February 6, 2010

  • East Coast Is Hit by ‘Potentially Epic Snowstorm

    February 6, 2010

    Snow and more Snow.

    By JOHN M. BRODER and JACK HEALY

    WASHINGTON — One of the largest winter storms the Mid-Atlantic region has seen in decades swept into Washington and Baltimore on Friday, grounding flights, closing schools and government offices, and sending residents racing to stock up on groceries and rock salt before the snow accumulated to what are expected to be record-setting depths.

    “Tonight into Saturday morning will be about as dangerous as winter weather can get around here,” said Christopher Strong of the National Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington office.

    He added in an e-mail alert that travel conditions would be “extremely dangerous and life-threatening,” and recommended that people in the region stay off the roads and out of the way of plowing crews and emergency vehicles.

    Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parent agency of the weather service, called the blizzard “a potentially epic snowstorm” that could rival the 28 inches of snow that a January 1922 storm dropped on the capital.

    “The National Weather Service has been very clear that this is a storm to take very seriously,” she said. The halls of the Capitol building were quiet, and the federal government sent many workers home four hours early on Friday. Dr. Lubchenco said she was making contingency plans for all government offices in and near the capital to be closed through Tuesday.

    “If it is as much and as heavy as they are forecasting, it may be a number of days before people are actually moving around again,” she said. “This is a serious storm.”

    As snow began to accumulate on the White House grounds and the National Mall in the afternoon, much of Washington was hunkered down, bracing for what newspapers and bloggers have been calling the “snowpocalypse,” or “snowmageddon,” and the streets in the center of the city were unusually quiet. Schools in suburban Virginia were closed for the day, and students in Maryland and the District of Columbia had shortened school days.

    As the sun set and temperatures began to drop below freezing, accumulations in Washington quickly reached about 2 inches of wet, heavy snow, precisely as had been predicted all day long. As of 5 p.m. Friday, all operations had ceased at Ronald Reagan National Airport and only a few international flights were scheduled to take off from Dulles International Airport. Domestic flights into and out of both airports on Saturday had been canceled. There was no final word on the fate of incoming or outgoing international flights at Dulles.

    As the snow intensified, temperatures dropped, and the weather service warned of blizzard-level winds gusting to 35 miles per hour in the nation's capital, Washington's transit system said it would shut down the above-ground rail tracks just outside of town at 11 p.m. Friday, and that there would be no bus service on Saturday.

    Shelves at some supermarkets in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs resembled something out of the old Soviet bloc, stripped nearly bare of eggs, milk, meat and chicken by shoppers who carried fresh memories of the icy roads and deep drifts of a December storm that buried Washington in more than 18 inches of snow.

    The weather service issued a blizzard warning on Friday afternoon for Annapolis, Md., saying that by late Friday night northeasterly winds would start to whip through with gusts of 35 to 40 miles an hour. A blizzard warning for Atlantic City, N.J., was posted earlier in the day. Late Friday, the weather service also issued an overnight tornado watch along the coast of North Carolina.

    In Pittsburgh, snow started falling just after midday. Dozens of school districts and local colleges in and around the city closed early on Friday. and the state’s health department canceled H1N1 vaccine clinics that were scheduled for Saturday.

    Officials closed some lanes on the Parkway North, a freeway that runs from downtown into the northern suburbs, to free road crews to spend more time keeping other roads clear. Travel was already snarled up and down the East Coast by the time the first flakes fell. Numerous Amtrak trains in the storm track along the Eastern seaboard from Savannah, Ga., to Boston were canceled on Friday and Saturday, although alternate service was available for some routes. Amtrak was posting schedule changes and cancellations on its Web site. A number of airlines were canceling flights out of major cities in the affected areas.

    In Virginia, which was expected to take the brunt of the storm, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell declared a state of emergency and warned residents in the storm’s path to prepare emergency kits, stay off roads and brace for outages. The state’s General Assembly called off all floor sessions and committee meetings scheduled for Friday, the first time in recent memory that the Legislature was shut down because of snow, The Associated Press reported.

