IFS Ensino de Idiomas

The Sun In My Eyes

2011-08-07T17:40:00.000-07:00

The Sun In My Eyes
I've got to get out of whatever I'm in
Find a point with my way back to the beginning
I've had it up to here with being nowhere near
I'm through with making do, I'm cutting to a point that's new

'Cos I am on the threshold of some brighter thing
Not many understand that all I wanna do is sing
My words hold me in place, they help to keep me safe
Push my back against the wall and catch me, if I fall
Catch me, if I fall
[repeat]

With the sun in my eyes and the world at my feet
My love's in the music, the music's in me
[repeat]
The sun in my eyes

Catch me, if I fall
[repeat]

With the sun in my eyes and the world at my feet
My love's in the music, the music's in me
[repeat]
The sun in my eyes

'Cos what goes round comes back around
[repeat]

With the sun in my eyes and the world at my feet
My love's in the music, the music's in me
[repeat]
The sun in my eyes

Live Your Life

2011-08-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

Live Your Life (ft. Erick Morillo & Eddie Thoneick)
Sometimes you just need to let go
Don't keep it all inside
Sometimes you just have to let the whole world know
That you are going to be alright
So come on and give? it up give it up
Get into your rhythm
No need for you to be stressed
So come on and give it up give it up
And get into your system
And find your happiness
Live your life, be free, you know you can have it all.
Live your life, be free, you know you can have it all
Got to be free ...
gotta be fee
Sometimes you just need to let go
Don't keep it all inside
Sometimes you just have to let the whole world know
That you are going to be alright
So come on and give? it up give it up
Get into your rhythm anekatips
No need for you to be stressed
So come on and give it up give it up
And get into your system
And find your happiness
Live your life, be free, you know you can have it all
Live your life, be free, you know you can have it all

Choose the best answer

2011-04-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

1. _____ your homework? Did you do / Has you done / Has you done / Have you do / Have you done 2. Which books .......................................... to school yesterday? did you take / do you take / have you taken / take you / took you 3. When _____? did you arrive / did you arrived / do you arrived / has you arrived / have you arrived 4. We _____ my aunt next week on Friday. It will be her birthday. are visiting / have visited / is visiting / visited / will visit 5. We ............................... that film. already did see / already saw / has already seen / have already seen / will already seen 6. The weather forecast says the sun _____ tomorrow. is going to shine / is shining / may shine / shines / will shine 7. She _____ in this house for years. has been living / has lived / have lived / lived lives 8. Many things _____ this month. would change / have changed/ has changed / didn't changed / changed 9. Look! She ……………………………………….. from a large whisky-bottle. are drinking / drink / drinks / is drinking / will drink 10. Leif Ericson..................Vinland while he …………………………towards the west. has discovered ... were sailing / discovered ... sailed / has discovered ... was sailing / was discovering ... sailed / discovered ... was sailing 11. If I ....................... the Superman, I ........................ was- fly /were -will fly / were -would fly / would be- flew / would be -would fly 12. I ….……… (finish) doing this exercise. just have/ finished / just finished / have just / finished / has just finished / am finishing 13. I ........................................... positive reviews about that film in the papers so I am going to see it. has read / have read / read / readed / will read 14. Hi Jane, you _____ sad! What's up? will look / looks / look / is looking / are looking 15. He …………………………… mineral water every day. will drink / is drinking/ drinks / drink / are drinking 16. He was late. When he ......................... at the airport, the plane ................... left ... had arrived / has arrived ... left / had arrived ... left / had arrived ... had left / arrived ... had already left 17. He ......................................... about everything! always complain / always complains/ is always complaining/ is complaining will always complain 18. Harry ............... and we ............................ him the news. woke up -were telling / woke up -told / was waking up -told/ wakes up -told/ had woken -up told 19. After he .............................painting, he ..........................a shower. finish-have finished /had -had finished /had - had finished/ had -had /has finished- had 20. ........................................... rugby? Do you ever played /Have you ever play /Have you ever played / Has you ever played /Did you ever played

Test On Past Progressive

2011-04-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

Was or Were? The pirates was/were fighting for the treasure. We was/were discussing the problem. The candle was/were burning. The cat was/were chasing the mice. The mice was/were running away from the cat. Write sentences in past progressive. the snowman / melt / in the sun → we / explore / a new territory → the secretary / print out / a document → the girls / not / concentrate / on the task → Garth / not / practise / on the piano → Write questions in past progressive. Jill / dance → your cousins / swim / in the lake → the student / answer / a question → William / play / the guitar → Janet / sit / on the bench → Ask for the information in the bold part of the sentence. At a quarter past six, Phil was translating the document. Sheila was waiting in the park. The pupils were talking about the United States. The boss was dictating a letter. Barbara was looking for her necklace.

Test On Simple Past

2011-04-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

Put the sentences into simple past. They repeat the question. → She hugs her little brother. → The snowman melts in the sun. → The candle does not burn. → Do they chat in a forum? → Write sentences in simple past. Jim / his head / cover she / the chapter / copy not / the clouds / disappear he / to our question / refer not / we / our punishment / escape Was or Were? It was/were the right thing to do. The shop was/were open. The men was/were very strong. The weather was/were great. My father and I was/were in the car. Ask for the bold part of the sentence. He clicked the mouse button. Robby Robber robbed a bank. The house burnt down. The children respected their teacher. They welcomed the new pupil warmly.

2011-03-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

Complete the sentences. Use Simple Present or Present Progressive.

We (help) in the canteen this week.
Martin usually (drive) to work.
But today, he (take) the bus.
Listen! She (practise) the piano.
My friend (play) the guitar every evening.

Complete the sentences. Use Simple Present or Present Progressive.

He (not / spend) his holidays in Spain each year.
I (not / meet) Francis tonight.
They (not / fly) to London tomorrow.
We (not / work) this week.
The film (not / begin) at 7 o'clock.

Complete the sentences. Use Simple Present or Present Progressive.

(leave / you) the party now?
(have / you) any brothers or sisters?
(love / she) him?
Who (cook) dinner tonight?
(send / he) you an e-mail every day?

Text

Complete the sentences. Use Simple Present or Present Progressive.
Maria (want) to improve her English.
Therefore, she (do) a language course in London at the moment.
She (stay) with a host family and (must) take the tube to get to her language school.
It (be) only a five-minute walk to the nearest tube station.
The tube (leave) at half past eight.
The first lesson (begin) at 9 o'clock.
In the afternoons, the school (offer) sightseeing tours in and around London.
Tomorrow, the students of the language school (go) to Windsor.

Exercise on Simple Present

2011-03-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

Form questions in Simple Present.

we / a mountain / climb→
we / in London / live→
they / us / remember→
we / at the airport / arrive→
Ruth / the pencil / drop→
you / your bag / pack→
the dinner / a fortune / cost→
the train / the station / leave→
he / the street / cross→
Rupert / the number / dial→

St. Patrick´s Day

2011-03-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

Every 17 March, Irish people all over the world celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in honour of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. Let’s find out what was so special about that person.
When St. Patrick was born, his name actually was not Patrick but Maewyn. He grew up in Wales, but when he was 16, people kidnapped him and sold him into slavery in Ireland.
Maewyn spent six years as a slave in Ireland, but then he escaped and went to Gaul in France where he studied in a monastery for 12 years. Finally, Maewyn became a bishop and adopted the Christian name Patricius (in English: Patrick).
Later Patrick decided to go back to Ireland. Unlike many other missionaries before him, Patrick successfully converted Irish pagans to Christianity because he knew a lot about Irish life and their gods. So Patrick for example did not simply introduce the Christian cross – he put a sun behind it because he knew that the sun was an important symbol for the Irish. The so called Celtic Cross therefore is a cross with a circle symbolising the sun.
Furthermore, Patrick explained the holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) with the help of a shamrock, which grows everywhere in Ireland. The shamrock has three equally sized leaves and Patrick used this to show how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit could exist as separate elements of the same entity.
There are several legends about St. Patrick, for example that he banned all snakes from Ireland (still now there are no snakes in Ireland). People also say that Patrick met some Irish legends such as the Children of Lir.
Patrick died on 17 March 461. That day now is a national holiday in Ireland and there are parades in the streets and music everywhere. Not only in Ireland – Irish emigrants took this tradition all over the world. So there will most probably be a St. Patrick’s Day party in an Irish pub near you. Why not go there and get a little St. Patrick’s Day feeling? Have a good time and sing along. Here are two traditional Irish songs that will surely be sung in every Irish pub that night: Whiskey in the Jar and The Wild Rover.

Questions on the text
Are the statements true or false?
St. Patrick spent his childhood in Ireland. true false
St. Patrick knew the Irish very well. true false
17 March is the day of St. Patrick’s birth true false
St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in many countries. true false

Dreams - The Corrs

2010-10-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

Dreams

Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
It's only right that you should play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound

Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost
[Refrain]
Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
yeh, women they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean you'll know, you'll know
Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams and
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell
Dreams of loneliness...
You'll know, whoa-o-oa, you'll know

Hallelujah

2010-09-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the lord
but you don't really care for music do ya
Well it goes like this the fourth the fifth
the minor fall and the major liftthe baffled king composing hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Well your faith was strong but you needed proof you saw her bathing on the roof her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
she tied you to a kitchen chair she broke your throne and she cut your hair and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.
Hallelujah,hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Baby I've been here before
I've seen this room and
I've walked this floor You know,
I used to live alone before I knew you
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch and love is not a victory marchit's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Hallelujah,hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Well there was a time when you let me know
what's really going on below but now you never show that to me do youbut remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too and every breath we drew was
hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Well maybe there's a god above but all I've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
And it's not a cry that you hear at nightit's not somebody who's seen the lightit's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujahHallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujahHallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujahHallelujah

Reading Interpretation

2010-09-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

India is working against the clock to try and save the 2010 Commonwealth Games after a series of PR disasters. The sporting event is behind the Olympics and World Championships in terms of status. India is holding it for the first time but is struggling to satisfy competing national teams. Several well-known athletes, including Jamaica’s Olympic 100-metre champion and world record holder Usain Bolt, have already pulled out, some because they have security concerns. More athletes were worried about their safety after two Taiwanese tourists were shot in Delhi last week. Other countries are worried about health and safety. The Scottish and South African teams are among many who described the athletes’ village as “unfit for human habitation.”

The Commonwealth Games are attended by countries who have strong links with the British monarchy. It is the second time for an Asian country to host the games, following Malaysia in 1998. This year has seen the Games dogged by problems. A majority of Indians believe they are a waste of money; they are already more than 500 per cent over budget. This week has seen several embarrassing accidents with the Games’ facilities; a footbridge leading to the main stadium collapsed, injuring 28 people, four critically; and part of the ceiling in the weightlifting venue fell down. Many athletes say they are worried about diseases and terrorism. The Games’ organizers are confident everything will be ready on time and that Western nations are worrying too much.

1. TRUE / FALSE: Read the headline. Guess if a-h below are true (T) or false (F).
a. India has limited time to finish preparing to host a major sports event.
T / F
b. India is holding the Commonwealth Games for the first time.
T / F
c. Usain Bolt, the 100-metre champion, is the biggest star at the Games.
T / F
d. All athletes are very happy with the housing India is providing.
T / F
e. Only countries that have a king or queen can compete at the Games.
T / F
f. One other Asian country has hosted the Commonwealth Games.
T / F
g. Several weightlifters fell down at a weightlifting venue.
T / F
h. The Games’ organizers think Western countries should worry less.
T / F

2. SYNONYM MATCH: Match the following synonyms from the article.
1.series a.fell down
2holding b.worries
3.pulled out c.hold
4.concerns d.sequence
5.habitation e.positive
6.links f.hosting
7.host g.bulk
8.majority h.living
9.collapsed i.connections
10.confident j.withdrawn

How Can I Go On?

2010-09-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

Guide Me Home
Freddie Mercury

Now the wind has lost my sail
Now the scent has left my trail
Who will find me, take care and side with me
Guide me back safely to my home
Where I belong, once more
Where is my star in heaven's bough
Where is my strength, I need it now
Who can save me, lead me to my destiny
Guide me back safely to my home
Where I belong, once more
Who will find me, take care and side with me
Guide me back safely to my home
Where I belong, once more

How Can I Go On

How can I go on ?
How can I go on this way...
When all the salt is taken from the sea I stand dethroned
I'm naked and I bleed
But when your finger points so savagely Is anybody there to believe in me ?
To hear my plea and take care of me ?
How can I go on From day to day Who can make me strong in every way
Where can I be safe
Where can I belong
In this great big world of sadness
How can I forget
Those beautiful dreams that we shared
They're lost and they're no where to be found
How can I go on ?
Sometimes I start to tremble in the dark I cannot see
When people frighten me I try to hide myself so far from the crowd
Is anybody there to comfort me Lord...take care of me
How can I go on From day to day
Who can make me strong in every way
Where can I be safe Where can I belong In this great big world of sadness
How can I forget Those beautiful dreams that we shared
They're lost and they're no where to be found
How can I go on ?

Test on The English Tenses

2010-09-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Test on the English Tenses

Choose the correct answer!
1. Scientists ..... hard to find a new and effective treatment which ..... most-scared diseases.
A) have been struggling / will cure
B) struggled / had been curing
C) will struggle / have cured
D) are struggling / are being cured
E) have struggled / were curing

2. In two years, many of our school friends ....., and then we ..... no hardship in keeping our international business going.
A) graduated / had had
B) are graduating / have had
C) have graduated / will have
D) graduate / would have
E) will graduate / will have

3. The girls ...... a game called 'bomb' for almost ten minutes when the teacher suddenly ..... the classroom.
A) have played / will enter
B) were playing / entered
C) are playing / comes
D) had been playing / entered
E) played / was entering

4. It is five months since we ....... over this company.
A) have taken
B) had taken
C) will take
D) are taking
E) were taking

5. When I .... into him on the street, he said he .... abroad for business affairs that evening.
A) ran / was going
B) will run / would go
C) had run / is going
D) have run / will be going
E) ran / will go

6. The government ..... action into increasing taxes as soon as they ..... by the IMF authorities.
A) takes /will be urged
B) took / had been urged
C) is taking / have been urged
D) had taken /were urged
E) will take / have urged

7. Don't you think it .... time we ..... typing the report.
A) has been / have started
B) is / started
C) will be / are starting
D) was / started
E) would be / had started

8. China ...... greatly in terms of its cultural values over the past five years.
A) changed
B) is changing
C) has changed
D) will have changed
E) had changed

9. I feel lucky to have found a well-paid job on time, otherwise ...... for a job now.
A) will be looking
B) have looked
C) am looking
D) would be looking
E) were looking

10. I ..... quite a low grade in the English exam, so I ..... harder and harder.
A) have got / was studying
B) got / am studying
C) will get / have studied
D) get / will have studied
E) had got / will study

Pratique Preposição

2010-09-19T16:18:00.000-07:00

Quiz on Prepositions

Fill in the spaces using prepositional patterns

1- Causing something wrong ________ fault
2- From memory ________ heart
3- Definitely; without doubt ______ certain
4- Owing money ______ debt
5- Usually; as a whole ______ general
6- Occurring together _______ hand hand
7- Not functioning properly _______ of order
8- Accidentally ______ mistake
9- Act in a dangerous or foolish way _______ ask trouble
10- Deliberately _______ purpose
11- Being watched carefully ______ observation
12- Concerning; about _______ respect to
13- Openly; not in private _______ public
14- Near ______ the vicinity of
15- Very close to; about to _______ the verge of

What is missing?
have a talent _____
run the risk _____
pay attention _____
enthusiastic ______
detached _______
independent ______
consistent _______
report ________
intervene _______
succumb ________

Reading Interpretation 2

2010-09-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

Official records state that the Pueblo Indians lived in New Mexico and Arizona . The word "Pueblo" comes from the Spanish word "pueblo," meaning town or village. The Spaniards found these Indians living in apartment houses, some of them on the side of a cliff in order that they could be reached only by ladders. Whenever they were attacked by Apaches, the Pueblos would pull up the ladders. They grew corn, which they watered with water flowing down in ditches. They wove cloth, made wonderful baskets, and created jars and pots out of clay proving how skilful they were at hand-craft.

1. From the passage we understand that the Pueblo Indians were afraid of ............. .
a) cliff dwelling
b) Apache Indians
c) apartment houses
d) water flowing down in ditches
e) solitary life

2. Why the Spaniards called these Indians "Pueblos" is because they ................ .
a) were close to the Apaches
b) lived together in a town or village
c) farmed and brought down water in ditches
d) pulled up their ladders when attacked
e) achieved fame thanks to their hand-craft

3. The Pueblo Indians lived on the side of a cliff ................ .
a) although they had apartment houses
b) to observe the stars in the sky for rain season
c) so that they could provide themselves with shelters
d) and, the didn't have a lake, a stream, or a pond
e) as long as they were all together

Reading Interpretation:

2010-09-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

Researches suggest that there are creatures that do not know what light means at the bottom of the sea. They don't have either eyes or ears; they can only feel. There is no day or night for them. There are no winters, no summers, no sun, no moon, and no stars. It is as if a child spent its life in darkness in bed, with nothing to see or hear. How different our own life is! Sight shows us the ground beneath our feet and the heavens above us - the sun, moon, and stars, shooting stars, lightning, and the sunset. It shows us day and night. We are able to hear voices, the sound of the sea, and music. We feel, we taste, we smell. How fortunate we are!

1. Judging from the passage, we can say that this story is mainly about ............ .
a) life of sea creatures at the bottom of the sea
b) how changes in the seasons are perceived by the deep-sea creatures
c) how wonderful our lives were and will be
d) the differences among creatures of the earth and those of the sea
e) the superiority of human beings over some creatures in terms of senses

2. We discover that the sea creatures in the story ................ .
a) have the same senses that we do
b) have no sense of hearing as well as sight
c) hear the sounds of the ocean
d) live in darkness because no light reaches to the bottom
e) do not hear the sound of sea as they are accustomed to it

3. In the passage a child in darkness is likened to ................ .
a) someone who lives where there are no seasons
b) an animal without the sense of touch
c) a sea creature with no seeing or hearing ability
d) a deaf child unaffected by the environment
e) a perfect sleeper, for there is no sound around to hear

Tears Dry On Their Own

2010-09-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

AMY WINEHOUSE
"Tears Dry On Their Own"
All I can ever be to you,Is a darkness that we knew,
And this regret I've got accustomed to,Once it was so right,
When we were at our high,Waiting for you in the hotel at night,
I knew I hadn't met my match,
But every moment we could snatch,
I don't know why I got so attached,
It's my responsibility,And you don't owe nothing to me,
But to walk away I have no capacity
He walks away,
The sun goes down,
He takes the day but I'm grown,
And in your way, in this blue shade
My tears dry on their own,I don't understand,
Why do I stress A man,
When there's so many bigger things at hand,
We could a never had it all,We had to hit a wall,
So this is inevitable withdrawal,
Even if I stop wanting you,
A Perspective pushes true,
I'll be some next man's other woman soon,
I shouldn't play myself again,
I should just be my own best friend,
Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men,
So we are history,YOUR shadow covers me
The sky above, A blaze only that lovers see
I wish I could say no regrets,
And no emotional debts,
Cause that kiss goodbye the sun sets,
So we are history,The shadow covers me,
The sky above a blaze that only lovers see,
He walks away,The sun goes down,
He takes the day but I'm grown,
And in you way,My deep shade,My tears dry

Test Your English.

