October 21, 2007
Raikkonen Wins Formula One Title
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:40 p.m. ET
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- Kimi Raikkonen is known as ''The Iceman,'' and he more than kept his cool Sunday, winning the Brazilian Grand Prix and capturing the Formula One title in the tightest race for the championship in 21 years.
Raikkonen won his first F1 crown by taking advantage of Lewis Hamilton's mistake on the first lap and a subsequent gearbox problem with his McLaren, combined with Fernando Alonso's disappointing run.
The Ferrari driver took the lead with 21 laps to go, rallying from third in the drivers' standings to win the closest title race since 1986. Teammate Felipe Massa was second Sunday.
''We had very good speed in both cars,'' Raikkonen said. ''Were just taking it easy, saving the tires and the cars. We could have gone much faster it we wanted to. It was perfect teamwork from the team and it paid off very well.''
Hamilton, trying to become the first rookie to win the title and F1's youngest champion, went off the track on the first lap and went on to finish seventh. Alonso finished third.
''I went into the race and said to myself, 'Whatever happens today, it's been a phenomenal year,''' Hamilton said. ''Who would've thought I would be leading the world championship during the last races? It's a great feeling being in that position. The team did a phenomenal job all year.''
Alonso would have had to finish second and Hamilton fifth to keep Raikkonen from winning the drivers' championship after his victory.
There were some doubts after the race whether Raikkonen would keep the title, however, as Formula One's governing body -- FIA -- opened up an investigation into possible fuel irregularities.
FIA called a meeting involving representatives from BMW-Sauber and Williams, whose drivers finished fourth, fifth, sixth and 10th, and if at least two of them were punished, Hamilton could have moved up to fifth and taken the title.
Nearly six hours after the race, FIA said there wasn't enough evidence to penalize the drivers or the teams.
Raikkonen erased a seven-point gap behind Hamilton coming into the race to finish with 110 points, one more than Hamilton and Alonso.
''This is a great feeling,'' Raikkonen said. ''We had some hard times, some reliability problems and lost some points. A lot of people didn't believe in us, but we showed that they were wrong and we were able to come back. It was a great season.''
The Finn was reserved in his celebrations on the podium, waving his cap to the crowd before briefly throwing his arms in the air.
He finished the race on the 2.6-mile Interlagos track in 1 hour, 28 minutes, 15.270 seconds -- 1.493 seconds ahead of Massa and 57.019 ahead of Alonso.
Raikkonen -- second in the drivers' championship in 2003 and '05 -- became only the third Finn to win the F1 title, and the first since two-time winner Mika Hakkinen in 1998 and '99. The first Finnish champion was Keke Rosberg in 1982.
It was a hectic start for the Brazilian GP.
Hamilton, who started in the front row beside pole-sitter Massa, was passed by Raikkonen and Alonso on the first turn. Hamilton then made a mistake trying to recover the position from Alonso three turns later.
''I locked up behind Fernando to avoid hitting him and I went a bit wide,'' Hamilton said.
''When I saw Hamilton going off, I knew that maybe we had some chances,'' Raikkonen said. ''I wasn't 100 percent sure, I was really just waiting. It took a long time to hear that we had finally won it.''
The Englishman moved back to sixth place after six laps, but his car slowed dramatically with a gearbox problem two laps later and he seemed on the verge of retiring from the race. His car suddenly picked up pace again, but he had already dropped to 18th.
''Lewis has enjoyed phenomenal reliability from his car this year,'' McLaren team chief Ron Dennis told British television. ''It was just a default in the gearbox which selected neutral for a period of time, but then sorted itself out.''
Hamilton's car was without problems for the rest of the race as he moved past the slower cars with ease. By lap 18 of 71, Hamilton was 11th, but he couldn't manage to move up past seventh.
He had needed a top-two finish to guarantee the title Sunday without depending on other drivers.
''It has been an incredible season,'' Hamilton said. ''Under extremely difficult conditions, I beat the two-time world champion, which was my objective from the very beginning.''
Massa and Raikkonen stayed 1-2 from the start. Raikkonen took the lead after a final pit stop, coming ahead of Massa as the Brazilian apparently slowed his pace.
''Felipe worked hard ... he's been a big help,'' Raikkonen said.
Massa, who had won four times in the previous five races he started from the pole, had an emotional victory in Interlagos last year as he became the first Brazilian to win at home since the late Ayrton Senna in 1993.
Alonso was trying to become only the third driver to win three consecutive titles in the history of F1, along with Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher.
''I knew it was going to be a difficult situation for me,'' Alonso said. ''It was impossible to keep the pace from Ferrari. I was just waiting for something.''
