright opaque colors, and open landscapes are more and more punctuated by steeply tilted buildings whose sumptuous interiors become central.

Partly because of the exhibition’s placement in the permanent-collection galleries, Ms. Watanabe has supplemented the scrolls, books and screens with works in other mediums. A lacquer box and a kimono decorated with images of books suggest the high value placed on literature, and lacquer stirrups and saddles are placed near several screens recounting historic battles that had assumed mythic status in Japanese culture. They teem with mounted soldiers and archers and, according to the label, can depict up to 80 separate episodes.

If you wonder what a six-legged red-lacquer storage case is doing in the show, look no farther than the pair of painted screens next to it. On one a nearly identical case is boldly outlined in ink. According to the label a brave samurai cut off the a

rm of a wicked demon and hid it the case, until the demon returned in the guise of the warrior’s mother and tricked him out it. On the second screen the demon, rendered larger than life with exaggerated vigor, is shown speeding away, clutching her lividly red arm. The work’s creator, Shibata Zeshin (1807-91), was known internationally during his lifetime as a master of lacquer; a nearby preparatory study for the image is just as large, but less strained.

The same storage case, this time in black, appears in the show’s final gallery in "Night Parade of 100 Demons," where it is being torn apart by one of the hand scroll’s wonderfully grotesque creatures in an effort to free several more of his ilk trapped inside. This final gallery is dominated by depictions of anthropomorphized animals, among them the frolicking creatures on a 12th-century hanging scroll that was excised from a set of 12th-century hand scrolls revered in Japan as one of the starting points of manga. Also here is "The Tale of Mice," one of several impressive loans from the New York Public Library, with its cast of well-dressed white rodents. One wonders if Art Spiegelman knew of its existence when he undertook "Maus," his graphic novel of Jewish mice and Nazi cats.

"The Tale of Mice" is one of many points in "Storytelling in Japanese Art" where you may find yourself wondering if Japan, despite its small size, has contributed far more than its share to today’s popular culture. There is no hard science by which to arrive at a definitive answer. Still, this fascinating show reverberates with that tantalizing possibility.

"Storytelling in Japanese Art" is on view through May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1203Center of Penn State Scandal, Sandusky Tells His Own Story ... By JO BECKERIn an extensive interview, Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach, insisted that he had never sexually abused any child.===== notyetThe former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, in his first extended interview since his indictment on sexual abuse charges last month, said Coach Joe Paterno never spoke to him about any suspected misconduct with minors. Mr. Sandusky also said the charity he worked for never restricted his access to children until he became the subject of a criminal investigation in 2008.

The failure by Mr. Paterno to act more aggressively after being told in 2002 that Mr. Sandusky had molested a 10-year-old boy in the showers of the university’s football building played a role in Mr. Paterno’s firing last month after 62 years at Penn State. Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said that Mr. Paterno did not speak to him or confront him over the accusation, despite the fact that Mr. Sandusky had been one of his assistant coaches for three decades and was a regular presence at the football team’s complex for years after the 2002 episode.

Mr. Sandusky, in a nearly four-hour interview over two days this week, insisted he had never sexually abused any child, but he confirmed details of some of the events that prosecutors have cited in charging him with 40 counts of molesting young boys, all of whom came to know Mr. Sandusky through the charity he founded, known as the Second Mile.

Mr. Sandusky said he regularly gave money to the disadvantaged boys at his charity, opened bank accounts for them, and gave them gifts that had been donated to the charity.

Prosecutors have said Mr. Sandusky used such gifts

as a way to build a sense of trust and loyalty among boys he then repeatedly abused.

Mr. Sandusky, after repeated requests, agreed to the interview because he said his decades of work with children had been misunderstood and distorted by prosecutors.

“They’ve taken everything that I ever did for any young person and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever,” Mr. Sandusky said. He added: “I had kid after kid after kid who might say I was a father figure. And they just twisted that all.”

Yet over the course of the interview, Mr. Sandusky described what he admitted was a family and work life that could often be chaotic, even odd, one that lacked some classic boundaries between adults and children, and thus one that was open to interpretation — by those who have defended him as a generous mentor and those who have condemned him as a serial predator.

He said his household in State College, Pa., over the years came to be a kind of recreation center or second home for dozens of children from the charity, a place where games were played, wrestling matches staged, sleepovers arranged, and from where trips to out-of-town sporting events were launched. Asked directly why he appeared to interact with children who were not his own without many of the typical safeguards other adults might apply — showering with them, sleeping alone with them in hotel rooms, blowing on their stomachs — he essentially said that he saw those children as his own.

“It was, you know, almost an extended family,” Mr. Sandusky said of his household’s relationship with children from the charity. He then characterized his close experiences with children he took under his wing as “precious times,” and said that the p

hysical aspect of the relationships “just happened that way.”

Wrestling, hugging — “I think a lot of the kids really reached out for that,” he said.

Mr. Sandusky said his wife, Dorothy, known as Dottie, ultimately had some concerns about the household dynamics. He said she had warned him not to neglect his own children — the Sanduskys had adopted six children, including one from the Second Mile — “for the sake of other kids.” Mr. Sandusky recalled one scene after a Penn State football game that underscored her concerns.

“I remember the kids were downstairs, and we always had dogs,” he said. “And Dottie said, ‘You better go down and check on those kids, you know those Second Mile kids after football games.’ I went down, and I look, and there goes a kid flying over a couch, there goes a dog flying over a couch. And I go, ‘I don’t think she wants to see this.’ ”

He said of his household: “Yeah, I mean it was turmoil. It was turmoil.”

During the interview, conducted at the home of his lawyer, Mr. Sandusky was at times subdued, but occasionally capable of humor — some of it awkward laughter about his legal jeopardy and ruined reputation, some of it bright amusement at a recalled anecdote about his own father, who himself had worked with disadvantaged and disabled children, or a moment of remembered comedy at one of the many summer camps he helped run for children.

He grew most animated when talking about his relationships with children, and he grew most disconsolate when he, with a touch of childlike reverence, spoke of Mr. Paterno and Penn State, and the damage his indictment had caused them. “I don’t think it was fair,” he said.

During the interview, Joseph Amendola, Mr. Sandusky’s lawyer, captured what he asserted was his client’s predicament:

“All those good things that you were doing have been turned around,” Mr. Amendola said, speaking to his client, “and the people who are painting you as a monster are saying, ‘Well, they’re the types of things that people who are pedophiles exhibit.’ ”

Prosecutors, in their indictment of Mr. Sandusky, charged him with a horrific array of abuse, including the repeated assaults of young boys.

Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, confirmed aspects of what prosecutors have said was a manipulative scheme: he gave money and gifts to Second Mile children, including computers and golf clubs. However, Mr. Sandusky presented his actions in a benevolent light.

“I would call kids on the phone and work with them academically,” he said. “I tried to reward them sometimes with a little money in hand, just so that they could see something. But more often than not, I tried to set up, maybe get them to save the money, and I put it directly into a savings account established for them.”

Sometimes, he said, he found work for the children at his football camps. Sometimes he bought them shoes or a shirt with his money. And sometimes, he passed along gifts to them that had been given to the charity by donors. “I never bought a computer for any kid; I had a computer given to me to give to a kid,” he said. “I never bought golf clubs. People gave things because they knew there would be kids. They wanted to get rid of things.”

It is unclear whether the supervisors or directors of the charity knew of Mr. Sandusky’s setting up

bank accounts or giving away donated gifts. Investigators with the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office have subpoenaed the financial records of the charity, but say they have been alarmed to learn that some records from some years are missing.

Jack Raykovitz, the executive director of Second Mile, resigned after Mr. Sandusky’s indictment.

Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said Penn State officials had contacted Mr. Raykovitz after the episode in 2002. An assistant football coach has told investigators that he saw Mr. Sandusky raping a young boy in the football building’s showers, and that he told Mr. Paterno some version of that scene the following day. Mr. Paterno has testified that he then informed the university’s athletic director, Tim Curley, that Mr. Sandusky had done something sexually inappropriate with a young boy.

Mr. Sandusky, in the interview, said word of an episode with a young boy in the shower reached Mr. Raykovitz. He said he talked with Mr. Raykovitz, and identified the boy he thought Penn State was concerned about. Mr. Sandusky, though, said Mr. Raykovitz did not see fit to limit his interaction with youths, in part because he was aware of the nature of Mr. Sandusky’s mentoring relationship with the boy, and in part because he knew Mr. Sandusky had undergone repeated background checks clearing him to work with children.

Mr. Raykovitz’s lawyer, Kevin L. Hand, called Mr. Sandusky’s account inaccurate, but refused to say more.

As for Mr. Paterno, Mr. Sandusky said the two never spoke about any incidents, not the episode in 2002 or an earlier complaint of child molestation made against Mr. Sandusky in 1998 that was investigated by the Penn State campus police.

“I never talked to him about either one,” Mr. Sandusky said of Mr. Paterno. “That’s all I can say. I mean, I don’t know.”

Mr. Paterno, through his son, Scott, has denied knowing about the 1998 investigation at the time it happened.

“He’s the only one who knows whether anybody ever said anything to him,” Mr. Sandusky said of Mr. Paterno.

In the interview, Mr. Sandusky, the longtime defensive coordinator at Penn State, said that his relationships and activities with Second Mile children did cause some strain with Mr. Paterno, but only in that Mr. Sandusky worried that having some of the children with him at hotels before games, or on the sideline during games, risked being seen as a distraction by the demanding Mr. Paterno.

“I would have dreams of we being in a squad meeting and that door fly open and kids come running through chasing one another, and what was I going to do?” he said. “Because, I mean, Joe was serious about football.”

Mr. Sandusky, despite expressing concern about talking about the formal charges made against him, did talk about his relationships with several of the eight people cited as victims by prosecutors last month. He said his relationships with more than one of them had extended for years after the suspected episodes of molestation or inappropriate behavior.

In 1998, the mother of a child reported concerns to the Penn State campus police when she learned her son had showered with Mr. Sandusky at the university. After an investigation, Mr. Sandusky admitted to the police and child welfare authorities that he had most likely done something inappropriate,

according to prosecutors. The local district attorney declined to prosecute.

In the interview this week, Mr. Sandusky said the boy and his mother remained a part of his life for years. He said that the mother had sought him out for tickets to Penn State games for her son, and that Mr. Sandusky had contributed financially years later, when the young man, interested in the ministry, went on a mission.

“He went to Mexico in the poverty-stricken areas and worked with the kids and things like that,” Mr. Sandusky said of the young man. “He showed me, he sent me pictures of he and the kids.”

In the grand jury report, prosecutors cited Mr. Sandusky’s attempts to reach some of his accusers. He acknowledged that he reached out to at least one, but said he thought the young man might be a character witness on his behalf, and was unaware that prosecutors had listed him as a victim.

Asked how he came to be involved more closely with some children rather than others, Mr. Sandusky said he got to know many of them at Second Mile summer camps.

“Some of them sought me out,” Mr. Sandusky said.

Mr. Sandusky, facing grave charges and the possibility of imprisonment, discussed how much was now missing from his life, and how much more might be missing in the future.

“I miss coaching,” he said. “I miss Second Mile. I miss Second Mile kids. I miss interrelationships with all kinds of people. I miss my own grandkids. I miss, I mean you know I’m going to miss my dog. So, I mean, yeah, I miss, yeah. Good grief.

“I used to have a lot of contact with a lot of peo

ple and so that circle is diminished, and as it diminished, you know Bo is still there,” he said of his dog. “And I swear he understands. I swear he knows. And you know I love him dearly for that.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1203Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers ... By NICK WINGFIELDWhen virtual assistants like Apple's Siri are used in public places, the results can be annoying, even creepy, to unwilling listeners.===== notyetIs talking to a phone the same as talking on it?

The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.

But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.

In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.

“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.

Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone

on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.

The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.

“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emoticon into a message.

“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.

Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.

Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.

Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks. Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”

Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinfo

rcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”

Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.

“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.

Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.

“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”

James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.

While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything bu

t. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.

“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.

When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.

“It was very robotic,” he said.

Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.

People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.

“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.

But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1204A Second Arrival for 'Once' ... By PATRICK HEALYThe stars of the film "Once" and those of the stage musical discuss what is similar - and what is not - about the two versions.===== notyet (2 pages)WHILE preparing for the lead role of Girl in the new Off Broadway musical “Once,” Cristin Milioti made a choice common among performers in screen-to-stage adaptations: She avoided watching the original film, a 2006 indie romance from Ireland that won an Academy Award for the song “Falling Slowly.” Her concern was that she might slip into mimicking Marketa Irglova, the spirited young Czech musician who became a fan favorite as Girl in the movie.

It turns out Ms. Milioti’s decision did not sit well with Glen Hansard, who played Guy in the picture. (Guy, Girl — get it?) He and Ms. Irglova fell in love while filming “Once,” a real-life consummation of longings between their characters, two lost souls wandering around Dublin and playing guitar (him) and piano (her). They had since broken up, but the 41-year-old Mr. Hansard felt protective of Ms. Irglova, who is 18 years his junior. He thought any other actress playing Girl needed to watch the genuine article.

“I wanted Cristin to know how good Mar is in the movie,” Mr. Hansard recalled. “I had a hard time at first with someone else playing Girl, because Girl to me was Mar.”

Mr. Hansard didn’t blink as he revealed these feelings last month at a table across from Ms. Milioti, during an interview at an East Village brasserie. Nor was she fazed. After more than a year of workshops and out-of-town tryout performances, everyone involved with “Once” has become reconciled to the complexities of art’s imitating life in the musical, which opens Tuesday at New York Theater Workshop.

With few original musicals opening on Broadway this season, the producers are considering a transfer in the spring. Some Broadway executives are already betting on “Once” as a contender for the Tony Award for best musical, seeing it as a prestige project. Ms. Milioti said she was glad that the two stars of the movie felt invested in the stage version, even in her acting choices, “because there would have been a cold void in the project otherwise.” She added, “We’re here because they made this beautiful music.”

Also at the interview were Ms. Irglova and the actor Steve Kazee, who plays Mr. Hansard’s role onstage. It quickly became hard not to view the foursome in two distinct pairs.

On one side of the table were the Guy and the Girl with European accents, who memorably infused their vaguely written movie characters with their own personalities. These were the Guy and Girl who spoke so winningly in accepting their Academy Award — they wrote the songs for the movie that form the score for the musical — and they were the Guy and Girl whose breakup was painfully rendered in a follow-up to “Once,” the 2011 documentary “The Swell Season.”

On the other side were the Guy and the Girl who were still working with a dialect coach. If their looks were camera ready, this Guy and Girl also spoke nervously about balancing their desire to take ownership of the characters with an awareness that admirers of the film might buy tickets to the musical expecting to see the other Guy and Girl they remembered.

Mr. Kazee and Ms. Milioti inevitably lack the sort of chemistry born out of actual love, but they have worked on “Once” long enough that they evince an openness and respect toward each other. Mr. Kaze

e has seen the movie, and Ms. Milioti said she could vouch that it is among his top five favorite films of all time.

Mr. Kazee’s affection for the film proved unnerving, however, when he was offered the role of Guy, he said. He recalled an earlier experience playing Lancelot in the Broadway musical “Spamalot,” which was based on the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” John Cleese had played Lancelot in that movie, but Mr. Kazee said he was determined “to do my own thing.”

“I did, and you could hear crickets in the audience every night, I think because people expected me to be word-perfect Monty Python,” Mr. Kazee said. “You have to balance being yourself and paying some tribute to the original. Still, when we started working on this musical, I was scared I’d muck it up. I didn’t want to be the guy who was responsible for doing the first bad thing to ‘Once.’ ”

The movie, which was shot in 17 days on a $150,000 budget, was rejected by several film festivals until a scout for the Sundance Film Festival picked it up after a screening in Galway. “Once” emerged as an unexpected audience favorite at Sundance and was bought for $500,000 by Fox Searchlight Pictures; the movie went on to gross more than $20 million.