2010-09-05T17:09:00.000-07:00

Please select the best option to complete the following sentence:

I come ___________ England.
to
from
at
in

There aren't ___________ people here.
much
many
a lot
some

Tim ___________ work tomorrow.
isn't going
isn't
isn't going to
isn't to

I'd like ___________ information, please.
an
some
piece
a piece

________________ to school yesterday?
Do you walk
Did you walked
Did you walk
Have you walked

I went to the shop ___________ some chocolate.
for buying
for buy
to buy
buy

'I don't like coffee.' ' ___________ do I.'
So
Neither
Either
No

'Have you visited London?' ' ___________ .'
Not yet
Ever
Already
Not

Is Jo ___________ Chris?
taller
that taller
as tall as
more tall

You should ___________ your homework.
make
do
work
give

'Where's the ___________ post office, please?'
most near
near
more near
nearest

Would you mind ___________ the window?
closing
close to
close
closed

He's interested ___________ learning Spanish.
on
to
in
for

How long ___________ English?
do you learn
are you learning
have you been learning
you learn

His office is on the second ___________ of the building.
floor
level
ground
stage

The doctor gave me a ___________ for some medicine yesterday.
note
receipt
prescription
recipe

Can you tell me when ___________ ?
the train leaves
does the train leave
leaves the train
does leave the train

I ___________ a reply to my letter in the next few days.
hope
expect
wait for
get

When Simon ___________ back tonight, he'll cook dinner.
comes
will come
come
shall come

We arrived ___________ England two days ago.
to
in
on
at

'Why are you so hungry?' 'Oh, I ___________ breakfast this morning.'
hadn't
didn't
didn't have
haven't

You ___________ better see a doctor.
did
would
should
had

You should ___________ swimming.
start up
get off
take up
take off

'Did you speak to Juliet?' 'No, I've ___________ seen her.
nearly
hardly
often
always

He told me that he ___________ in Spain the previous year.
has been working
had been working
has worked
had been worked

She looks ___________ she's going to be sick.
as if
as
likes
if

The best way to learn a language is ___________ a little every day.
speak
in speaking
to speaking
by speaking

She ___________ me to go to school.
said
told
suggested
made

I want to be a teacher when I ___________ .
grow
age
grow up
am more years

I'm fed up ___________ this exercise.
with doing
to do
to doing
for doing

It ___________ my brother.
is ages that I didn't see
is ages since I saw
was ages that I haven't seen
was ages since I saw

She has been ___________ of murdering her husband.
charged
accused
arrested
blamed

You aren't allowed to use your mobile so ___________ .
it's no point to leave it on
it's no point in leaving it on
there's no point in leaving it on
there's no point to leave it on

You ___________ the cleaning. I would have done it tonight.
needn't have done
couldn't have done
can't have done
wouldn't have done

They have put speed bumps on the road to ___________ accidents.
avoid
prohibit
prevent
forbid

We would never have had the accident if you ___________ so fast.
wouldn't been driving
hadn't been driving
had driven
wouldn't drive

The tree ___________ by lightning.
was flashed
struck
was struck
flashed

If only I ___________ richer.
am
were
would be
will be

_______________ the better team, we lost the match.
Despite of being
Despite
Despite being
Although

By this time next year, I ___________ all my exams.
will have taken
will take
take
have taken

Choose The Right Preposition

2010-08-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at/by/for/from/of/to/upon a mean distance at/by/for/from/of/to/upon 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives at/by/for/from/of/to/upon the sun is barely half of that received at/by/for/from/of/to/upon this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life at/by/for/from/of/to/upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh at/by/for/from/of/to/upon the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling at/by/for/from/of/to/upon the temperature at/by/for/from/of/to/upon which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary at/by/for/from/of/to/upon the support of animated existence.

Phrasal Verbs

2010-08-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Fill in the blanks using the words in the box below.
about after away back by for in into off on over together up

1. We had some problems when we checked _______________the hotel. They had reserved the room under the wrong name.
2. My book club meets regularly to discuss selected novels. In fact, we are getting ______________ next week to talk about a really unique mystery novel called Illusion.
3. Mrs. Jones's husband passed ____________________ last Friday. We are going to attend his funeral next week.
4. In the dream, my wallet turned _________________ a butterfly and flew away. Isn't that symbolic. I think I'd better stop spending so much money.
5. Before the plane took _________________________, the flight attendant told everyone to fasten their seat belts and put their chairs in an upright position.
6. Don't forget to put ____________________ your gloves . It is cold outside!
7. The police chased the robber down the street and through the park but they couldn't catch him. He got _______________ by jumping on the back of a passing truck.
8. Fred told us to keep ________________ . He said the dog was very aggressive and that it might even be rabid.
9. I am looking __________________ an apartment near the beach. I would like a studio or a one bedroom with a view of the ocean.
10. I can't believe how much John takes _____________________ his father. They look and act exactly the same.
11. I can mail the letter for you. I go _______________ the post office on my way to work.
12. If you watch your money, stay in hostels, make your own food, and plan carefully, you can get _________________ there on less than $30.00 a day.
13. If you don't understand the word "superstitious," look it ________________ in the dictionary.
14. For legal reasons, our lawyer wants to go ______________________ the papers thoroughly before we sign them.
15. Popular protest and extensive media coverage finally helped bring ________________ change in the country's environmental policies.
16. Mr. Octavio checked our names _____________________ the list one by one as we entered the room.
17. I can't hear what they are saying on TV. Can you please turn it _________________ ?18. This radio station is based in Chicago, which is 60 miles from here. That is why the broadcast doesn't come _________________ clearly.
19. This is the most intensive language course I have ever taken. I have to study four hours per night just to keep ________________ with the pace of the class.
20. I think the experiment supports my theory, but I need to go ___________________ the results a couple of times to make sure that no mistakes were made while collecting the data.

Write the best answer

2010-07-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

1. London _____ a lot since 1975.
will change - have changed - has changed - changed - change
2. I did my homework when I _____ television.
had watched - was watch - was watching - watched - watching
3. If she asks for money, I _____ her.
will give - gives - given - give - gave
4. The manager _____ soon.
arrived - arrives - has arrive - is arriving - will arrive
5. She never _____ late to school.
came - come - comes - coming - is coming
6. I met Jane while I _____ on the beach.
walk - walked - walking - was walking - were walking
7. If I _____ the address, I would have gone there.
had known - have known - knew - know - known
8. She _____ to London yesterday.
go - gone - had went - went - will go
9. Scientists _____ a new planet.
had just discover - has just discover - have just discover - have just discovered - will just discovered
10. The baby _____ usually well behaved.
were - shall - is - has - are
11. I _____ my work now. Do not disturb me.
am doing - do - done - was doing - were doing
12. She _____ cooking food daily.
has liked - is liking - like - likes - liking
13. I _____ a letter tomorrow.
has written - have written - will write - write
14. I _____ in this school for ten years.
has been studying - have been studying - studied - studying - were studying
15. I _____ the pen before she did.
had taken - is taking - take - taken - took
16. Look! The boy _____ the hill.
climbing - climbs - is climbing - was climbing - were climbed
17. The bus _____ before I reached the bus-stop.
arrive - arrived - had arrived - have arrive - will arrive
18. You should always _____ healthy food.
eaten - was eating - eating - eat - shall eat
19. I _____ my grandmother next week.
should be visit - visit - visiting - will visit - would visit
20. She caught them while they _____.
did talked - is talking - talked - was talked - were talking

Test your English

2010-07-03T17:46:00.000-07:00

Choose the right answer:
The sun rising - is to rise - rises in the East.
In Siberia there is - is - it is cold all the time.
The British often talk about a weather - some weather - the weather because it's so changeable.
English people carry umbrellas for keeping - to keep - for to keep them dry.
In the monsoon season it rains - it raining - there rains almost every day.
In the Gobi desert there isn't some - any - no grass.
Places near the Equator have a warm - the warm - warm climate all year round.
In Northern Europe coldest - the coldest - colder season is usually from December to February.
The most - Most of - Most people don't have the opportunity to live outside their own country.
Very less - little - few people can study abroad.
Hong Kong has reverted - reverted - is reverting to China in 1997.
After she is winning - won - has won the "Miss Universe" title she got a lot of lucrative offers.
Madonna's agent have made her - made her - to made her change her name at the start of her career.
If the world had ended - have ended - was ending on 1st January 2000, some people wouldn't have been surprised.
Warsaw is famous both and - or - as the capital of Poland and as a tourist destination.
He is becoming well known all in - all over - in all the world.
Many people is believing - are believing - believe that Nigel Kennedy is England's greatest violinist.
Getting to be the greatest violinist from - in - of the world is not easy.
Like any top musician, he had to - must to - can to practice long and hard.
Even though Lady Diana is dead, people would - will - did remember her as a 'fairytale princess'.

Lyrics - Gold

2010-07-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

And I love her so
I wouldn't trade her for gold
I'm walking on moon beams
I was born with a silver spoon
And I'm gonna be freeI'm gonna be free
I'm walking on moon beamsand staring out to sea
and if a door close
then a road for home start building and tear your curtains down
for sunlight is like gold
And you better be you
And do what you can do
When you're walking on moon beams
Staring out to sea
Cause if your skin was soil
How long do you think before they start digging
and if your life was gold
how long would you think you'd stay livin'?
HeyAnd I love her so
I wouldn't trade her for gold

Choose the best answer

2010-06-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Choose the best way to complete these quotations.
1. When you don't _____ an education, you've got to use your brains. Unknown
make take got have give
2. When in Rome, _____ as Rome does. AMBROSE BIERCE 1842-1914, American Authordid do make take took
3. What a grand thing it is to be clever and _____ common sense. Terence BC 185-15
do give have make take
4. We don't make mistakes, we only _____ happy accidents. Unknown
get go have take give
5. We all _____ ability. The difference is how we use it. STEVIE WONDER
make have do grant take
6. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to _____ it over.
do make take have give
7. The trick is to _____ sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come. LEE IACOCCA
do give have make take
8. People who never _____ any time on their hands are those who do the least. Georg C.
do get give have make
9. Never miss a chance to _____ sex or appear on television. GORE VIDAL
give take have do make
10. If you _____ money your god, it will plague you like the devil. HENRY FIELDING
make have give take get
11. If you stand up to be counted, someone will _____ your seat. Unknown
do give got make take
12. If I spit, they will _____ my spit and frame it as great art. PABLO PICASSO
make do give have
13. I've never been an intellectual but I _____ this look. WOODY ALLEN,
take make have give get
14. I _____ a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour. EDWARD ALBEE,
work take make have go
15. I am about to _____ my last voyage, a great leap in the dark. THOMAS HOBBES
took take give do made
16. How many fools does it _____ to make up a public? SEBASTIEN-ROCH NICOLAS
do go have make take
17. Advertising is the most fun you can _____ with your clothes on. JERRY DELLA FEMINA, do give have make take
18. A woman past forty should _____ up her mind to be young; not her face. BILLIE BURKE
take make have give do
19. A person will be just about as happy as they _____ up their minds to be. ABRAHAM
do give have make take
20. A liberal man is too broad-minded to _____ his own side in a quarrel. ROBERT FROST make give get take have

Fill in the missing parts

2010-06-26T16:46:00.000-07:00

1.
_____________ you type very fast?
2.
__________ you got a motorbike?
3.
____________ there any money in this purse?
4.
______________ it easy to learn a foreign language?
5.
_____________ is more dangerous, motor racing or sky diving?
6.
Which cartoon ____________ you like when you were a child?
7.
Where _____________ Shakespeare born?
8.
What ___________ you doing when I phoned you this morning?
9.
What ____________ the weather like yesterday?
10.
What ______________ of books are you interested in?
11.
What do you like ______________ in your free time?
12.
How _____________ is your home from work?
13.
How ____________ does he earn a month?
14.
How many brothers and sisters does she _____________ ?
15.
How long _______________ it take to boil an egg?
16.
How long have you _______________ living in this country?
17.
Have you ______________ seen a ghost?
18.
' ____________ sent you these lovely flowers?' 'Peter.'
19.
'_____________ jeans are these?''I don't know. They are not mine.
20.
'What ____________ your father do?' 'He is a doctor.'

Write the text in American English

2010-06-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

Choose the correct word.
A trip to LondonLast week I drove to London by car. As there was an accident on the M25 I had to take a detour/diversion . I stopped in front of a theater/theatre to ask for directions. A young man told me to turn right at the crossroads/intersection and ask again at the gas station/petrol station . There a friendly sales clerk/shop assistant told me to take the second exit of the roundabout /traffic circle . After I had passed a pedestrian crossing/ zebra crossing I saw a bookshop/bookstore and a large car park /parking lot . I parked my car there and walked to the center/centre of London.

Make or Do ??

2010-06-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Make or Do? - Write the correct answer.
1) to ___________ someome a favour
2) to ___________ a bargain
3) to __________ an examination
4) to __________ a complaint
5) to __________ progress
6) to __________ the washing up
7) to __________ money
8) to __________ a reservation
9) to __________ harm to someone
10) to _________ a decision

2010-06-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

Borrow or Lend? - Choose the correct word.
1) Could you ________________ me some money, please?
2) Some pupils can ___________________ books from their school.
3) Will you _______________ me your umbrella till tomorrow?
4) Should I ________________ him my football?
5) You may _______________ my bike, but be careful.
6) Could I _____________ your cup?
7) You can __________________ your book to Steve.
8) Why do students _____________________ so much money from their parents?
9) Peter won't _________________ his car to anyone.
10) Will your mother _____________________ you some money?

Choose the correct preposition

2010-06-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

Choose the correct preposition.
1) I'm tired of on with in waiting for you.
2) He hasn't smoked since for at to ages.
3) Nina is good for to in at running.
4) I'm looking for after of to my keys. Has anyone found them?
5) They dream at in for of moving to South Africa.
6) This song was written to with by in Madonna.
7) You can look the word on up through with in a dictionary.
8) I can't come to the party. Don't wait for on after at me.
9) She had problems to by in with reading the instructions.
10) The police car chased the robbers among between through on the streets.

Oscar Wilde

2010-06-12T17:10:00.001-07:00

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854.
His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1820-96), was a successful writer.
His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon.
Oscar had one elder brother, Willie.
Oscar was educated at home up to the age of nine.
From 1864 to 1871, he attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.
From 1871 to 1874, he studied the classics at Trinity College, Dublin.
From 1874 to 1878, he studied at Magdalen Colege in Oxford.
After his graduation, Wilde lectured in London, the United States and Canada. He also lived in Paris for a while.
On 29 May, 1885 Wilde married Constance Lloyd. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.
In May 1895 Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality.
After his release in 1897, Wilde moved to France and lived under the name Sebastian Melmoth.
He died of cerebral meningitis in Paris on 30 November, 1900.
He was buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris and later moved to Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Exercises on If Clauses

2010-06-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

Exercise on If Clauses
Complete the sentences.
If your conditions are competitive, we_______________________ (place) an order.
If I had more time, I _________________________(do) a course in business English.
If we had known more about their culture, negotiating ___________________(be) easier.
If you __________________ (customize) your CV, your chances of getting a job will be better.
We _____________________ (cancel) our order if you don't deliver the goods by Friday.
If Brittany _____________________ (speak) better English, she would apply for a job abroad.
If you ____________________ (tell) me about the problem, I would have helped you.
I __________________ (let) you know if I weren't satisfied.
If you execute the order carelessly, they __________________ (place / not) another order with you in the future.
If I were you, I _____________________ (worry / not) about the presentation.

Powerful Phone Interview.

2010-06-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

By Dale Kurow
Phone interviews are de rigueur with many organizations. Companies conduct phone interviews for a number of reasons. It’s a way to screen out the dead wood. It gives the next interviewer baseline information from which to work. It saves money.
So, how do you prep for a powerful phone interview? And how is it different from a face-to-face interview? Recently, three of my clients aced their phone interviews. Here’s what we learned works.
Prepping for the phone interview:
If you need to call from work or from a phone booth or a cell phone, tell the screener/interviewer what the circumstances are. It’s better to explain ahead of time than to suddenly have to stop midway through because of noise or an interruption.
Stand up. You project stronger energy when you stand. Or even better, walk around. Remember, the interviewer has only your words and the sound of your voice with which to judge you. You will come across more upbeat and enthusiastic if you stand.
Even for a phone interview, you need to do your homework. The interviewer will be asking, “Why do you want to work at XYZ Company?” and “What do you know about us?”
Be prepared to answer classic questions, such as: “Tell me about a difficult situation you handled well,” “What are your areas of development?” or an all-time favorite: “Why should we hire you?” If you need help in formulating answers to these questions, see the suggested reading section below.
Keep your responses brief, 1–3 sentences maximum. Choose your words carefully, and be focused. Answer the question. Do not go off on a tangent. This is even more important in the phone interview stage, where the interviewer will appreciate your succinctness.
Have water and throat lozenges handy. If you get dry mouth (don’t you hate that), these can be lifesavers.
How is a phone interview different from a face-to-face interview?
You can use crib notes. And I would. Just in case you get the jitters or have a senior moment, have your responses written out (in bullet form). It’s better than any security blanket.
The timbre and inflection of your voice is critical. Modulate your voice to avoid sounding monotone. When I was a recruiter and conducted phone interviews, I could pick up immediately by the tone of the person’s voice whether they had the requisite drive for the job.
A phone interview is brief, sometimes 20 minutes or less. It is oftentimes a screening rather than an interview. There won’t be a lot of follow-up questions based upon your responses. You won’t get to connect with the interviewer. It may feel formulaic. The interviewer asks a question, and you respond. This is normal.
You will know immediately if you have done well. They will tell you they are passing you on. If you haven’t done well, you will get a vague response. Ask when you should follow-up.
Finally, like a face-to-face interview, always send a thank-you note. A handwritten note is best. Sending an e-mail is acceptable, but less personal. Thank the interviewer for her time. Say you enjoyed the conversation and look forward to taking the next step. Indicate you will follow up within the appropriate time frame.
A successful phone interview is a wonderful prep for the in-person gig. You’ve learned what your top lines are. You’ve done your research. You’ve made it to the next step. And your confidence level is up.
So, when you get the chance for a phone interview, embrace the opportunity. It’s practice for the main event.
Dale Kurow, M.S., is an author and a career and executive coach in NYC. Dale works with clients across the U.S. and internationally, helping them to survive office politics, become better managers, and figure out their next career move. Visit Dale’s web site at www.dalekurow.com for information about her latest E-book, Phone Interview Skills Sharpened Right Here!
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Saiba usar: Big, Great, High, Large e Tall.

2010-06-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

Big, Great, High, Large,Tall ?
Write the correct answer:
1) There is a nice house with a _______________ garden.
2) Albert Eintsein was a _______________ physicist.
3) She is a very __________________ child for her age.
4) A _________________ rate of inflation makes exports uncompetitive.
5) My mother is six feet __________________ .
6) He is making a _______________ mistake.
7) Can you see the ________________ trees behind the lake?
8) The city has a ____________________ level of pollution.
9) This pullover isn't ________________ enough.
10) My grandfather lived to a __________________ age.

Pratique vocabulário em Inglês.

2010-06-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

Fill in the the following words into the gaps:
ancient, ballads, band, been, English, evidence, figure, his, king, lips, name, no, outlaws, sung, than, this, the, was, wrapped
Of all the popular heroes of the __________________ people, none as ever achieved an equal ______________ and fame with Robin Hood. For more ________________ six hundred years, songs and ballads of ________________ famous outlaw have been familiar on the ___________________ of the peasantry. Kings and princes have ___________________ forgotten, but not Robin Hood and his ___________________ of bold followers in merry Sherwood Forest. ___________________ adventures were told in rhymes, which were _____________________ at village merry-makings. We have no clear ________________ of Robin Hood's life history: all is ______________________ in the dim mist of legend and _________________ history. There are students of the old _____________________ and stories who say that Robin Hood __________________ an actual leader in Sherwood Forest, a __________________ of the greenwood, a true and living _________________, and there are others who say that ___________________ doings of a famous band of _________________ have gathered about his name, and that ____________________ real Robin Hood existed.

Exercícios Com Todos os Tempos Verbais

2010-05-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

Fill the gaps with the correct tenses.
I (learn)____________________ English for seven years now.
But last year I (not / work)___________________________ hard enough for English, that's why my marks (not / be) ________________________really that good then.
As I (pass / want) ______________________my English exam successfully next year, I (study) _______________________harder this term.
During my last summer holidays, my parents (send) __________________________me on a language course to London.
It (be) _________________________great and I (think) I (learn) ____________________a lot.
Before I (go)___________________________ to London, I (not / enjoy) _______________________learning English.
But while I (do) _________________________the language course, I (meet) ____________________ lots of young people from all over the world.
There I (notice)__________________________ how important it (be)__________________________ to speak foreign languages nowadays.
Now I (have)_________________________ much more fun learning English than I _______________________ (have) before the course.
At the moment I (revise) __________________________________English grammar.
And I (begin / already) ________________________________ to read the texts in my English textbooks again.
I (think)______________________ I (do) _______________________one unit every week.
My exam (be)___________________________ on 15 May, so there (not / be) ____________________________any time to be lost.
If I (pass) _____________________________my exams successfully, I (start) ___________________________an apprenticeship in September.
And after my apprenticeship, maybe I (go) _________________________back to London to work there for a while.
As you (see / can)___________________________ , I (become) _________________________a real London fan already.