It was the third year in a row the F1 season was decided at the Brazilian GP. Alonso won both of his titles at the Interlagos track in 2005 and '06.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
October 18, 2007
Recycling the Whole House
By KRISTINA SHEVORY
IF the idiosyncratic, ’40s-era cottage Alice Keller bought in Shoreline, a small city just north of Seattle, had a style, it might be called classic teardown. The ceiling in one room was so low she couldn’t stand up under it. A downstairs bathroom was so narrow she had to wiggle sideways to get to the toilet. None of the windows matched.
“It was livable, and quirky,” Ms. Keller said, “but in ways I didn’t find amusing.”
The place was crying out for a wrecking ball, but Ms. Keller, a 63-year-old retired teacher of English as a second language, who has an environmentally aware conscience, didn’t want to scrap the building materials only to buy new ones. Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, she hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.
The crew left the garage and a portion of the subfloor intact and broke the concrete driveway into chunks for a back patio. A gas water heater, fiberglass insulation and windows landed at the RE Store, a local nonprofit shop that sells used or excess construction materials. The drywall, shingles and extra concrete went to a recycling center.
Ms. Keller was able to reuse around 90 percent of the original house. “I just like reusing things,” she said. “You can end up with something with more character.”
Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.
Fueling that interest are efforts by cities and states across the country to stanch the flow of demolition rubble into landfills. Some 245,000 houses in the United States are razed each year, generating nearly 20 million tons of debris, according to a 1996 report from the Environmental Protection Agency, the most recent data available.
Confronted with mounting waste, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has banned brick, concrete, metal, wood and asphalt from landfills.
In San Jose, Calif. — where construction and demolition refuse accounts for 30 percent of landfill waste, according to official estimates — homeowners who apply for a city permit to demolish, remodel or build an addition have to pay a deposit based on the size and type of project. To get the money back, they must show that 90 percent of the material generated has been reused or sent to a certified recycling or reuse center. Cities including Seattle, and Chicago have also introduced measures to reduce construction and demolition waste.
Using old materials for new buildings isn’t a new idea. The Coliseum in Rome was used as a quarry to build St. Peter’s Basilica and other Roman landmarks. In the United States, families often reused building materials to save money in the early part of the 20th century, a custom that fell out of favor as the country grew wealthier in the 1950s.
Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to 85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their integrity.
Unbuilding a home takes longer than leveling it the usual way and often costs more, at least initially. While almost anyone who’s watched a TLC rehab show can rip out a kitchen cabinet, unpiecing an entire house without having the roof collapse isn’t a job for the uninitiated. The Building Materials Reuse Association, which introduced a deconstruction training program in May, has certified 60 builders so far.
When Carolyn Bronstein and John Tapper wanted to dismantle a 2,500-square-foot Victorian adjacent to their house in the Southport section of Chicago, they could not find a local deconstruction contractor. They recruited Ted Reiff, a contractor and the president of a group called the Reuse People of America, based in Oakland, Calif. The couple bought the house for about $800,000, intending to knock it down so their children could have more space to play, and to make sure a developer didn’t snap up it up.
While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple spent $38,000 to have a contractor trained by Mr. Reiff unpiece it over six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a reuse store.
“It was cleaner and quieter than demolition,” said Ms. Bronstein, an assistant professor of communication at DePaul University in Chicago. “We didn’t have dust flying everywhere.”
Usually, the real savings comes in the reconstruction phase. Paul Pedini, the owner of the Big Dig House in Lexington, Mass., possibly the country’s most celebrated recycled dwelling, estimates he shaved at least $200,000 from his materials costs by using concrete on-ramps and steel beams recovered from the Big Dig highway project in Boston for his modernist structure.
“There were these materials and we wanted to build a house. We just put two and two together,” said Mr. Pedini, a civil engineer who was a contractor on the Big Dig. “I told them, why not keep the money you’d pay in disposal costs and give the materials to us to reuse?”
Although few home builders have access to the remains of a $14.6 billion highway project, many cities now have “reuse” stores, which sell salvaged goods — from wall sockets to vintage redwood floorboards — for 50 to 75 percent off what similar products would cost if purchased new.
There are about 1,000 such stores nationwide according to the Reuse Association, most of them nonprofits that offer tax deductions in exchange for donations of used housing materials. Habitat for Humanity International, the affordable housing organization, runs 500 such shops in 45 states, mostly selling easily recoverable accessories like cabinets, doors and flooring. Unlike architectural salvage stores, which sell marble fireplace mantels, stained glass and spiral staircases, reuse stores generally traffic in mundane items like light switches and insulation.