The musical adaptation follows the plot of the film and its frustrated romance (when they meet, both Guy and Girl have other love interests), but the stage version fleshes out several characters and subplots that were barely featured in the movie. Such adaptations as “Shrek the Musical” and “Catch Me if You Can” have struggled on Broadway in recent years, especially when they have hewed too closely to the films.

Mr. Kazee and Ms. Milioti said trying to recreate the loose, casual feel of the film scenes would be

particular folly, and their counterparts seconded them. Ms. Irglova said most of those scenes had been either improvised or shot with little rehearsal, and that she and Mr. Hansard — neither of whom had acting training — basically riffed on their own personalities.

“Girl was a kind of woman I would aspire to be someday, because she had great honesty and integrity, which are important to me,” Ms. Irglova said. “If part of the character isn’t in you, I don’t think it’s believable.”

Ms. Milioti took a somewhat different point of view.

“I like acting because you have so many things you can do in performance to hide behind, when you’re nervous during a moment onstage,” said Ms. Milioti, who has appeared in dramatic roles at New York Theater Workshop in “The Little Foxes” and “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” “I often paint my characters in broad colors, big expressive moments, whereas in reality I’m pretty direct and unsentimental.”

Those two adjectives, as it happens, are good descriptions of Ms. Irglova’s performance in the film. During one scene, in both the movie and the musical, the two main characters sit in his bedroom and Guy suddenly asks Girl to spend the night. It was one of the hardest scenes for Mr. Hansard, he recalled, but relatively easy for Ms. Irglova.

“I felt the proposition came out of nowhere,” Mr. Hansard said, “but Mar was grand. She just sat on the bed in that scene and held my gaze and looked like someone you could say anything to. No pretense.”

Mr. Kazee said he and Ms. Milioti were performing the scene in a similar way, but not because they wanted to ape the film.

“It’s a delicate, quiet story — both the movie and the musical — and you risk disrupting that if you overplay the emotion,” he said. “Cristin is a natural at that. She’s got this quiet drive to her, an intense power in a tiny package,” he added, referring to the actress’s relatively small frame.

Transforming the intimate atmospherics of the film to a theater — especially a large, multilevel one if the show moves to Broadway — is a concern for all four performers.

“I thought a live musical would ruin what was special about ‘Once,’ ” Mr. Hansard said. “So I went to see the show ‘In the Heights,’ to try to feel better, and I loved the energy, but I still thought that musicals were bigger and louder and more performance driven than two reserved people just talking and singing to each other.”

Speaking for Ms. Irglova, as he did with her seeming assent a few times in the interview, he added: “Mar is not a nostalgist. She just moves forward, so I thought she’d be more O.K. with the show.”

“Yeah,” said Ms. Irglova, who has gone on to marry a studio engineer. “As long as there wasn’t anybody saying I want to re-edit our movie, I was O.K. But still, you want to make sure the story works onstage.”

Mr. Kazee too said he had worried about what would happen to Guy, who first connects with Girl by offering to fix her vacuum cleaner. “I imagined a dancing chorus of vacuum cleaners and other big Broadway showy stuff,” he said. But then he learned that the director was John Tiffany, who blended emotional intensity and steadfast friendships in the Iraq war play “Black Watch,” and that the book writer was the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, known for lyrical prose in plays like “Penelope.”

A brief tryout run at the American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts last spring, however, allayed Mr. Hansard’s qualms. He recalled watching Ms. Milioti’s Girl telling Mr. Kazee’s Guy “to shape up, to live life, and everything would be all right” — moments that sent frissons through him.

“The essence of the characters was still there,” Mr. Hansard said.

Backstage afterward, Mr. Kazee recalled, he anxiously awaited Mr. Hansard’s review. “When Glen arrived, I stuck out my hand, and he just put his arms around me and gave me a big hug,” Mr. Kazee said. “He offered to tell me anything I wanted, anything about what he was thinking when he and Marketa wrote the songs.

“And who wouldn’t want that? Looking at the Mona Lisa is great, but wouldn’t it be better if you could actually talk to da Vinci while looking at it?”

“That’s very generous,” Mr. Hansard said grandly, drawing laughter.

“But it’s true,” Mr. Kazee said. “Glen and Mar were at rehearsal the other day. We were singing ‘Falling Slowly’ in this tiny little room, and they were there watching us, and it was the first time that everything felt truly right.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1206: SCIENCE TIMESCreating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing ... By STEVE LOHRFacing the physical limits of conventional design, researchers work to design a computing architecture that more closely resembles that of the brain.===== notyetEver since the early days of modern computing in t

he 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.

The physical limits of conventional computer designs are within sight — not today or tomorrow, but soon enough. Nanoscale circuits cannot shrink much further. Today’s chips are power hogs, running hot, which curbs how much of a chip’s circuitry can be used. These limits loom as demand is accelerating for computing capacity to make sense of a surge of new digital data from sensors, online commerce, social networks, video streams and corporate and government databases.

To meet the challenge, without gobbling the world’s energy supply, a different approach will be needed. And biology, scientists say, promises to contribute more than metaphors. “Every time we look at this, biology provides a clue as to how we should pursue the frontiers of computing,” said John E. Kelly, the director of research at I.B.M.

Dr. Kelly points to Watson, the question-answering

computer that can play “Jeopardy!” and beat two human champions earlier this year. I.B.M.’s clever machine consumes 85,000 watts of electricity, while the human brain runs on just 20 watts. “Evolution figured this out,” Dr. Kelly said.

Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers from I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Merced — are engaged in a project that seems particularly intriguing.

The project, a collaboration of computer scientists and neuroscientists begun three years ago, has been encouraging enough that in August it won a $21 million round of government financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, bringing the total to $41 million in three rounds. In recent months, the team has developed prototype “neurosynaptic” microprocessors, or chips that operate more like neurons and synapses than like conventional semiconductors.

But since 2008, the project itself has evolved, becoming more focused, if not scaled back. Its experience suggests what designs, concepts and techniques might be usefully borrowed from biology to push the boundaries of computing, and what cannot be applied, or even understood.

At the outset, Dharmendra S. Modha, the I.B.M. computer scientist leading the project, described the research grandly as “the quest to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain.” The project embarked on supercomputer simulations intended to equal the complexity of animal brains — a cat and then a monkey. In science blogs and online forums, some neuroscientists sharply criticized I.B.M. for what they regarded as exaggerated claims of what the project could achieve.

These days at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., there is not a lot of talk of reverse-engineering the brain. Wide-ranging ambitions that narrow over time, Dr. Modha explained, are part of research and discovery, even if his earlier rhetoric was inflated or misunderstood.

“Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do,” Dr. Modha said. “We’re not trying to replicate the brain. That’s impossible. We don’t know how the brain works, really.”

The discussion and debate across disciplines has helped steer the research, as the team pursues the goals set out by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency. The technology produced, according to the guidelines, should have the characteristics of being self-organizing, able to “learn” instead of merely responding to conventional programming commands, and consuming very little power.

“We have this fantastic network of specialists who talk to each other,” said Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. “It focuses our thinking as neuroscientists and guides the thinking of the computer scientists.”

In early 2010, Dr. Modha made a decision that put the project on its current path. While away from the lab for a few weeks, because of a Hawaiian vacation and a bout of flu, he decided to streamline the work of the far-flung researchers. The biologically inspired chip under development would come first, Dr. Modha said. That meant a lot of experimental software already written was scrapped. But, he said, “chip-first as an organizing principle gave us a coherent plan.”

In designing chips that bear some structural resemblance to the brain, so-called neuromorphic chips,

neuroscience was a guiding principle as well. Brains are low-power, nimble computing mechanisms — real-world proof that it is possible.

A brain does its computing with a design drastically different from today’s computers. Its processors — neurons — are, in computing terms, massively distributed; there are billions in a human brain. These neuron processors are wrapped in its data memory devices — synapses — so that the brain’s paths of communication are extremely efficient and diverse, through the neuron’s axons, which conduct electrical impulses.

A machine that adopts that approach, Dr. Modha said, would represent “a crucial shift away from von Neumann computing.” He was referring to a design with processor and memory physically separated and connected by a narrow communications channel, or bus, and operating according to step-by-step sequential methods — the von Neumann architecture used in current computers, named after the mathematician John von Neumann.

The concept of neuromorphic electronic systems is more than two decades old; Carver Mead, a renowned computer scientist, described such devices in an engineering journal article in 1990. Earlier biologically inspired devices, scientists say, were mostly analog, single-purpose sensors that mimicked one function, like an electronic equivalent of a retina for sensing image data.

But the I.B.M. and university researchers are pursuing a more versatile digital technology. “It seems that we can build a computing architecture that is quite general-purpose and could be used for a large class of applications,” said Rajit Manohar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University.

What might such applications be, 5 or 10 years fro

m now, if the technology proves successful? They would be the sorts of tasks that humans find effortless and that computers struggle with — the pattern recognition of seeing and identifying someone, walking down a crowded sidewalk without running into people, learning from experience. Specifically, the scientists say, the applications might include robots that can navigate a battlefield environment and be trained; low-power prosthetic devices that would allow blind people to see; and computerized health-care monitors that watch over people in nursing homes and send alerts to human workers if a resident’s behavior suggests illness.

It is an appealing vision, but there are formidable obstacles. The prototype chip has 256 neuron-like nodes, surrounded by more than 262,000 synaptic memory modules. That is impressive, until one considers that the human brain is estimated to house up to 100 billion neurons. In the Almaden research lab, a computer running the chip has learned to play the primitive video game Pong, correctly moving an on-screen paddle to hit a bouncing cursor. It can also recognize numbers 1 through 10 written by a person on a digital pad — most of the time. But the project still has a long way to go.

It is still questionable whether the scientists can successfully assemble large clusters of neuromorphic chips. And though the intention is for the machines to evolve more from learning than from being programmed, the software that performs that magic for any kind of complex task has yet to be written.

The project’s Pentagon sponsor is encouraged. “I’m surprised that we’re so far along, and I don’t see any fundamental reason why it can’t be done,” said Todd Hylton, a program manager.

If it succeeds, the project would seem to make peace with the “airplanes don’t flap their wings” cri

tique. “Yes, they are different, but bird wings and plane wings both depend on the same aerodynamic principles to get lift,” said Christopher T. Kello, director of the Cognitive Mechanics Lab at the University of California, Merced. “It’s the same with this project. You can use essential design elements from biology.”~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1207Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup ... By MARTIN FACKLERJapan hopes the cleanup near the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will allow the displaced to return home.===== notyet (2 pages)FUTABA, Japan — Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.

Its traditional wooden homes have begun to sag and collapse since they were abandoned in March by residents fleeing the nuclear plant on the edge of town that began spiraling toward disaster. Roofs possibly damaged by the earth’s shaking have let rain seep in, starting the rot that is eating at the houses from the inside.

The roadway arch at the entrance to the empty town almost seems a taunt. It reads:

“Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a prosperous lifestyle.”

Those who fled Futaba are among the nearly 90,000 people evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and another area to the northwest contaminated when a plume from the plant scattered radioactive cesium and iodine.

Now, Japan is drawing up plans for a cleanup that is both monumental and unprecedented, in the hopes that those displaced can go home.

The debate over whether to repopulate the area, if trial cleanups prove effective, has become a proxy for a larger battle over the future of Japan. Supporters see rehabilitating the area as a chance to showcase the country’s formidable determination and superior technical skills — proof that Japan is still a great power.

For them, the cleanup is a perfect metaphor for Japan’s rebirth.

Critics counter that the effort to clean Fukushima Prefecture could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects — and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades.

So far, the government is following a pattern set since the nuclear accident, dismissing dangers, often prematurely, and laboring to minimize the scope of the catastrophe. Already, the trial cleanups have stalled: the government failed to anticipate communities’ reluctance to store tons of soil to be scraped from contaminated yards and fields.

And a radiation specialist who tested the results of an extensive local cleanup in a nearby city found that exposure levels remained above international safety standards for long-term habitation.

Even a vocal supporter of repatriation suggests that the government has not yet leveled with its people about the seriousness of their predicament.

“I believe it is possible to save Fukushima,” said the supporter, Tatsuhiko Kodama, director of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo. “B

ut many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes.”

To judge the huge scale of what Japan is contemplating, consider that experts say residents can return home safely only after thousands of buildings are scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced.

Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean.

The Soviet Union did not attempt such a cleanup after the Chernobyl accident of 1986, the only nuclear disaster larger than that at Fukushima Daiichi. The government instead relocated about 300,000 people, abandoning vast tracts of farmland.

Many Japanese officials believe that they do not have that luxury; the evacuation zone covers more than 3 percent of the landmass of this densely populated nation.

“We are different from Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the towns that was evacuated. “We are determined to go back. Japan has the will and the technology to do this.”

Such resolve reflects, in part, a deep attachment to home for rural Japanese like Mr. Watanabe, whose family has lived in Okuma for 19 generations. Their heartfelt appeals to go back have won wide sympathy across Japan, making it hard for people to oppose their wishes.

But quiet resistance has begun to grow, both among those who were displaced and those who fear the country will need to sacrifice too much without guarantees that a multibillion-dollar cleanup will pr

ovide enough protection.

Soothing pronouncements by local governments and academics about the eventual ability to live safely near the ruined plant can seem to be based on little more than hope.

No one knows how much exposure to low doses of radiation causes a significant risk of premature death. That means Japanese living in contaminated areas are likely to become the subjects of future studies — the second time in seven decades that Japanese have become a test case for the effects of radiation exposure, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The national government has declared itself responsible for cleaning up only the towns in the evacuation zone; local governments have already begun cleaning cities and towns outside that area.

Inside the 12-mile ring, which includes Futaba, the Environmental Ministry has pledged to reduce radiation levels by half within two years — a relatively easy goal because short-lived isotopes will deteriorate. The bigger question is how long it will take to reach the ultimate goal of bringing levels down to about 1 millisievert per year, the annual limit for the general public from artificial sources of radiation that is recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. That is a much more daunting task given that it will require removing cesium 137, an isotope that will remain radioactive for decades.

Trial cleanups have been delayed for months by the search for a storage site for enough contaminated dirt to fill 33 domed football stadiums. Even evacuated communities have refused to accept it.

And Tomoya Yamauchi, the radiation expert from Kobe University who performed tests in Fukushima City

after extensive remediation efforts, found that radiation levels inside homes had dropped by only about 25 percent. That left parts of the city with levels of radiation four times higher than the recommended maximum exposure.

“We can only conclude that these efforts have so far been a failure,” he said.

Minamisoma, a small city whose center sits about 15 miles from the nuclear plant, is a good place to get a sense of the likely limitations of decontamination efforts.

The city has cleaned dozens of schools, parks and sports facilities in hopes of enticing back the 30,000 of its 70,000 residents who have yet to return since the accident. On a recent morning, a small army of bulldozers and dump trucks were resurfacing a high school soccer field and baseball diamond with a layer of reddish brown dirt. Workers buried the old topsoil in a deep hole in a corner of the soccer field. The crew’s overseer, Masahiro Sakura, said readings at the field had dropped substantially, but he remains anxious because many parts of the city were not expected to be decontaminated for at least two years.

These days, he lets his three young daughters outdoors only to go to school and play in a resurfaced park. “Is it realistic to live like this?” he asked.

The challenges are sure to be more intense inside the 12-mile zone, where radiation levels in some places have reached nearly 510 millisieverts a year, 25 times above the cutoff for evacuation.

Already, the proposed repatriation has opened rifts among those who have been displaced. The 11,500 displaced residents of Okuma — many of whom now live in rows of prefabricated homes 60 miles inland

— are enduring just such a divide.

The mayor, Mr. Watanabe, has directed the town to draw up its own plan to return to its original location within three to five years by building a new town on farmland in Okuma’s less contaminated western edge.

Although Mr. Watanabe won a recent election, his challenger found significant support among residents with small children for his plan to relocate to a different part of Japan. Mitsue Ikeda, one supporter, said she would never go home, especially after a medical exam showed that her 8-year-old son, Yuma, had ingested cesium.

“It’s too dangerous,” Ms. Ikeda, 47, said. “How are we supposed to live, by wearing face masks all the time?”