Present Perfect

2010-05-21T17:41:00.000-07:00

Write questions in Present Perfect simple.
1-you / knock / at the door -
2-the teacher / mark / the tests -
3-she / buy / a new computer -
4-they / rescue / the girl -
5-Brad / wear / a blue shirt -

Ask for the information in the bold part of the sentence.
1-They have seen him at the library. -
2-Robby Robber has robbed another bank. -
3-Bill has ordered three desserts. -
4-Clara has repeated the sentence five times. -
5-Jane has asked a question. -

Simple Past

2010-05-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

Form questions in Simple Past.
1- you / high / jump→
2- I / sad / look→
3- Fiona / her grandma / visit→
4- we / her / an apple / give→
5- they / their calculators / use→
6- she / her room / tidy→
7- Janet / the bus / miss→
8- he / the mouse button / click→
9- he / the problem / discuss→
10-you / at the door / knock→

Reading Comprehension

2010-04-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

Yosemite National Park is located in the central Sierra Nevada of California. It is accessible by automobile all year, 24 hours per day. Reservations are not required to enter. However, reservations for accommodations are strongly recommended if you wish to spend the night in the park. If you are planning on driving your own vehicle into the park anytime from October through April, it is a good idea--and often required--that you carry tire chains.
Yosemite can change a great deal in one week. One day it can be warm and sunny and days later it can be cold and snowy. From spring through fall, run-off slowly decreases as the weeks go by, sometimes it seems as if the spring and early-summer wildflowers are barely gone when the mild fall colors appear.
Yosemite is home to countless waterfalls. The best time to see waterfalls is in the spring. Peak run-off typically occurs in May or June, with some waterfalls often only a trickle or completely dry by August. The most famous among them is Yosemite Falls (2,425 ft) which flows from winter through early to mid-summer.
The 2004 Black Bear Activity Report tells that 300 vehicles were damaged and four people were injured. Help keep Yosemite's bears wild by storing your food properly!
During your visit to Yosemite, be aware that there are people who either intentionally or unknowingly harm park resources. Please contact a park official if you see any of the following illegal acts:• feeding or approaching wildlife • hunting animals • collecting reptiles and butterflies • collecting plants (including pine cones) • picking up archeological items such as arrowheads • using metal detectors to locate and collect historic objects • driving vehicles into sensitive meadows • camping outside of designated campgrounds • possession of weapons
Indian people have lived in the Yosemite region for as long as 8,000 years. By the mid-nineteenth century, when native residents had their first contact with non-Indian people, they were primarily of Southern Miwok ancestry. The native people of Yosemite developed a complex culture rich in tradition, religion, songs, and political affiliations. Making use of the varied local ecosystems, they used plant and animal resources to the best of their abilities. The pattern of oaks and grassland noted by early visitors to Yosemite Valley is probably a direct result of the intentional burning of underbrush practiced by native people.
Although the first sighting of Yosemite Valley by non-Indian people was probably by members of the Joseph Walker Party in 1833, the first actual known entry into the Valley was not until nearly 20 years later. After the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1849, thousands of miners came to the Sierra to seek their fortune. Their arrival resulted in conflict with local native people who fought to protect their homelands.
Writers, artists, and photographers spread the fame of "the Incomparable Valley" throughout the world. A steadily increasing stream of visitors came on foot and horseback, and later by stage. Hotels and residences were constructed, livestock grazed in meadows, orchards were planted, and as a result, Yosemite Valley's ecosystem suffered.
On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting Yosemite Valley as an inalienable public trust. This was the first time in history that a federal government had set aside scenic lands simply to protect them and to allow for their enjoyment by all people. This idea was the spark that allowed for Yellowstone becoming the first official national park a few years later, in 1872.
Later, John Muir's struggle against the devastation of the subalpine meadows surrounding Yosemite Valley resulted in the creation of Yosemite National Park on October 1, 1890. The day of the horse-drawn stage drew to a close in 1907. Cars were not officially permitted until 1913. Impacts resulting from increasing visitation in Yosemite Valley became apparent. People camped throughout meadows and dramatically increasing automobile traffic driving on unpaved roads left the Valley dull with dust each summer.
Visitation exceeded one million in 1954 for the first time, and by 1976 over two million people visited Yosemite. In the mid-1990s, visitation topped four million. In the early 1970s, the National Park Service established one-way road traffic patterns. Today there are five entrances to the park.
Text used with the permission of National Park Service/Yosemite
1) Yosemite is famous for its waterfalls. true false
2) You don't need any reservation if you want to stay overnight in Yosemite. true false
3) Yosemite was the first official national park. true f alse
4) Waterfalls in Yosemite can dry out in summer. true false
5) There was a close of Yosemite in 1907 because there were too many visitors. true false
6) Today the is a one-way road system in Yosemite. true false
7) In winter you should have tire chains in you car when you enter the park. true false

Encontre os Erros:

2010-04-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Corrija os erros:

Hello, My name is Susan. I'm forteen and I life in Germany. My hobbys are go to discos, sometimes I hear music in the radio. In the summer I go bathing in a lake. I haven't any brothers or sisters. We take busses to scool . I visit form 9 at my school. My birthday is on Friday. I hope I will become a new guitar.I'm looking forward to get a e-mail from you.Yours,Susan

Test your English

2010-03-31T13:21:00.000-07:00

Your Test

1) Which is wrong?
an arm of a coat
the arm of the family
the arm of the law

2) Which sentence is correct?
I want to have a word with you before you go.
I want to have a word with you before you will go.
I want to have a word with you before you will have gone.

3) Which word is closest in meaning to these three:
love, like, enjoy?
adore
hope
want

4) What is a synonym to rude?
brave
impolite
stupid

5) What is part of a flower?
a kernel
a nib
a stem

6) Which sentence is correct?
The woman was arrested and charged because of murder.
The woman was arrested and charged for murder.
The woman was arrested and charged with murder.

7) Which is wrong?
apple skin
orange skin
peach skin

8) Which word is not an adjective?
friendly
fully
silly

9) Which is wrong?
to do a favour
to do a journey
to do one's hair

10) The middle of an apple which we don't eat is called the:
centre
core
heart

11) Complete this phrase:
hale and
fit
healthy
hearty

12) Which sentence is wrong?
I'm going to make my hair.
Make the beds.
She often makes some coffee.

13) Which sentence is wrong?
He is very sleepable.
He looks sleepy.
He wants to sleep.

14) Which of the following words is Australian English?
billabong
freeway
trunk

15) A woman who has never married is called a:
bachelor
spinster
virgin

Apostrophe's or Of phrase??????

2010-03-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Write apostrophe 's or the of - phrase into the gaps.
Example: (Mandy) sister - ____________ (Mandy)
Answer: (Mandy) sister - Mandy's sister

1) (a glass) milk -
2) (my friend) bike -
3) (the window) room -
4) (Mr Smith) car -
5) (ten minutes) walk -
6) (the headteacher) office -
7) (the number) house
8) (two days) work -
9) (the waiter) shoes -
10) (Britain) economy -

Exercícios de Gramática

2010-03-23T11:54:00.001-07:00

Read the article below about distance education and try and decide what the missing word might be in each case. None of the missing words are longer than four letters long. The majority are articles (a, an, the) or prepositions (in, at, on etc.).

Not so long ago, getting -----college degree meant enrolling in a three or four year program and heading off ----campus every day. Now, with the proliferation -----correspondence and on-line courses, getting a degree might appear to be easier than ever.
Distance learning or education is completing a curriculum of studies without being present -----a classroom. The quality of education -----is often equal -----or better than that -----a class room since most individuals who choose distance learning to obtain their education are more self motivated and every bit as conscientious about their education as their counterpart -----the class room. Due to today's technology, made -----part -----the internet, more people than ever before are choosing distance learning over traditional class room settings as -----vehicle of choice to obtain their education. Convenience, cost of travel and other costs associated with a more traditional setting and busy schedules are just some of -----reasons more students are studying for -----degree through distance education institutions. After all, consider the commuting time to and -----a campus and the delays between classes. Wouldn't your time be better spent -----studies or leisure time.
Distance degree programs are delivered using videotape, DVD's or VCD's, others are delivered entirely online, and some use -----combination of media. Some degree programs require you to attend -----few classes a year -----the university -----question.
Despite the obvious advantages -----studying for a degree online, it is important to choose -----university to study at ----- great care.

Aperfeiçoe seu Presente Perfeito

2010-03-10T04:39:00.000-08:00

Test
Write the participle forms of the following verbs.
shut →
spend →
give →
teach →
sell →

Write sentences in present perfect simple.
we / reach / our goal -
our team / lose / the match -
she / underline / the word -
they / not / discover / the treasure -
Ron / not / talk / about the problem -
Write questions in present perfect simple.
you / knock / at the door -
the teacher / mark / the tests -
she / buy / a new computer -
they / rescue / the girl -
Brad / wear / a blue shirt -

Ask for the information in the bold part of the sentence.
They have seen him at the library. -
Robby Robber has robbed another bank. -
Bill has ordered three desserts. -
Clara has repeated the sentence five times. -
Jane has asked a question. -

Pratique Present Perfect Tense

2010-03-10T04:21:00.000-08:00

Write the participle forms of the following verbs.
make →
drink →
catch →
have →
sit →

Write sentences in present perfect simple.
Phil / not / miss / the bus -
they / not / plant / a tree -
Vanessa / catch / the ball -
we / sell / our old car -
the train / leave / the station -

Write questions in present perfect simple.
you / correct / my mistakes -
you / practise / your English -
she / tidy up / her room -
the boss / sign / the letter -
Mary / shut / the door -

Ask for the information in the bold part of the sentence.
Tony has built a house. -
Avril has crossed the street at the traffic lights. -
They have never been to Australia. -
Rupert has dialled the number. -
Betty has spent 200 euros at the shopping mall. -

More Prepositions

2010-03-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

Fill in with : In, At or On

It can get extremely hot here ___ Summer.

Magda doesn't have a job ___ the moment.

Both cars stopped ___ the same time.

Piotr left at 9am. He's probably ___ Kraków now.

Would you like to go to the cinema ___ Saturday night?

Roman's always tired. He's ___ bed now!

Bye! I'll see you ___ the morning.

Were you ___ Hania's party last night?

I'll see you ___ three weeks time.

Simon was born ___ 1966.

The dentist will see you ___ 11:15.

___ the age of eight I wanted to be a train driver.

My boyfriend gave me a fantastic present ___ my birthday.

The sugar is ___ the shelf.

Your car keys are ___ your pocket.

Ela's gone to work. She's probably ___ work now.

My uncle lives ___ Skwierzyna.

___ my opinion you should buy the black polo shirt.

___ second thought, the dark green one is nicer.

I'll see you ___ Wednesday.

I'll be taking my holiday ___ Easter this year.

Buy some biscuits ___ your way home.

What will you be doing ___ New Year's Eve?

___ the end of a course students usually get drunk!

That new bench ___ your garden is very nice.

There weren't many cars ___ the road today.

Jacek and Kasia always go out to dinner ___ their wedding aniversary.

I got up ___ 11am today!

Are you doing anything ___ the weekend?

He lives ___ this address.

Sentenças úteis para reuniões de negócios

2010-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

Opening the Meeting
Good morning/afternoon, everyone.
If we are all here, let's. . . get started (OR)start the meeting. (OR). . . start.

Welcoming and Introducing Participants
Please join me in welcoming (name of participant).
We're pleased to welcome (name of participant).
It's a pleasure to welcome (name of participant).
I'd like to introduce (name of participant).
I don't think you've met (name of participant)

Stating the Principal Objectives of a Meeting
We're here today toOur aim is to ...
I've called this meeting in order to ...
By the end of this meeting, I'd like to have ...

Giving Apologies for Someone Who is Absent
I'm afraid.., (name of participant) can't be with us today.
She is in...I have received apologies for the absence of (name of participant), who is in (place).

Reading the Minutes (Notes) of the Last Meeting
First let's go over the report from the last meeting, which was held on (date).
Here are the minutes from our last meeting, which was on (date)

Dealing with Recent Developments
Jack, can you tell us how the XYZ project is progressing?
Jack, how is the XYZ project coming along?
John, have you completed the report on the new accounting package?
Has everyone received a copy of the Tate Foundation report on current marketing trends?

Moving Forward
So, if there is nothing else we need to discuss, let's move on to today's agenda.
Shall we get down to business?
Is there any other business?
If there are no further developments, I'd like to move on to today's topic.

Introducing the Agenda
Have you all received a copy of the agenda?
There are three items on the agenda.
First,Shall we take the points in this order?
If you don't mind, I'd like to ... go in order (OR)skip item 1 and move on to item 3.
I suggest we take item 2 last.

Allocating Roles (secretary, participants)
(name of participant) has agreed to take the minutes.(name of participant) has kindly agreed to give us a report on this matter.(name of participant) will lead point 1, (name of participant) point 2, and (name of participant) point 3.(name of participant), would you mind taking notes today?

Agreeing on the Ground Rules for the Meeting (contributions, timing, decision-making, etc.)
We will hear a short report on each point first, followed by a discussion round the table.I suggest we go round the table first.The meeting is due to finish at...We'll have to keep each item to ten minutes. Otherwise we'll never get through.We may need to vote on item 5, if we can't get a unanimous decision.

Introducing the First Item on the Agenda
So, let's start withShall we start with.
So, the first item on the agenda is ....
Pete, would you like to kick off?
Martin, would you like to introduce this item?

Closing an Item
I think that covers the first item.Shall we leave that item?
If nobody has anything else to add,

Next Item
Let's move onto the next item.
The next item on the agenda is...
Now we come to the question of.

Giving Control to the Next Participant
I'd like to hand over to Mark, who is going to lead the next point.
Right, Dorothy, over to you.

Summarizing
Before we close, let me just summarize the main points.
To sum up, ...In brief, Shall I go over the main points?

Finishing Up
Right, it looks as though we've covered the main items.
Is there Any Other Business?

Correct the Mistakes

2010-03-03T13:17:00.000-08:00

1. Ann and Peter was married.
2. Did she found a job?
3. He buyed some new shoes.
4. He come late yesterday.
5. How old was you?
6. I knew he is here.
7. I knowed him very well.
8. I losed all my money.
9. I payd by credit card.
10. I putted it here.
11. I selled my old car.
12. I was to the cinema.
13. I went out last evening.
14. I were at home yesterday.
15. We didn't enjoyed the film.
16. What dids he say?
17. What do you won?
18. When did they met?
19. Where you went yesterday?

Expressões Usadas em Inglês.

2010-02-24T13:43:00.000-08:00

airhead: stupid person.
ace: excellent, great.
Adam and Eve - Rhyming Slang for 'believe'
aggro - short for aggravation or violence
amber fluid : beer
anorak - geek, nerd.
armpit: dirty, unappealing place.
arse / ass [slightly offensive] (1): backside.
arse / ass (2): an unworthy person.
arse about/arsing about - to fool around
arse-about-face: something that is in a mess or crooked
arseholed: very drunk
Aussie : Australian
awesome: great and impressive.
backhander (1): a payment given, normally in a secretive fashion.
backhander (2): hit someone.
ball (1): a fun time.
ball [slightly offensive] (2): a testicle.
ballistic - to go mad with rage
bang [slightly offensive](1): to make love
bang (2): a powerful effect.
banged up - to be put in prison.
bangers - another name for sausages.
barbie : barbecue, grill.
barf (1): vomit.
barmy - a foolish person, mad.
barney - row, violent argument.
beans: money.
beast [offensive] - an ugly woman.
beat: tired.
beemer: a BMW.
bent (1): a 'gay man'
bent (2): 'stolen'.
biggie: something important.
biker: a motorcycle rider.
bikkie : biscuit
bimbo - a young woman considered sexually attractive but of limited intelligence.
bird - woman/girl/girlfriend
bitch [offensive] (1): a very unpleasant woman.
bitch [offensive] (2): complain.
bitchy [slightly offensive]: moody.

Exercício de Preposição 3

2010-02-23T04:25:00.000-08:00

Test you knowledge of the prepositions for / while / during.
Choose either for, while or during.
He's been working .......................... three weeks.
I fell asleep .......................the film.
Did you see Donata ................................. your holiday?
We talked --for ................... an hour.
He watched TV ........................ I cooked.
.......................... our stay in London, we visited a lot of museums.
What did you do ......................... you were in London?
I think I need to study Polish ........................ a few months before I go there.
I came up with a great idea .......................... I was thinking about my class.
They drove through the countryside ............................. they were staying in France.
He was out of work ...................... six months before he found a new job.
I broke my finger .......................... I was playing squash.
Please, don't interrupt the teacher .......................... he is speaking.
Magda broke into tears ................................ the film.
Could you hold on ........................... a few moments?

Exercícios de Preposição 2:

2010-02-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

Coloque a preposição correta:

He lives . . . . . . . Zielona Gora.
She went ............. home.
Piotrek works . . . . . . Gorzów Wlkp.
He went . . . . . . his friend's house.
She arrived . . . . . . . Manchester for the celebrations.
I'm going to stay . . . . . . . . home this weekend.
Joanna works . . . . . . . . the hospital.
Why don't we go . . . . . . . the movies tonight?
I'm going to see Hania . . . . . . . . France this summer.
I arrived . . . . . . . . work early this morning.
She came home .................. early.
We stayed . . . . . . . . the Mieszko Hotel.
They visited ....................... England last summer.
She's going to travel . . . . . . . . . Finland this summer.
I'll be . . . . . . . . . school later today.

Exercícios de Preposição:

2010-01-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

1.
You must check the petrol ________ regular intervals.
2.
You can get a person to do it for you. _____________all, you are a man with many contacts.
3.
___________ this occasion I would like to express my thanks.
4.
___________ the end everything was fine.
5.
___________ Christmas day our family eat carp.
6.
We will know everything _____________ he comes.
7.
We wanted to hide ___________ a big storm. He didn't want to get wet.
8.
This contract will be confirmed _____________ December.
9.
There's an excellent restaurant ____________ the end of the street.
10.
There were two intervals ___________ the performance.
11.
The vocabulary seems to be easy ___________ the beginning.
12.
The President will be in evidence ____________ the Senate Committee.
13.
She promised to call back _____________ an hour.
14.
It didn't happen yesterday but the day _______________ yesterday.
15.
If she doesn't get angry _____________ five minutes everything will be all right.
16.
I would like to know if you could make _____________ it tomorrow.
17.
I am _____________ loss, I don't know what to do.
18.
He wasn't angry ____________ all.
19.
He should come ____________ a few minutes.
20.
Has anybody asked ____________ me while I was away?

Expressões Mais Usadas em Inglês.

2010-01-15T02:09:00.000-08:00

" To be busy ": Estar Ocupado/a = I am very busy this morning.

" To go for a walk ": Sair para caminhar = We went for a walk along the river.

" To take exercise ": Se exercitar = You should take more exercise.

" To give or deliver a lecture ": Dar uma palestra = He gave an interesting lecture.

" To make a mistake ": Errar = I made one mistake in dictation.

" To tell or speak the truth ": Dizer a verdade = Fiona always tells/ speaks the truth.

" To learn by heart ": Decorar, Memorizar = We have a poem to learn by heart.

" To put on weight ": Engordar, Ganhar peso = I have put on at least three kilos.

2010-01-15T01:57:00.000-08:00

Quando Usar??? Qual Usar????? Como Usar?????

IF ou Whether?
Don't say: I asked Paul if he was going.
Say: I asked Paul whether he was going.
Say: I shall speak to him if he comes.

Quando você usa " If " você não espera por uma resposta afirmativa ou negativa.
O uso de " whether " requer uma resposta afirmativa ou negativa.

2010-01-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

Is she enjoying a private joke? Is she sneaking a sly glance at an unseen lover? Or is the glint in the Mona Lisa’s eye in fact the result of a build-up of fatty acids around her eye socket, a sure sign that she wasn’t watching her cholesterol?
An Italian medical expert says he has found evidence of a range of afflictions in some of the world’s greatest works of art. Vito Franco, Professor of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Palermo, claims that there are clear signs of diseases, from bone malformations to kidney stones, that cast certain icons of perfection in a very different light.
Professor Franco, who presented his findings at a European congress on human pathology in Florence, told The Times that he had begun studying art masterpieces for evidence of disease and illness two years ago.
“I look at art with a different eye from an art expert, much as a mathematician listens to music in a different way from a music critic,” he said. He added that he had analysed about 100 art works, from Egyptian sculpture to contemporary paintings but his focus, he told La Stampa, was on Old Masters. He found that not only aristocrats but also Madonnas, angels and mythical heroes — or at least the sitters — revealed telltale signs of illness.
In Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), at the Prado in Madrid, the five-year-old Infanta Margarita depicted with her attendants at the court of Philip IV appears to be a victim of Albright syndrome, “a genetic illness involving precocious puberty, low stature, bone disease and hormonal problems”.
The “almost feminine” elegance of the young nobleman in a red velvet hat and wearing a gold medal in Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man at the National Gallery in Washington was due to his unnaturally long, thin fingers — a sign of arachnodactyly, or “spider fingers”. This condition is linked to Marfan syndrome, a genetic defect apparently visible in Parmigianino’s long-necked Madonna, at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Sufferers from Marfan syndrome, first identified by the French physician Bernard Marfan in 1896, tend to be unusually tall and thin with disproportionately long limbs.
Another famous Virgin Mary, the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, has a goitre, or swelling of the thyroid gland, on her neck “typical of people who drank water from a well in certain areas” in medieval times. This produced a deficiency of iodine, which caused changes in the thyroid.
Michelangelo’s own ailment, which Professor Franco diagnoses as kidney stones — is shown in Raphael’s School of Athens where he appears with strangely swollen and knobbly knees. Michelangelo complained of kidney and bladder problems in his letters and may have suffered from gout.