As with buying secondhand clothes, the challenge — and potential charm — of reuse shopping is its unpredictability. Build it Green! NYC, a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment. The original owners paid $18,000 to buy and install the cabinets, according to Justin Green, a founder of the store, who was asking $1,200 for the set — top and bottom cabinets as well as counters.
“I love shopping there,” said Timothy Etienne of Garden City, N.Y. “You never know what you’re going to find.”
He has purchased windows, doors and paint at the store for a second home upstate, along with a six-foot-tall wooden tepee ($30) that is now a backyard playhouse for his four daughters.
Ms. Keller, meanwhile, has been combing the RE Store in Seattle for months, trying to find secondhand glass blocks for the master bath in her new 1,600-square-foot home. She recently scavenged a double-pane glass door for her balcony and a cast-iron double sink for a craft room.
To outfit a home this way, it helps to have a retiree’s schedule.
“You have to be patient,” Ms. Keller said. “It’s the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going back.”
Recycling the Whole House
By KRISTINA SHEVORY
IF the idiosyncratic, ’40s-era cottage Alice Keller bought in Shoreline, a small city just north of Seattle, had a style, it might be called classic teardown. The ceiling in one room was so low she couldn’t stand up under it. A downstairs bathroom was so narrow she had to wiggle sideways to get to the toilet. None of the windows matched.
“It was livable, and quirky,” Ms. Keller said, “but in ways I didn’t find amusing.”
The place was crying out for a wrecking ball, but Ms. Keller, a 63-year-old retired teacher of English as a second language, who has an environmentally aware conscience, didn’t want to scrap the building materials only to buy new ones. Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, she hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.
The crew left the garage and a portion of the subfloor intact and broke the concrete driveway into chunks for a back patio. A gas water heater, fiberglass insulation and windows landed at the RE Store, a local nonprofit shop that sells used or excess construction materials. The drywall, shingles and extra concrete went to a recycling center.
Ms. Keller was able to reuse around 90 percent of the original house. “I just like reusing things,” she said. “You can end up with something with more character.”
Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.
Fueling that interest are efforts by cities and states across the country to stanch the flow of demolition rubble into landfills. Some 245,000 houses in the United States are razed each year, generating nearly 20 million tons of debris, according to a 1996 report from the Environmental Protection Agency, the most recent data available.
Confronted with mounting waste, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has banned brick, concrete, metal, wood and asphalt from landfills.
In San Jose, Calif. — where construction and demolition refuse accounts for 30 percent of landfill waste, according to official estimates — homeowners who apply for a city permit to demolish, remodel or build an addition have to pay a deposit based on the size and type of project. To get the money back, they must show that 90 percent of the material generated has been reused or sent to a certified recycling or reuse center. Cities including Seattle, and Chicago have also introduced measures to reduce construction and demolition waste.
Using old materials for new buildings isn’t a new idea. The Coliseum in Rome was used as a quarry to build St. Peter’s Basilica and other Roman landmarks. In the United States, families often reused building materials to save money in the early part of the 20th century, a custom that fell out of favor as the country grew wealthier in the 1950s.
Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to 85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their integrity.
Unbuilding a home takes longer than leveling it the usual way and often costs more, at least initially. While almost anyone who’s watched a TLC rehab show can rip out a kitchen cabinet, unpiecing an entire house without having the roof collapse isn’t a job for the uninitiated. The Building Materials Reuse Association, which introduced a deconstruction training program in May, has certified 60 builders so far.
When Carolyn Bronstein and John Tapper wanted to dismantle a 2,500-square-foot Victorian adjacent to their house in the Southport section of Chicago, they could not find a local deconstruction contractor. They recruited Ted Reiff, a contractor and the president of a group called the Reuse People of America, based in Oakland, Calif. The couple bought the house for about $800,000, intending to knock it down so their children could have more space to play, and to make sure a developer didn’t snap up it up.
While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple spent $38,000 to have a contractor trained by Mr. Reiff unpiece it over six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a reuse store.
“It was cleaner and quieter than demolition,” said Ms. Bronstein, an assistant professor of communication at DePaul University in Chicago. “We didn’t have dust flying everywhere.”
Usually, the real savings comes in the reconstruction phase. Paul Pedini, the owner of the Big Dig House in Lexington, Mass., possibly the country’s most celebrated recycled dwelling, estimates he shaved at least $200,000 from his materials costs by using concrete on-ramps and steel beams recovered from the Big Dig highway project in Boston for his modernist structure.
“There were these materials and we wanted to build a house. We just put two and two together,” said Mr. Pedini, a civil engineer who was a contractor on the Big Dig. “I told them, why not keep the money you’d pay in disposal costs and give the materials to us to reuse?”