She, like many other evacuees, berated the government, saying it was fixated on cleaning up to avoid paying compensation.

Many older residents, by contrast, said they should be allowed to return.

“Smoking cigarettes is more dangerous than radiation,” said Eiichi Tsukamoto, 70, who worked at the Daiichi plant for 40 years as a repairman. “We can make Okuma a model to the world of how to restore a community after a nuclear accident.”

But even Mr. Kodama, the radiation expert who supports a government cleanup, said such a victory would be hollow, and short-lived if young people did not return. He suggested that the government start rebuilding communities by rebuilding trust eroded over months of official evasion.

“Saving Fukushima requires not just money and effort, but also faith,” he said. “There is no point i

f only older people go back.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1207: DINING & WINE - SPIRITS OF THE TIMESFrom Scotland, Fog and Smoke and Mystery ... By ERIC ASIMOVThe panel tasted 2o single malts from Islay, smoky whiskies that demand a sense of wonder.===== notyetTASTING whiskies can be a clinical, prosaic task, nosing and assessing, jotting notes, reconsidering, lips compressed in concentration, brow furrowed. Yet, as the spirits panel tasted 20 single malts from Islay, we reminded ourselves to step back a moment, to contemplate with no small amount of awe the magic of what was in the glass. Islay demands a sense of wonder.

I’ve never visited Islay, that island off Scotland’s western coast with the evocative pronunciation EYE-lah. But sipping a good Islay single malt, with its astounding range of complex expressions, transports you to an Islay that seems as mythical as it is real.

It’s a world unscarred by modernity’s claws, an island of fog, smoke, brine and mystery, where ancient distilleries, after years of throbbing production, go dark when demand wanes. There they sit, abandoned on the green and craggy landscape, their distinctive pagoda roofs intact, yet silent like phantom freighters.

Some remain that way, their sites revered like ancient stone circles by whisky lovers. For others comes reincarnation when market conditions change again. The ghostly cobwebs are cleared away, the pot stills rejuvenated, and once more they will yield the precious distilled vapors of malted barley, peat, yeast, crystalline water and air.

If it seems odd to consider air an ingredient, you have to stick your nose in a glass of Islay single malt. Along with all the other components, a savory whiff of salty sea breeze is unmistakable.

The sense of mystery in the terrain is palpable as well. “As you explore you can see how it compresses its secrets into tight parcels: dune-fringed beaches, remote hills, cliffs, caves, peat bogs, standing stones, lost parliaments, abandoned townships and Celtic memories,” Michael Jackson wrote in “Whiskey: The Definitive World Guide” (DK, 2005). “It is a tapestry of geographical and historical treasures through which whiskey runs like a golden thread.”

It’s this air of mystery, along with a reputation for the smokiest, most robust and challenging malts, that seems to set Islay apart from Scotland’s other whisky regions. Most experts, however, agree that whiskies can no longer be classified geographically. Production methods have become so homogenized that they no longer reflect local eccentricities as much as they do a distiller’s predilections.

The smokiness comes from the tradition of using peat — bog soil made of decomposed vegetable matter that was harvested to fuel kilns used for drying barley. Assertive peating has long been a trait of famous Islay malts, like Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg, but it is not exclusive to Islay. And just as much a part of the Islay tradition are gentler malts like Bunnahabhain (BUN-na-hah-ven) and Bruichladdich (brook-LAD-dy), which are lighter in body and more floral than peaty. Another tradition, shared throughout Scotland, seems to be names that are impossible to sound out phonetically.

Our 20 Islay single malts included bottles from each of the eight working Islay distilleries. Indeed, two of the eight, Bruichladdich and Ardbeg, were dormant for years, only to be reawakened to disti

ll again. The revival of another distillery, Port Charlotte, is planned.

With 20 whiskies, we tried to mix in widely available, well-known bottles with some of each distillery’s more esoteric malts. We also included one mystery malt, a bottle packaged by a whisky merchant who does not reveal the actual distiller.

For the tasting Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Flavien Desoblin, an owner of the Brandy Library in TriBeCa, which has more than 250 single malts on its list, including 50 from Islay. Also with us was Pete Wells, who next month takes over as the restaurant critic.

The gathering of 20 samples from Islay made it as clear as a Scottish spring that whatever traits the whiskies had in common were overshadowed by their differences.

“To pull utterly different characters out of essentially the same material is stunning,” Pete said. “It’s a wonderful demonstration of range and diversity.”

The tasting also testified to the high level of quality in Islay malts. Seven of the eight distilleries were represented among our top 10, and the eighth did not miss the cut by much. Islay malts are not cheap. With a cap at $100, our 20 bottles ranged from $36 to $97, with 16 of them $50 or over.

Our No. 1 bottle was one of the easiest Islay malts to find, the Laphroaig 10-Year-Old. It was one of the smokiest of the group yet one of the subtlest and most complex as well, with all of the rich medicinal, waxy, savory and saline flavors that people associate with Islay, but with an underlying sweetness, too. At $45, it was also our best value.

By contrast, the Laphroaig 18-Year-Old, our No. 5

bottle, was less bracing and mellower. The smokiness was more of an undercurrent, amplifying its floral, honey and meadowlike qualities.

We found similar distinctions in comparing two other pairs of bottles that made our list. Our No. 2 bottle, the Ardbeg Corryvreckan, was huge and robust, with layers of complex flavors. Smokiness was only a small part of the majestic picture. Its 10-year-old sibling, the No. 4 bottle, was likewise complex, but emphasized a briny, smoky, almost oceanic quality.

Our No. 3 bottle, the Lagavulin Distillers Edition 1993, showed the warm, burnished complexity of age with a spicy, raisiny fruitcake quality that perhaps attests to time spent in barrels previously used for sweet sherry. The basic Lagavulin 16 Years, our No. 10, though not appreciably younger, was much less complex, mildly smoky with both savory and sweet flavors. I must say that, as a fan of Lagavulin 16 Years, which I remember as so robust it demanded a bit of water for sipping, this example seemed a bit meek.

The bottles rounding out our list show the range of Islay. Bruichladdich, No. 7, was the gentlest, most delicate malt, with sweet notes of butterscotch. Caol Ila, No. 9, was huge and oily in texture, smoky yet fresh, too. In the middle was Bowmore, No. 8, rich, balanced, moderate, delicious nonetheless.

That leaves the new guy, Kilchoman, which began production in 2005. Its Spring 2011 Release was one of the youngest in our tasting, if you do the arithmetic, yet it was superb, fresh and complex with plenty of smoke.

Bunnahabhain was the only Islay distillery not on our top-10 list, and although Florence and Flavien loved the 18-year-old (the $97 bottle), it barely

missed the cut. Other bottles worth recommending that did not overcome the stiff competition include Bowmore’s 15-Years-Old Darkest, which Flavien and Pete especially liked, and the Laphroaig Triple Wood, which we all liked.

And the mystery malt? It was simply called Smokehead, a whisky that, judging by its busy graphics and aggressive packaging, is being marketed to young single-malt newcomers. It was powerful and smoky, and Pete and I liked it more than Flavien and Florence did.

“It’s for peat freaks,” Flavien said.

Guilty. But I will allow that, while I liked it, I would not classify Smokehead among the more contemplative malts in the bunch. No, for woolgathering and armchair voyaging, preferably in front of a fire, I would be most happy with any of our favorites. I prefer them straight, with maybe a spoonful of water and an equal amount of wonder. As the song goes, thinking is the best way to travel.

Tasting Report

BEST VALUELaphroaig Islay, $45, *** ?10 Years, 43%Heavily smoked, richly medicinal, savory, subtle, complex and deep. (Laphroaig Import, Deerfield, Ill.)

Ardbeg Islay, $80, *** ?Corryvreckan, 57.1%Lightly smoky and sweet with rich citrus, soy and saline flavors. (Moet Hennessy, New York)

Lagavulin Islay, $90, *** ?Distillers Edition 1993 Double Matured, 43%Complex and mellow with flavors of smoke, wax, citrus and fruitcake. (Diageo, Norwalk, Conn.)

Ardbeg Islay, $50, *** ?10 Years, 46%Multidimensional and oceanic with smoky, briny, medicinal flavors. (Moet Hennessy)

Laphroaig Islay, $75, ***18 Years, 48%Like a meadow, with aromas of flowers, honey, spices and a light touch of smoke and citrus. (Laphroaig Import)

Kilchoman Islay, $65, ***Spring 2011 Release, 46%Fresh yet complicated with aromas of smoke, butter cream and citrus. (Impex Beverages, Burlingame, Calif.)

Bruichladdich Islay, $52, ***12 Years Second Edition, 46%Gentle and mild, with aromas and flavors of citrus, honey, flowers and butterscotch. (Winebow, New York)

Bowmore Islay, $45, ***12 Years, 40%Rich and well balanced with aromas of flowers, forest and beeswax, and an underlying smokiness. (Skyy Spirits, San Francisco)

Caol Ila Islay, $57, ** ?12 Years, 43%Big, broad and almost oily in texture, with ample citrus and smokiness yet a freshness as well. (Diageo, Norwalk, Conn.)

Lagavulin Islay, $57, ** ?16 Years, 43%Pleasant and mildly smoky, with savory flavors but also a creamy sweetness. (Diageo, Norwalk, Conn.)~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1207: DINING & WINEWith Rude Names, Wine Stops Minding Its Manners ... By WILLIAM GRIMESA growing army of budget-priced wines with names like Bitch and Fat Bastard have shoved their way into stores.===== notyetIT’S peppery and full of fight. The tannins have grip. The nose takes no prisoners. This shiraz is a bitch.

It says so on the label. Royal Bitch is the name of the wine, one of a teeming sisterhood of cabernets and chardonnays from a variety of producers with labels like Sassy Bitch, Jealous Bitch, Tasty Bitch and Sweet Bitch. They’re reinforcements for a growing army of rude, budget-priced wines that have shoved their way into wine stores and supermarkets in the past few years — most recently Happy Bitch, a Hudson Valley rose that made its debut last month.

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, an agency of the Treasury Department, approves about 120,000 applications for wine labels every year. Most names are traditional, often genteel, especially at the lower price points. It’s natural for a chardonnay or cabernet priced below $15 or even $10 to buff the image a bit. Woodbridge, Coastal Estates and Turning Leaf could be suburban subdivisions.

Then there are the others. Wines like the Ball Buster, a beefy shiraz-cabernet-merlot blend from the Barossa Valley in Australia. Or BigAss Red, from Milano Family Winery in California. Or Stench, an Australian sparkler from R Winery, the company that collaborated with the American importer Dan Philips of the Grateful Palate in 2004 to get the postfeminist ball rolling with a grenache named, simply, Bitch.

Like a slap across the face, Bitch grabbed the att

ention of a certain type of consumer, primarily young women en route to a bachelorette or divorce party, or looking for a special way to say, “I love you” on Mother’s Day.

“They can buy it and say, ‘Here, bitch, I bought you a present,’ ” said John F. Umbach, the owner of Joseph Victori Wines, which distributes Royal Bitch and Sweet Bitch.

Chatham Imports sensed the appeal of an irreverent women’s drink in 2005 when one of its distributors developed a promotional rum cocktail called Jealous Bitch and shopped it around, diffidently, to bars and nightclubs. The sales representatives were a little nervous about how the name might go over. But young women loved it, and the company developed a wine to match the name.

“The thing is, if you come out with a conservative label, it’s hard to separate yourself from the herd on the shelf,” Mr. Umbach said. “The competition is just brutal.”

The competition is especially keen at the lower end of the market, where winemakers clamor for the attention of consumers looking for a drinkable chardonnay or cabernet for under $20.

For years, winemakers and marketers have been frantically popularizing their products, shedding the chateau image and embracing a blue-collar beer aesthetic. Last year, the top-selling wine brand in the United States was Barefoot. The label shows not a stately mansion among the vines, but the footprint of one of the winery’s former owners.

That irreverence reflects an evolution in the cultural presentation of wine that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mapped in the recent exhibition “How Wine Became Modern: Design and Wine 1976 to Now.” Traditionally, wine labels were purely info

rmational. “Around 1980, however — earlier in the New World, somewhat later in Europe — labels became surfaces for communication, projecting a brand identity for the wine and trying to reach a target audience,” said Henry Urbach, an architectural curator who organized the exhibition with the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro.

Casual became cheeky. Now, cheeky has given way to saucy. In 2005, Brandever Strategy, a Vancouver brand consultancy, was hired by Scherzinger Estates, a sleepy winery in British Columbia, to create a new image and name. It came up with Dirty Laundry Vineyard — an allusion to a Chinese laundry and bordello that flourished nearby during the gold rush era.

“Your immediate reaction is, this is not a good name for a wine, but that’s why it is a good name,” said Bernie Hadley-Beauregard, a principal in Brandever. “It has a scratchy hook to it.”

Highway workers posted a new sign along the local wine route. Traffic into the winery increased tenfold. “The owner called me and said, ‘We haven’t done any advertising, but suddenly we’re the toast of the Okanagan Valley.’ ”

The newer, racier-sounding wines are unlikely to displace Barefoot, but they all chase the same dream. On the golden horizon, they see Fat Bastard, a line of wines from the Languedoc-Roussillon region that was introduced in the United States in 1998.

Imported by Peter Click of Click Wine Group, the line sold just over 2,000 cases at $10 a bottle in its first year. By 2004, Fat Bastard was selling 425,000 cases, making it one of the most popular French wines in the United States.

The other wines do not come close to those numbers, but they have their little niche. Jim Knight, a

salesman and buyer at the Wine House in Los Angeles, which stocks about 7,000 labels, says he sells about five cases of Bitch and the Ball Buster every month. “We carry them because people ask for them,” he said. “They’re good wines that people can give with a smile on their face.”

John Gorman, the vice president of sales and marketing at Southern Starz, which imports the Ball Buster, said, “The wine makes its way to a lot of lawyers from their clients.”

Under the rules of the federal alcohol bureau, labels cannot contain incorrect or misleading information, disparage a competitor’s product, or have a statement or image that is obscene or indecent. But the agency routinely gives the go-ahead for tasteless or risque labels, which was not always the case.

“It’s actually a good place to see the cultural fault lines shift,” said Robert C. Lehrman, whose company, Lehrman Beverage Law, advises clients on government regulations. “Because of a series of commercial speech decisions, not many things are off limits anymore.”

Winemakers have some way to go before equaling the shock value of Jersey’s Toxic Waste, a specialty spirit. But the bitch category may yield dividends. Take Rae-Jean Beach, a blended white wine. (The name needs to be said aloud.) She’s got a husband, a zinfandel. Sorry, but the name is not printable here.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1207: OP-EDA Reluctant Enemy ... By IAN W. TOLLThe architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor had been against going to war with the United States at all.===== notyet

San Francisco - ON a bright Hawaiian Sunday morning 70 years ago today, hundreds of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor and laid waste to the United States Pacific Fleet. The American people boiled over in righteous fury, and America plunged into World War II. The “date which will live in infamy” was the real turning point of the war, which had been raging for more than two years, and it opened an era of American internationalism and global security commitments that continues to this day.

By a peculiar twist of fate, the Japanese admiral who masterminded the attack had persistently warned his government not to fight the United States. Had his countrymen listened, the history of the 20th century might have turned out much differently.

Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto foresaw that the struggle would become a prolonged war of attrition that Japan could not hope to win. For a year or so, he said, Japan might overrun locally weak Allied forces — but after that, its war economy would stagger and its densely built wood-and-paper cities would suffer ruinous air raids. Against such odds, Yamamoto could “see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy.” His Pearl Harbor operation, he confessed, was “conceived in desperation.” It would be an all-or-nothing gambit, a throw of the dice: “We should do our best to decide the fate of the war on the very first day.”

During the Second World War and for years afterward, Americans despised Yamamoto as an archvillain, the perpetrator of an ignoble sneak attack, a personification of “Oriental treachery.” Time magazine published his cartoon likeness on its Dec. 22, 1941, cover — sinister, glowering, dusky yellow complexion — with the headline “Japan’s Aggressor.” He was said to have boasted that he would “dictate terms of peace in the White House.”