Phrasal Verbs Exercises

2010-01-12T10:59:00.000-08:00

Use the following verbs (believe, fill, get, look, put, switch, take, throw, turn, try) and the prepositions (away, down, for, in, off, on, out) an form meaningful sentences.Example: My parents are out. So I have to _________ my baby-brother.Answer: My parents are out. So I have to look after my baby-brother.
1) Quick! the bus. It's ready to leave.
2) I don't know where my book is. I have to it.
3) It's dark inside. Can you the light, please?
4) the form, please.
5) I need some new clothes. Why don't you these jeans?
6) It's warm inside. your coat.
7) This pencil is really old. You can it .
8) It's so loud here. Can you the radio a little.
9) The firemen were able to the fire in Church Street.
10) Does your little brother ghosts?

2010-01-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

Common Questions:

Do you use Similar "to" or Similar " with" ?
Don't say: Your house is similar with mine.
Say: Your house is similar TO mine.
Say: His voice is similar TO my father's voice.

Do you use Spend "on" or Spend "for" ?
Don't say: I spend a lot of time for my computer.
Say: I spend a lot of time ON my computer.

Do you use Surprise "at" , "by" or "for" ?
Don't say: Harold was surprised for the loud bang.
Say: Harold was surprised AT/BY the loud bang.

2009-10-28T06:21:00.000-07:00

October 28, 2009
Push to Legalize Marijuana Gains Ground in California
By JESSE McKINLEY
SAN FRANCISCO — These are heady times for advocates of legalized marijuana in California — and only in small part because of the newly relaxed approach of the federal government toward medical marijuana.
State lawmakers are holding a hearing on Wednesday on the effects of a bill that would legalize, tax and regulate the drug — in what would be the first such law in the United States. Tax officials estimate the legislation could bring the struggling state about $1.4 billion a year, and though the bill’s fate in the Legislature is uncertain, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has indicated he would be open to a “robust debate” on the issue.
California voters are also taking up legalization. Three separate initiatives are being circulated for signatures to appear on the ballot next year, all of which would permit adults to possess marijuana for personal use and allow local governments to tax it. Even opponents of legalization suggest that an initiative is likely to qualify for a statewide vote.
“All of us in the movement have had the feeling that we’ve been running into the wind for years,” said James P. Gray, a retired judge in Orange County who has been outspoken in support of legalization. “Now we sense we are running with the wind.”
Proponents of the leading ballot initiative have collected nearly 300,000 signatures since late September, supporters say, easily on pace to qualify for the November 2010 general election. Richard Lee, a longtime marijuana activist who is behind the measure, says he has raised nearly $1 million to hire professionals to assist volunteers in gathering the signatures.
“Voters are ripping the petitions out of our hands,” Mr. Lee said.
That said, the bids to legalize marijuana are opposed by law enforcement groups across the state and, if successful, would undoubtedly set up a legal showdown with the federal government, which classifies marijuana as an illegal drug.
California was the first state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes, in 1996, but court after court — including the United States Supreme Court — has ruled that the federal government can continue to enforce its ban. Only this month, with the Department of Justice announcement that it would not prosecute users and providers of medical marijuana who obey state law, has that threat subsided.
But federal authorities have also made it clear that their tolerance stops at recreational use. In a memorandum on Oct. 19 outlining the medical marijuana guidelines, Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden said marijuana was “a dangerous drug, and the illegal distribution and sale of marijuana is a serious crime,” adding that “no state can authorize violations of federal law.”
Still, Mr. Lee anticipates spending up to $20 million on a campaign to win passage of his ballot measure in California, raising some of it from the hundreds of already legal medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, which have been recently fighting efforts by Los Angeles city officials to tighten restrictions on their operations.
“It’s a $2 billion industry,” Mr. Lee said of the medical marijuana sales.
Opponents said they are also preparing for a battle next year.
“I fully expect they will qualify,” said John Lovell, a Sacramento lobbyist for several groups of California law enforcement officials that oppose legalization.
Any vote would take place in a state where attitudes toward marijuana border on the schizophrenic. Last year, the state made some 78,500 arrests on felony and misdemeanors related to the drug, up from about 74,000 in 2007, according to the California attorney general.
Seizures of illegal marijuana plants, often grown by Mexican gangs on public lands in forests and parks, hit an all-time high in 2009, and last week, federal authorities announced a series of arrests in the state’s Central Valley, where homes have been converted into “indoor grows.”
At the same time, however, there are also pockets of California where marijuana can seem practically legal already. At least seven California cities have formally declared marijuana a low priority for law enforcement, with ballot measures or legislative actions. In Los Angeles, some 800 to 1,000 dispensaries of medical marijuana are in business, officials say, complete with consultants offering public relations services and “canna-business management.”
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat and author of the legalization bill, said momentum for legalization has built in recent years, especially as the state’s finances have remained sour.
“A lot of people that were initially resistant or even ridiculed it have come aboard,” Mr. Ammiano said.
In Oakland, which passed a tax on medical cannabis sales in July, several people who signed a petition backing Mr. Lee’s initiative said they were motivated in part by the cost of imprisoning drug offenders and the toll of drug-related violence in Mexico.
“Personally I don’t see a way of getting it under control other than legalizing it and taxing it,” said Jim Quinn, 60, a production manager. “We’ve got to get it out of the hands of criminals both domestic and international.”
Mr. Lovell, the law enforcement lobbyist, however, said those arguments paled in comparison to the potential pitfalls of legalization, including people driving under the influence. He also questioned how much net revenue a tax like Mr. Ammiano is proposing would actually raise. “We get revenue from alcohol,” he said. “But there’s way more in social costs than we retain in revenues.”
The recent history of voter-approved drug reform laws in California is not encouraging for supporters of legalization. Last November, voters rejected a proposition that would have increased spending for drug treatment programs and loosened parole and prison requirements for drug offenders.
None of which seems to faze Mr. Lee, 47, a former roadie who founded Oaksterdam University, a medical marijuana trade school in Oakland, in 2007. Mr. Lee says he plans to use the Internet to raise money, as well as tapping out-of state sources for campaign money.
More than anything, however, Mr. Lee said he was banking on a basic shift in people’s attitudes toward the drug.
“For a lot of people,” he said, “it’s just another brand of beer.”

2009-03-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

March 3, 2009
Basics
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
By NATALIE ANGIER
In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire.
Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine baby wrapped inside.
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.
As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.
Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or “allomothers,” individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.
Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.
By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children, another remarkable display of social trust.
Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”
Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern long before the human brain had reached its current average volume of 1,300 cubic centimeters, which is about three times the size of a chimpanzee brain — in other words, that we became the nicest apes before becoming the smartest. You don’t need a bulging brain to evolve cooperative breeding. Many species of birds breed cooperatively, as do lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among others. But to become a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of smart, hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary development, the advent of this thing called trust.
To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr. Hrdy synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics, infant development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research has overturned the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal species, that is, with women moving away from their birth families to join their husbands. Instead, it seems that young mothers in many traditional societies have their own mothers and other female relatives close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care than your mom or your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of postmenopausal women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods that are difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without television or Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in town.
However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution was profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all competing forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and will somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.

2009-03-03T07:45:00.000-08:00

March 3, 2009
Short of Dentists, Maine Adds Teeth to Doctors’ Training
By KATIE ZEZIMA
FAIRFIELD, Me. — Cindy Merrithew was nervous about having her teeth pulled, mainly because a doctor would be doing the work.
“I was skeptical,” said Ms. Merrithew, 47, a nurse’s assistant whose mouth is filled with damaged, brittle teeth. “I didn’t know if they knew much about the dentistry field.”
Dentists are in such short supply in Maine that primary care doctors who do their medical residency in the state are learning to lance abscesses, pull teeth and perform other basic dental skills through a program that began in 2005.
“Doctors typically approach the mouth from a distance,” said Dr. William Alto, a physician at the Maine Dartmouth Family Practice Residency here in rural Fairfield, which conducts one of two dental clinics for medical residents (the other is at Maine General Hospital in Augusta).
“They say ‘say aah,’ take a look at the back of the throat and are done,” Dr. Alto said. “Many physicians, even family physicians, have given up that part of the body because they don’t have the skills.”
Maine has one dentist for every 2,300 people, compared with one doctor for every 640, and the gap is expected to widen as both dentists and doctors retire over the next decade.
Nationally there is one dentist for every 1,600 people.
Maine has trouble recruiting dentists because many young graduates do not want to work in rural areas. The shortage is much less acute in Portland, the state’s largest city. Maine also does not have a dental school — the closest are in Boston, about 50 miles from the state’s southernmost town.
Last year the American Dental Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics announced a program to train pediatricians to apply fluoride and look for signs of tooth decay, a step already taken by some other states, including Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina and Washington.
In Maine, training physicians in dentistry provides a dental safety net for the rural poor who have never had one, doctors and dentists said. About two-thirds of the residents who have trained at the dental clinic now practice in the state, many in rural areas.
“I see dental complaints all the time from people who come into the E.R.,” said Dr. Andrew Fletcher, who learned dentistry at Maine Dartmouth during his residency. He now works at Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent, on the Canadian border. “It’s mostly Medicaid patients who don’t have money to see dentists.”
Maine Dartmouth’s office here is emblematic of the chasm between medicine and dentistry in the state: the office has 31 physicians in a county with only 12 dentists.
Ronald Smart, 51, who had not been to a dentist in five years, came to the Fairfield clinic on a Wednesday to have an infected tooth pulled; he has had three teeth pulled here before, and most likely will have more.
“It’s hard when you don’t have insurance,” Mr. Smart said. The severe decay of teeth like Mr. Smart’s can make simple dental procedures difficult.
Natalie Karishev, a third-year resident, pulled the tooth with Dr. Alto’s assistance. Dr. Karishev injected a painkiller in Mr. Smart’s gums and cheek, loosened the tooth and started to pull. Mr. Smart yelled; the painkiller was not working.
After injecting three more syringes of painkiller and applying a nerve block, Dr. Karishev was able to extract the tooth.
“It hurt, and I have a high tolerance for pain,” Mr. Smart said. “But once it numbed, it was fine.”
He has no issues with doctors pulling his teeth. “I don’t mind at all,” Mr. Smart said. “I think it’s great. It’s convenient.”
The doctors must also step in for dentists in urging patients to break bad habits — namely smoking and drinking soda.
Nicholas Noyes, 24, recently quit smoking and is trying to kick his two-liter-a-day soda habit.
“It’s so hard for me not to drink Mountain Dew every day,” said Mr. Noyes, who came to the Augusta clinic for tooth pain. He, like all the patients here, was referred to the dental clinic by his primary care doctor.
But after hearing Dr. James Schmidt, the co-founder of the dental training program, and the resident, Katje Musgrave, warn Mr. Noyes that he was in danger of losing all his teeth, Mr. Noyes decided to mend his ways.
“When they said I wouldn’t have teeth by the time I’m 34, that’s a biggie,” Mr. Noyes said.
Ms. Merrithew, unfortunately, is close to losing all her teeth. She needed three pulled on a recent afternoon. They were the first teeth Dr. Mark Winiecki had ever extracted.
Under the direction of Dr. Alto, Dr. Winiecki applied a topical anesthetic to Ms. Merrithew’s gums and palate, then started loosening a tooth.
“That’s good,” Dr. Alto said. “I like how you’re doing this. It’s going to save you work later.”
The doctors were only able to extract two of Ms. Merrithew’s teeth. The third kept shattering as Dr. Winiecki tried to loosen it, and they made an appointment for her with an oral surgeon.
After finishing the procedure, Dr. Winiecki was thrilled and relieved. “I’m excited,” he said. “It’s another tool in the doctor’s kit.”
While the Maine Dental Association supports the program, its executive director, Frances Miliano, said it would prefer to recruit more dentists to the state.
“Medical residents are only going to be doing this in really dire circumstances,” Ms. Miliano said. “They’re not going to be the alternatives to dentists in rural areas. It’s not a total solution by any means.”
Other places are trying similar approaches. The University of New Mexico School of Medicine runs a yearlong residency program for dentists, and medical residents are allowed to participate to learn basic dentistry.
“If that is a skill they would like to have in practicing medicine, we by all means want them to have that skill,” said Mark Moores, president of the New Mexico Dental Association.
Here in Maine, Dr. Alto and Dr. Schmidt, president of the Maine Dental Association, see the program continuing to train doctors, even as dentists move to the state. It helps both patients and doctors, they said.
“If you want to be a real doctor, you have to know how to do all the simple things in the field and refer out as appropriate,” Dr. Alto said. “We try to give experience not only looking in the mouth, but with all the things you can do.”

2009-02-18T03:15:00.000-08:00

February 17, 2009
The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives
By JOHN MARKOFF
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.
It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.
“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.
As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.
On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.
But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes.
It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps.
“We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.”
Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.
With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.
“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.
“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.
A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion.
Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection.
On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view.
Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.
Mr. Altman said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts.
The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.
“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.
For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?
“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”
Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications.
“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.

2009-02-18T02:36:00.000-08:00

February 17, 2009
Well
Vitamin Pills: A False Hope?
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Ever since the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Linus Pauling first promoted “megadoses” of essential nutrients 40 years ago, Americans have been devoted to their vitamins. Today about half of all adults use some form of dietary supplement, at a cost of $23 billion a year.
But are vitamins worth it? In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life.
The latest news came last week after researchers in the Women’s Health Initiative study tracked eight years of multivitamin use among more than 161,000 older women. Despite earlier findings suggesting that multivitamins might lower the risk for heart disease and certain cancers, the study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, found no such benefit.
Last year, a study that tracked almost 15,000 male physicians for a decade reported no differences in cancer or heart disease rates among those using vitamins E and C compared with those taking a placebo. And in October, a study of 35,000 men dashed hopes that high doses of vitamin E and selenium could lower the risk of prostate cancer.
Of course, consumers are regularly subjected to conflicting reports and claims about the benefits of vitamins, and they seem undeterred by the news — to the dismay of some experts.
“I’m puzzled why the public in general ignores the results of well-done trials,” said Dr. Eric Klein, national study coordinator for the prostate cancer trial and chairman of the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. “The public’s belief in the benefits of vitamins and nutrients is not supported by the available scientific data.”
Everyone needs vitamins, which are essential nutrients that the body can’t produce on its own. Inadequate vitamin C leads to scurvy, for instance, and a lack of vitamin D can cause rickets.
But a balanced diet typically provides an adequate level of these nutrients, and today many popular foods are fortified with extra vitamins and minerals. As a result, diseases caused by nutrient deficiency are rare in the United States.
In any event, most major vitamin studies in recent years have focused not on deficiencies but on whether high doses of vitamins can prevent or treat a host of chronic illnesses. While people who eat lots of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables have long been known to have lower rates of heart disease and cancer, it hasn’t been clear whether ingesting high doses of those same nutrients in pill form results in a similar benefit.
In January, an editorial in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute noted that most trials had shown no cancer benefits from vitamins — with a few exceptions, like a finding that calcium appeared to lower the recurrence of precancerous colon polyps by 15 percent.
But some vitamin studies have also shown unexpected harm, like higher lung cancer rates in two studies of beta carotene use. Another study suggested a higher risk of precancerous polyps among users of folic acid compared with those in a placebo group.
In 2007, The Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed mortality rates in randomized trials of antioxidant supplements. In 47 trials of 181,000 participants, the rate was 5 percent higher among the antioxidant users. The main culprits were vitamin A, beta carotene and vitamin E; vitamin C and selenium seemed to have no meaningful effect.
“We call them essential nutrients because they are,” said Marian L. Neuhouser, an associate member in cancer prevention at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “But there has been a leap into thinking that vitamins and minerals can prevent anything from fatigue to cancer to Alzheimer’s. That’s where the science didn’t pan out.”
Everyone is struggling to make sense of the conflicting data, said Andrew Shao, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a vitamin industry trade group. Consumers and researchers need to “redefine our expectations for these nutrients,” he said. “They aren’t magic bullets.”
Part of the problem, he said, may stem from an inherent flaw in the way vitamins are studied. With drugs, the gold standard for research is a randomized clinical trial in which some patients take a drug and others a placebo. But vitamins are essential nutrients that people ingest in their daily diets; there is no way to withhold them altogether from research subjects.
Vitamins given in high doses may also have effects that science is only beginning to understand. In a test tube, cancer cells gobble up vitamin C, and studies have shown far higher levels of vitamin C in tumor cells than are found in normal tissue.
The selling point of antioxidant vitamins is that they mop up free radicals, the damaging molecular fragments linked to aging and disease. But some free radicals are essential to proper immune function, and wiping them out may inadvertently cause harm.
In a study at the University of North Carolina, mice with brain cancer were given both normal and vitamin-depleted diets. The ones who were deprived of antioxidants had smaller tumors, and 20 percent of the tumor cells were undergoing a type of cell death called apoptosis, which is fueled by free radicals. In the fully nourished mice, only 3 percent of tumor cells were dying.
“Most antioxidants are also pro-oxidants,” said Dr. Peter H. Gann, professor and director of research in the department of pathology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “In the right context and the right dose, they may be able to cause problems rather than prevent them.”
Scientists suspect that the benefits of a healthful diet come from eating the whole fruit or vegetable, not just the individual vitamins found in it. “There may not be a single component of broccoli or green leafy vegetables that is responsible for the health benefits,” Dr. Gann said. “Why are we taking a reductionist approach and plucking out one or two chemicals given in isolation?”
Even so, some individual vitamin research is continuing. Scientists are beginning to study whether high doses of whole-food extracts can replicate the benefits of a vegetable-rich diet. And Harvard researchers are planning to study whether higher doses of vitamin D in 20,000 men and women can lower risk for cancer and other chronic diseases.
“Vitamin D looks really promising,” said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, the chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an investigator on several Harvard vitamin studies. “But we need to learn the lessons from the past. We should wait for large-scale clinical trials before jumping on the vitamin bandwagon and taking high doses.”

2009-02-04T11:10:00.001-08:00

February 4, 2009
Square Feet
On Madison Avenue, Shops Pack Their Hand-Tooled Bags
By TERRY PRISTIN
After more than 30 years on Madison Avenue, the retailer E. Braun & Company is packing up its $3,500 hand-embroidered tablecloths and $2,390 bedding sets and will defect in April for cheaper space on Park Avenue.
And it is not alone. New York’s most elegant shopping corridor, the Gold Coast of Madison Avenue, from 57th Street to 72nd Street, is pockmarked with vacancies as retailers flee sky-high rents. More than two dozen retail spaces are on the market and are either empty now or about to be. Windows that once showcased hand-tooled leather suitcases are now plastered with for-rent signs.
“This is as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” said Alan Victor, a broker who has worked the street for more than four decades and who is an executive vice president of the Lansco Corporation.
Another broker, Gene P. Spiegelman, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield, said that 13 percent of the retail spaces on Madison Avenue were available either as a direct lease or a sublet. Not included are those with tenants who would move if the right offer turned up.
“There are tenants that say, ‘If you get me a good sublease, I’ll take it and run,’ ” said E. William Judson, a broker who is also the chairman of the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District, a group made up of property owners and retailers. “Some people are thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll either downsize or I’ll close the store.’ If they have a lousy day, they say, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ If they have a good day, they say, ‘Let’s stay.’ ”
Lately, the people who sell $2,400 leather bags and $1,600 satin-and-rhinestone evening sandals are more likely to have bad days. Of all retail chain categories, luxury stores had the greatest decline in sales in 2008, falling 7.5 percent from 2007, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group. From 2004 to 2007, by contrast, the luxury sector outperformed all other categories by a wide margin.
The recent holiday season was the worst in four decades for the retail industry. Sales at Neiman Marcus’s specialty division, which includes Bergdorf Goodman, declined 31.2 percent. Tiffany reported that sales in stores open at least a year were down 24 percent.
“If you’re in New York, and you’ve got the financial services industry in a depression, how can you possibly do well in high-level goods?” asked Howard L. Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting and investment banking firm.
Madison Avenue has traditionally catered to the wealthy, but until Polo Ralph Lauren opened at the former Rhinelander Mansion on 72nd Street in 1986, most of the shops were private boutiques like E. Braun. In 1998, the stretch on Madison Avenue known as the Gold Coast surpassed Causeway Bay in Hong Kong as the most expensive shopping strip in the world, Cushman & Wakefield reported, with annual rents averaging $550 a square foot. By then, Giorgio Armani had two 16,000-square-foot stores on Madison and Hermès was about to move there from 57th Street.
For many international retailers, a Madison Avenue address was viewed as essential for promoting their brand, even if sales were not robust enough to justify the rent. Often, part of the rent came out of the marketing budget — a practice that brokers say is fast disappearing.
Rents began escalating rapidly a few years ago, after the stores on the Madison Avenue side of the General Motors Building, at Fifth Avenue on 58th and 59th Streets, were expanded and began commanding annual rent of more than $1,000 a square foot, said Benjamin Fox, the president of Winick Realty Group, a New York retail brokerage.
In 2007, fancy jewelers clustered on the avenue, especially between 61st and 64th Streets. They were able to afford higher rents because their costly merchandise could fit into smaller spaces and more revenue could be squeezed out of every inch. Rents skyrocketed to $1,250 a foot or even more. (Even so, Fifth Avenue between 49th and 59th Streets is now ranked as the world’s costliest shopping strip, with asking rents as high as $2,000 a foot. Its luxury tenants share the avenue, however, with shopping-mall clothing chains like Diesel and Abercrombie & Fitch.)
Retailers typically expect their rent to equal about one-tenth of their sales volume. “In a prime location like Madison Avenue, most retailers will change that to 25 percent,” said Joel Isaacs, the president of Isaacs & Company, a retail brokerage. Even under that formula, a tenant paying $1.25 million for 1,000 square feet would need to have nearly $5 million in annual sales.
Today, however, asking rents on Madison and elsewhere are dropping by as much as one-third, brokers say. And many landlords will offer more concessions than before, like additional months of free rent. “If you’re a good retailer and you’ve got a good product, the landlord wants you,” said Faith Hope Consolo, the chairwoman of the retail group at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “The word ‘no’ no longer exists.”
Taking advantage of the softening market, Lalique, which sells crystal goods, gave up its two-level store near 63rd Street — now occupied by the watchmaker Mauboussin — and is moving into smaller quarters five blocks to the south, with lower rent than it would have paid six months ago, Ms. Consolo said.
The astronomical rise in rents did not cause all the impending vacancies on Madison. Some tenants, like the jeweler Graff, have moved to larger quarters nearby. (Hublot, a Swiss watchmaker, recently came close to leasing Graff’s former store but got cold feet and withdrew, said Robert C. Fink, director of leasing for the landlord, the Winter Organization.)
William Friedland, the Gold Coast’s largest property owner, is emptying out a building that houses the restaurant La Goulue and several stores in order to redevelop it.
Frederic L. Barbatelli, a co-owner of E. Braun, said he was moving to be closer to D. Porthault and other Park Avenue purveyors of luxury home goods. But Ms. Consolo, who is offering a Mini Cooper to the broker who snags a lease for E. Braun’s Madison Avenue space, between 63rd and 64th Streets, said the store had been driven out by high rents.
Mr. Victor of Lansco said that lower rents would be good for Madison Avenue. “The market reached a crazy level,” he said. “A lot of people who wanted to look at Madison Avenue couldn’t make it pencil out. This may be a reality check. It will still be high-end, but it will be a healthier Madison Avenue.”