Although few home builders have access to the remains of a $14.6 billion highway project, many cities now have “reuse” stores, which sell salvaged goods — from wall sockets to vintage redwood floorboards — for 50 to 75 percent off what similar products would cost if purchased new.
There are about 1,000 such stores nationwide according to the Reuse Association, most of them nonprofits that offer tax deductions in exchange for donations of used housing materials. Habitat for Humanity International, the affordable housing organization, runs 500 such shops in 45 states, mostly selling easily recoverable accessories like cabinets, doors and flooring. Unlike architectural salvage stores, which sell marble fireplace mantels, stained glass and spiral staircases, reuse stores generally traffic in mundane items like light switches and insulation.
As with buying secondhand clothes, the challenge — and potential charm — of reuse shopping is its unpredictability. Build it Green! NYC, a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment. The original owners paid $18,000 to buy and install the cabinets, according to Justin Green, a founder of the store, who was asking $1,200 for the set — top and bottom cabinets as well as counters.
“I love shopping there,” said Timothy Etienne of Garden City, N.Y. “You never know what you’re going to find.”
He has purchased windows, doors and paint at the store for a second home upstate, along with a six-foot-tall wooden tepee ($30) that is now a backyard playhouse for his four daughters.
Ms. Keller, meanwhile, has been combing the RE Store in Seattle for months, trying to find secondhand glass blocks for the master bath in her new 1,600-square-foot home. She recently scavenged a double-pane glass door for her balcony and a cast-iron double sink for a craft room.
To outfit a home this way, it helps to have a retiree’s schedule.
“You have to be patient,” Ms. Keller said. “It’s the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going back.”
Schumacher to leave Toyota at season's end.
Cologne, Germany (Sports Network) Ralf Schumacher announced that he would not be back with the Toyota Formula One team after the final race of 2007 in Brazil.
"Having been a Toyota driver for the past three years, I've decided to look for a new challenge," said Schumacher. "I joined Toyota with high expectations. It was an exciting challenge to be involved in developing a new car and team, but I am waiting for years for a competitive car."
Ralf Schumacher is the younger brother of seven-time World Champion Michael Schumacher. He owns six F1 wins, but none with Toyota. All of his wins came when he drove for Williams, his last coming in 2003. The 32-year-old earned five points this season, with a best finish of sixth at the Grand Prix of Hungary.
10/01 14:05:36 ET
Cologne, Germany (Sports Network) Ralf Schumacher announced that he would not be back with the Toyota Formula One team after the final race of 2007 in Brazil.
"Having been a Toyota driver for the past three years, I've decided to look for a new challenge," said Schumacher. "I joined Toyota with high expectations. It was an exciting challenge to be involved in developing a new car and team, but I am waiting for years for a competitive car."
Ralf Schumacher is the younger brother of seven-time World Champion Michael Schumacher. He owns six F1 wins, but none with Toyota. All of his wins came when he drove for Williams, his last coming in 2003. The 32-year-old earned five points this season, with a best finish of sixth at the Grand Prix of Hungary.
10/01 14:05:36 ET
October 18, 2007
Sports of The Times
In Need of a Plan B to Deter Young Athletes From Drug Use
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
As much as many of us abhor drug testing in principle, with drug use exploding around us we accept the premise — I did, at least — that drug testing at the high school level was a necessary deterrent to drug use.
But a study released today in the Journal of Adolescent Health challenges the deeply held, or at least hopeful, notion that high school drug testing is a deterrent.
According to the study, these drug tests may not be the deterrent we expect them to be.
Even as state high school associations across the nation begin to implement programs to test athletes for drug use, Dr. Linn Goldberg, the head of the division of health promotion and sports medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and a co-author of the study, raises the sobering possibility that these tests do not deter athletes from using drugs.
“The big thing that people say is you got to give kids a reason not to use drugs, and drug testing is a reason,” Goldberg said Tuesday from his home in Oregon. “That’s not what we found. You can look at testing as a way to catch an early addiction, but as a deterrent, which this study was looking at, we didn’t find any evidence that testing was a deterrent.”
The researchers tested for all illicit drugs, including steroids. The two-year study of 11 Oregon high schools, based solely on questionnaires given to student-athletes, found that random drug and alcohol testing did not reliably keep student-athletes from using.
•
The Saturn (Student Athlete Testing Using Random Notification) study used six schools with no drug-testing policy and five with random drug and alcohol testing.
The researchers found that the presence of a drug-testing program was a minimal deterrent to drug use.