    The National Weather Service predicted “near-blizzard conditions” and issued a winter storm warning extending from Friday to late Saturday that covered a broad stretch of the Mid-Atlantic region. Snow was expected to spread northward late on Friday to the New York City area and possibly the southern edge of New England.

    Accumulations of two feet or more were expected in the heart of the storm, with southern New Jersey getting up to 18 inches. But New York may escape with just a few inches of snow as the system spirals out to sea, said Carl Erickson, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com.

    “The further south you go, the more snow you’re going to see,” he said. “But 50 or 60 miles north of New York City there may not be a flake.”

    President Obama did not cancel any of his events on Friday, and he was scheduled to deliver a speech at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday. But he did not make any public comments about the snow. That contrasted with last year, when he playfully mocked the reaction of his new city to an approaching snowstorm, saying Washington would do well to emulate “flinty Chicago toughness.”

    “Even a transplanted Hawaiian-to-Chicagoan has sufficient respect for a forecast of nearly two feet of snow,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. He added that the snowstorm would not affect the president’s weekend schedule: “He doesn’t even have to shovel the walk.”

    John M. Broder reported from Washington and Jack Healy from New York. Jeff Zeleny and Janie Lorber contributed reporting from Washington, Anahad O’Connor from New York, and Sean D. Hamill from Pittsburgh.

    Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

  • Snow piles up, paralyzing nation's capital

    By NAFEESA SYEED, Associated Press Writer Nafeesa Syeed, Associated Press Writer 27 mins ago

    WASHINGTON – A blizzard battered the Mid-Atlantic region Saturday, with emergency crews struggling to keep pace with the heavy, wet snow that has piled up on roadways, toppled trees and left thousands without electricity.

    Officials urged people to huddle at home and out of the way of emergency crews. Forecasters said the storm could be the biggest for the nation's capital in modern history.

    A record 2 1/2 feet or more was predicted for Washington. As of early Saturday, 10 inches of snow was reported at the White House, while parts of Maryland and West Virginia were buried under more than 20 inches. Forecasters expected snowfall rates to increase, up to 2 inches per hour through Saturday morning.

    Blizzard warnings were issued for the District of Columbia, Baltimore, parts of New Jersey and Delaware, and some areas west of the Chesapeake Bay.

    "Things are fairly manageable, but trees are starting to come down," said D.C. fire department spokesman Pete Piringer, whose agency responded to some of the falling trees. No injuries were reported.

    Airlines canceled flights, churches called off weekend services and people wondered if they would be stuck at home for several days in a region ill-equipped to deal with so much snow.

    "D.C. traditionally panics when it comes to snow. This time, it may be more justifiable than most times," said Becky Shipp, who was power-walking in Arlington, Va., Friday. "I am trying to get a walk in before I am stuck with just the exercise machine in my condo."

    The region's second snowstorm in less than two months brought heavy, wet snow and strong winds that forecasters warned could gust near 60 mph in some areas along the coast.

    Hundreds of thousands of customers across the region had lost electricity and more outages were expected to be reported because of all the downed power lines. A hospital fire in D.C. sent about three dozen patients scurrying from their rooms to safety in a basement. The blaze started when a snow plow truck caught fire near the building.

    Authorities blamed the storm for hundreds of accidents, including a deadly tractor-trailer wreck that killed a father and son who had stopped to help someone in Virginia. Some area hospitals asked people with four-wheel-drive vehicles to volunteer to pick up doctors and nurses to take them to work.

    The country band Rascal Flatts postponed a concert Saturday in Ohio, but the Atlanta Thrashers-Washington Capitals NHL game went on as planned.

    In Dover, Del., Shanita Foster lugged three gallons of water out of a Dollar General store.

    "That's all we need right now. We've got everything else," said Foster, adding that she was ready with candles in case the power went out.

    Shoppers jammed aisles and emptied stores of milk, bread, shovels, driveway salt and other supplies. Many scrambling for food and supplies were too late.