Yamamoto made no such boast — the quote was taken out of context from a private letter in which he had made precisely the opposite point. He could not imagine an end to the war short of his dictating terms in the White House, he wrote — and since Japan could not hope to conquer the United States, that outcome was inconceivable.

In fact, Yamamoto was one of the most colorful, charismatic and broad-minded naval officers of his generation. He had graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War. As a 21-year-old ensign, he fought in one of the most famous sea battles in history — the Battle of Tsushima, in 1905, a lopsided Japanese victory that shocked the world and forced Czar Nicholas II to sue for peace. Yamamoto was wounded in the action and wore the scars to prove it — his lower midsection was badly pockmarked by shrapnel, and he lost two fingers on his left hand.

In the course of his naval career, he traveled widely through the United States and Europe, learning enough English — mostly during a two-year stint at Harvard soon after World War I — to read books and newspapers and carry on halting conversations. He read several biographies of Lincoln, whom he admired as a man born into poverty who rose to become a “champion” of “human freedom.”

From 1926 to 1928 he served as naval attache in Washington; while in America, he journeyed alone across the country, paying his way with his own meager salary, stretching his budget by staying in cheap hotels and skipping meals. His travels revealed the growing power of the American industrial machine. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”

Yamamoto didn’t drink; for vices, he preferred wom

en and gambling. He played shogi (Japanese chess), poker and bridge aggressively, and for high stakes. In Tokyo, Yamamoto spent his nights among the geishas of the Shinbashi district, who nicknamed him 80 sen. (A manicure cost one yen, equivalent to 100 sen; since he had only eight fingers he demanded a discount.)

When Yamamoto appeared in uniform, on the deck of his flagship or before Emperor Hirohito, he was the picture of hatchet-faced solemnity. But in other settings he was prone to sentimentality, as when he freely wept at the death of a subordinate, or poured out his heart in letters to his geisha lover.

During the political turmoil of the 1930s, Yamamoto was a leading figure in the navy’s moderate “treaty faction,” known for its support of unpopular disarmament treaties. He criticized the mindlessly bellicose rhetoric of the ultranationalist right and opposed the radicals who used revolutionary violence and assassinations to achieve their ends. He despised the Japanese Army and its leaders, who subverted the power of civilian ministers and engineered military adventures in Manchuria and other parts of China.

As navy vice minister from 1936 to 1939, Yamamoto staked his life on forestalling an alliance with Nazi Germany. Right-wing zealots condemned him as a “running dog” of the United States and Britain and vowed to assassinate him. A bounty was reportedly placed on his head. He received letters warning him of an impending punishment “on heaven’s behalf,” and authorities discovered a plot to blow up a bridge as he passed over it.

In August 1939, Yamamoto was named commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, the highest seagoing command in the Japanese Navy. (As it placed him beyond the reach of his enemies, the appointment probably saved his life.) From his flagship, Nagato, us

ually anchored in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto continued to warn against joining with the Nazis. He reminded his government that Japan imported around four-fifths of its oil and steel from areas controlled by the Allies. To risk conflict, he wrote, was foolhardy, because “there is no chance of winning a war with the United States for some time to come.”

But Japan’s confused and divided government drifted toward war while refusing to face the strategic problems it posed. It signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in Berlin in September 1940. As Yamamoto had predicted, the American government quickly restricted and finally cut off exports of oil and other vital materials. The sanctions brought events to a head, because Japan had no domestic oil production to speak of, and would exhaust its stockpiles in about a year.

Yamamoto realized he had lost the fight to keep Japan out of war, and he fell in line with the planning process. But he continued to ask critical questions. Two decades of strategic planning for a war with the United States had envisioned a clash of battleships in the western Pacific — a decisive battle like that at Tsushima. But Yamamoto now asked: What if the American fleet declined to play its part? What if the Americans instead chose to bide their time and build up their strength?

IN 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the fleet to Pearl Harbor. He had intended to signal that the United States Navy was in striking distance of Japan — but “conversely,” Yamamoto observed, “we’re within striking distance, too. In trying to intimidate us, America has put itself in a vulnerable position. If you ask me, they’re just that bit too confident.” Therein lay the germ of his plan to launch a sudden carrier air attack on the Hawaiian stronghold.

Adm. Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staf

f, stiffly resisted the proposed raid. His planners worried that it would expose the Japanese aircraft carriers to devastating counterstrikes. Yamamoto countered that the American Fleet was a “dagger pointed at Japan’s heart,” and surmised that the attack might even cause the Americans to recoil in shock and despair, “so that the morale of the U.S. Navy and the American people goes down to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.” At last, he threatened to resign unless his operation was approved, and Admiral Nagano capitulated: “If he has that much confidence, it’s better to let Yamamoto go ahead.”

Yamamoto appreciated the irony: having risked his life to prevent war with the United States, he was now its architect. “What a strange position I find myself in,” he wrote a friend, “having been assigned the mission diametrically opposed to my own personal opinion, with no choice but to push full speed in pursuance of that mission. Alas, is that fate?”

And yet even in the final weeks of peace, Yamamoto continued to urge that the wiser course was not to fight the United States at all. “We must not start a war with so little a chance of success,” he told Admiral Nagano. He recommended abrogating the Tripartite Pact and pulling Japanese troops out of China. Finally, he hoped that the emperor would intervene with a “sacred decision” against war. But the emperor remained silent.

On Dec. 7, 1941, all eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet were knocked out of action in the first half hour of the conflict. More than 180 American planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground, representing about two-thirds of the total American military aircraft in the Pacific theater. The Japanese carriers escaped with the loss of just 29 planes.

The Japanese people exulted, and Yamamoto was lift

ed in their eyes to the status of a demigod. Now he could dictate his wishes to the Tokyo admirals, and would continue to do so until his death in April 1943, when American fighters shot down his aircraft in the South Pacific.

And yet, Pearl Harbor aside, Yamamoto was not a great admiral. His strategic blunders were numerous and egregious, and were criticized even by his own subordinate officers.

Indeed, from a strategic point of view, Pearl Harbor was one of the most spectacular miscalculations in history. It aroused the American people to wage total, unrelenting war until Japan was conquered. Yamamoto was also directly responsible for Japan’s cataclysmic defeat at the Battle of Midway, and for the costly failure of his four-month campaign to recapture the island of Guadalcanal.

But perhaps the most important part of Yamamoto’s legacy was not his naval career at all, but the part he played in the boisterous politics of prewar Japan. He was one of the few Japanese leaders of his generation who found the moral courage to tell the truth — that waging war against the United States would invite a national catastrophe. As Japan lay in ashes after 1945, his countrymen would remember his determined exertions to stop the slide toward war. In a sense, Isoroku Yamamoto was vindicated by Japan’s defeat.

Ian W. Toll is the author of “Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208: OPINION: OPINIONATOR - THE STONEIntellectuals and Politics ... By GARY GUTTINGGood politicians don't need to be intellectuals, but they should at least have intellectual lives.===== notyet

The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to information and events that have appeared in the news.

The rise of Newt Gingrich, Ph.D.— along with the apparent anti-intellectualism of many of the other Republican candidates — has once again raised the question of the role of intellectuals in American politics.

In writing about intellectuals, my temptation is to begin by echoing Marianne Moore on poetry: I, too, dislike them. But that would be a lie: all else equal, I really like intellectuals. Besides, I’m an intellectual myself, and their self-deprecation is one thing I really do dislike about many intellectuals.

What is an intellectual? In general, someone seriously devoted to what used to be called the “life of the mind”: thinking pursued not instrumentally, for the sake of practical goals, but simply for the sake of knowing and understanding. Nowadays, universities are the most congenial spots for intellectuals, although even there corporatism and careerism are increasing threats.

Intellectuals tell us things we need to know: how nature and society work, what happened in our past, how to analyze concepts, how to appreciate art and literature. They also keep us in conversation with the great minds of our past. This conversation may not, as some hope, tap into a source of enduring wisdom, but it at least provides a critical standpoint for assessing the limits of our current cultural assumptions.

In his “Republic,” Plato put forward the ideal of a state ruled by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical c

apacity for applying it to concrete problems. In reality, no one has theoretical expertise in more than a few specialized subjects, and there is no strong correlation between having such knowledge and being able to use it to resolve complex social and political problems. Even more important, our theoretical knowledge is often highly limited, so that even the best available expert advice may be of little practical value. An experienced and informed non-expert may well have a better sense of these limits than experts strongly invested in their disciplines. This analysis supports the traditional American distrust of intellectuals: they are not in general highly suited for political office.

But it does not support the anti-intellectualism that tolerates or even applauds candidates who disdain or are incapable of serious engagement with intellectuals. Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives. Concretely, they should have an ability and interest in reading the sorts of articles that appear in, for example, Scientific American, The New York Review of Books, and the science, culture and op-ed sections of major national newspapers — as well as the books discussed in such articles.

It’s often said that what our leaders need is common sense, not fancy theories. But common-sense ideas that work in individuals’ everyday lives are often useless for dealing with complex problems of society as a whole. For example, it’s common sense that government payments to the unemployed will lead to more jobs because those receiving the payments will spend the money, thereby increasing demand, which will lead businesses to hire more workers. But it’s also common sense that if people are paid for not working, they will have less incentive to work, which will increase unemployment. The trick is to find the amount of unemployment benefits that will strike the most effective balance between stimulating demand and discouraging employmen

t. This is where our leaders need to talk to economists.

Knowing how to talk to economists and other experts is an essential skill of good political leaders. This in turn requires a basic understanding of how experts in various fields think and what they might have to offer for resolving a given problem. Leaders need to be intelligent “consumers” of expert opinions.

Our current electoral campaigns are not very good at determining candidates’ understanding of relevant intellectual issues. “Pop quizzes” from interviewers on historical or geographical facts don’t tell us much: those who know the answers may still have little grasp of fundamental policy questions, whereas a good grasp can be consistent with a lack of quick factual recall. Nor does reading sophisticated policy speeches that others have written or reciting pre-programmed talking points in interviews or news conferences tell us much about a candidate’s knowledge. Even quick-thinking responses in debates may indicate glibness rather than understanding.

The best evidence of how capable candidates are of fruitfully interacting with intellectuals would be to see them doing just this. Concretely, I make the follow suggestion for the coming presidential election: Gather small but diverse panels of eminent, politically uncommitted experts on, say, unemployment, the history of the Middle East, and climate science, and have each candidate lead an hour-long televised discussion with each panel. The candidates would not be mere moderators but would be expected to ask questions, probe disagreements, express their own ideas or concerns, and periodically summarize the state of discussion. Such engagements would provide some of the best information possible for judging candidates, while also enormously improving the quality of our political discourse.

A utopian fantasy? Very likely — but imagine a race between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, two former college professors, and who knows?~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208Military Flexes Its Muscles as Islamists Gain in Egypt ... By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKGen. Mokhtar al-Molla of Egypt's ruling military council said it would manage the writing of the country's new constitution in order to insure against an Islamist takeover.

NYT-1208Plot to Smuggle Qaddafi Son Into Mexico Is Disrupted, Government Official Says ... By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLDSaadi el-Qaddafi and his family were going to receive false documents identifying them as Mexican, the interior minister said.

NYT-1208Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret U.S. Surveillance Effort ... By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID E. SANGERHigh-altitude flights of stealth C.I.A. drones from bases in Afghanistan had been among the most secret of many American intelligence-collection efforts against Iran.

NYT-1208New Orleans Struggles to Stem Homicides ... By CAMPBELL ROBERTSONThe mayor says the problem is so bad that a student at a certain city high school was more likely to be killed than a soldier in Afghanistan.

NYT-1208Democrats See a Two-Horse G.O.P. Race, Adding a Whip ... By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERGThe White House and its allies hope to help stretch the Republican presidential nominating contest i

nto a longer and bloodier battle between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

NYT-12082 Character Models for a Single Cinematic Point: Winning Elections at Any Cost ... By ADAM NAGOURNEYTwo political movies seem likely to fuel debate over what is done in the name of winning elections.

NYT-1208New Romney Ad Turns Up Heat on Gingrich ... By MICHAEL D. SHEARMitt Romney's campaign has shifted gears with a newly aggressive phase, less than a month before the Iowa caucuses.

NYT-1208G.O.P. Candidates, at Jewish Coalition, Pledge to Be Israel's Best Friends ... By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.Most candidates suggested they would differ substantially from previous Democratic and Republican administrations on critical elements of the Middle East peace process.

NYT-1208Frenzy of Year-End Activity for Congress ... By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and ROBERT PEARWhile the first session of the 112th Congress was defined by bruising fiscal battles, Democrats and Republicans have now moved to the election-year stage of governing.

NYT-1208From Vacant to Vibrant ... By NICK BUNKLEYDevelopers, drawn by lower property values, have been purchasing closed auto plants, which have helped communities regain considerable tax revenue.

NYT-1208Phones Get Game Power in the Cloud ... By NICK WINGFIELD

The Silicon Valley start-up OnLive is introducing software to bring the power of its game service to mobile devices via so-called cloud computing.

NYT-1208White House Pushes Vote on Consumer Agency Chief ... By EDWARD WYATTPresident Obama is trying to sway enough Republican Senators to allow a vote on the nomination of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

NYT-1208Cellphones Test Strength of Gym Rules ... By CATHERINE SAINT LOUISThe versatility of smartphones is a challenge to gyms, who seek to block users who want to make a call, text or send e-mail.

NYT-1208Central Park, the Soundtrack ... By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.The music duo Bluebrain created Central Park (Listen to the Light), an app responding to a strolling visitor's location and movements.===== notyetClamp on headphones, start up the iPhone app by the musical duo Bluebrain and walk into Central Park. The music does not begin until you pass through an entrance and head into the trees. Then it sounds like an orchestra tuning up, a chaotic jumble of wind chimes, electronic moans and discordant strings. Push farther into the park, and a sweet violin melody emerges over languid piano chords.

As you walk, new musical themes hit you every 20 or 30 steps, as if they were emanating from statues, playgrounds, open spaces and landmarks. At the Bethesda Fountain a string quartet plays a hopeful march. The Kerbs Boathouse, with its tranquil pond full of model sailboats, triggers a soothing Pachelbel-like motif with a descending bass. Strolling

across Sheep Meadow you hear a pastoral piano theme with a bubbling undercurrent of electronic arpeggios.

The themes layer over one another, growing in volume as you approach certain points on the map and fading out as you move away. It’s a musical Venn diagram placed over the landscape, and at any time you might have two dozen tracks playing in your ears, all meshing and colliding in surprising ways. The path you take determines what you hear, and the biggest problem with what the composers call a “location-aware album” is that you may get blisters on your feet trying to hear it all.

“It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure album,” said Ryan Holladay, who forms this Washington electro-pop duo with his brother Hays.

They released the app, called Central Park (Listen to the Light), for the iPhone and iPad in October. The app is free, but the brothers hope the musical format will become a commercially viable medium. It uses a global positioning network to activate different themes as the listener wanders through the park. The app contains more than 400 tracks, each tied to a location. They were written to fit together harmonically like a sonic jigsaw puzzle.

The Holladays are not the only musicians harnessing such technology on iPhones, iPads and their imitators. Bjork turned her most recent album, “Biophilia,” into an audio-visual game of sorts for the iPhone, letting listeners rearrange and mix musical elements on some songs.

A few others have experimented with music shaped by the listener’s movements. In 2006 Jesse Stiles and Melissa St. Pierre of the Baltimore musical group Face Removal Services hitched a car’s global positioning system to a computer containing hundreds of dance beats on loops and created what they cal

led the Beatmap. As they drove the car across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the beats overlapped, creating complex mash-ups.

But Bluebrain’s project goes further, creating music that not only must be listened to in a specific place but also is inspired by the landscape itself.

“It’s not just that they are using this as a novel delivery mechanism,” said Peter Kirn, an electronic composer who edits the Web site Create Digital Music. “It’s part of their musical process. They are forcing you to go to a place because that place for them is musically meaningful.”