“If drug testing was so great, if it was so wonderful, we wouldn’t have anybody test positive,” Goldberg said. “People would be scared of testing positive and being thrown out; you have a lot of people who test positive.
“Look at the World Anti-Doping Agency Web site, you’ll see people testing positive all the time. Obviously, it doesn’t scare them.”
The study offers no reasons why drug tests failed to deter some student-athletes “other than they’re kids,” said Goldberg, who has five sons.
“Kids take risks and they are willing to challenge authority — that’s part of being a kid.”
The study does not advocate the removal of drug testing at the high school level. However, high school administrators who read the study may consider thinking before plunging in, using precious resources on drug tests that may or may not do what they want them to do.
Administrators and especially coaches often aren’t clear on why they want testing. Do you test to level the playing field to catch so-called drug cheats? Do you test to catch early addiction?
What Goldberg found in Oregon and beyond is that drug testing in high schools takes the place of substantial education.
“Here’s what I see is the big problem,” Goldberg said. “If you put in drug testing and you think it works, then you’re not going to put anything else in. You’re not going to care about anything else because you probably feel, ‘We’ve taken care of it.’ ” Goldberg cited one school in the study that used hair samples as a test for drugs. The tests did not turn up any users.
“Then we gave our surveys,” he said. “They had a ton of drug users; they’re just not catching them. They’re happy as can be that they think they’ve got just a wonderful program. In reality, kids are using just as many drugs and the administrators are walking around in their dream world.”
Among other things, the journal’s study raises the question in my mind of whether this focus on testing at the high school level is a deterrent or a burgeoning cottage industry.
The governor of Texas signed a bill that allows testing of athletes in all sports. The state set aside $3 million a year for testing.
In Florida beginning this fall, high school athletes in football, baseball and weight lifting will be subjected to random steroid testing under a one-year pilot program. The Florida High School Athletic Association will supervise the testing with a budget of $100,000.
New Jersey became the first state to start a statewide testing policy for high school athletes last year. Its initial testing for performance-enhancing drugs among 150 random samples taken last fall failed to produce a positive result, according to the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association. As Goldberg points out, however, the association tests only during the playoffs. “You can use drugs until you reach the tournament,” he said.
•
The Oregon study raises compelling issues in the ongoing game of cops and robbers among illegal drug agents, the agencies trying to catch them and the athletes often caught in the middle.
“The kids let us know what they were doing,” Goldberg said of the athletes who participated in the Oregon study. “It was really the kids who were speaking as clearly as they could. This is just their self-report, and you can either believe it or not believe it.”
What the study makes clear is that there is a need for education and detection. This is not an either/or proposition.
Sports of The Times
In Need of a Plan B to Deter Young Athletes From Drug Use
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
As much as many of us abhor drug testing in principle, with drug use exploding around us we accept the premise — I did, at least — that drug testing at the high school level was a necessary deterrent to drug use.
But a study released today in the Journal of Adolescent Health challenges the deeply held, or at least hopeful, notion that high school drug testing is a deterrent.
According to the study, these drug tests may not be the deterrent we expect them to be.
Even as state high school associations across the nation begin to implement programs to test athletes for drug use, Dr. Linn Goldberg, the head of the division of health promotion and sports medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and a co-author of the study, raises the sobering possibility that these tests do not deter athletes from using drugs.
“The big thing that people say is you got to give kids a reason not to use drugs, and drug testing is a reason,” Goldberg said Tuesday from his home in Oregon. “That’s not what we found. You can look at testing as a way to catch an early addiction, but as a deterrent, which this study was looking at, we didn’t find any evidence that testing was a deterrent.”
The researchers tested for all illicit drugs, including steroids. The two-year study of 11 Oregon high schools, based solely on questionnaires given to student-athletes, found that random drug and alcohol testing did not reliably keep student-athletes from using.
•
The Saturn (Student Athlete Testing Using Random Notification) study used six schools with no drug-testing policy and five with random drug and alcohol testing.
The researchers found that the presence of a drug-testing program was a minimal deterrent to drug use.
“If drug testing was so great, if it was so wonderful, we wouldn’t have anybody test positive,” Goldberg said. “People would be scared of testing positive and being thrown out; you have a lot of people who test positive.
“Look at the World Anti-Doping Agency Web site, you’ll see people testing positive all the time. Obviously, it doesn’t scare them.”
The study offers no reasons why drug tests failed to deter some student-athletes “other than they’re kids,” said Goldberg, who has five sons.
“Kids take risks and they are willing to challenge authority — that’s part of being a kid.”