2009-02-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

February 3, 2009
Really?
The Claim: Sitting in a Sauna Can Relieve Cold Symptoms
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR
THE FACTS
Scientists recently confirmed the age-old notion that hot liquids can relieve some cold and flu symptoms. But what about a dose of heat on a much larger scale — say, in a sauna?
With temperatures of 176 Fahrenheit or greater, saunas have been recommended for arthritis, asthma and chronic fatigue, among other things, since they were used by nomads in Finland centuries ago. Some reputed benefits have not been examined, but there is evidence that saunas may speed recovery from colds and reduce their occurrence.
Some researchers suspect sauna heat reduces symptoms because it improves drainage, while others speculate that the high temperatures help weaken cold and flu viruses. Why this might prevent sickness in the first place, however, is unclear. But research suggests an effect.
In one study by Austrian researchers, for example, a group of 50 adults were split into two groups and tracked for six months. One group was instructed to use saunas regularly; the other group abstained. At the end of the study the sauna group had contracted fewer colds.
“This was found particularly during the last three months of the study period, when the incidence was roughly halved compared to controls,” the scientists wrote.
Other studies have found similar results. But doctors caution that saunas can be hazardous to those with heart or circulatory problems.
THE BOTTOM LINE
There is evidence sauna use might reduce or prevent cold symptoms.

2009-02-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

February 3, 2009
Well
Telling Food Allergies From False Alarms
By TARA PARKER-POPE
For Ingelisa Keeling, a Houston mother of three children with multiple allergies, mealtime was a struggle. Nuts, eggs, wheat, beef, peas and rice were all off limits — banned by the children’s allergist.
But recently, Mrs. Keeling learned that her family’s diet need not be so restrictive. Although her children do have real allergies — to peanuts, milk and eggs, among other foods — extensive testing at a major allergy center showed that they were not in fact allergic to many of the foods they had been avoiding. Her 2-year-old son, who had been living on a diet primarily of potatoes, fruit and hypoallergenic formula, has resumed eating wheat, bananas, beef, peas, rice and corn.
“His diet had become so, so restricted that nutrition had become a real concern,” said Mrs. Keeling, who traveled to specialists at National Jewish Health in Denver last summer for answers about her children’s diet and eczema problems. Among other findings, she learned that neither of her younger children was really allergic to wheat.
“That’s the big one,” she said. “Wheat is in everything, so it makes life a whole lot easier.”
Doctors say that misdiagnosed food allergies appear to be on the rise, and countless families are needlessly avoiding certain foods and spending hundreds of dollars on costly nonallergenic supplements. In extreme cases, misdiagnosed allergies have put children at risk for malnutrition.
And avoiding food in the mistaken fear of allergy may be making the overall problem worse — by making children more sensitive to certain foods when they finally do eat them.
More than 11 million Americans, including 3 million children, are estimated to have food allergies, most commonly to milk, eggs, peanuts and soy. The prevalence among children has risen 18 percent in the past decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the increase appears to be real, so does the increase in misdiagnosis.
The culprit appears to be the widespread use of simple blood tests for antibodies that could signal a reaction to food. The tests have emerged as a quick, convenient alternative to uncomfortable skin testing and time-consuming “food challenge” tests, which measure a child’s reaction to eating certain foods under a doctor’s supervision.
While the blood tests can help doctors identify potentially risky foods, they aren’t always reliable. A 2007 issue of The Annals of Asthma, Allergy & Immunology reported on research at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, finding that blood allergy tests could both under- and overestimate the body’s immune response. A 2003 report in Pediatrics said a positive result on a blood allergy test correlated with a real-world food allergy in fewer than half the cases.
“The only true test of whether you’re allergic to a food or not is whether you can eat it and not react to it,” said Dr. David Fleischer, an assistant professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health. In one recent case there, doctors treated a young boy who had been given a feeding tube because blood tests indicated he was allergic to virtually every food. Food challenge testing allowed doctors to quickly reintroduce 20 foods into his diet, and they expect more to be added.
Blood tests may be unreliable because they fail to distinguish between similar proteins in different foods. A child who is allergic to peanuts, for instance, might test positive for allergies to soy, green beans, peas and kidney beans. Children with milk allergies may test positive for beef allergy.
The most important question in diagnosing food allergy is whether the child has tolerated the food in the past, Dr. Fleischer says. While some severe allergies are obvious, parents given a positive blood test result should seek advice from an experienced allergist who performs medically supervised food challenge testing.
Even when a food allergy has been confirmed, parents should have children retested, because many allergies are outgrown, particularly in the cases of milk, eggs, soy and wheat.
Doctors’ groups are also starting to acknowledge that some of their own policies may have contributed to overtesting and misdiagnoses. A committee for the American Academy of Asthma Allergy and Immunology is considering revised guidelines recommending earlier introduction of foods like eggs, peanuts and shellfish, which in the past have been delayed until age 2 or 3. A 2008 study of 10,000 British children, reported in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, found that early exposure to peanuts lowered allergy risk.
Just as an allergy indicates oversensitivity to certain foods, it may be that doctors and parents have become oversensitive to food allergies. In an essay in The British Medical Journal in December, Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School, argues that an “overreaction” to allergy is leading to unnecessary testing and false positives.
“If the kid has been doing fine, I would advise parents not to get allergy testing, because the results are more likely to be false positives than true positives,” Dr. Christakis said in an interview. “If they do think they need allergy testing, be extremely measured and go to reputable people.”
well@nytimes.com

2009-02-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

February 4, 2009

In Motorola Earnings, Signs of an Industry in Change

By MATT RICHTEL

Cellphone sales are falling, manufacturers have announced thousands of layoffs and wireless carriers are finding it harder to acquire and keep customers.

It sounds like another tale of “recession bites industry,” but there are signs that this downturn is masking something more fundamental, that the cellphone industry’s best days are behind it.

A fourth-quarter earnings report on Tuesday by the telecommunications equipment manufacturer Motorola reinforced that notion. The company, which is suspending its quarterly dividend, lost $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with earnings of $100 million in the period a year ago. Sales were $7.14 billion, down 26 percent, from $9.65 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Motorola sold 19.2 million cellphones in the quarter, down 53 percent from the period a year ago. It went from being the world’s second-largest maker of cellphones in 2007 to its fifth-largest.

Analysts and investors are beginning to ask whether the industry as a whole can continue growing. The challenge is both simple and daunting: how to expand when four billion of the six billion people on the planet already have phones. And even in developing countries where there are underserved markets, subscribers spend less on phones and services.

Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, is one of the skeptics. “I don’t think anyone would argue that the salad days of the wireless industry are over,” he said. He added that in terms of subscriber growth in North America, “we’re awfully close to saturation.”

“It’s not correct to call this a cyclical problem,” Mr. Moffett said. “To do so suggests that after the recession, growth rates will bounce back. There’s no reason to believe that’s the case.”

To be sure, nobody is looking at the cellphone industry and making comparisons with Detroit. There is little doubt that there are tens of billions of dollars to be made selling phones and providing services, particularly those involving data.

The industry is pinning high hopes on a new generation of more powerful (and expensive) smartphones. AT&T activated 1.9 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, while Verizon added more than a million BlackBerry Storms.

Over all, these devices make up about 10 percent of the domestic cellphone market and are considered likely to grow in popularity, driving people to upgrade and pay for more data to do things like download songs and send text messages. In the fourth quarter, for example, AT&T’s data revenue for each subscriber rose 27 percent, to $16.30, from about $12 a year earlier.

Over the long term, the industry vigorously disputes the notion that it is anywhere near slowing down. “If there’s anything I can be extremely confident about, it’s that our customer base wants new phones,” said Denny Strigl, president and chief operating officer of Verizon, which owns 55 percent of Verizon Wireless (the Vodafone Group owns 45 percent). Verizon and its chief rival, AT&T, each reported financial returns last week that hinted at challenges to sustained high levels of growth. Verizon Wireless gained 1.4 million subscribers, but that is down from 2 million a year earlier. AT&T gained 2 million subscribers, compared with 2.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2007.

SprintNextel recently announced plans to eliminate 8,000 jobs.

Some industry analysts say they believe the lure of data and the fancier phones that provide it will not stop growth rates from falling over time.

Over all in the wireless industry, “there’s ton of money being made, but it’s not going to grow as fast as people have experienced or as quickly as they’re relying on it to in the future,” said Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research. “All this talk about data and other services bringing a renaissance of growth is wrong.”

One challenge for the long-term growth of smartphones is that they are expensive. The average selling price of the Apple iPhone is $600 (excluding carrier subsidies) and the BlackBerry from Research in Motion costs $370, according to Broadpoint Amtech, a research firm.

By comparison, the average selling price of phones made by Motorola and Samsung (companies with fewer smartphones in their inventory) is around $120. Analysts have little doubt that this price differential will fall over time. But that still means the cellphone industry is depending on consumers to upgrade to a significantly more expensive product in the years ahead.

Smartphones are also smart in preventing their own obsolescence. As they are more dependent on software than hardware to stay up to date, a downloaded upgrade or new application (one that mobile carriers are eager to sell) can do for some of these new phones what used to require an entirely new device.

Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, addressed this issue in 2007 when he introduced the iPhone, praising its adaptability when compared with more hardware-based competitors at the time.

“What happens if you think of a great idea six months from now?” he asked about the other devices. “You can’t run around and add a button to these things; they’ve already shipped.”

Smartphones notwithstanding, the number of handsets sold around the world has been falling in important regions — even before the recession. In Western Europe, around 191 million mobile phones were sold in 2007, a figure that fell to 171 million in 2008 and is projected at 165 million in 2009, according to Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with the research firm, Gartner.

In the United States, people bought 176 million handsets in 2007, and 184 million in 2008. That number will probably remain flat this year, the Gartner analyst said. She said that Europe might provide some indication of where the United States was headed because, as highly populated as it is with phones, it is still slightly behind Europe.

The toll seemed to blindside handset makers in the last quarter. Motorola said last month that it sold half as many phones in the fourth quarter than it had the year earlier, and announced 3,000 job cuts from its cellphone unit.

In the fourth quarter, Nokia sold 113 million handsets, down about 15 percent from the period a year earlier. Samsung Electronics said worldwide cellphone demand might be down 10 percent in 2009.

Meanwhile, new and more numerous competitors are fighting over that demand. The industry did not have to contend with Apple until two years ago. This year may bring a resurgent Palm with its Pre smartphone, as well as Dell, which is reportedly working on its own mobile device.

“The macro environment is challenging and we believe will remain clearly so in 2009,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s chief executive, said recently in a conference call with investors to discuss the earnings. He added that he believed Internet-centric phones and mobile services would drive a new generation of growth.

“This will drive the next wave of industry growth, and innovation will not stand still,” he said.

2008-06-20T05:28:00.001-07:00

June 18, 2008
New Treatment Saves Man With Deadly Skin Cancer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:13 p.m. ET
ATLANTA (AP) -- An Oregon man, given less than a year to live, had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors.
The 52-year-old patient's dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers.
''Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach'' to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research.
Still, the immune-priming experiments have yet to yield a consistent therapy. Even researchers who worked on the experiment involving nine patients and just one success are quick to couch the result. ''This is only one patient,'' said study co-author Dr. Cassian Yee of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
And two years after his remarkable recovery, the patient fell out of contact with researchers and scientists do not know his current condition. The man, who lives in a small town in Oregon, has declined media interviews, Yee said.
Melanoma is a cancer in the skin cells that make pigments and cause skin to tan, as part of the body's attempt to protect itself from ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Cancer begins when radiation overloads and damages the cells, causing mutations.
About 62,000 news cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, and there are about 8,000 melanoma deaths.
When caught early, melanomas can be easily treated by surgically removing the cancerous patch of skin. But ''once it has spread, basically nothing works,'' Rigel said.
Recently, however, scientists began thinking they might have another option -- helping the body's immune system.
Doctors had long thought that immune system cells, which so effectively attack foreign threats like viruses, were giving a pass to cancer cells. The theory was that because cancers cells are generated by the body, the immune system perceived them as part of the body.
But about 20 years ago, some scientists discovered that immune cells could latch onto and attack skin cancers.
''There's a long history behind all of this,'' said Dr. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, a pioneer in that research.
In recent experiments, Rosenberg and other researchers have focused on souping up a certain kind of immune system cell -- the ''killer T cells'' that envelop and kill foreign agents. Experiments have also involved giving patients chemotherapy or other drugs that are toxic to patients but can help the immune system's ability to fight cancer.
The new research took a different approach. The Hutchinson center scientists focused instead on specific helper T cells that are adept at locking onto a cancer cell and guiding the killer cells to their target.
The researchers drew blood from patients, located the special helper cells and then grew more of them in the laboratory. They then infused roughly 5 billion of the cells back into the patients -- without chemotherapy or the other harsh drugs.
''It's a simpler and less toxic approach to melanoma than had been previously employed,'' said Dr. Louis Weiner, director of the cancer center at Georgetown University.
The fourth patient they treated was the Oregon man, who had a melanoma on his back before it had spread to his groin and right lung. He was treated in July 2005. Two months after the treatment, advanced scans of his body revealed no tumors. Two years after the treatment, he had no symptoms.
More good news: There were no harmful side effects. What's more, an analysis showed that his immune system had targeted not only one type of protein target on cancer cells, but two others as well.
It's possible the treatment spurred his immune system to expand its cancer-fighting ability in new ways, Yee said.
However, the case raised many unanswered questions. The man had been treated earlier with other drugs. It's possible those treatments had already weakened or altered the cancer.
Also, none of the eight other patients in the study did as well. It's not clear why.
------
On The Net:
New England Journal: http://nejm.org

2008-06-20T04:22:00.000-07:00

June 20, 2008
Spike in School’s Pregnancies Leads to Report That Some Resulted From Girls’ Pact
By KATIE ZEZIMA
BOSTON — At least 17 girls at the public high school in the seaside town of Gloucester, Mass., are expecting babies, and a Time magazine report says nearly half became pregnant after making a pact to do so and raise the children together.
Local officials reached Thursday would not confirm the existence of such a pact but acknowledged that many of the 17 pregnancies — a total four times as many as last school year at the 1,200-student school — had been intentional.
“I’ve heard some of them were not accidents; some of them were pleased when they got the results,” said Greg Verga, a member of the Gloucester School Committee. “I did hear that there were cases where a teen went in several times for pregnancy tests and seemed depressed when it was negative.”
Joseph Sullivan, the principal of the school, Gloucester High, could not be reached for comment. But Time quoted him as saying that of the pregnant students, almost half, none older than 16, had engaged in the pact.
Reached on Thursday, Mayor Carolyn Kirk said the existence of such an agreement was “believable, in the sense that it would explain this spike” in teenage pregnancies.
Ms. Kirk, a member of the school committee, also said that some of those who impregnated the students were men in their mid-20s.
Gloucester is a fishing town of 30,000 that is encountering hardships with the decline of the fishing industry.
“This is a city in transition going through a hard economic time,” Ms. Kirk said. “There are cuts in economic programs, cuts in services, cuts in after-school programs, and they’re all impacting the social climate. We really let these kids down.”
“It’s the social environment these girls are coming from,” she added. “They think that a baby can give them love or give them status or fill an empty space in their life, and these girls are very, very young. And I think if you talk to any teenage mother who is caring for an infant, the road is not easy.”
The surge in teenage pregnancy has brought a heated debate over contraception and education in Gloucester, which is heavily Roman Catholic. The school clinic’s medical director and its chief nurse practitioner both resigned in May after the hospital that administers grants for the clinic opposed making contraceptives available to students.
The clinic does not distribute contraceptives, and Gloucester High School’s health curriculum has been cut for budget reasons, meaning there is no sex education, Ms. Kirk said.
Meanwhile, in addition to the 17 girls known to be pregnant, others continue to arrive at the clinic asking for pregnancy tests.
The school committee is now considering educational programs on teenage pregnancy and weighing whether the clinic should distribute contraceptives. Mayor Kirk has instructed her health director to compile information about the issue from the state, other agencies and independent experts. She said the committee hoped to have a policy regarding education, contraception and related services in place by the start of the next school year.
“It’s very complicated,” she said. “There are many layers, and I am insisting on a process where the school committee can explore all of the layers, get good information, find out what works in other communities and come to a good decision on behalf of our children.”