The idea for such a project came to the Holladay brothers more than two years ago, as they brainstormed about ways to use new applications available for the iPhone. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were an album that you would interact with in Central Park?” Hays recalled saying. “Then we started thinking about what would you be controlling, and we came to the idea of: What if it were your movement?”

It was easier said than done. It took months to find Brian Feldman, a Brooklyn software developer who was willing to work for little money up front. They worked out bugs in the program as they composed their first location-aware piece of music for the National Mall in their hometown; they released that app in May.

Mr. Feldman wrote a new software engine, which he named Sscape, for the application, borrowing ideas from video games that have different sound effects and background music tied to places in their virtual worlds. To use the program, the composers establish map coordinates for each track, and those tracks, usually loops of several minutes, are set off as the listener approaches. Last month the brothers hired a second software firm, Zamtools, in To

ronto, to improve and compress the program.

“We didn’t want something to sound like a machine,” Mr. Feldman said. “We wanted it to sound like these guys were conducting an orchestra and watching where you are walking.”

For Central Park the Holladays went for a classical feeling. The melodies are mostly stately, slow marches played on strings or the piano, usually involving a simple two- or four-chord progression, with some electronic chirps, loops and ambient sounds added in the higher registers or rumbling beneath the melody.

Josh Stewart, a 25-year-old publicist, who writes a blog about alternative music, was recently part of a group of 100 Bluebrain fans who came up from Washington to New York by chartered bus to try the new app.

At the Lake, Mr. Stewart recalled, he heard paddles in water keeping time to a string melody and had to take off the headphones to make sure the swishing rhythm was on the recording and not coming from boaters.

“You are walking around, and you are experiencing the park in your own way, and the music is kind of adapting to you,” he said. “I have never experienced anything else like that.”

The Holladay brothers grew up in Virginia, but say they fell in love with Central Park when they were going to college in New York in the late 1990s, Ryan at New York University and Hays at Columbia. While still students, they formed a five-piece electro-pop band, the Epochs, and made two albums before disbanding in 2008. In New York they were influenced by the works of the avant-garde composer Phil Kline and participated in his boom-box walks in Greenwich Village, during which dozens of people

carry tape players carrying different recordings that complement one another.

They moved back to Washington in the fall of 2009 and began performing as Bluebrain, playing offbeat electronic music and pursuing experimental projects. They have financed the two location-aware albums — which together have been downloaded more than 10,000 times — out of their own pockets, cajoling friends to play the string and percussion parts and recording the tracks at the Iguazu recording studio in Arlington, Va., where Hays, 27, works. Ryan, 29, is an art curator.

Mr. Feldman said the Central Park album only uses a fraction of his program’s potential. The program can create a virtual world of sound, with sources of music that move through the park and tracks that change depending on factors like the weather and the speed of the listener’s gait. “These guys are only scratching the surface,” he said.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208BlackBerry Maker Changes New Operating System's Name ... By IAN AUSTENLess than two months after Research in Motion announced that the new operating system to revive the BlackBerry brand would be called BBX, the company was ordered by a court not to use the name.===== notyetOTTAWA — Less than two months after Research In Motion announced that its new operating system to revive the BlackBerry brand would be called BBX, the company has changed its mind. Now, it will be called BlackBerry 10.

The late change followed the granting of a restraining order on Tuesday by a federal court in New Mexico to a small Albuquerque-based software maker, Basis International, that has long used the name BBx.

In a statement on Wednesday about the name change, RIM did not address the trademark infringement action by Basis International. “The BlackBerry 10 name reflects the significance of the new platform and will leverage the global strength of the BlackBerry brand while also aligning perfectly with RIM’s device branding,” the statement said. RIM did not respond to questions about whether it has abandoned the BBX name.

The sudden rebranding is the latest in a series of setbacks, both small and large, for RIM recently, including having to restate its financial guidance for the current quarter because of steep discounts on its tablet computer as well as the firing of two executives whose drunken outbursts forced the return of a Toronto-to-Beijing flight and led to criminal charges. The new financial guidance further depressed RIM’s already battered stock price.

The new phone operating system was developed by QNX Software Systems, a company based in Ottawa that RIM acquired last year. The BBX name appeared to be an attempt to meld the BlackBerry and QNX names.

Basis has been using both the BBX and BBx names for several years on products that allow developers to create apps that can work on any operating system.

“Even the more cursory search for the BBX trademark would have shown that we hold it,” said Nico Spence, the chief executive of Basis.

After RIM announced the BBX name at a developers’ conference in San Francisco in October, Basis sought a permanent injunction under trademark laws. It also asked for the temporary order, which is valid for only 14 days, to prevent RIM from using the name at its developers conference in Singapore this week.

Mr. Spence said Wednesday that he had not heard anything from RIM or its lawyers about the company’s new brand. He said that Basis would continue to seek a permanent injunction as well as damages from RIM. “Their announcement is certainly encouraging in that it looks like they are abandoning it, but it may only be temporary,” he said.

The new name follows RIM’s traditional practice of naming operating systems using numbers. The operating system it will replace is called BlackBerry 7.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOKConstantly Checking In, Without Ever Checking In ... By HOWARD BECKFor Howard Beck, the Times reporter who covered the N.B.A. lockout, the 149-day ordeal was spent inside and outside some of New York's finest hotels.===== notyetThis summer and fall, I spent 156 hours in some of New York’s finest hotels. I did not sleep, or shower, or earn rewards points. I was not, in the vernacular of the service industry, a “guest.” At times, I felt more like a hostage, subsisting on a diet of stale pizza, trail mix and anonymous sources.

To be a reporter covering the N.B.A. lockout was to enter a parallel universe, where normalcy was suspended, truth was pliable and time had no meaning. Absurdity reigned.

There were news conferences at 4 in the morning, Betty White sightings, a Gregg Popovich jog-by and a cameo by former President Bill Clinton.

Bargaining sessions stretched for 15 hours while we stood on sidewalks or loitered in chilled lobbies, or sweated in stuffy conference rooms with bad wallpaper.

Twitter turned into a newswire, a lifeline to the outside world and a catchphrase machine, all in one. A player’s inadvertent text message became a universal lockout greeting: “How u?”

For the dozen or so reporters who covered every meeting, it often felt like we were living in our own twisted reality show: “Survivor: Lockout Edition.”

The show mercifully ended at 3 a.m. Nov. 26, when owners and players at last agreed to a new labor deal, on the lockout’s 149th day. That deal is expected to be ratified Thursday, at yet another Midtown hotel, the final chapter of a dizzying stakeout saga.

To our great surprise, thousands of people joined us for the ride via Twitter, clicking and “retweeting” every trivial nugget (“Talks have broken for dinner”), every news conference quote (“Enormous consequences”) and every punch-drunk riff by reporters (“Mutant pizza”), no matter the hour.

During one late-night session at the Waldorf-Astoria, I heard from a Twitter follower in Australia. He was just getting out of work. My friend David Aldridge of TNT said he received Twitter responses from six continents that night. Everywhere but Antarctica, where I’m guessing the Wi-Fi is a little sketchy.

Covering a professional sports labor battle can be a thankless task. No one wants to hear about millionaire athletes and billionaire owners fighting over a $4 billion pie, especially in a depressed economy. The average fan wants to know only three things:

Is it over?

Who won?

How does it affect my team?

The rest is just posturing and mind-numbing jargon: escrow tax, BRI, repeater tax, the cliff, nontaxpayer midlevel exception.

Somehow, these issues and phrases found a dedicated audience which, through the beauty of modern technology, could respond to all of us in real time as we drifted into a late-night stupor at the Waldorf, or the Sheraton, or the Lowell Hotel.

Twitter provided instant gratification — Look, people care! — reassuring us in 140-character bursts that the endless stakeouts were worthwhile.

The fans helped keep us sane — along with reruns of “Seinfeld” streaming on the touchpad screens of Ken Berger of CBSSports.com and Alan Hahn of Newsday.

The fans kept us fed, too. A network of generous bloggers, coordinated by the salary-cap savant Larry Coon — out of pity or support — regularly sent us stacks of pizza. Marc Cornstein, a New York-based player agent, sent two massive deli platters (thus inspiring a new sandwich title, the Cornstein on rye). The Brooklyn-bound Nets also sent pizza one afternoon, to the chagrin of the Waldorf security staff, which harrumphed at the stack of cardboard boxes in their pristine lobby. (That lobby was routinely chilled to what felt like 55 degrees, which at least helped keep us awake.)

The various hotel staffs generally tolerated us as we gradually took over every couch, every table and every wall outlet, our own little Occupy movement.

It was while waiting in the Waldorf lobby, on Oct. 26, that we had our Betty White sighting. She was

being honored at the 21st annual Broadcasting & Cable Hall Of Fame awards. She left around 5:15 a.m., presumably after a solid night of sleep. I was still typing.

Clinton passed through after a Nov. 8 player meeting at the Sheraton. He stopped long enough to shake hands, hug the union president Derek Fisher and hand out copies of his book, before heading to a “Daily Show” taping.

Along the way, I learned that the Cole Porter piano, in the Waldorf lobby, is a major tourist attraction. (We resisted the urge to plank it.) I learned that the Lowell, a boutique hotel on East 63rd Street, makes amazing chocolate-chip cookies. The Lowell also provided my back rest, as I sat on the 63rd Street sidewalk on the night of Oct. 4, and wrote that the N.B.A. had just canceled the first two weeks of the season.

The hotels were chosen, often at the last minute, based on the availability of conference rooms. N.B.A. officials had a particular affinity for the Lowell, which had a tiny lobby, forcing us to wait outside.

Passers-by, many of them walking tiny dogs, often asked if we were waiting for someone famous. No, we told them, just David Stern.

During one of the early stakeouts, Popovich, the San Antonio Spurs coach, jogged by and seemed startled to find N.B.A. reporters on the sidewalk. He claimed to have no idea that negotiations, which involved the Spurs owner Peter Holt, were going on nearby.

On another night, I watched a man surreptitiously videotape a couple having dinner at the French bistro across the street. Apparently, someone was about to get divorced.

That same night, two TV cameramen fought – poorly — after angrily wrestling for position during Stern’s sidewalk press conference. That was the last time the sides used the Lowell.

We thought the odyssey would end much sooner. For a minute, we thought it had. On Sept. 8, Roger Mason Jr., a member of the players’ executive board, sent out a Twitter message: “Looking like a season. How u.” Mason said the message was inadvertent and was not intended as a prediction.

Mason’s misstep spawned a lockout meme, later joined by “marathon session,” “mutant pizza” and “enormous consequences” in the lockout lexicon. An N.B.A. blog, Outside the Arc, immortalized them in a lyrical tribute, put to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

The last night was the longest. I filed an article announcing the lockout’s end around 6:30 a.m. The sun was rising as a cab took me over the Manhattan Bridge. The New York Times was already on my stoop. The most surreal chapter in my N.B.A. reporting career had reached its weary conclusion.

With a vote by N.B.A. owners on Thursday afternoon, a sense of normalcy will return.

It is, finally, looking like a season. How u?~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208Millions? Private Jet? Columbia Offers New York ... By ANDREW KEHColumbia, which is searching for a new coach after a 1-9 season, can't compete with the likes of Ohio State, but it does have its advantages.===== notyetEarly one morning last week, inside Columbia’s subterranean athletic center in Upper Manhattan, M. D

ianne Murphy leaned over a conference table and wrapped her fingers around a disposable cup of coffee. There was no time to sleep these days, she said.

Murphy, the university’s athletic director, was in the midst of a nationwide hunt for a new football coach, a circumstance shared by a high number of top-flight programs this fall. Earlier that week, Ohio State made headlines by hiring Urban Meyer, the former coach at Florida, enticing him with a compensation package that included a base salary of $4 million per year, a country club membership, a $12,000 automobile stipend and the use of a private jet.

As Murphy, bleary-eyed yet cheerful, prepared for another day of telephone interviews, the situation in Columbus seemed a far cry from the situation at Columbia. The quirks of coaching Ivy League football — not to mention finding a coach in the first place — are well known, but the idiosyncrasies feel multiplied at Columbia, a university in the heart of a bustling city with a football program famous for losing 44 straight games in the 1980s. And, of course, Murphy does not have an airplane to use as a bargaining chip.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Murphy said with a laugh. “Yeah, that would be nice. But the right person for us is probably sitting in coach somewhere.”

Murphy arrived at Columbia in 2005 with the task of revitalizing a floundering athletics department, and in many respects she has seen success. Sports at Columbia have found some new respectability. This past season, the men’s cross-country team qualified for the N.C.A.A. nationals for the first time and the men’s soccer team came within a goal of its first league title since 1993.

Football, though, has continued to lag. This year,

the team did not win a game until the final day of the season. The next morning, the coach, Norries Wilson, was fired. He finished with a record of 17-43 in six seasons.

For decades, the football team has been at best a punch line and at worst an object of scorn. Last week, the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, ran a column questioning whether the team should exist at all, painting the program as antithetical to the university’s academic values.

Jim Pagels, one of the newspaper’s sports editors, said the views did not represent the majority of the student body, but that the football team in his view was indeed marginalized. “There is not a real resentment or a call to disband the football team,” he said. “But I think in general there is widespread apathy and indifference.”

Taken together, these factors might at first glance afford Murphy’s search a measure of quaintness. Yet, there are indications that the vacant job — though lacking in outward glamour — might be an unexpectedly enviable one.

The average salary for the head coaches of Columbia’s 14 men’s teams last year was $93,984, according to a report from the United States Department of Education. The same report showed the university had spent $2,670,238 — far less than Meyer’s new annual salary — to cover the combined expenses of the entire football program.

The football coach, however, is compensated at a level comparable to senior administration officials and top faculty members, according to people familiar with the program, and his base salary is actually closer to $250,000. Other benefits can include an apartment in Manhattan and assistance in enrolling a coach’s children in the competitive, university-run elementary school on the Upper West Side.

And the bonuses, many say, run deeper than that.

“The perks in the Ivy League are more intangible than they are material,” said Tom Beckett, the athletic director at Yale. “The perks and salaries at these other big schools, that’s not going to happen. But there are wonderful things that do happen.”

Ivy League universities emphasize the prestige of their institutions to coaching candidates. This year, Columbia was No. 4 in U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of national universities, and people at the university consider its alumni network to be particularly strong.

The athletic department in 2007 received pledges of $10 million from William V. Campbell, the chairman of the board of Intuit, and $5 million from Robert K. Kraft, the chairman of the Kraft Group and the owner of the New England Patriots. Both played football at Columbia. Campbell is also the chairman of Columbia’s trustees, giving the team a powerful advocate on campus.

“Even successful alums from other areas of the school don’t have the same affinity for the school that athletes do,” said Jake Novak, a senior producer at Fox Business who chronicles Columbia athletics on a widely read blog. “They can open so many doors for a coach and give him entree into a different world in New York.”

Novak and others said that for a savvy coach, the Columbia job was a sparkling opportunity. The administration has shown a new commitment to athletics, as evidenced by recent increases in operating budgets, the opening next year of a new primary facility for the athletics department and efforts to help athletes in areas like class scheduling.

“Fifteen years ago, there was a long list of thing

s needed for the program to even begin to be competitive, and that list has now largely been eliminated,” said Mike Griffin, who was an assistant athletic director from 1996 to 2004.

And the endless losing seasons, combined with these recent advances, creates a sort of job security, where a handful of victories would be a major success and losses would not create undue pressure.

“There’s a certain hope-springs-eternal quality within the job,” said Jim McMenemin, the director of principal gifts and senior adviser to the dean of the college. “This is particularly true now, as university leadership is fully behind the football program being successful and believes it to be compatible with the academic and intellectual culture of the university.”

Murphy acknowledged the futility of Columbia football, pointing out that it had only five winning seasons since 1956. She disputed, though, the characterization of Columbia as apathetic toward football. As an example — one she said she was disappointed to see — she said Wilson’s wife had been subjected to rude comments from angry fans at recent home games.

She believes steadfastly that football is a core element of the college experience, even in New York.