The study does not advocate the removal of drug testing at the high school level. However, high school administrators who read the study may consider thinking before plunging in, using precious resources on drug tests that may or may not do what they want them to do.
Administrators and especially coaches often aren’t clear on why they want testing. Do you test to level the playing field to catch so-called drug cheats? Do you test to catch early addiction?
What Goldberg found in Oregon and beyond is that drug testing in high schools takes the place of substantial education.
“Here’s what I see is the big problem,” Goldberg said. “If you put in drug testing and you think it works, then you’re not going to put anything else in. You’re not going to care about anything else because you probably feel, ‘We’ve taken care of it.’ ” Goldberg cited one school in the study that used hair samples as a test for drugs. The tests did not turn up any users.
“Then we gave our surveys,” he said. “They had a ton of drug users; they’re just not catching them. They’re happy as can be that they think they’ve got just a wonderful program. In reality, kids are using just as many drugs and the administrators are walking around in their dream world.”
Among other things, the journal’s study raises the question in my mind of whether this focus on testing at the high school level is a deterrent or a burgeoning cottage industry.
The governor of Texas signed a bill that allows testing of athletes in all sports. The state set aside $3 million a year for testing.
In Florida beginning this fall, high school athletes in football, baseball and weight lifting will be subjected to random steroid testing under a one-year pilot program. The Florida High School Athletic Association will supervise the testing with a budget of $100,000.
New Jersey became the first state to start a statewide testing policy for high school athletes last year. Its initial testing for performance-enhancing drugs among 150 random samples taken last fall failed to produce a positive result, according to the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association. As Goldberg points out, however, the association tests only during the playoffs. “You can use drugs until you reach the tournament,” he said.
•
The Oregon study raises compelling issues in the ongoing game of cops and robbers among illegal drug agents, the agencies trying to catch them and the athletes often caught in the middle.
“The kids let us know what they were doing,” Goldberg said of the athletes who participated in the Oregon study. “It was really the kids who were speaking as clearly as they could. This is just their self-report, and you can either believe it or not believe it.”
What the study makes clear is that there is a need for education and detection. This is not an either/or proposition.
October 18, 2007
Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School
By JOEL ELLIOTT
PORTLAND, Me., Oct. 17 — The Portland school board on Wednesday approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control medications without notifying parents.
The proposal, from the Portland Division of Public Health, calls for the independently operated health care center at King Middle School to provide a variety of services to students, including immunizations and physical checkups in addition to birth-control medications and counseling for sexually transmitted diseases, said Lisa Belanger, an administrator for Portland’s student health centers.
All but two members of the 12-person committee voted to approve the plan.
The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.
Health care professionals at the clinic advised the committee that the proposal was necessary in order for the clinic to serve students who were engaging in risky behavior.
The conference room at the Wednesday night meeting was packed with parents, students and television cameras as school board committee members discussed the issue and heard testimony from experts and residents.
“It has been shown, over and over again, that this does not increase sexual activity,” said Pat Patterson, the medical director of School-Based Health Centers.
Reaction was mixed.
“This is really a violation of parents’ rights,” Peter Doyle, a Portland resident, told the committee. “If there were a constitutional challenge, you guys would be at risk of a lawsuit.”
Others argued for approval.
“Not every child is getting the guidance needed to keep them safe,” said Richard Veilleux, who said his child attends King Middle School. “This is about giving kids who are sexually active the tools that they need.”
According to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, about 30 percent of the 1,700 school-based health centers in the United States provide birth control to students, Dr. Patterson said.
Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School
By JOEL ELLIOTT
PORTLAND, Me., Oct. 17 — The Portland school board on Wednesday approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control medications without notifying parents.
The proposal, from the Portland Division of Public Health, calls for the independently operated health care center at King Middle School to provide a variety of services to students, including immunizations and physical checkups in addition to birth-control medications and counseling for sexually transmitted diseases, said Lisa Belanger, an administrator for Portland’s student health centers.
All but two members of the 12-person committee voted to approve the plan.
The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.
Health care professionals at the clinic advised the committee that the proposal was necessary in order for the clinic to serve students who were engaging in risky behavior.
The conference room at the Wednesday night meeting was packed with parents, students and television cameras as school board committee members discussed the issue and heard testimony from experts and residents.
“It has been shown, over and over again, that this does not increase sexual activity,” said Pat Patterson, the medical director of School-Based Health Centers.
Reaction was mixed.
“This is really a violation of parents’ rights,” Peter Doyle, a Portland resident, told the committee. “If there were a constitutional challenge, you guys would be at risk of a lawsuit.”
Others argued for approval.