2008-06-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

June 20, 2008
China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI — When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a detached retina while training, a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family members and fans speculated about the imminent end of a great career.
The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the Chinese sports establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that this was sacrifice enough. Had he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have sent him off to dive.”
But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first time, Mr. Hu is training and competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that China hopes will dominate the sport this summer.
“The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu, whose other retina was also injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of another gold medal, he added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really blind.”
Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial riches awaiting star performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to their limits and beyond, causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
“An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004 Olympics, its highest ranking ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the hosting of the Games by surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic aspirants, from still largely unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s brightest marquee names, like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months of the N.B.A. season with a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of retirement, and some female stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving birth. Previous gold medal winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a repeat victory will let the whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious injuries. A female weight lifter, Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high blood pressure that her chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
‘Don’t Retreat’
These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Liu Xiang, a Chinese track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular sports star in Athens when he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, as saying, “Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last August, after winning the track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high expectations. “I’ve been tortured these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve never been so nervous; more nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of China’s Olympic-caliber competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every aspect of their lives, often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care and interactions with the public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training regimens and the risks of injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top female doubles tennis player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often operates.
Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last year to gain tour points required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost in the first round of the French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong I could hardly concentrate,” she said.
Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if she kept playing without treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her request to concede the French Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was an important factor in their performance.”
“The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen Peide, former director of the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive to succeed, to be faster, to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes at the expense of athletes’ health.
“When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to give up so easily,” he said.
Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front lines with light injuries,” was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach, for many other Olympics hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical professionals.
“The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and they usually don’t have a say” in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the sports injury department at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to handle injuries of important athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
Sacrificing for a Payoff
If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just as demanding of themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in China, money has become a powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a national weight-lifting champion and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I told both him and his parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The parents replied that there was nothing for their child to do but persevere.
“They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting 48-kilogram category in 2004, put it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become another person,” she said, referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on victors. “One Olympics can change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in Hubei Province in central China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground, then let him jump from a bed to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver and sent to train with a coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered relatively untalented by coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004 Games. But he distinguished himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the same determination in working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery because he hoped it would speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on the road, but I have to keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have had retina injuries. Yu Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor screening of young athletes for congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods. Divers wear no goggles, and repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts say, especially if divers fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who discovered a high incidence of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said there had been minor changes in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to have much effect on the rate of injury.
“I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other countries, but the rate should be lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the front lines, China’s national sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from the cold war. Within five years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of the heavily centralized sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately conceived as an instrument of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign policy, aimed both at increasing the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the people.
Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties between Moscow and Beijing soured.
“The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for each team, while the Chinese system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan Brownell, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system of intense rivalries between the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as young as 6, experts say, with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising. These children are placed in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly intensive competitions that weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of those, only a tiny fraction will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
The Strategy of Success
“Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each province, and even from the cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau director. “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold medals last time, it should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports officials in each province depends on how many medals their province has won.”
In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and may speak to them only once or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly attentive, showering gifts on the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to make up for the children’s absence.
Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of the era of economic reform in the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the “Ten Year Sports Guidelines” and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods, pioneered in the 1980s by Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on multiple, grueling training sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were customary in the West. Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into disrepute and were withdrawn from Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for steroids.
A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has been the astute targeting of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories, competition is relatively thin.
“The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major efforts into training for new events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into effect. This has been the case with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of the China Weight Lifting Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in developing female weight lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced, China has won half of the 14 gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as high in this sport as in any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a successful push in this sport — widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for muscle-bound women to find work or spouses when their careers end — depends on recruiting among the rural poor. With its heavy training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s life.
Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the 48-kilogram category, was asked to try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better shot at winning medals. But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight class. Her parents, who say they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in their last phone call not to worry.
“We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang Meiyu, said, explaining the decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so little and we couldn’t see her often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so tough.”
Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s weight-lifting champion in the 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at least 10 years’ practice before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a world championship, you can go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you get nothing but injuries all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”

2008-04-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

April 29, 2008
Ronaldo goes into hiding in Brazil
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 p.m. ET
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Ronaldo went into hiding Tuesday after a run-in with cross-dressing prostitutes that prompted police to investigate whether to charge one with trying to extort money from the soccer star.
The AC Milan player, in Brazil recovering from a knee surgery, canceled two TV appearances, and local media said he will continue physiotherapy at his home.
Police said Ronaldo committed no crime, but he was accused by one prostitute of using drugs and not wanting to pay.
Prostitution is legal in Brazil.
''It is necessary to clarify that no formal accusations were made against Ronaldo,'' read a statement on the player's Web site. ''An advocate of social causes, Ronaldo has never used drugs and has always been admired by children in Brazil and around the world. There are indications of an extortion attempt in which the Milan striker is the only victim.''
Ronaldo, a three-time FIFA player of the year, acknowledged to police he knew they were prostitutes but did not realize they were cross-dressers until getting to a motel early Monday morning, according to police.
Police released more details Tuesday, and the AP reviewed witnesses' accounts to authorities.
The motel manager -- identified only as Luisa -- said Ronaldo, who was dressed and appeared to be sober, tried to get rid of the prostitutes after realizing they were men.
She told police Ronaldo offered the prostitutes $600 to end the incident but they would not accept dollars. The manager then converted the money into reals for Ronaldo, but before he made the payment one prostitute asked for 50,000 reals ($30,000) to keep the story from the media, according to the police document.
A motel waiter, who was not identified in the police documents, told police the prostitute went to the street and yelled ''the Phenomenon didn't want to pay.''
Witnesses also told police the prostitute who asked for 50,000 reals ripped out the phone wires to keep Ronaldo from calling for help, and broke into his car to steal his belongings, according to police documents. That prostitute later showed local media a car document belonging to Ronaldo.
Police inspector Carlos Augusto Nogueira said there was no evidence drugs were involved in the incident.
But he said Ronaldo and the prostitutes must return to the police station for further questioning next week. Nogueira added the one prostitute might be charged with extortion. Ronaldo will not be charged, Nogueira said, unless he threatened to physically assault the prostitutes, as one hinted.
The case made front-page headlines in several Brazilian newspapers Tuesday. And a brief video clip of Ronaldo at the motel, apparently taped by one of the prostitutes, became a big hit in Brazil after being uploaded on YouTube.
''It's really a soap opera,'' said 48-year-old Luiz Mendes, a private chauffeur. ''Ronaldo has money to fill mattresses. He can afford the best and most beautiful women in the world. Why would he want to go out with these (prostitutes).''
Some Brazilians defended the star.
''It's no surprise they are on the front page of all newspapers,'' said 27-year-old Catia Lopes, a bakery-shop worker. ''But I don't think Ronaldo's image was hurt. For me he is still the same person.''
Ronaldo's spokesman did not immediately return an e-mail from The Associated Press.
Ronaldo went out Sunday night reportedly to celebrate Flamengo's 1-0 victory over rival Botafogo in the first leg of the Rio de Janeiro state final. Ronaldo is a fan of Flamengo and has said he wants to play for the Brazilian club before retiring. He was at Maracana stadium to watch Sunday's match.
The player told reporters during the match that he could be back in action in six months if his recovery continues to go as planned.
Ronaldo has won two World Cups with Brazil, including in 2002 when he scored eight goals, including two in the final against Germany.
------
Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS Ronaldo was at motel early Monday instead of Sunday night and that he went out Sunday night.)

2008-03-27T07:24:00.001-07:00

March 27, 2008
Front Row
A Bad Reaction to a Diet
By ERIC WILSON
VOGUE made the proposal, but was it indecent?
Last September, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sibling designers of Rodarte, received a phone call from a Vogue editor who suggested that they see a trainer and go on a diet. The sisters, who said they wanted to be healthier and balance their stress levels, agreed, accepted four months of personal training and a meal delivery service paid for by the magazine, lost a combined 50 pounds and kept a journal of their experiences, which appears in the April issue.
“Kate and I have decided we have to do this program in a realistic way,” Laura Mulleavy wrote in an Oct. 22 entry. “We’ll have wine when we feel like it and cheat on holidays.”
Reactions to the issue have been blistering. Dozens of objections were posted to an entry about the diet on the blog Jezebel.
Nonetheless, Cynthia M. Bulik, a professor of eating disorders at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, defended the offer as it was presented in the magazine, noting that the designers had written that a doctor had also told them to get in shape. She said she was surprised by the controversy, given that Anna Wintour, in her editor’s letter, had challenged designers to use healthier looking models.
“I saw more of an emphasis on healthy eating and healthy fitness than an order, ‘You’ve got to lose weight,’ ” Dr. Bulik said.
The magazine has a track record of chronicling the diets of its staff, and in 1998, Oprah Winfrey acknowledged that she had agreed to lose 20 pounds in order to appear on its cover.
On top of this, Vogue has also been accused of racial stereotyping in its April cover choice: a black male athlete posing ferociously with his arm around a skipping-to-my-lou supermodel. Some media critics compared the pose unfavorably to images of King Kong and Fay Wray.
“We thought it was a strong and beautiful photo shoot,” said Abigail Walch, a senior editor at Vogue, who said the pose happened naturally. The Rodarte article, she said, was intended to inspire women who have trouble incorporating fitness into their hectic schedules. On subjects like weight and shape, she added, dissension is to be expected.
“It’s a hot topic that people love to talk about,” Ms. Walch said

2008-03-27T07:16:00.001-07:00

March 27, 2008
Personal Best
Yes, Running Can Make You High
By GINA KOLATA
THE runner’s high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.
Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?
Some who said they had experienced a runner’s high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner’s high?
Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.
My friend Marian Westley said her runner’s high came at the end of a marathon, and it was paired with such volatile emotions that the sight of a puppy had the power to make her weep.
Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race.
But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric. “I feel like I want to throw up,” she said.
The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.
The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people’s blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body’s stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one’s mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner’s high remained an unproved hypothesis.
But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.
Leading endorphin researchers not associated with the study said they accepted its findings.
“Impressive,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970’s.
“I like it,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. “This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there.”
For athletes, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner’s high is not just a New Agey excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.
For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner’s high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.
The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.
The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.
Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.
The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.
The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
“Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training,” said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.
That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: “You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces.”
In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. “There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners,” he said. “You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, ‘O.K., this hurts.’ ”
And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.
Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of nonathletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.
The nonathletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner’s high or changed pain perception.
Annie might question that. She loves to run, but wonders why. But her husband tells her that the look on her face when she is running is just blissful. So maybe even she gets a runner’s high.

2008-03-27T07:09:00.001-07:00

March 27, 2008
Pressured, Motorola Splits in Two
By LAURA M. HOLSON
After a two-month strategic review of its businesses, Motorola said on Wednesday that it would split itself into two separate publicly traded companies, spinning off its unprofitable mobile phone unit to investors.
The activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who has pressured Motorola to make such a move, said in a letter to its board that the announcement was “clearly a step in the right direction.” But he questioned Motorola’s commitment to moving quickly to solve its problems.
Gregory Q. Brown, Motorola’s chief executive, conceded that the main problem facing the company was its inability to come up with new products to replace the highly successful Razr, which was once a must-have phone but has faded from the scene.
He said he hoped that by turning the mobile devices business into its own unit, the company would have better luck attracting a new chief executive to run it and revive Motorola’s reputation.
“I think the challenges around Motorola have been about consistent execution,” Mr. Brown said. “That is why it is so important for us to expand and improve our product portfolio.”
Motorola’s influence and stock price have declined as rivals have taken the lead in creating interesting devices. Apple and its popular iPhone, for example, have captured the attention of buyers in the high-end market.
Executives of Motorola, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., declined to talk about what new handsets it planned to offer consumers in the coming months.
Next week is a big one for the mobile business, as all of the top handset makers and wireless companies are gathering in Las Vegas for the industry’s largest American trade show, CTIA Wireless 2008. Many will take the opportunity to unveil flashy new phones that consumers will be snapping up over the next year.
But when it comes to Motorola, expectations are low.
“It will be interesting to see if they announce anything at CTIA,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Research.
Rivals aside, Motorola is also facing pressure from investors — in particular Mr. Icahn — who are dissatisfied with Motorola’s weak stock performance; the shares have dropped 44 percent in the last year. Cellphone production is the largest division of the company, with $18.99 billion in net sales in 2007, a 33 percent decline from a year earlier. Last year, the division lost $1.2 billion. Motorola’s other two units are smaller but profitable.
Analysts have questioned what effect a split would have on operations and on attracting solid executives to the troubled company. Already there has been an exodus of executives from Motorola, among them Stu Reed, the former chief of the mobile devices division.
“The danger is they are getting rid of the underperforming part of the business just to get rid of it,” Mr. Entner of IAG said. “The fear is in a year or two the operations will cease to exist.”
The profitable side of Motorola is decidedly less well known than the mobile devices division. It makes set-top boxes and products used by businesses and law enforcement officials for scanning and fingerprinting, as well as data and video communications systems for public agencies like fire departments.
Motorola expects to have the spinoff, which will be a tax-free distribution to shareholders, completed by 2009.
The move to split the company has long been advocated by Mr. Icahn, who led a fight last year for a seat on Motorola’s board. That effort failed, but it helped lead to the departure of the chief executive, Edward J. Zander, who was succeeded by Mr. Brown.
This week, Mr. Icahn sued Motorola, demanding internal board documents that he believed would show that it was lax in its oversight of management. Mr. Icahn is now leading a proxy fight for four Motorola board seats ahead of the company’s annual meeting in May.
In his letter to the board, Mr. Icahn also questioned why it would take so long to complete the split, and why it took “the threat of a proxy fight for you to make promises we all want to hear.” He did not return calls seeking comment.
There is still the chance that Mr. Brown and his board could decide to sell the mobile phone division if they do not find a suitable chief executive to run it. Selling it to a competitor was one option that Motorola pursued, according to a person involved in those discussions, but there were no takers.
Mr. Brown declined to discuss whether the division could be sold. “We’ve never had a ‘For Sale’ sign on it,” he said. “After our review, we believe this is the appropriate action.”

2008-03-05T07:51:00.000-08:00

March 5, 2008
Yes, MSG, the Secret Behind the Savor
By JULIA MOSKIN
IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame.
The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods.
“It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.”
Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away.
But then, neither will MSG.
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by American home cooks, and to the cheese Goldfish crackers and the low-fat yogurts in many lunchboxes.
It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan.
“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,” said Dr. Nuripa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the first research team to identify human glutamate receptors.
In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Prof. Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.
“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,” Dr. Chaudhari said.
If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating, and enjoying, MSG. And if you are the kind of cook who likes to keep a globe-trotting kitchen, well, then, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.
“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,” said Zak Pelaccio, a New York chef whose ride to fame has been greased with Kewpie mayonnaise. One of the dishes that put him on the map was a sandwich of roasted salmon on pumpernickel bread slathered with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a tube and the mayonnaise.
In regions where meat and meaty flavors have been out of reach for most cooks, MSG has long filled the gap.
“My father called Maggi sauce la segunda venida, the second coming, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,” said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a home health aide from Puebla, Mexico, who was waiting in line at a taco truck on the Upper West Side. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a general flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeteners and extracts.
Her mother died when she was young, she said, and her father was a reluctant cook, making scrambled eggs most nights. “Huevos revueltos with Maggi sauce is still one of my favorite things, with tortillas and pico de gallo,” she added.
Maggi sauce (there are various other Maggi products, not all of which contain MSG) is extremely popular in regions as far-flung as India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast. One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is called Maggi goreng.
“It’s the kind of thing people crave late at night,” said Bee Yinn Low, who is from Penang but lives in Irvine, Calif., and writes a blog about Malaysian food at rasamalaysia.com. Maggi has a faintly similar flavor to Indonesian kecap manis, a salty-sweet-savory condiment that is one ancestor of modern tomato ketchup.
“Asia wouldn’t survive without MSG,” said Mike Crewe-Brown, a cooking teacher who recently spent three months producing a food documentary in Southeast Asia.
Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”
Meat and MSG work beautifully together. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the fallback rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. Accent, which is mostly MSG, was introduced in 1947 and quickly became a staple for American home cooks.
But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, now popular on pizza, omelets and sushi. (Mayonnaise Kitchen, a food stall in Tokyo, serves only mayonnaise-friendly foods and lets patrons store their own bottles of Kewpie, the most popular brand.)
Japanese mayonnaise is flavored with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it an addictive roundness and tang. It is the main ingredient in dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili sauce that has become a staple of sushi bars here and in Japan. At Ginza in Boston, a dish called hotate hokkaiyaki — baked shellfish with dynamite sauce — has had a passionate following for more than 10 years.
If you have ever wondered what makes spicy tuna rolls so much tastier than plain tekka maki, dynamite sauce, or perhaps the MSG in it, is the answer.
In upscale restaurants, whether by tradition or by inclination, chefs are unlikely to use monosodium glutamate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto because we can get the ingredients that have natural umami: shiitake mushrooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,” said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in New York.
Although umami is only a bit player in Japanese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been produced here on this elusive fifth taste, which is supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of kelp and dried tuna.
Umami “is delicious,” Katsuhiro Utada told The New York Times in 1983, and a food-lovers’ swoon began. Mr. Utada, not coincidentally, was the president of the Ajinomoto Company — then, and now, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate.
Whether umami is the fifth taste or the 50th — there is little agreement among neuroscientists — it has been positively identified as the flavor of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. Food writers lost no time adding umami to their mental glossaries. But this same crowd rarely mentions MSG, a cheap, synthetic route to the flavor of glutamate.
I keep kecap and (umami-rich) ketchup on hand, but MSG is not normally present in my kitchen. The spice drawer has never seen Accent, the canned chicken broth has a big “No MSG” stamp on the label and the hoisin, soy and fish sauces on hand are the food-writer-approved brands. Again, no MSG.
So the food I produced at home using Maggi sauce, MSG-laden bouillon cubes and Japanese mayonnaise tasted ... different.
I made two versions of pad kee mao, with and without Maggi, and while both were good, the one with MSG had the kind of round flavor I’d normally associate with homemade chicken stock or some form of professional expertise.
Tasted straight, though, the sauces had the chemical, tangy aftertaste common to many processed foods.
“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid taste,” said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it just right and that dish will sing.”
The role of MSG in food, and its effects on health, remain controversial. Linda Bartoshuk, a director of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste, who has studied the sensory effects of MSG for years, believes not only that MSG is harmful to health, but also that it has virtually no effect on the taste of food. “All this umami stuff is just marketing,” she said.
In 1995 the Food and Drug Administration issued a large-scale review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, clearing glutamates as a health risk for the vast majority of consumers.
An international research review in 1987 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had come to the same conclusion.
“There was simply no clinical evidence for any of it,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.
She did not even mention MSG in her recent book “What to Eat,” much of which is devoted to health concerns over food additives. “I thought the issue was settled, though I know a lot of people will never believe that,” she said.
MSG is blamed by some groups for a range of serious neurological and physiological disorders. Some studies have identified both MSG and aspartame (another Ajinomoto product) as excitotoxins, substances that overstimulate the neurotransmitters to the point of cell damage. But no large-scale clinical research has been done since the F.D.A.’s 1995 review.
Since the 1970s, MSG has sidled back onto American supermarket shelves, under assumed names: hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, protein concentrates and other additives that are not labeled as MSG but, according to nutritionists and the United States Department of Agriculture, are essentially the same thing: synthetically produced glutamates.
The whey protein concentrate and liquid aminos that many Americans buy at health food stores are also, essentially, pure glutamate, Dr. Chaudhari said.
According to U.S.D.A. guidelines, “labeling is required when MSG is added as a direct ingredient.” But other glutamates — the hydrolyzed proteins, the autolyzed yeasts and the protein concentrates, which the U.S.D.A. acknowledges are related to MSG — must be identified under their own names.
Alternatively, they may also be included under certain terms, like vegetable broth or chicken broth. Thus, these ingredients are now routinely found in products like canned tuna (vegetable broth is listed as an ingredient; it contains hydrolyzed soy protein), canned soup, low-fat yogurts and ice creams, chips and virtually everything ranch-flavored or cheese-flavored.
Thus, the richest source of umami remains your local convenience store. Grab a tube of Pringles or a bologna sandwich, and glutamic acid is most likely lurking there somewhere.
Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan.
No wonder they taste so good.

2008-03-05T05:27:00.001-08:00

March 5, 2008
Easily Overlooked Lesions Tied to Colon Cancer, Study Finds
By DENISE GRADY
An easily overlooked type of abnormality in the colon is the most likely type to turn cancerous, and is more common in this country than previously thought, researchers are reporting.
The findings come from a study of colonoscopy, in which a camera-tipped tube is used to examine the lining of the intestine. Generally, doctors search for polyps, abnormal growths that stick out from the lining and can turn into cancer. But another type of growth is much more dangerous, and harder to see because it is flat or depressed and similar in color to healthy tissue.
Japanese researchers became concerned about these flat lesions in the 1980s and ’90s, but studies here had mixed results and American doctors tended to think that flat growths were less common and less dangerous in the United States.
The new study, to be published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests otherwise.
Some doctors in this country were already alert to flat lesions, but the findings will pose a challenge to others, because it takes a trained and vigilant eye to see the growths and special techniques to remove them. The results also mean it is especially important that patients take the harsh laxatives that many dread in advance of the test. The flat lesions, hard to find even under the best conditions, will be impossible to see if any waste is left in the bowel.
Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, after lung cancer, with about 154,000 new cases detected and 52,000 deaths a year. It is one of the few cancers that is totally preventable if precancerous growths are found and removed; it can also be cured with surgery alone if found early enough.
People who have just had a colonoscopy should not rush to schedule another one just to look for the flat growths, doctors said.
“I don’t think people have to panic that they’ve somehow been neglected and had poor care,” said Dr. David A. Rothenberger, deputy chairman of surgery at the University of Minnesota.
But he and other experts emphasized that people should see a doctor any time they have persisting symptoms that could indicate colon cancer, like rectal bleeding or a change in bowel habits — no matter how recently they had a colonoscopy. The test is highly reliable, but not perfect, doctors say.
Some doctors who perform colonoscopy just are not good at seeing flat lesions, but may improve with training and practice, said Dr. Douglas K. Rex, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at Indiana University.
“I think there are people who expect everything in there to be shaped like a golf ball,” he said. “It’s not.”
Dr. David Lieberman, chief of gastroenterology at Oregon Health and Science University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said: “I think there will be some surprise. There has been in general some skepticism in the United States about how common flat and depressed lesions are and how important they are. So I think this study, coming from the United States and from a good group of investigators, will be a wake-up call to a lot of physicians and will prompt people to be looking for these lesions.”
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
The first author of the study, Dr. Roy M. Soetikno of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System said, “The message for doctors is, Here is a large amount of data showing that these precursors of cancer, always believed to be a Japanese disease, are actually a disease here, and are important, because they are much more likely to be cancerous, and doctors need to spend the time to provide quality colonoscopy.”
The message to patients, Dr. Soetikno said, is that when preparing for colonoscopy, they must follow instructions to the letter and take the hated laxatives to make sure their bowels are empty so that doctors can see the lining.
If any waste remains, flat lesions will be buried by it. Studies have shown that in about a quarter of all colonoscopies, the bowel preparation is inadequate.
Dr. Rex said that male veterans tended to have more precancerous colon growths than other groups, so the rate of flat lesions in women or the general population might not be quite as high as those in the study.
Dr. Soetikno and his colleagues started an exchange program with doctors in Japan to learn their techniques for recognizing and removing the flat lesions.
American doctors should learn from overseas colleagues more often, Dr. Rothenberger said, adding, “We tend to get very smug about our abilities.”
The quality of colonoscopy has become a delicate issue, because an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in December 2006 found that some doctors were 10 times better than others at finding precancerous polyps. A major factor in their success was taking enough time to examine the colon thoroughly, as opposed to rushing through the procedure. Doctors who miss polyps would almost certainly miss flat lesions as well because they are harder to see. The new study underscores the need for careful examinations, because the flat lesions are more dangerous.
The study also raises doubts about whether “virtual colonoscopy,” performed by a CT scanner, will ever be able to take the place of the colonoscope inserted into the rectum, as many patients had hoped. The problem is that CT scans use X-rays to reveal shapes, and find polyps because they stick out. Flat lesions are unlikely to show up in such scans.
Studies show that from 0.3 percent to 0.9 percent of patients develop colon cancers within just a few years of having a colonoscopy and polyp removal — exactly what the procedure is supposed to prevent. Some doctors think that flat lesions, missed entirely during the colonoscopy or not fully removed, may account for some of these apparent failures.
Dr. Robert Smith, the director of screening for the American Cancer Society, said flat lesions were “a vexing issue” that had provoked a lot of arguments among doctors.
“This paper shows they’re more prevalent than we believed, and also quite serious with regard to the presence of features associated with an elevated risk of cancer,” Dr. Smith said.
The difficulty facing patients is how to be sure their doctors are doing a good job. Professional groups have issued guidelines about the best way to perform a colonoscopy, but they are recommendations, not rules. The groups also urge doctors to track their own success rates at finding precancerous growths to see how they measure up to standards, but even if they do keep track, the doctors do not have to share the data with anyone. And many people are loath to ask about it. The doctor wielding the scope is the last person most patients would want to offend.
“The patient really has no way to act as an informed consumer,” Dr. Smith said. “You can’t call up a facility and say, ‘By the way, is my doctor any good?’ or, ‘Tell me who the best one is.’ ”
He added: “For some physicians there is an expectation of trust, and it is offputting to have a patient request documentation of competence. However, some physicians know patients are hearing about these issues and are not offended by questions about performance and errors.”