Murphy said in the past she had been “naive” about the influence of the city on the job, discounting such factors like the cost of living and where a coach would send his children to school. Now, she said, the city was one of her strongest selling points and that a candidate’s enthusiasm for it would be a primary concern as she looks to hire a coach before a self-imposed Dec. 15 deadline.

“There’s nothing like New York,” Murphy said. “And

if you’re going to be frustrated because the subway is slow, you’re not going to do well here.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208To Sleep on the Subway, Maybe, but to Dream? Poor Chance ... By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEYA sleep researcher, with the aid of a drowsy straphanger, set out to discover whether dozing underground was worth its while.===== notyetA ride on the New York subway can be a sensory overload: musicians perform for change; conductors plead to those who hold open train doors to relent; and passengers, often in unimaginably close proximity, subject one another to all sorts of sights, sounds, smells and touches, preferably inadvertent.

Amid all of that, some New Yorkers nevertheless manage to fall asleep. Seats are found, trains begin their rhythmic rattles of movement, and eyelids flutter closed. Gritted jaws loosen, furrowed brows release and heads nod.

People outside of New York may wonder how in a city that never sleeps, so many New Yorkers manage to doze on the subway. There is no law against it, but those who take subway catnaps do so at their own risk; a recent Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee meeting featured a presentation on how criminals seeking iPhones slice open the pockets of dozing passengers.

So are these naps really worth the trouble?

Dr. Carl Bazil, director of the Epilepsy and Sleep Division at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, offered to try to find out.

After Dr. Bazil stepped into an uptown A train on

a recent morning, he tried to guess what stage of sleep the nappers onboard were in. He said that to reach Stage 1 sleep, the least restorative of the five stages, riders must be able to slow down their eye movements. To get Stage 2 sleep, riders must relax their muscles and stop moving their eyes entirely.

As Dr. Bazil watched the riders sitting across from him, the nappers’ eyelids fluttered when train doors opened. The riders also seemed to clench their messenger bags and backpacks with death grips.

“I suspect all you get is Stage 1 sleep; it’s not going to be restorative,” he said. “It’s kind of wasted sleep.”

At a reporter’s request, Dr. Bazil wired up a sleepy subway rider to study his brain waves as he tried to nap. He enlisted Dr. Brandon Foreman, a 30-year-old neurology fellow, whose 2-year-old son, Jude, still does not sleep through the night. Neither does Dr. Foreman.

But he has observed how the subway lulls his son to sleep, so he tries to replicate the train’s stops and jerks when he puts his son to bed. Dr. Foreman is no stranger to subway napping: He began doing so when commuting from Brooklyn during his residency, and said he coveted any sleep he could get.

“Lectures, classes, I can pretty much sleep anywhere,” Dr. Foreman said. “But it’s not usually a great sleep. It’s more the nodding off.”

Both doctors met at the end of a long workweek after Dr. Foreman had been up every night dealing with his son’s cold. As Dr. Foreman yawned, Dr. Bazil had a technician attach 25 multicolored plastic wires to Dr. Foreman’s head, connecting them to a monitor slightly larger than an iPod to track his brain waves. Then Dr. Foreman covered the wires wit

h a long sock and a winter hat.

The pair got onto a southbound A train at 207th Street. After Dr. Foreman chose a corner seat, Dr. Bazil sat across from him to take notes. When the train left the station at 6:09 p.m., it seemed unlikely that Dr. Foreman would get any sleep. The train’s operator screeched the cars along as if she were training for Formula One. She shouted into the loudspeakers that her train was late, and peeled from stop to stop.

Dr. Foreman yawned, folded his arms, crossed his legs and shut his eyes. He opened his eyes when the train stopped. His eyes fluttered when several neurologists boarded and chatted over his shoulder. The train jostled. He opened his eyes and yawned deeply.

By 6:18 p.m., two minutes after Dr. Foreman left the 168th Street station, he looked as if he was falling asleep. He first held his head up and kept his arms crossed. But he let his head nod back and forth slightly. Then his head fell, and he dozed until 59th Street — no doubt aided by the uninterrupted run from 125th Street. As the doors opened at 59th Street, Dr. Foreman jumped up and hopped off the train.

After they briefly celebrated what looked like a successful subway nap, the doctors boarded an uptown train to see if Dr. Foreman could fall asleep again. Dr. Foreman found a seat lodged between two passengers. He put on his jacket hood, crossed his legs, folded his arms and let his head fall. While the conductor was quieter on this train, Dr. Foreman could not get back to sleep. At 145th Street, when a vendor stood before him and shouted that he was selling four DVDs for $10, Dr. Foreman opened his eyes widely.

“No luck,” he said.

Dr. Bazil was more pleased with the results. After downloading the data about Dr. Foreman’s brain waves, Dr. Bazil found that Dr. Foreman had slept for 10 minutes out of a 23.5-minute ride. For three and a half minutes, Dr. Foreman reached a Stage 2 level of sleep.

“It looks like it is definitely possible to get small amounts of restorative sleep on the subway, but only very small amounts,” Dr. Bazil said. He added that some studies show “even a brief nap that includes Stage 2 sleep can improve performance.”

But Dr. Foreman was less persuaded that he got any productive sleep.

“I don’t feel rested,” he said. “It’s not like I took a nap in bed.”~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208: EDITORIALSNot What Mr. Putin PlannedThe lesson of this week's election is that Russians' patience is not unlimited and a surprising number can imagine a world after Vladimir Putin.===== notyetPrime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia has cynically dominated his country’s politics for the last 11 years and intends to do it for many more years to come. Given the way he has muzzled independent media and hobbled opponents, it looked as though nothing could challenge his reign. Then came Sunday’s parliamentary election in which a surprising number of voters made clear that they are tired of the status quo and Mr. Putin.

Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, received just under 50 percent of the votes. By Russian standards, that’s a stunning rebuke. What makes the numbers even more extraordinary is that Western election observers reported blatant and widespread fraud by

Putin supporters, including brazen stuffing of ballot boxes. Not only did United Russia barely secure a legislative majority — 238 seats out of 450, down from 315 now — it had to cheat to do it.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said election administrators lacked independence and there was no free media to cover the campaign. Some opposition parties were barred, and United Russia was given huge advantages over those that could run.

The United States needs Russia’s cooperation on a host of issues, most notably Iran, and the Obama administration made the right decision to try to “reset” the relationship. But that can’t mean giving Mr. Putin’s authoritarian ways a pass. So it was good to hear Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton express “serious concerns” that the voting was neither free nor fair.

Since then, Washington has said nothing about the government crackdown on protestors who have turned out by the thousands to denounce the electoral fraud. More than 1,000 people have been detained, among them a number of prominent opposition figures. The administration needs to keep speaking out. It would certainly help to have an American ambassador in Moscow, but Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican of Illinois, is still blocking the confirmation of Michael McFaul.

Mr. Putin has promised to shuffle the government next year. What he really needs to do is listen to voters who are demanding a real chance at political competition and economic opportunity. Unfortunately, he has long ago made clear his disdain for democracy. And while his approval ratings have declined, they remain, for now, above 60 percent. But the lesson of this week’s election is that Russians’ patience is not unlimited — and a surprising number can imagine a world after Putin.

~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1208: OP-EDBring the Iron Lady Back ... By RICHARD VINENMargaret Thatcher was tough, decisive and widely disliked. At a moment of crisis, Britain needs her type of adversarial politics, not consensus.===== notyetLondon

MARGARET THATCHER has long been reviled by the British left, so much so that the singer Elvis Costello once fantasized about stomping on her grave in his 1989 song “Tramp the Dirt Down.” But Mrs. Thatcher achieved more than any other British peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. It is rumored that, when she dies, she will receive a state funeral — an honor rarely accorded to anyone except monarchs. There are also plans for a public celebration.

Her life is the inspiration for a new movie that opens later this month, starring Meryl Streep as “The Iron Lady.” It chronicles Mrs. Thatcher’s divisive policies as prime minister as she led Britain through the economic doldrums of the 1980s. It was a time when the country faced financial ruin and politicians were compelled to make hard choices.

Mrs. Thatcher was a tough, adversarial leader. She was never liked, even by those who supported her policies, and she was hated by those who opposed her.

Yet her political style may be just what Britain needs right now. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis that will force the government to make difficult, unpopular decisions. And that is what Mrs. Thatcher did so well. Facing long-term economic decline and the brooding menace of the Soviet Union, she broke the trade unions, sold off nationalized industries and helped imbue British capi

talists with a confidence that they had not felt since the death of Queen Victoria.

She was at her best when the odds seemed against her or when she had clear enemies. In 1982, she sent an armada to fight the Argentines in the Falkland Islands. And in 1984-85, she held out against a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, which had been powerful enough to bring down a government 10 years before.

Although Mrs. Thatcher has become a respected symbol of statesmanship outside Britain, she remains a reminder of social division within it. In 2008, the future foreign secretary, William Hague, sought to reassure American officials that he and David Cameron, soon-to-be prime minister, were “Thatcher’s children.” When his comment leaked, the Labour opposition seized upon it, keen to circulate the quote in the hopes that it would stir up old anti-Thatcher feelings. And despite being in power today, Conservative leaders still worry that they are associated with the bitterness of the Thatcher years. They speak of changing their image as “the nasty party” and the need to “detoxify the brand.”

One reason British politicians feel uncomfortable with Thatcherism is that Britain has been relatively prosperous in the last two decades, at least in part because of things the Thatcher government did: tax cuts, financial-sector deregulation and weaker unions all made Britain a more attractive place to do business.

A new generation of politicians who grew up in an age of prosperity has ceased to think of politics in terms of hard choices and scarce resources; Mr. Cameron belongs to that generation. He was just 12 years old when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979 and he became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, when the current economic storms seemed almost unimaginable. Even when Mr. Cameron became p

rime minister last year, the financial crisis still felt, to most of the British electorate, like something short-term and vaguely unreal.

But British politics has lost something with its post-Thatcher embrace of consensus and optimism. Thatcherism was a galvanizing force. It mobilized right-wingers to do things, such as selling off huge state-owned corporations, that many of them would once have considered impossible. It also mobilized the left to develop radical alternatives: during the 1980s, the Labour Party veered toward support for unilateral nuclear disarmament and increased state intervention in the economy.

Unlike today, voters in 1983 faced clear choices. A vote for Thatcher’s Tories was a vote for large-scale privatization; a vote for Labour was a vote for socialism. A Conservative vote meant keeping Britain in the European Economic Community; a Labour vote meant withdrawal. A Tory vote meant stationing American cruise missiles in Britain; a Labour vote meant that they would be stopped.

There are no longer such clear-cut choices. Explicit talk of class interests and inequality have been replaced by a vaguer and less divisive language of “fairness” and “equal opportunity.”

The major political parties look remarkably similar today. All are led by clean-cut 40-somethings who blend social liberalism (support for same-sex marriage and opposition to the death penalty) with acceptance of the free market. Indeed, the Conservatives now find themselves governing with strange bedfellows, in a coalition with the small Liberal Democrat Party, whose president recently described Thatcherism as “organized wickedness.” Mrs. Thatcher hated coalitions. She most likely would have preferred to lose an election than to govern without an outright parliamentary majority.

Unlike Mr. Cameron, Mrs. Thatcher came to power at a time when people felt desperate. This desperation, and the sense that she might be the last chance to restore Britain’s fortunes, accounted for much of her success.

Thatcherism was not an alien invasion. It reflected a consensus by many members of the British establishment that things could not go on as they were. This is why so many supported Mrs. Thatcher’s policies, even when they disliked her personally.

Mr. Cameron is certainly a more likable figure than Mrs. Thatcher, but likability may not be enough when the British people realize that their current predicament — requiring government spending cuts at a time of rising unemployment and financial chaos in Europe — is actually worse than the crisis when Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979.

In these circumstances, it will take a bracing dose of Thatcherite ideological confrontation to revive British politics.

Richard Vinen, a professor of history at King’s College, London, is the author of “Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.”~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1209: U.S.: VIDEOAn Unexpected DebutBoyd Lee Dunlop found his musical talent during the Great Depression. But after years of playing in bars and nightclubs, it took a damaged piano in a Buffalo nursing home for him to be discovered.---NYT-1209: U.S. - THIS LANDRhythms Flow as Aging Pianist Finds New Audience ... By DAN BARRYAfter a chance encounter, Boyd Lee Dunlop, living in a nursing home in Buffalo, got a chance to reco

rd a CD and headline a concert.===== notyetBUFFALO - For years, the donated piano sat upright and unused in a corner of the nursing home’s cafeteria. Now and then someone would wheel or wobble over to pound out broken notes on the broken keys, but those out-of-tune interludes were rare. Day after surrendering day, the flawed piano remained mercifully silent.

Then came a new resident, a musician in his 80s with a touch of forgetfulness named Boyd Lee Dunlop, and he could play a little. Actually, he could play a lot, his bony fingers dancing the mad dance of improvised jazz in a way that evoked a long life’s all.

The lean times and the flush. The Saturday night hop and the Sunday morning hymn. Those long drives in a Packard to the next gig. That fine woman Adelaide, oh Adelaide, down in North Carolina. The deaths of a beloved aunt and a difficult marriage. Some things you don’t forget, so Mr. Dunlop keeps a white towel handy to wipe his eyes dry.

And so Mr. Dunlop would have remained, summoning transcendence from a damaged piano in the Delaware Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, his audience a couple of administrators, a few nurses and many patients beset with dementia, loneliness and age — were it not for a chance encounter and some cheesecake.

Instead, Boyd Lee Dunlop, 85, is the featured performer at a concert on Saturday night at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Buffalo. Admission is $10. And if you want to buy his debut CD, that will cost you another $15.

Sitting at Table 8, guarding the cafeteria piano beside him like a jealous lover, Mr. Dunlop accepts all of this with boastful humility. He thanks God

for the talent, shares a few unprintable thoughts, and turns to play a soulful take of “Come Back to Sorrento.”

“I got to be Boyd,” he says, as aides scrape the remnants of pork fried rice from plastic dinner plates. “If I die Boyd, I’m still Boyd.”

Mr. Dunlop arrived at the brown-brick nursing home nearly four years ago, a strong-willed but slightly bent half-note. He had 50 cents in his pocket, too much sugar in his blood, and a need to be around others. He liked to sit in the lobby and greet people, especially the women.

After a while, Mr. Dunlop let it be known that he was a musician. This did not distinguish him in a place where someone might claim to be a retired concert violinist or President Obama’s mother, and, in the first case at least, be telling the truth. Also, music here usually meant something to be endured — the weekly sing-along, say, with a resident armed with his own electric keyboard.

The broken cafeteria piano was a tease that Mr. Dunlop could not resist. He played when no one else was around, between meals, early and late. He learned how to dodge the piano’s flaws, how to elongate the good notes and suffocate the bad.

Nothing like his music had been heard in these cleanser-scented halls. The sounds of Boyd, including the occasional yowl, would flow from the empty cafeteria to greet Kate Wannemacher, the director of nursing, as she arrived early in the morning. “He plays right out of his heart,” she says.

Life kept time to a nursing home’s beat. Breakfast lunch dinner, breakfast lunch dinner, with occasional riffs of bingo, sing-alongs, insulin shots, paranoia, and more bingo. Mr. Dunlop had his bellicose moments, but mostly he was charming away in th

e lobby or, more likely, entranced by the cafeteria piano.

Then came that chance encounter.

In the spring of 2010, a freelance photographer named Brendan Bannon arrived to discuss an art project with nursing home administrators — and Mr. Dunlop greeted him at the door. Mr. Bannon is balding, so Mr. Dunlop assumed for some reason that he was a doctor. “Hey doc!” he shouted. “Take my temperature.”

A bond quickly developed, and before long Mr. Dunlop invited his new friend to hear him play what he referred to as “that thing they call a piano.” Mr. Bannon, who knows his Mingus from his Monk, could not believe the distinctive, vital music emanating from a tapped-out piano missing a few keys.

“He was a beautiful player,” Mr. Bannon says. “He was making it work even though it was out of tune.”