“Not every child is getting the guidance needed to keep them safe,” said Richard Veilleux, who said his child attends King Middle School. “This is about giving kids who are sexually active the tools that they need.”
According to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, about 30 percent of the 1,700 school-based health centers in the United States provide birth control to students, Dr. Patterson said.
October 18, 2007
Stalled Health Tests Leave Storm Trailers in Limbo
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.
“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”
But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.
One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.
Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.
“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.
This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.
But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense.
The mixed signals have confounded storm victims like Tom and Linda Pieri of Livingston, Tex., who have spent the last 21 months with their two dogs and, on occasion, their grown son, in a 12-by-32 foot Mallard trailer that the agency provided after their East Texas house was wrecked by Hurricane Rita in 2005.
Disabled and living on Social Security, the Pieris said they had made “a handshake deal” to buy their trailer for $300 in August, only to have FEMA withdraw the offer, leaving them facing ruinous rent charges — or so they feared.
The program that the emergency agency now says it has withdrawn would have charged the Pieris $50 a month in March, $100 in April and $50 more each month until the rent hit a ceiling of $600 a month. The charges would have varied according to the occupants’ means. But Mr. Pieri, 60, a former prison laundry manager injured in a work accident in 2001, said the rent would have been prohibitive on the couple’s combined Social Security payments of $1,700 a month.
“I just want to keep a roof over my head, and my wife’s head,” he said.
At the height of relief efforts after the 2005 storms, the emergency agency was providing 134,502 trailers of various sizes up to mobile homes.
The number of trailers still deployed was 55,785, Ms. Walker said. The agency paid about $10,000 each for the trailers, from eight manufacturers, she said.
Kathy Munson, a spokeswoman for one of the suppliers, Fleetwood Enterprises in Riverside, Calif., said dealers commonly aired out the trailers before selling them, which dissipated the formaldehyde. “FEMA ordered so many, they were at staging areas all sealed up and not aired out, and that causes fumes to get worse,” Ms. Munson said.
Charles Green, a C.D.C. spokesman, said that testing was expected to start at the end of this month or early November in at least 300 occupied trailers in Mississippi and 300 in Louisiana. Teams will spend about an hour in each trailer using a portable pump to take air samples. The occupants would also be asked questions about pets, smoking habits and the use of pesticides.
The Environmental Protection Agency lists formaldehyde as a colorless, pungent gas released by building materials and household items, including paint, draperies and pressed wood products. It can cause burning of the eyes, nausea and asthma attacks. It has been shown to cause cancer in animals and, the environmental agency said, “may cause cancer in humans.”
Formaldehyde has become a special concern in trailers, especially when they are new and unventilated, Mr. Paulison told the House oversight committee. The Department of Housing and Urban Development sets formaldehyde limits in manufactured housing, but not trailers.
The Pieris said formaldehyde was not of great concern. Both chain-smoke cigarettes despite asthma and pulmonary problems and, in Mrs. Pieri’s case, breast cancer and a mastectomy several years ago. “I know, we’re dumb,” Mr. Pieri said, adding that he had tried every possible anti-tobacco treatment.
In any case, he said, they were committed to keeping their trailer. Their house, which they bought for $27,000 in 2000 with $1,000 down and a mortgage of $301 a month, needed $32,000 in repairs, Mr. Pieri said, and the $5,300 FEMA had provided was barely enough to fix the roof.
FEMA offered them $411 a month to find housing elsewhere but the cheapest apartment in the area was $600, he said.
“Even if I can find another place,” he said, looking at his damaged house spilling moldy furniture and clothes, “everything we own is right there.”
Stalled Health Tests Leave Storm Trailers in Limbo
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.
“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”
But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.
One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.
Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.
“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.
This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.
But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense.
The mixed signals have confounded storm victims like Tom and Linda Pieri of Livingston, Tex., who have spent the last 21 months with their two dogs and, on occasion, their grown son, in a 12-by-32 foot Mallard trailer that the agency provided after their East Texas house was wrecked by Hurricane Rita in 2005.
Disabled and living on Social Security, the Pieris said they had made “a handshake deal” to buy their trailer for $300 in August, only to have FEMA withdraw the offer, leaving them facing ruinous rent charges — or so they feared.
The program that the emergency agency now says it has withdrawn would have charged the Pieris $50 a month in March, $100 in April and $50 more each month until the rent hit a ceiling of $600 a month. The charges would have varied according to the occupants’ means. But Mr. Pieri, 60, a former prison laundry manager injured in a work accident in 2001, said the rent would have been prohibitive on the couple’s combined Social Security payments of $1,700 a month.
“I just want to keep a roof over my head, and my wife’s head,” he said.