2008-02-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

February 14, 2008
At Home in the World
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
As soon as Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric’s chairman, became chief executive in 2001, his foreign-based managers began pressing him to move some major operations overseas.
“They’d say, ‘G.E. will never be really global until you do,’ ” Mr. Immelt recalled. For years, his reaction was, “That’s really stupid; no need to do that.”
But his managers kept up the pressure, and Mr. Immelt figured that “with so much smoke, there must be a fire.”
So in 2004, he moved G.E. Healthcare from Wisconsin to outside London, the home of Amersham, a company G.E. had just bought.
Clearly, he liked the results. G.E. now has research centers in Munich, Shanghai and Bangalore, India. The unit that sells equipment and services to oil and gas companies is based in Florence, Italy.
And this month, G.E. promoted an American executive, William H. Cary, to lead G.E. Money. The company also said that it would move the group’s headquarters to London from Stamford, Conn., to be closer to customers in Europe and Asia.
The European operations are helping G.E. rebuild its image in Europe, where hard feelings still linger from G.E.’s aborted effort to acquire Honeywell in 2001. The centers in Asia help build new relationships with governments of developing countries, both as showcases for technology and as sources for jobs.
Sales of engines, turbines and other so-called infrastructure items are not only the biggest contributors to G.E.’s profits these days, but also the greatest source of its growth.
“Everyone talks about outsourcing manufacturing, but it is the high-level R.& D. jobs that are the great marketing tools,” Mr. Immelt said. “And I’m a salesman, remember. I know that you don’t get to sell things for long unless you are part of the culture into which you are selling.”
Much is at stake. Last year, for the first time, G.E.’s overseas revenue surpassed domestic sales. But more important, overseas sales are growing even though the slowing American economy is damping sales back home.
That is true of many companies, of course. But for G.E., the result has been more than a shifting of revenue. The company’s once-rigid hierarchy and vaunted training programs are going through a huge overhaul, as American executives learn to treat foreign-born colleagues as equals, not subordinates. “They are managing their worldwide organization as a network, not a centralized hub with foreign appendages,” said Christopher A. Bartlett, a professor at the Harvard Business School who has written a case study on G.E.
This year, in a highly symbolic gesture, G.E. Transportation, which is based in Erie, Pa., moved its annual sales meeting to Sorrento, Italy, from Florida. “It was time the Americans learned what it’s like to deal with jet lag,” said John Dineen, who leads the unit.
In a sense, G.E. is returning to its past. When John F. Welch Jr. became its chief in 1981, G.E. was organized geographically, with powerful country heads — usually American-born — running different regions. He reorganized the company around businesses. Now, Mr. Immelt is creating a hybrid of the two approaches.
“Jeff recognizes that the center of gravity is shifting,” said Noel M. Tichy, a management professor at the University of Michigan who has written about G.E.
That is true outside G.E. as well.
International Business Machines, which now derives 65 percent of its revenue from overseas, operates most of its software and services business from India. It has moved its global procurement center, as well as most of its voice recognition technology work, to China.
Last year, for the first time, I.B.M. brought 23 Chinese employees to its headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., for nearly two weeks to learn about I.B.M.’s ethics and culture. In September, the same 23 workers went through training in Shanghai, to learn how to apply those principles. I.B.M. also has begun to send American executives to training sessions in Asia, both to teach and to learn.
“The people in Armonk can’t just say, ‘grow earnings 30 percent,’ ” said Denis Fred Simon, provost of the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce, which helped I.B.M. devise the new training program. “They have to understand what it means to operate on the ground in China.”
But G.E.’s size — $173 billion in revenue last year — and product diversity make the task of imparting such understanding especially formidable.
So G.E.’s American managers now travel overseas for management training almost as often as European executives come to G.E.’s management center in Crotonville, N.Y.
Today, G.E. researchers in Shanghai or Bangalore have the kind of autonomy that used to exist only in Niskayuna, N.Y., where the G.E. Global Research Center long reigned supreme.
Mr. Immelt is thinking about replicating Crotonville in China, and building a residential lodge at the Munich research center, similar to the one in Niskayuna.
And foreign accents are heard at higher rungs of the management ladder. G.E.’s country managers, who act as liaisons between G.E. businesses and customers in their territories, increasingly hail from the regions they manage and are growing in internal stature as G.E.’s overseas sales continue to soar.
“In places like China, governments are big customers, and it’s the country heads who have the relationships with the governments,” said Deane M. Dray, the G.E. analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Most business heads are still based in the United States. And because they control the bottom lines of their respective units, they still have the most clout.
But foreign-born nationals are rising through the businesses. The executive roster at G.E. Transportation includes Pierre Comte, a Frenchman who runs Global Signaling from Paris, and Rafael Santana, a Brazilian who manages G.E. Transportation-Americas from Brazil.
Evren Eryurek, manager of global rail operations, works from Florida, but he is Turkish. Mr. Dineen is American, as is Tim Schweikert, president of G.E. Transportation China. But their successors, Mr. Dineen suggested, “might well be foreign-born.”
Mr. Immelt, who never did a foreign stint himself, can easily picture that. He would not name them, but he said he could think of at least three foreign-born nationals who could succeed him when he retires in a decade or so.
“The business C.E.O.’s have to be socially and politically astute and able to anticipate political risk,” Mr. Immelt said. “There are more people competing for these top jobs, but a lot fewer who qualify for them.”
Management experts say that may soon change. “Students coming out of the Indian Institute of Technology are every bit as talented as those who study in London or New York,” said Robert N. Bontempo, a professor of executive education at the Columbia Business School. “And the globalization of big companies has enabled them to get meaningful work experience without leaving their countries.”
The transition has been bumpy for American employees. They no longer have first crack at plum assignments and promotions. And they no longer get to lord it over foreign colleagues.
“Sometimes you need dogmatic leadership,” Mr. Immelt said. “You need to say, ‘I don’t care if you like this, it’s happening.’ ”
Recalcitrant executives are coming around. “It is easy to fly anywhere from London, and I’m not out of phase with anyone’s time zone,” said Joseph M. Hogan, chief executive of G.E. Healthcare. “I call China in the morning, Europe midafternoon, then the U.S. last.”
There are more tangible results as well. Mark Little, who runs the Niskayuna research center, noted that the Shanghai lab came up with a new desalination method, and researchers in India devised a less-expensive electrocardiogram.
Mr. Hogan points to a low-cost CT scanner developed in China. American versions use a hydraulic pedal to move the table up and down; in China, the table is stationary, and patients simply use a step stool. “American engineers would have tried to somehow dumb down the tables we were already using,” he said.
Mr. Comte pushed G.E. Transportation to make electric locomotives and signaling devices, while executives in China persuaded the company to put cabs at both ends so the locomotive can switch directions without turning around.
“As outsiders, they can focus on what we weren’t doing, not on what we’d done well for 100 years,” Mr. Dineen said.
G.E.’s goal is to create a generation of foreign-born insiders. It has been holding what Susan P. Peters, who leads executive development at G.E., calls “talent forums” at G.E. businesses in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at which corporate human resources people evaluate high-potential people in their 30s, and suggest development plans.
John F. Lynch, G.E.’s senior vice president for human resources — and a Scotsman by birth — said that the number of G.E. managers on foreign assignments has long hovered around 1,800 a year. But until a few years ago, probably 80 percent were Americans doing overseas stints.
Today, a similarly disproportionate number are foreign nationals working outside their home countries, many of whom are en route to becoming country managers. “Someday, country manager jobs will be culture-blind, and an American can again run Japan or a Scotsman can run India,” he said. “But it will be 25 years before that happens.”

2008-02-13T05:59:00.000-08:00

February 13, 2008
I Love You, but You Love Meat
By KATE MURPHY
SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.
“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.
Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.
No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”
Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea.
Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.
Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.
Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”
While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.
June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,” she said.
Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.
Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”
Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.
“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”
A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her, is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier. “A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I love to cook for him,” she said.
Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.
As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.
“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.
“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”
In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.
In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms. Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.
Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26, a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules. “We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”
Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.
“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”
Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic, household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms. Benson said.
So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.
“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr. Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.
For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.
“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.
Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.

2008-01-27T09:58:00.001-08:00

January 27, 2008
Officials Make Deals to Learn Who Made Drug Deals
By MICHAEL BRICK
PLANO, Tex. — A black Hummer pulled into the Hooters parking lot as dusk fell. Arthur Dale Atwood, a professional bodybuilder with a 61-inch chest, opened the tailgate for a police informant to deliver more than 100 bottles of fake drugs made from vegetable oil.
For months, city detectives had been watching as Atwood, 34, amassed steroids, human growth hormone, Ecstasy and exotic thyroid stimulators. Last May, the police made their move. Outside the Hooters lot, officers pulled over the Hummer. But instead of filing drug charges, they turned Atwood over to federal prosecutors running a more ambitious investigation.
Three days later, federal agents began arresting seven other bodybuilders across the state. One of them, David C. Jacobs, 35, known to friends as Bulletproof, publicly boasted of having evidence to link players for the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons to steroids. No such evidence has been revealed, and those teams have strongly denied his statements.
Prosecutors could have tried Atwood and Jacobs on multiple counts of drug conspiracy, seeking to make an example of two bodybuilders suspected of distributing steroids. But instead, they made deals that could keep both men from serving any prison time. Law enforcement officials would not disclose the final targets of their investigation or say whether the names of steroid customers would ever be revealed.
The deals struck with Atwood and Jacobs , indicate a shift in steroid prosecution methods and goals. As the use of performance-enhancing substances draws concern from the halls of Congress to the offices of high school coaches, prosecutors have turned their onetime prime targets into partners in a broader endeavor.
Atwood and Jacobs were enlisted to cooperate in Operation Raw Deal, the federal government’s most aggressive drive yet to interrupt the importation and traffic of performance-enhancing drugs through nutrition stores, gyms and Web sites. In September, authorities in 10 countries coordinated the arrests of more than 120 people, seized more than $6 million and collected 11 million steroid doses, 3 boats and dozens of weapons.
Since then, prosecutors from San Diego to Rhode Island have been making deals with distributors to build their cases. The distribution networks for steroids are amorphous, unlike the traditional narcotics cartels led by strongmen. They thrive on the anonymity of the Internet, the discreet camaraderie of the locker room, and the reckless entrepreneurship of home laboratories and pharmacies.
“Our goal is to go after the bigger fish,” said Steve Robertson, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. “You start looking at other dealers, customers, things like that.”
Although customers were rarely prosecuted in the past, the names of police officers, prominent athletes and entertainers have appeared in news accounts of several cases around the country. Customer lists have not been revealed.
“It runs the gamut,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the D.E.A. “Lots of different kinds of athletes, weekend warriors, gym rats, girls, dealers/remailers, a lot of traffickers, people who have never taken steroids in their life but make a lot of money selling them.” From 2001 through 2005, when prosecutors focused their efforts on sophisticated, high-end laboratories, only 46 people were sentenced under the federal guidelines for steroid trafficking, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. In the past four months, however, at least 10 people have pleaded guilty to federal steroid-distribution charges, court records show.
Drug policy experts said the prosecutors of Operation Raw Deal could seek, at best, to disrupt the steady flow of performance-enhancing drugs.
“Use goes down when price goes up or availability is reduced,” said Jonathan P. Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “We also know that ongoing enforcement pressure forces dealers to operate in inefficient ways, greatly increasing their costs of operation and, hence, increase the final retail price. So even if an operation doesn’t create a price spike, if it’s part of the background level of enforcement that forces the dealers to keep their heads down, then it may be doing some good.”
Definition and Diversifying
The police here began investigating a tip on Atwood early last year, soon after his arrival on the bodybuilding scene from Wisconsin. By traditional measures, he was a prime target: a ranked professional star in his sport whose downfall could serve as an example.
Atwood, who declined a request for an interview, was reared in Milwaukee, lifting weights to build strength for high school football. In gyms there, he was regarded as friendly and passionate about the sport.
“The guy trained like a monster,” said Tony Frontier, an amateur weight lifter in the 1990s who now works in education. “Didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, didn’t have a sense that he would use his strength to intimidate anybody or to his own advantage.”
Through the 1990s, Atwood refined his exercise routine, studied kinesiology and managed fitness clubs. In publicity materials and magazine interviews, he described a regimen of 13 workouts a week to train each muscle. In a typical day, he ate three protein shakes, cereal, oatmeal, three pounds of chicken, a potato, rice, steak, more chicken, then an egg-white omelet with protein powder.
In 2002, he won in his professional debut in Toronto at 5 feet 11 inches and 255 pounds, 70 pounds below his off-season weight.
“He came with just an incredible combination of size, symmetry and proportion, so he was one to watch,” said Milos Sarcev, a competitive bodybuilder and gym owner in Fullerton, Calif.
That victory became Atwood’s calling card as he traveled to competitions in the Netherlands, Russia, Hungary and San Francisco, with middling results over the next four years.
“After that, the criteria was more toward the smaller, symmetrical, so his physique was really rewarded no longer,” Sarcev said.
To supplement his income, Atwood sold health foods, vitamins and supplements through his retail storefront, Mass Results in Greenfield, Wis., before moving to this north Dallas suburb a few years ago.
In May, as Atwood drove away with the fake steroids, officers arrested him on a traffic violation. Searching his red brick town house, they confiscated $6,986 in cash, 2 computers, scales, tablets and capsules, a hollowed-out book, a 2007 Lexus and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Court records show he was not charged with any drug violation “due to the fact that this is still an ongoing federal investigation.” Prosecutors would not say whether he would be charged with a crime.
A Plea to Name Players
Meanwhile, federal agents were investigating Jacobs, a less-successful bodybuilder with deeper local roots. He was listed as a senior in the 1991 yearbook for Plano Senior High School without a photograph.
In promotional materials and social networking sites, Jacobs appeared as a great pile of muscle, tattoos and intensity, topped by a buzz cut. Posing beside strapping women with glowing tans, he described himself as a Bible reader, a teetotaler and a “movie fiend.”
Jacobs operated the Supplement Outlet from a storefront on President Bush Highway. The shopping center adjoined an LA Fitness gym, where he sought customers among the staff. He made an imposing first impression.
“Tatted-up and just huge as anything and looks mean,” Colby Lee, a gym employee, said of Jacobs. “But when I actually started talking to him, he was just a super-nice guy.”
Lee began visiting the Supplement Outlet daily for energy drinks and workout advice but rarely saw any other customers.
“At that point, I was suspicious,” he said. “I was like, How is he paying for this?”
When federal agents arrested Jacobs on charges of conspiring to distribute steroids, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, they confiscated cash, laptop computers, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, a Hummer, a Mustang, a noise filter, semiautomatic pistols, rifles and a double-barrel shotgun.
Through the summer, six other people connected to Atwood and Jacobs were arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute steroids. Most have pleaded guilty to the federal distribution charge. In interviews, investigators and defense lawyers described the six as bodybuilders who were supplied by Atwood and Jacobs and who were familiar with one another partly through competitions and mostly through online sales.
Jacobs pleaded guilty and could serve only probation for his cooperation. One law enforcement official said the case now spanned “Texas and beyond.”
On the eve of his plea in November, Jacobs told a local television program that he intended to name steroid users who play for the Cowboys and the Falcons.
“Obviously, that’s one of the reasons I am here and pleading guilty,” he told the station, without offering proof or names. The teams denied that their organizations had any connection to Jacobs. One investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was not finished, said Jacobs “likes the limelight, I guess.”
The investigator added: “But I think a lot of what he says is true. He’s been able to back up a lot of the stuff he claims.”
Jacobs could not be reached through telephone calls and a knock at his door. His lawyer, Henry E. Hockeimer, said: “It’s an ongoing investigation. He’s cooperating.”
The assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas handling the case, Samuel W. Cantrell, did not return calls.
But another law enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity because the case was active, said people who bought steroids from Jacobs, Atwood and the others could face prosecution.
“We typically only prosecute distributors, not users,” the official said. “There are exceptions.”

2008-01-08T01:18:00.000-08:00

January 8, 2008
Tiny Specks of Misery, Both Vile and Useful
By NATALIE ANGIER
I spent New Year’s Eve with friends and family. A couple of days later, my pathologically healthy mother called to say she’d gotten very sick after the party, like nothing she’d experienced before. She thought it had been a stomach bug. Hey, it’s just like in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I said lightly, the perfect way to jump-start your new diet!
Hardy har. By that afternoon, my husband and I had been drafted into the same violent weight-loss program, and for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin, while our poor daughter ran around scrubbing her hands and every surface in sight as she sought to stay healthy. I am relieved to report that she succeeded, and that her parents lost 10 pounds between them.
The agent of our misery was a virus, very likely a type of norovirus. Named for Norwalk, Ohio, the site of a severe outbreak of vomiting, nausea and diarrhea among schoolchildren in the late 1960s, the norovirus is a small, spherical, highly contagious virus that targets the digestive system. Its sour suite of symptoms is often referred to as “stomach flu,” but norovirus infection is distinct from the flu, which is caused by the influenza virus and targets not the gut but the lungs.
Well, not that distinct. Noroviruses, flu viruses, the rhino and corona viruses that cause the common cold, the herpes virus that causes the cold sore, all are active players in the wheezing ambient pleurisy of January.
As viruses, all of them are, by definition, infectious parasitic agents tiny enough to pass through a microfilter that would trap bacteria and other microbes, tiny enough to fit millions on board a single fleck of spit. All viruses have at their core compact genetic instructions for making more viruses, some of the booklets written in DNA, others in the related nucleic language of RNA. Our cells have the means to read either code, whether they ought to or not. Encasing the terse viral genomes are capsids, protective coats constructed of interlocking protein modules and decorated with some sort of docking device, a pleat of just the right shape to infiltrate a particular cell. Rhinoviruses dock onto receptors projecting from the cells of our nasal passages, while hepatitis viruses are shaped to exploit portholes on liver cells.
Their ergonomic specificity stems from the competition for a niche in a virus-packed world. Viruses very likely arose along with or possibly just before the appearance of the first living cells, nearly four billion years ago, and they have been jimmying cellular locks ever since. “Viruses are found everywhere, in every tree of life,” said Phillip A. Sharp of the Center for Cancer Research at M.I.T., “and every virus has to have a scheme.”
It’s easy to hate viruses for those freeloading schemes: nice trick, forcing me to throw up just so you can get out and mingle. How about if I name an entire class of computer problems after you? Yet viruses can seem almost tragic. Many strains, it turns out, are surprisingly delicate.
“Microbes like the anthrax bacterium can remain dormant in the soil for years” and still retain their power to kill, said Marlene Zuk, author of “Riddled With Life” and a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. “But viruses are really fragile, and they can’t survive outside their host for very long.” A few hours, maybe a couple of days left unclaimed on a cup or keyboard, and the average viral spore falls apart.
And they are so nakedly needy. They depend on our cells to manufacture every detail of their offspring, to print up new copies of the core instruction booklets, to fabricate the capsid jackets and to deliver those geometrically tidy newborn virions to fresh host shores. Through us, viruses can transcend mere chemistry and lay claim to biology. Many scientists view viruses, with their lack of autonomous means of metabolism or reproduction, as straddling the border between life and nonlife. But if there is ever a case to be made for the liveliness of viruses, it is when they are replicating and mutating and evolving inside us.
Yet viruses have not only taken; they have also repaid us in ways we are just beginning to tally. “Viral elements are a large part of the genetic material of almost all organisms,” said Dr. Sharp, who won a Nobel Prize for elucidating details of our genetic code. Base for nucleic base, he said, “we humans are well over 50 percent viral.”
Scientists initially dismissed the viral elements in our chromosomes as so much tagalong “junk DNA.” But more recently some researchers have proposed that higher organisms have in fact co-opted viral genes and reworked them into the source code for major biological innovations, according to Luis P. Villarreal, director of the Center for Virus Research at the University of California, Irvine.
Some genes involved in the growth of the mammalian placenta, for example, have a distinctly viral character, as do genes underlying the recombinant powers of our adaptive immune system — precisely the part that helps us fight off viruses.
In fact, it may well have been through taking genomic tips from our viral tormentors that we became so adept at keeping them at bay.
“Our bodies spontaneously recover from viruses more so than overwhelming bacterial infections,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Viral infections have shaped the nature of the human immune system, and we have adapted to mount a very effective response against most of the viruses that we confront.” Vaccines accentuate this facility, he added, which is why vaccination programs have been most successful in preventing viral diseases.
Should prevention elude you, well, you may at least lose some weight.