Now for the cheesecake.

Sensing Mr. Dunlop’s growing frustration with the damaged piano, two nursing managers, Pete Amodeo and Sue Cercone, came up with an idea: a bake sale. He made several Italian cheesecakes, she baked some cookies and other staff members helped out to raise more than $100 — enough to pay for a visit by Vinny Tagliarino, a blind piano tuner.

The tuner healed the piano. “And that moved me,” Mr. Dunlop says, which means his white towel got a good workout that day. “The notes by themselves — they were sharp.”

The crisp sounds now rising from the cafeteria’s corner, that haunting take on “The Man I Love,” were so distinctive that Mr. Bannon sent cellphone re

cordings to his childhood friend Allen Farmelo, now a music producer in New York. His question: Is this any good?

What Mr. Farmelo heard were snippets from the ongoing composition of a black man who was born poor in Winston-Salem and raised poor on Buffalo’s East Side. Whose mother cleaned houses and whose father is mostly clean from memory. Whose younger brother, Frankie, would become a world-famous jazz drummer whose work is featured in more than 100 recordings.

Young Boyd found his own calling in a discarded piano in a neighbor’s backyard (“I got to play you!” he remembers thinking). He learned his chords from a Czerny guide and took five lessons from a local teacher. By 15 he was playing in church and in a downtown nightclub, where crowds came to listen and prostitutes chipped in to buy him a new suit.

He was cocky, but then the great, lightning-fast Art Tatum stopped at the house while passing through Buffalo to hear the kid, drink some beer, and play a little. “So many keys being sounded off at one time,” Mr. Dunlop recalls, awed still, partly because Tatum could play with a beer bottle in one hand.

Mr. Dunlop played in the Army, he played in long-gone Buffalo nightclubs, he played after his shift at Bethlehem Steel, the soot coming off his hands to stain the ivory. Then, after a gut-check moment — “What am I doing here?” — he decided to play full-time, traveling to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.

“Mr. Boyd, you have to get your insulin,” interrupts a young nurse, Portia Pratt, who jokes that she loves to hear him play because it means he’s still alive.

“There’s my girlfriend,” Mr. Dunlop shouts. “Stick it in!”

Seattle, with Big Jay McNeely. Green Bay, Wis., where he won a $500 bet with a customer who said he couldn’t play 50 songs the customer named. Above and below the Mason-Dixon line, where he didn’t take kindly to being called the n-word. Outside Jonesville, N.C., where Adelaide worked as a waitress: “The way she walked, the way she moved. She glided! ‘Oh God, can I glide with you?’ ”

All this was in the music Mr. Farmelo heard. The daughters. The broken marriage. The gunshot wound inflicted by a nephew. Church. Diabetes. Old age. “Come Back to Sorrento.”

“I was pretty blown away,” Mr. Farmelo says.

So, in late February, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Farmelo rented a recording studio and hired two first-rate musicians: the drummer Virgil Day and the bassist Sabu Adeyola, who knew Mr. Dunlop from the still-open Colored Musicians Club in downtown Buffalo. When Mr. Dunlop arrived for the session, he didn’t even take off his coat. He went right to the Steinway, and started to play a riff that would become part of the CD, called “Boyd’s Blues.”

“What I remember is how happy he was,” Mr. Adeyola says. “How extremely happy he was.”

At the nursing home the other day, the remains of another chicken lunch were scraped from plastic plates, and another round of bingo was played. But not for Boyd Lee Dunlop.

He put on a black winter coat over the shirt and sweatpants he’s been wearing for days, walked past an honor guard of wheelchairs, and headed for the door. He had to get to rehearsal, for that gig he’s got Saturday night.

~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1209: EDITORIALSAs Russians protest their fraudulent elections, the prime minister wants to blame the United States instead of acknowledging voters' dissatisfaction.===== notyetTwenty years after the fall of communism, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia seems determined to resurrect the Soviet playbook. His United Russia Party tried to steal a parliamentary election on Sunday, and, when the results still delivered a stinging rebuke, he claimed the United States was whipping up protests and demonstrations.

Mr. Putin could have acknowledged voters’ dissatisfaction — his party’s parliamentary majority plummeted from 315 to 238 seats — and tried to address it, like democratic leaders might do. Instead, on Thursday, he accused Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of instigating street protests. He warned that Russia must protect against “interference” by foreign governments and hinted darkly at reprisals against demonstrators.

The charges are bizarre. After international observers reported widespread fraud by Putin supporters, Mrs. Clinton expressed “serious concerns” on Monday and Tuesday that the vote was neither free nor fair. It was ludicrous for Mr. Putin to claim that that was a “signal” that brought Russians to the streets three days running despite a heavy police presence and more than 1,000 detentions. The protesters were clear what motivated them: They were outraged by the fraud and tired of the status quo and Mr. Putin.

It’s true that Golos, Russia’s only independent electoral monitoring group, receives grants from the United States and Europe. But, as a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Euro

pe, Russia agreed that foreign and domestic election observers enhance the electoral process. The Soviet Union also signed a series of agreements on human rights that it ignored.

Mrs. Clinton and the White House did the right thing on Thursday by repeating their criticisms of the vote. She also expressed support for the “rights and aspirations” of the Russian people. They will need to keep speaking out; government opponents plan another protest for Saturday.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1209: OP-EDA United Russia? Far From It ... By VALERY PANYUSHKINStrategies to protest what are viewed as skewed parliamentary elections: a cartoon pig and a vote for any party but Putin's.===== notyetMoscow

A FEW months before this week’s parliamentary elections, around 10 of us gathered in a small room at the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center, a place meant to honor freedom of thought, a place that no one visits.

Boris Nemtsov was there, a former deputy prime minister whose opposition party was one of the many excluded from the elections. And so was Viktor Shenderovich, who hosted a popular satirical TV show and now performs only rarely in tiny clubs. There were entrepreneurs with no business opportunities and lawyers kept from the courtroom. And then there was me: a disenchanted former political reporter.

During the many years of Vladimir V. Putin’s rule, we lost our jobs and so much more. So our luckless gang had met to ponder what to do about the coming elections, all too aware that nothing could be done about them.

This is how parliamentary elections work in Russia: Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, faces off against collaborating parties — which would never dare to criticize him. And the real opposition parties are banned. But one cannot simply vote against every party involved. Nor is there any use in boycotting, because the election would be considered legitimate even if no one but the prime minister and president showed up.

The only solution, we decided, was irreverent protest. And so we came up with a cartoon pig called Nah-Nah, a name that, in Russian, evokes an unprintable version of “get lost!” — an expletive for what we’d like to say to those in power. We made posters and animated cartoons depicting Nah-Nah at the polls, destroying the ballot. He would check the box for every party running and draw an X across the ballot. He would do this not in hopes of changing anything, but to illustrate how nauseating these pretend elections are. We posted them online and called on real voters to follow Nah-Nah’s lead. Mostly, we wanted to laugh and misbehave a little, even as United Russia kept its throne.

At the same time, a young activist and very well-known blogger, Aleksei Navalny, offered a different protest strategy for the elections. He proposed voting for any of the collaborating parties in order to avoid casting a vote for United Russia — for the Communists, for A Just Russia, for Yabloko.

These two protests — Nah-Nah and Navalny — gained attention, and for the first time in the history of the anti-Putin movement, there was a real debate about methods, a conversation with substance and without enmity, taking place on the Internet, in cafes, in Moscow and the suburbs.

Mr. Navalny’s supporters argued that destroying the ballot would simply split the anti-Putin vote, g

iving United Russia a bigger victory.

“Nonsense!” Nah-Nah’s fans insisted. “Nothing depends on the vote. Our only option is protest.”

The Navalny faction thought there was hope for the collaborating parties. “If they could get enough seats in Parliament, you would see how quickly they would move away from Putin.”

The Nah-Nah enthusiasts disagreed. “The moment they get to Parliament, they will obey Putin like well-trained puppies.”

Though no one could convince anyone else, more and more people entered the conversation, more and more people abandoned the apathy that is the very foundation of the Putin government.

A few days before the election, I heard a rumor that United Russia would be satisfied with only a simple majority, as opposed to the two-thirds majority it has now — the party’s main concern is that the presidential election in March appear legitimate, so that Mr. Putin can replace Dmitri Medvedev, his underling and the current president, and stay in power until 2024. But in the end, when the government said that United Russia received half of the vote, most Russians knew the results were manipulated, and suspected the party got even less.

That is because voters, fueled by the debate between Nah-Nah and Navalny, came to the polls armed with cameras. There was footage of abuses and many accounts of corruption: witnesses said that the head of the Election Commission had thrown packaged ballots into a voting bin and that pro-Putin youth voted multiple times with fraudulent IDs; impossibly different results from incredibly similar polling stations have been posted online. And the government-controlled television stations said nothing.

On Monday, the day after the election, there was a protest in the center of Moscow; despite the rain, thousands assembled — a sight unseen since the time of Perestroika. The leaders of the Nah-Nah movement and Mr. Navalny’s supporters stood together. The police arrested nearly 300 people. Among them was one of the authors of the Nah-Nah strategy, Ilya Yashin, as well as Aleksei Navalny himself. They were held by the police all night, prevented from meeting with their lawyers. In the morning, they were brought to court and sentenced to 15 days for disobeying police orders and obstructing traffic, respectively.

An even larger protest is planned for Saturday. It seems that the government has decided to turn the two into heroes.

Valery Panyushkin is the author of “12 Who Don’t Agree: The Battle for Freedom in Putin’s Russia.” This essay was translated by Yevgeniya Traps from the Russian.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1210: THE SATURDAY PROFILERousing Russia With a Phrase ... By ELLEN BARRYAleksei Navalny has aroused Russians angry over what they say were fraudulent parliamentary elections, rebranding Vladimir V. Putin's United Russia party as "the party of swindlers and thieves."===== notyetMOSCOW — The man most responsible for the extraordinary burst of antigovernment activism here over the past week will not speak at a rally planned for Saturday, or even attend it, because he is in prison.

Cut off from the Internet, Russia’s best-known blogger will have to wait until the next morning, when his lawyer will take him a stack of printouts telling him what happened — whether the protest fizz

led, exploded into violence or made history. At a final coordinating meeting for the protest on Friday evening, where a roomful of veteran organizers were shouting to make themselves heard, a young environmental activist turned toward the crowd, suddenly grave.

“I’d like to thank Aleksei Navalny,” she said. “Thanks to him, specifically because of the efforts of this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of people will come out to the square. It was he who united us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swindlers and Thieves,’ ” the name Mr. Navalny coined to refer to Vladimir V. Putin’s political party, United Russia.

A week ago, Mr. Navalny, 35, was famous mainly within the narrow context of Russia’s blogosphere. But after last Sunday’s parliamentary elections, he channeled accumulated anger over reported violations into street politics, calling out to “nationalists, liberals, leftists, greens, vegetarians, Martians” via his Twitter feed (135,750 followers) and his blog (61,184) to protest.

If Saturday’s protest is as large as its organizers expect — the city has granted a permit for 30,000 — Mr. Navalny will be credited for mobilizing a generation of young Russians through social media, a leap much like the one that spawned Occupy Wall Street and youth uprisings across Europe this year.

The full measure of Mr. Navalny’s charisma became clear after protests on Monday night; an estimated 5,000 people materialized, making it the largest anti-Kremlin demonstration in recent memory, and Mr. Navalny was arrested on charges of resisting the police and sentenced to 15 days in prison.

All that night, as temperatures dipped below freezing, Mr. Navalny’s disciples stood vigil outside the precinct where he was being held, their eyes on

their Twitter feeds. Someone had spread a rumor that he was dead, and even his lawyers were unsure of his whereabouts, adding to the sense that Mr. Navalny — who has been reluctant to present himself as a political leader — was at the center of everything that was happening.

“He is the only man who can take all the common hipsters and make them go onto the street,” said Anton Nikolayev, 35, who spent much of Tuesday outside courtrooms hoping to see Mr. Navalny. “He is a figure who could beat Putin if he was allowed.”

This assertion may sound far-fetched. Mr. Putin, now in his 12th year as the paramount leader, has approval ratings of above 60 percent, according to the independent Levada Center. As recently as two weeks ago, Levada found that 60 percent of Russians surveyed were not willing to consider any figure from the anti-Putin opposition as a presidential candidate. Only 1 percent named Mr. Navalny, whose exposure is through Twitter and his blogs, Navalny.ru and Rospil.info.

But the aftermath of last Sunday’s parliamentary elections has shaken political assumptions, largely because the authorities seem unable to regain control of the public discourse. For a decade, Russia’s political agenda has been determined inside the Kremlin, where strategists selected and promulgated themes for public discussion, said Konstantin Remchukov, editor of the daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

“And now, just a few days after the elections, the political agenda is being determined by other people,” like the longtime opposition leader Boris Y. Nemtsov and Mr. Navalny, he said. “This is shocking, and totally unpredictable.”

MR. NAVALNY has Nordic good looks, a caustic sense of humor and no political organization.

Five years ago, he quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”

What attracts people to Mr. Navalny is not ideology, but the confident challenge he mounts to the system. A real estate lawyer by training, he employs data — on his Web sites he documents theft at state-run companies — and relentless, paint-stripping contempt. “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has made its way into the vernacular with breathtaking speed and severely damaged United Russia’s political brand.

He projects a serene confidence that events are converging, slowly but surely, against the Kremlin.

“Revolution is unavoidable,” he told the Russian edition of Esquire, in an interview published this month. “Simply because the majority of people understand that the system is wrong. When you are in the company of bureaucrats you hear them talking about who has stolen everything, why nothing works and how horrible everything is.”

He was less definitive about the future he envisioned for the country, saying only that he hoped it would “resemble a huge, irrational, metaphysical Canada.”

Mr. Navalny had become less obscure by the end of the week. On Wednesday, the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, said he would consider appearing at a protest if Mr. Navalny invited him. A few h

ours later, a blindingly profane reference to Mr. Navalny was reposted from President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s Twitter account, prompting his press office to release a statement explaining that the message had been sent out by a member of the technical support staff “during a routine password change.”

On Thursday, United Russia published an attack on Mr. Navalny, describing his activism as “typical dirty self-promotion,” and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a statement about his case. The consulting firm Medialogia documented a sudden leap in the number of mentions of Mr. Navalny in the Russian news media, from several hundred a day to around 3,000. On Friday, people started circulating a Web site promoting him as a candidate in the March presidential election. Mr. Navalny, even skeptics admit, managed to knit together a crowd that had not previously existed.

“They had never gathered anywhere together before,” wrote Grigory Tumanov, a reporter for Gazeta.ru. “They just read Twitter, and to them it was clear that in this situation you have to go somewhere, do something, unite around someone, because it was intolerable. Let this be Navalny, with all his pluses and minuses.”

BY his appeals hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Navalny looked tired and disgusted. His supporters had found amateur video showing that he had not resisted arrest, and that the officers who testified against him were not the ones who had arrested him, but the judge refused to review it. A photograph taken from outside the detention center showed him gripping the bars on his window and staring out with a fierce, fixed gaze.

“There are people standing here who were not recruited by anyone,” said Viktor Masyagin, 28, outside a courtroom earlier in the week. “No one drove us here in buses, no one paid us anything, but here

we are anyway, and we have been here for more than a day.”

“That should tell you something,” he said.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1210Tracing a Mother's Vagabond Path to Murder and Suicide in Texas ... By MANNY FERNANDEZDenied food stamps, Rachelle Grimmer, who had lived a wandering existence in recent months, took a hostage at gunpoint at a social services office before shooting her two children and herself.===== notyetLAREDO, Tex. — Months after being denied food stamps, Rachelle Grimmer grabbed her two children, a .38-caliber revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition and walked into the state social services office here on Monday to demand answers.

But Ms. Grimmer’s troubles were far deeper than a lack of food stamps, and neither the police nor the employee she held hostage could resolve them.

Divorced and living a vagabond existence in Texas in recent months, Ms. Grimmer, 38, told the police she was frustrated that she had been denied benefits in other states. She said that her former husband was affiliated with the Russian mob and the Ku Klux Klan, a situation she said led to government harassment that prevented her from receiving public assistance.