At the height of relief efforts after the 2005 storms, the emergency agency was providing 134,502 trailers of various sizes up to mobile homes.
The number of trailers still deployed was 55,785, Ms. Walker said. The agency paid about $10,000 each for the trailers, from eight manufacturers, she said.
Kathy Munson, a spokeswoman for one of the suppliers, Fleetwood Enterprises in Riverside, Calif., said dealers commonly aired out the trailers before selling them, which dissipated the formaldehyde. “FEMA ordered so many, they were at staging areas all sealed up and not aired out, and that causes fumes to get worse,” Ms. Munson said.
Charles Green, a C.D.C. spokesman, said that testing was expected to start at the end of this month or early November in at least 300 occupied trailers in Mississippi and 300 in Louisiana. Teams will spend about an hour in each trailer using a portable pump to take air samples. The occupants would also be asked questions about pets, smoking habits and the use of pesticides.
The Environmental Protection Agency lists formaldehyde as a colorless, pungent gas released by building materials and household items, including paint, draperies and pressed wood products. It can cause burning of the eyes, nausea and asthma attacks. It has been shown to cause cancer in animals and, the environmental agency said, “may cause cancer in humans.”
Formaldehyde has become a special concern in trailers, especially when they are new and unventilated, Mr. Paulison told the House oversight committee. The Department of Housing and Urban Development sets formaldehyde limits in manufactured housing, but not trailers.
The Pieris said formaldehyde was not of great concern. Both chain-smoke cigarettes despite asthma and pulmonary problems and, in Mrs. Pieri’s case, breast cancer and a mastectomy several years ago. “I know, we’re dumb,” Mr. Pieri said, adding that he had tried every possible anti-tobacco treatment.
In any case, he said, they were committed to keeping their trailer. Their house, which they bought for $27,000 in 2000 with $1,000 down and a mortgage of $301 a month, needed $32,000 in repairs, Mr. Pieri said, and the $5,300 FEMA had provided was barely enough to fix the roof.
FEMA offered them $411 a month to find housing elsewhere but the cheapest apartment in the area was $600, he said.
“Even if I can find another place,” he said, looking at his damaged house spilling moldy furniture and clothes, “everything we own is right there.”
Monday, October 01, 2007
Valores apartir de 01 de Março 2009
Campinas, 01 de Março de 2009
Prezados (as)
Segue abaixo, a nova tabela de valores de hora/aula, os quais entrarão em vigor para todos os NOVOS alunos.
Os valores abaixo, serão aplicados à todos os novos alunos, os quais, ingressarem apartir de 01 de março de 2009, ou ainda, àqueles que se ausentarem sem o pagamento antecipado do valor de 50% das horas aula, referente a reserva de horário (previsto em comunicado de reservas http://ifsc.blogspot.com/2006/09/comunicados-importantes-2006.html - férias ou ausência profissional).
Horário VIP 06:00 am a 09:00 am (inclusive); 11:00 am a 13:00 (inclusive) ; 17:00 em diante
Individual
1x por semana R$ 56,38/hora (*) ou R$ 45,10/hora (**)
2x por semana R$ 52,25/hora (*) ou R$ 41,80/hora (**)
3 ou mais x R$ 49,50/hora (*) ou R$ 39,60/hora (**)
Dupla/Trio/Quarteto
1x por semana R$ 39,88/hora (*) ou R$ 31,90 (**)
2x por semana R$ 35,75/hora (*) ou R$ 28,60/hora (**)
3 ou mais x R$ 31,63/hora (*) ou R$ 25,30/hora (**)
Horário Econômico 10:00 am; 14:00 a 16:00 (inclusive)
Individual 1,2 ou 3 x por semana R$ 49,50/hora (*) ou R$ 39,60/aula (**)
Dupla/Trio/Quarteto 1,2 ou 3 x por semana R$ 31,63/hora (*) ou R$ 25,30/aula (**)
-----------------------------------------------
(*) Valores para pagamento até o dia 30 do mês
(**) Valores para pagamento até o dia do mês escolhido pelo aluno ( 01, 05, 10)
(***) Os Valores para Dupla, Trio ou Quarteto indicados são referentes a um individuo do grupo.
Importante: Todos os pagamentos, independente da escolha da data, serão referentes ao mês em que as aulas foram dadas.
Aulas Avulsas
Individual R$ 66,00/aula
Dupla/Trio/Quarteto R$ 41,00/aula por membro do grupo
Serão consideradas aulas avulsas, todas aquelas em que o aluno optar por não manter reserva de horário regular; Devem ser reservadas com antecedência de 01 semana ; pagamento somente antecipado.
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