2007-12-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

December 12, 2007
Rape of Girl, 15, Exposes Abuses in Brazil Prison System
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
BRASÍLIA — The police jail at Abaetetuba could not be torn down soon enough for Márcia Soares, a lawyer and federal human rights official here. To her, the jail has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with Brazil’s efforts to safeguard women and children from violence.
It was at Abaetetuba, in the northeastern state of Para on the fringes of the Amazon, that a 15-year-old girl arrested on suspicion of petty theft was illegally placed among 34 male inmates in late October. For 26 days they treated her as their plaything, raping and torturing her repeatedly. Sometimes she traded sex for food; other times, she was simply raped, federal investigators here said.
The police in the jail did more than turn their backs on the violence. They shaved her head with a knife to make her look more like a boy, investigators said, and now are blaming her for lying about her age.
The case is causing soul-searching here in Brazil’s capital, where federal officials have become increasingly concerned about the treatment of women and minors in the nation’s crowded prison system and the failure of judges throughout the country to prosecute cases of torture.
Women make up only 5 percent of Brazil’s prison population, but the number is growing. States have not built enough jails and prisons with separate facilities for women, even though federal law requires such separation. A recent study commissioned by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva showed that female prisoners were being illegally placed with men or transvestites in five Brazilian states, and being subjected to torture and sexual abuse.
Even as Brazil was raised in November to the United Nations’ highest human development category, its spotty human rights history and mixed record of punishing those guilty of abuses have been an Achilles’ heel internationally. A SWAT team operates in Rio de Janeiro to root out and kill drug traffickers with impunity. The police are rarely convicted under a 1997 law against torture, because of an “institutionalizing of torture” under Brazil’s military dictatorship and more than 300 years of slavery, said Paulo Vanucchi, Brazil’s human rights minister.
The case of the 15-year-old will be another test of justice in the largely lawless Amazon region. Two years ago, a Brazilian rancher ordered the killing of Dorothy Mae Stang, 73, an American-born nun and rain forest advocate. She was shot to death on a jungle road. The rancher, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
What has been particularly disheartening to federal human rights officials in the case of the 15-year-old girl is how many people had the chance to protect her. Ms. Soares, the lawyer, said the police, the judge and a public defender who had visited the jail all knew the teenager was in an all-male setting.
“Several officials were aware of what was happening, and at worst they were complicit in it,” Ms. Soares said. “It’s a very serious situation.”
Ana Júlia Carepa, the governor of Para, has been scrambling to clean up the mess since the situation became public late last month. Ms. Carepa pressed Raimundo Benassuly, the state police chief, to resign the day after he said publicly that the girl had lied about her age because she had a “mental deficiency.” The police have said that the girl had claimed she was 19, not 15, during several run-ins with the law.
Ms. Soares said that officials, including the judge in the case, a woman, did not press the girl for documentation proving she was an adult, even though she is under five feet tall and weighs about 80 pounds. “When I first saw her I thought she was 12, not 15,” Ms. Soares said.
For Ms. Carepa, the girl’s age is beside the point. “If she is 15, 20, 50, 80 years old or almost 100, it doesn’t matter,” she told journalists in Rio last month. “A woman cannot be in a cell with men.”
Ms. Carepa said that the jail would be torn down and replaced with something that has facilities for women.
The judge who placed the girl in the all-male jail, Clarice Maria Andrade, is being investigated and could lose her job. Two others in her office are accused of altering a document to make it seem as if the judge had approved a transfer from the jail shortly after the police made the request, not 12 days later.
Local officials were already familiar with the girl before she was arrested and placed in the Abaetetuba jail on Oct. 21. Growing up in a broken home, she had left school before and frequented an area known for child prostitution, Ms. Soares said. At the time of her arrest, she was shuttling among her parents’ homes and an uncle’s house, and no one seemed to keep careful tabs on her. During the 26 days, no relative came to the jail looking for her.
Within her first two days in jail, a man raped her in the bathroom, the girl told investigators. Inmates rely on visiting relatives to bring food. With no such visits, extreme hunger soon overtook the girl and she began trading sex for food, investigators said. Other men, however, simply raped her when they wanted to, and tortured her for amusement, investigators said. Some placed crumpled papers between her toes as she slept and lighted them, Ms. Soares said, adding that the girl still had burn marks on her feet.
Residents heard the girl’s screams from the road, which is near the jail windows. Yet for weeks no one came to her rescue. It was only after an anonymous note reached the local child protection services agency that she was removed from the jail.
In recent days, she and her family have been relocated under a federal witness protection program. The girl’s father complained of death threats from the police. He said they had tried to press him to say that the girl was 19 or 20.
“It’s now up to us to protect her and help her to start a new life,” Ms. Soares said. “And we need to keep up the political pressure, so that justice has a chance.”

2007-11-14T05:28:00.000-08:00

Hingis retires, says she tested positive for cocaine
Zurich, Switzerland (Sports Network) - Former World No. 1 Martina Hingis announced on Thursday that she tested positive for cocaine during this year's Wimbledon Championships and also announced her retirement from professional tennis.
Hingis denied the allegations in a statement Thursday saying, "I find this accusation so horrendous, so monstrous, that I have decided to confront it head-on by talking to the press."
"I am frustrated and angry. I believe that I am absolutely, one hundred percent innocent."
Despite her protests, Hingis said she doesn't want to fight officials or try to battle back from injuries, and instead will call it a career.
"Considering this situation, my age, and the problems I have been having with my hip, I have decided to no longer play tennis on the Tour."
Amid the controversy, WTA CEO Larry Scott released the following statement:
"The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour has not received any official information regarding the positive doping test result referred to by Martina Hingis in her press conference today, and as a result we are not in a position to comment on the matter.
"However, it is important to remember that in the area of anti-doping, all players are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to doping in sport, and fully supports the Tennis Anti-Doping Program. The Tennis Anti-Doping program is both rigorous and comprehensive, and is designed to keep our sport clean.
"With respect to her retirement announcement, Martina Hingis is a tremendous champion and a fan favorite the world over. In her most recent comeback, she proved again that she can perform at the very highest levels of the game. Martina will always be respected for not only having achieved the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour World Number 1 ranking, her five Grand Slam singles titles, nine Grand Slam women's doubles titles and two Sony Ericsson Championships titles, but just as much for her incredible touch, on-court intelligence and off-court professionalism."
Hingis, 27, has not played since being bounced in the second round by Shuai Peng in Beijing at the end of September. She announced at the time that she was going to take as much time as needed to recover from hip problems.
This is the second time that Hingis has retired. She stepped aside for the first time in 2002 due to injuries to her feet, left knee and left hip, but returned in 2006.
The "Swiss Miss" had a 24-13 record this season, and is currently ranked 19th in the world. After her return in 2006, Hingis won three tournaments, including one this season, to increase her career total to 43.
Her best finish in the Grand Slams this season was a quarterfinal berth at the Australian Open. She did not play at the French Open and only advanced to the third round in both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
She won five career Grand Slam titles, capturing the Australian three straight years starting in 1997, when she also won her only Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles. She never won the French, advancing as far as the final twice.
Hingis first reached the world's top ranking March 31, 1997. She ended that year at the same position. The next year she ended the season ranked No. 2 before finishing the next two seasons as the top-ranked player in the world.

2007-11-14T05:25:00.000-08:00

November 13, 2007
Italy Moves to Tighten Soccer Security and Control Fans After Riots
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
ROME, Nov. 12 — The Italian authorities moved Monday to ban large groups of soccer fans from traveling to out-of-town matches and imposed stricter security measures in stadiums, in response to rioting that took place in several cities on Sunday after the accidental police shooting of a soccer fan.
In another sign that Italy had had enough of the fan violence that often mars matches, the Italian soccer federation also said Monday that next weekend’s matches in Serie B and C — Italy’s second- and third-tier professional leagues — would be postponed and played at a later date. No matches were to be played this weekend in Serie A, Italy’s premier league, because of a previously scheduled break for international play.
The move to restrict traveling fans fell far short of a general ban. Under the measure passed Monday, supporters of clubs will still be able to attend out-of-town matches; they will be prohibited only from traveling to those matches in large groups.
The new security measures would also give local police chiefs the right to suspend a match if matters appeared to be getting out of control. The authorities also ordered clubs to deploy extra match stewards to monitor crowds in stadiums that hold more than 7,500 people. The stewards must be in place by March 1.
The decisions by the Interior Ministry and the country’s top soccer officials were made after widespread demands for tougher action following “yet another Black Sunday,” as the Rome daily Corriere dello Sport described the weekend riots.
The worst violence on Sunday took place in Rome where hundreds of enraged soccer fans responded to the police shooting by attacking police barracks as well as the headquarters of the Italian Olympic Committee, which is next to the city’s soccer stadium, causing nearly $150,000 of damage. About 40 police officers were injured during the clashes, the news agency ANSA reported.
Gabriele Sandri, a 26-year-old Roman D.J., was killed Sunday morning after a stray bullet hit him in the neck as he was sitting in a car on the highway that leads from Rome to Milan. Mr. Sandri, a supporter of Lazio, one of the capital’s two teams, was on his way to watch Lazio play Internazionale.
According to news reports, a police officer had fired his gun in an attempt to halt a scuffle between soccer fans at a highway rest stop, and hit Mr. Sandri. On Monday, the officer was charged with manslaughter. The authorities on Sunday called the death “a tragic error.”
Italy’s police chief, Antonio Manganelli, said in an interview with the state broadcaster RAI on Monday night that it was unlikely that the officer who shot Mr. Sandri knew that the scuffle he was trying to halt was between opposing soccer team supporters.
Italy has a history of soccer-related violence punctuated by explosions of widespread rioting, usually set off by random incidents like the shooting on Sunday morning. In February, riots broke out throughout Italy after rampaging fans killed a police officer outside a match in Catania, prompting the government to pass a series of stricter security measures for stadiums.
In response to that outbreak of violence, all Serie A matches were postponed for one week.
The soccer authorities suspended three Serie A matches on Sunday as well as one in Serie B. Many fans were angered that only three Serie A matches were postponed in response to the killing of a fan by a police officer, while in February the entire Serie A slate was postponed in response to the killing of a police officer by a fan.
The violence in Rome and other cities “is pure madness,” Roberto Donadoni, coach of the Italian national team, told ANSA. “It’s one of those moments where you just feel nauseous.”
On Monday, prosecutors in Rome said they would be charging four people arrested during the riots in the city with participating in terrorist activities, reportedly the first time such a charge has been levied against soccer rioters.

2007-11-14T05:23:00.001-08:00

November 14, 2007
Study Compares States’ Math and Science Scores With Other Countries’
By SAM DILLON
American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released yesterday. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that students in Singapore and several other Asian countries significantly outperform American students, even those in high-achieving states like Massachusetts, the study found.
“In this case, the bad news trumps the good because our Asian economic competitors are winning the race to prepare students in math and science,” said the study’s author, Gary W. Phillips, chief scientist at the American Institutes of Research, a nonprofit independent scientific research firm.
The study equated standardized test scores of eighth-grade students in each of the 50 states with those of their peers in 45 countries. Experts said it was the first such effort to link standardized test scores, state by state, with scores from other nations.
Gage Kingsbury, a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, a group in Oregon that carries out testing in 1,500 school districts, praised the study’s methodology but said “a flock of difficulties” made it hazardous to compare test results from one country to another and from one state to another. “Kids don’t start school at the same age in different countries,” he said. “Not all kids are in school in grade eight, and the percentage differs from country to country.”
Because of such differences, Dr. Kingsbury said, it would be a mistake to infer too much about the relative rigor of the educational systems across the states and nations in the study based merely on test score differences.
The scores for students in the United States came from tests administered by the federal Department of Education in most states in 2005 and 2007. For foreign students, the scores came from math and science tests administered worldwide in 2003, as part of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, known as the Timss.
Concern that science and math achievement was not keeping pace with the nation’s economic competitors had been building even before the most recent Timss survey, in which the highest-performing nations were Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. American students lagged far behind those nations, but earned scores that were comparable to peers in European nations like Slovakia and Estonia, and were well above countries like Egypt, Chile and Saudi Arabia.
The Timss survey gives each country a metric by which to compare its educational attainment with other nations’. The nationwide American test, known as the National Assessments of Educational Progress, allows policy makers in each state to compare their students’ results with those in other states.
The new study used statistical linking to compare scores on the national assessment, state by state, with other nations’ scores on the Timss. Dr. Phillips, who from 1999 to 2002 led the agency of the Department of Education that administers the national assessment, likened the methodology to what economists do when they convert international currencies into dollars to compare poverty levels across various countries, for instance.
On the most recent national assessment, the highest-performing state in math was Massachusetts, and in science, North Dakota. The new study shows that average math achievement in Massachusetts was lower than in the leading Asian nations and in Belgium, but higher than in 40 other countries, including Australia, Russia, England and Israel.
Mississippi was the lowest-performing state in both math and science. In math, Mississippi students’ achievement was comparable to those of peers in Bulgaria and Moldova, and in science, to those in Norway and Romania.
In math, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York students were roughly equivalent with each other and with their peers in Australia, the Netherlands and Hungary.
The study’s contribution is the high-level perspective it offers on the nation’s education system, a bit the way a satellite image highlights the nation’s topography, said Thomas Toch, a co-director of Education Sector, an independent policy group.
“It shows we’re not doing as badly as some say,” Mr. Toch said. “We’re in the top half of the table, and a number of states are outperforming the majority of the nations in the study. But our performance in math and science lags behind that of the front-running Asian nations.”

2007-11-14T05:20:00.001-08:00

November 14, 2007
Four Transplant Recipients Contract H.I.V.
By DENISE GRADY
Four transplant recipients in Chicago have contracted H.I.V. from an organ donor, the first known cases in more than a decade in which the virus was spread by organ transplants.
The organs also gave all four patients hepatitis C, in what health officials said was the first reported instance in which the two viruses were spread simultaneously by a transplant.
Though exceedingly rare, this type of transmission highlights a known weakness in the system for checking organ donors for infection: the most commonly used tests can fail to detect viral diseases if they are performed too early in the course of the infection. Officials say the events in Chicago may lead to widespread changes in testing methods.
“There are important policy implications,” said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, director of the Office of Blood, Organ and Other Tissue Safety at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is investigating the case. “Clearly, the organ transplant community is going to think about the issues raised by this, and we look forward to being involved in those discussions.”
The cases were first reported yesterday by The Chicago Tribune. Two patients were infected at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and one each at Rush University Medical Center and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The transplants were coordinated by an organization called the Gift of Hope of Elmhurst, Ill.
Officials would not say what organs were transplanted, but a transplant expert not connected with the case said they were most likely the kidneys, liver and either the heart or lungs. Only four organs, and no other tissue, were taken from the donor.
The University of Chicago said that the operations took place in January, and that the donor was an adult who died in an Illinois hospital “three days after traumatic injury.” Neither the donor’s age nor sex were disclosed. The other hospitals declined to discuss what happened, except to confirm that each had an infected patient.
The situation came to light earlier this month when one of the recipients, who was being evaluated for a retransplant, tested positive for H.I.V. and hepatitis C. At that point, blood preserved from the donor was given a highly sensitive test for viruses, and the infection was found.
Dr. J. Michael Millis, the chief of transplantation at the University of Chicago, said the patients were devastated, and the doctors heartbroken. But Dr. Millis said the diseases were treatable.
Initially, the donor had tested negative for H.I.V. and hepatitis C, apparently because the infection was too recent to be detected by commonly used blood tests. Those tests do not find the virus itself, but instead look for the body’s reaction to the infection — the antibodies produced by the immune system. But the body takes time to react, and if the test is done too soon, within 22 days of H.I.V. infection or 82 days for hepatitis C, antibodies may not yet be detectable.
Doctors say that is what probably occurred in Chicago. It has always been known that this kind of transmission was theoretically possible, but it was considered highly unlikely. And indeed, since 1994 nearly 300,000 transplants from cadavers have occurred without any reported cases of H.I.V. transmission.
Another more sensitive type of test can pick up viral infections earlier, but was not used. That test looks for evidence of the virus itself, and can reduce the “window,” the early period in which the test does not work, to 12 days for H.I.V. and 25 days for hepatitis C.
That test, the nucleic acid amplification test, or Naat, is not widely available, and doctors said it was more difficult and time-consuming than other tests — and there is usually no time to spare with transplants because organs deteriorate quickly when the donor dies. Another concern is that the test is more likely than others to give false-positive results, and lead to the needless destruction of healthy organs, a scarce resource.
Dr. Robert Brown, director of the liver transplant program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia said, “There is always a drive toward better testing, but if it leads to more organ wastage, we’ll probably hurt more people than we help.”
According to the University of Chicago, the organ donor in Illinois was known to be “high risk,” based on a risk factor revealed by a close friend who provided “a health and social history.” The exact nature of the risk was not disclosed. Federal guidelines recommend against transplanting organs from high-risk people unless the recipients are so likely to die for want of a transplant that H.I.V. seems a lesser threat.
Dr. Millis said that he did not know whether the patients there had been informed of the donor’s status.
About 9 percent of organ donors qualify as high-risk based on behaviors like prostitution or drug use with needle-sharing. Transplant experts say the percentage would probably be higher if they had full information on all donors.
Dr. Brown said Columbia got offers of organs from high-risk donors every week.
He also said that at Columbia, patients (or family members) were informed if a donor was high risk, and were required to sign a special consent form acknowledging it.
Dr. Millis said that although the organ supply was generally safe, he hoped it could be made safer, probably by developing regional centers around the country to perform Naat testing reliably and quickly enough to meet transplant needs.
Although it is rare, other diseases like rabies, West Nile fever and a rodent virus called LCMV have also been spread by organ transplants. In all of those cases, patients died.

Convênio IFS e KEO ORTODONTIA

2007-11-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

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2007-10-24T10:11:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

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.”

2007-10-18T12:08:00.001-07:00

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

IFS Ensino de Idiomas

The Sun In My Eyes

The Sun In My Eyes

Live Your Life

Live Your Life (ft. Erick Morillo & Eddie Thoneick)

Choose the best answer

Test On Past Progressive

Test On Simple Past

Exercise on Simple Present

St. Patrick´s Day

Dreams - The Corrs

Hallelujah

Reading Interpretation

How Can I Go On?

Test on The English Tenses

Pratique Preposição

Reading Interpretation 2

Reading Interpretation:

Tears Dry On Their Own

Test Your English.

Choose The Right Preposition

Phrasal Verbs

Write the best answer

Test your English

Lyrics - Gold

Choose the best answer

Fill in the missing parts

Write the text in American English

Make or Do ??

Choose the correct preposition

Oscar Wilde

Exercises on If Clauses

Powerful Phone Interview.

Saiba usar: Big, Great, High, Large e Tall.

Pratique vocabulário em Inglês.

Exercícios Com Todos os Tempos Verbais

Present Perfect

Simple Past

Reading Comprehension

Encontre os Erros:

Test your English

Apostrophe's or Of phrase??????

Exercícios de Gramática

Aperfeiçoe seu Presente Perfeito

Pratique Present Perfect Tense

More Prepositions

Sentenças úteis para reuniões de negócios

Correct the Mistakes

Expressões Usadas em Inglês.

Exercício de Preposição 3

Exercícios de Preposição 2:

Exercícios de Preposição:

Expressões Mais Usadas em Inglês.

Phrasal Verbs Exercises

In Motorola Earnings, Signs of an Industry in Change

Convênio IFS e KEO ORTODONTIA