Her hostage, Robert Reyes, a supervisor who had offered himself in trade for two other employees Ms. Grimmer had taken hostage, granted her the food stamp benefits she had requested — $3,050 worth, retroactive to July, the month she had first applied. The police slipped the paperwork under the door to show Ms. Grimmer it was for real. But she refused to leave the small office in the Texas Health a

nd Human Services building, at times sitting in a chair with her daughter on her lap and communicating with the police on an office phone.

About 10 minutes before midnight, about seven hours into the standoff, she hung up on hostage negotiators. Moments later, three shots were heard. Ms. Grimmer had shot both of her children in the head, and then herself. She died at the scene. The children were taken to University Hospital in San Antonio. Her daughter, Ramie Marie Grimmer, 12, died on Wednesday. Her son, Timothy Donald Grimmer, 10, died a day later.

Carlos R. Maldonado, Laredo’s police chief, said that the denial of benefits was only one of a series of issues that had been troubling Ms. Grimmer, but that investigators had more questions than answers about her motive. The police were not certain if she was being treated for mental health problems and did not know why she moved several months ago to Laredo, a border city of 236,000, where she had no family.

“Unfortunately in these situations, there’s a lot of questions that we have and a lot of those questions may never be answered,” Chief Maldonado said. “I think we did everything that we possibly could to resolve the situation. We heard people say, why didn’t the tactical team intervene and do something about the mother and save the children? There was never any inclination, any information available to us, that the children were in any danger at all.”

But Ramie appeared to have known her life was in danger. At one point during the standoff, using an office computer, she updated her Facebook page, writing “may die 2day” in the section for posting where she worked. Later, she wrote, “tear gas seriasly,” though none was used by the police.

Ms. Grimmer grew up in Montana and had been living in Ohio in 2005 when she divorced her husband and the children’s father, Dale R. Grimmer. By 2010 she had moved to Texas, and in recent months she and her children seemed to have no permanent address.

In September 2010, the family was staying in a tent on a beach on the South Texas coast. In Laredo, they lived at a mobile home park in a small trailer with a cracked wall. Neighbors and park workers would help them with groceries and cash. Ms. Grimmer sold her truck, forcing the family to walk long distances around town.

Janie Rodriguez, the manager of Towne North Mobile Home and RV Park, said that Ms. Grimmer often told her she was frustrated by the state’s refusal to give her benefits and that, one day weeks ago, she showed her a fax receipt for documents she had sent the social services office. “I do blame the state,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “She was a very intelligent person and a very wonderful person, a very good mother. She was not mentally ill. The state never came to see how she was living.”

The children were not enrolled in local schools, but were being home-schooled. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Family and Protective Services, had come in contact with the family at least twice before.

After receiving a report of possible neglect, investigators from the agency checked on the family in September 2010, when they were living on the beach. But the children appeared to be taken care of, and Ms. Grimmer had food and money, so the case was closed, a department spokesman said. In June, Ms. Grimmer told the police in Corpus Christi that she had been a victim of domestic violence. The agency checked on her and the children but had no concerns, said the spokesman, Patrick Crimmins.

Ms. Grimmer had first applied for food stamps at the Laredo social services office on July 7. She did not meet the criteria to receive benefits within 24 hours because she was receiving child support. But an employee scheduled a time with Ms. Grimmer for someone to call her the next day to review her case, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission said. A caseworker called twice but was unable to reach her, the spokeswoman said.

A letter was sent to Ms. Grimmer asking her to reschedule, and the appointment was set for July 22. On that day, a caseworker interviewed Ms. Grimmer by phone and explained what information was needed, said the spokeswoman, Stephanie Goodman. Though Ms. Grimmer turned in some of the paperwork, she did not supply materials verifying the amount of child support she had been receiving monthly, Ms. Goodman said.

On Aug. 8, the case was closed, and Ms. Grimmer was sent a letter informing her that she had been denied food stamp benefits because of the missing information, Ms. Goodman said.

In Texas, benefits applications are approved more often than they are denied: in the past six months, 85 percent of cases statewide were approved, and the median number of days to process an application was 12, the agency said.

In mid-November, Ms. Grimmer called the agency’s ombudsman office, saying that she disagreed with the reason she was denied benefits. A supervisor called her on Dec. 1 but could not reach her. No one in the Laredo office heard from her until she walked in on Monday.

The agency is reviewing its handling of Ms. Grimmer’s case. “I think we did everything we could,” said Thomas M. Suehs, the commissioner of health and

human services. “It’s a tragic situation.”

Outside the Grimmers’ trailer on Thursday, neighbors gathered to pray for the family. Standing next to a memorial of balloons and teddy bears, one mother spoke of the sunflower bookmark Ms. Grimmer had drawn for her. Santiago Morantes Jr., 16, recalled seeing Ms. Grimmer, Ramie and Tim walking to the post office one morning. He remembered it because he noticed all three of them were barefoot.~~~~~~~~~~

NYT-1210: VENTURESEveryone Speaks Text Message ... By TINA ROSENBERGIs technology killing indigenous languages or saving them? Well, you may soon be able to text in N'Ko.===== notyet (long)When Ibrahima Traore takes his sons to a park in Montclair, N.J., he often sits on a bench and reads. He reads English, French and Arabic, but most of the time he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers of those languages would recognize. N’Ko is the standardized writing system for Mande languages, a family of closely related tongues — among them Traore’s language of Mandinka, but also Jula, Bamana, Koyaga, Marka — spoken, for the most part, in eight West African countries, by some 35 million people. N’Ko looks like a cross between Arabic and ancient Norse runes, written from right to left in a blocky script with the letters connected underneath. Traore types e-mail to his family on his laptop in N’Ko, works on his Web site in N’Ko, tweets in N’Ko on his iPhone and iPad and reads books and newspapers written in N’Ko to prepare for the N’Ko classes he teaches in the Bronx and for his appearances on an Internet radio program to discuss cultural issues around the use of N’Ko.

For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese

and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language. For those who lived at the intersection of modern technology and traditional cultures, the problem was even worse. “For a long time, technology was the enemy,” says Inee Slaughter, executive director of the New Mexico-based Indigenous Language Institute, which teaches Native Americans and other indigenous peoples how to use digital technologies to keep their languages vital. Heritage languages were being killed off by increasing urbanization, the spread of formal education and the shift to cash crops, which ended the isolation of indigenous communities. Advances in technology seemed to intensify the decline. “Even in 1999 or 2000, people were saying technology killed their language,” Slaughter says. “Community elders worried about it. As television came into homes, English became pervasive 24/7. Mainstream culture infiltrated, and young kids want to be like that. It was a huge, huge problem, and it’s still there. But now we know ways technology can be helpful.”

For many tiny, endangered languages, digital technology has become a lifeline.

When Traore was born, N’Ko had already been in use for several years. But growing up, he did not know it existed. At 6, he was sent from his village of Kiniebakoro in rural Guinea to live with a brother in Ivory Coast, where he learned to read and write in French, the language taught in school in both countries. He never saw a book, newspaper, medicine label, store name or street sign in N’Ko.

And yet, N’Ko was invented to allow Mande speakers like Traore to read and write in the languages they spoke at home. In 1943, Solomana Kante, a teacher’s son who worked as a merchant in Ivory Coast, resolved to develop a written form for the Mande language family. (N’Ko means “I say” in Manden languages; speakers of Manden languages can typically

understand one another even if they don’t use all the same words for the same things.) He tried using the Arabic alphabet, then the Roman alphabet, but found that neither one could express the tonal variations of spoken Manden languages. So in 1949, he invented his own script — one flexible enough to capture any Manden language in writing. Among the first books he translated into N’Ko was the Koran. He later compiled a history of Manden languages and culture.

At the time, Guinea had a close relationship with the Soviet Union, and Kante managed to have two typewriters made in Eastern Europe with N’Ko letters. (He was given another one by the president of Guinea, according to a Guinean newspaper.) “If there was a typewriter, ink and ribbons were hard to find,” says Baba Mamadi Diane, a student of Kante’s who now teaches N’Ko at Cairo University. Almost all of the books and papers in N’Ko in Guinea were copied by hand by Kante’s students, like medieval monks, but with several sheets of carbon paper below.

Designed as a language for the common man, N’Ko seemed destined to remain a code used by an elite. Then came the digital revolution.

Heritage languages like N’Ko are taking on new life thanks to technology. An Internet discussion group, Indigenous Languages and Technology, is full of announcements for new software to build sound dictionaries and a project to collect tweets in Tok Pisin, a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea, or Pipil, an indigenous language of El Salvador. “It’s the amplification of Grandma’s voice,” Slaughter says.

Whether a language lives or dies, says K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, is a choice made by 6-year-olds. And what makes a 6-year-old want to learn a language is being able to use it in everyday life. “La

nguage is driven from the ground up,” says Don Thornton, a software developer in Las Vegas who specializes in making video games and mobile apps in Native American languages. “It doesn’t matter if you have a million speakers — if your kids aren’t learning, you’re in big trouble.”

Of 6,909 catalogued languages, hundreds are unlikely to be passed on to the next generation. Thornton, who has worked with more than 100 Native American tribes, says that some are already using sophisticated programs to preserve their languages. “Other groups,” he says, “we ask about their language program, and they say, ‘You’re it.’ We look at it from their standpoint — what are the coolest technologies out there? We start programming for that.”

For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking. Harrison tells of traveling in Siberia, where he met a truck driver who devised his own system for writing the endangered Chulym language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. “You find people like him everywhere,” Harrison said. “We are getting languages where the first writing is not the translation of the Bible — as it has often happened — but text messages.”

Traore, who left Guinea for New York in November 1988, did not discover N’Ko until a 2007 trip to visit his parents in his native village. When his wife, Greta, a software developer, went into his brother’s room, she noticed books in N’Ko on his shelves. Puzzled, she called her husband in. “You said your language was not written. So what are these books?” Traore was shocked. (He and Traore did not grow up together.) When he came back to New York,

he googled N’Ko. “That was the big wow,” he said. He found a teacher in Queens. “When I listened to the alphabet, I listened to our history. Now I can read the same words my mother would say to me.”

N’Ko first moved from hand-copied manuscripts into the digital age two decades ago. In the early 1990s, Diane, the teacher of N’Ko at Cairo University, was collating an N’Ko text in a copy shop when he was approached by an employee. “Why are you killing yourself?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know about DOS?” The employee explained to Diane that using computer software, he could write a new script and generate as many copies as he wished. Together with information-technology experts at Cairo University, Diane developed a rudimentary font to use on his own computer. But creating a font that anyone could use was a much more complicated task.

First, it meant getting N’Ko into Unicode — the international standard that assigns a unique number to each character in a given writing system. Then Microsoft picked up N’Ko for its local language program — sort of. N’Ko was included in Windows 7, but the ligatures were misaligned, and the letters were not linked from below as they should have been. “The original plan was to fully support it, but we just didn’t have the resources,” said Peter Constable, a senior program manager at Microsoft. For Windows 8, which is still being tested, Microsoft has fixed the problem. Most writers of N’Ko download the font for use with Open Office’s Graphite program, developed by SIL International, a Christian group with an interest in seeing the Bible reach every hut and yurt on the planet.

Digital technology has already transformed how Traore communicates with his family. When his father died in 1994, his family in Kiniebakoro sent news of the death to cousins in Ivory Coast by going to the bus station and looking for a passenger heading toward their city; the cousins then mailed a le

tter to Traore in New York. It took two months. Now communication with Kiniebakoro takes a day: Traore sends an e-mail in N’Ko. His nephew, who works in the nearby town of Siguiri, checks his e-mail at the town’s Internet cafe, prints Traore’s letter and then goes down to the dock where canoes ferry people across the Niger River to Kiniebakoro. He asks someone on the boat to take the letter to Traore’s family’s house.

For Traore and others, the most pressing reason for making N’Ko available to Mande speakers is that only a small percentage of Guineans can read and write. The United Nations puts the rate of adult literacy at 39 percent, but that figure counts mostly those who live in major cities — in rural areas, it is much lower. Schooling in rural Guinea is often conducted in the open air, with no chairs, perhaps a blackboard, maybe one book. But most discouraging to students, it takes place in French, a language they don’t speak at home.

“The only hope for literacy in Guinea is N’Ko literacy,” Traore says. For Mande speakers, he says, N’Ko is extremely simple to learn. He and his fellow N’Ko advocates have sponsored hundreds of informal schools throughout Guinea that teach in Manden languages and N’Ko. This year, for the first time, N’Ko will be taught side by side with French in an official school — the pilot program will be in Kiniebakoro, Traore’s hometown.

People had been working on breathing life into N’Ko for years, but they found out about one another only when they began to put up N’Ko Web sites. There is Traore’s site, kouroussaba.com, Diane’s kanjamadi.com and fakoli.net, the project of Mamady Doumbouya, a Guinean who worked as a software engineer in Philadelphia and is devoting his retirement to N’Ko. He also runs a small organization called the N’Ko Institute of America. Diane’s students in Cairo are subtitling DVDs for West Africa in N’Ko

. Among the first was a season of the TV show “24.”

If you have an iPhone, tweeting and e-mailing in N’Ko is now easy. Eatoni, a company based in Manhattan that has created software for cellphone keyboards in some 300 languages, released an N’Ko app earlier this year. The iPhone keyboard app works on the iPad too. Eatoni’s C.E.O., Howard Gutowitz, developed it after months of tests and advice from Traore, Diane and other N’Ko users. But iPhones are too expensive to be widely used in rural Africa. Almost every African villager owns or aspires to own a conventional cellphone (equipped with only a number pad) — even if he or she has to travel to town to charge it.

Africa is the world’s fastest-growing cellphone market. Texting allows farmers to check crop prices. Nurses can send health information. People can do their banking. With airtime prohibitively expensive, texting is the preferred mode of communication. “Text messages would be a lifesaving tool for us in Guinea,” Traore said. He also says he believes that the ability to text in their own language would give people a powerful reason to learn to read. “Before, men in my village used to brag about their wristwatches,” Traore said. “Now they brag about their cellphones.” When he shows N’Ko speakers his iPhone and tells them, “This is your language,” they are dumbstruck. An N’Ko newspaper published in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, recently crowed: “Don’t look for N’Ko under a cabbage leaf any more. It’s on the iPhone now.”

Those old cellphones don’t have apps, of course. You use the language the phone comes with; in West Africa, that is French. The market for an N’Ko phone would be, potentially, tens of millions of people. But getting manufacturers to add new alphabets to cellphones isn’t easy. Gutowitz has had a long and frustrating experience trying to do so. “Most manufacturers roll their eyes,” he said. “I spent

a decade running around the world talking to cellphone manufacturers — everyone I could think of — saying, ‘Look, we can support 100 languages, it’s a big market.’ They didn’t care. People say, ‘Why don’t you go talk to Nokia?’ I have talked to Nokia. Again and again and again.”

Lamine Dabo and Nouhan Sano, Guineans who live in Bangkok, where there is a prosperous and close-knit Guinean community, have had a similar experience. They have been trying to persuade manufacturers to develop an N’Ko cellphone since 2007. Dabo and Sano’s gem-importing businesses take them all over Asia, and all over Asia they bring their list of more than 17,000 N’Ko words. Dabo says it’s possible to build a cheap cellphone with N’Ko as its language, a camera and slots for two SIM cards — a necessity in Africa, where reception is often spotty. When he went to Guinea and Mali to discuss the phone with distributors, he said, he was mobbed with interest. But his briefcase was filled with rejections from manufacturers. Some asked him to put up the money himself. “Everyone says it’s possible, but the money is not enough for them to make it a priority,” he said.

Dabo and Sano are still trying. It might seem strange that the fortunes of N’Ko and of indigenous languages around the world should depend on the ability to subtitle “24,” to write with Windows and, above all, to text. But for hundreds of heritage languages, a four-inch bar of plastic and battery and motherboard is the future of the past.~~~~~~~~~~