    "Our shelves are bare," said Food Lion front-end manager Darlene Baboo in Dover. "This is just unreal."

    Metro, the transit system the Washington area is heavily dependent upon, closed all but the underground rail service and suspended bus service.

    Maryland's public transportation also shut down Saturday, including Baltimore's Metro. Maryland Transit Administration spokeswoman Jawauna Greene said the underground portion of the Metro could reopen later Saturday but it depended on the weather conditions.

    "We have trees on the overhead wires, trees on train tracks. We can't get anything out," she said.

    Amtrak also canceled several of its Northeast Corridor trains Saturday, and New Jersey's transit authority expected to suspend bus service. As much as a foot of snow was reported in parts of that state.

    Across the region, transportation officials deployed thousands of trucks and crews and had hundreds of thousands of tons of salt at the ready. Several states exhausted or expected to exhaust their snow removal budgets.

    Maryland budgeted about $60 million, and had already spent about $50 million, Gov. Martin O'Malley said. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who has been in office less than a month, declared his second snow emergency, authorizing state agencies to assist local governments. As of early Saturday, some parts of Virginia had already seen more than 18 inches of snow.

    The snow comes less than two months after a Dec. 19 storm dumped more than 16 inches on Washington. Snowfalls of this magnitude — let alone two in one season — are rare in the area. According to the National Weather Service, Washington has gotten more than a foot of snow only 13 times since 1870.

    The heaviest on record was 28 inches in January 1922. The biggest snowfall for the Washington-Baltimore area is believed to have been in 1772, before official records were kept, when as much as 3 feet fell, which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson penned in their diaries.

    In Washington, tourists made the best of it Friday, spending their days in museums or venturing out to see the monuments before the snow got too heavy.

    A group of 13 high school students from Cincinnati was stranded in D.C. when a student government conference they planned to attend was canceled — after they had already arrived. So they went sightseeing.

    At the Smithsonian's natural history museum, Caitlin Lavon, 18, and Hannah Koch, 17, took pictures of each other with the jaws of a great white shark in the Ocean Hall.

    "Our parents are all freaking out, sending texts to be careful," Koch said. "Being from Ohio, I don't think I've ever seen that much snow at once."

    ___

    Associated Press writers Brett Zongker and Sarah Karush in Washington, Kathleen Miller in Falls Church, Va., David Dishneau in Chantilly, Va., Ben Nuckols in Hanover, Md., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., and Steve Szkotak in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

February 5, 2010

  • Settlement Plan Drafted for Sept. 11 Lawsuits

    February 5, 2010

    Settlement Plan Drafted for Sept. 11 Lawsuits

    By MIREYA NAVARRO

    With a firm trial date looming for thousands of lawsuits brought by workers at ground zero against the city, lawyers for both sides are engaged in intensive talks aimed at settling some or all the cases.

    The first 12 cases are scheduled for trial on May 16 in Manhattan. But Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who is overseeing the litigation, said at a recent hearing that a detailed settlement plan about 70 pages long had been drafted.

    “There have been intensive discussions going on looking to settlements of individual cases and globally of all cases,” he said.

    Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the city declined to comment on the negotiations.

    “The parties have been working very hard,” said Judge Hellerstein, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. “The settlement is complicated.”

    The lawsuits against 90 government agencies and private companies were filed beginning in 2004 by more than 9,000 rescue and cleanup workers who sued over illnesses and injuries they say stemmed from working at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

    Several hundred lawyers are working on the cases, and the court documents run to tens of millions of pages.

    The plaintiffs claim that the city, along with its contractors and other major defendants like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, offered inadequate safety procedures and supervision to shield them from exposure to contaminants while working amid the debris in a 16-acre area at the site.

    Plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages for pain and suffering and economic loss, as well as, in certain cases, medical monitoring. They may also seek punitive damages in appropriate cases, said Paul J. Napoli, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

    James E. Tyrrell Jr., the lead lawyer for the defendants, contends that no link can be proven between the illnesses of plaintiffs and exposure at ground zero, and that some are making false claims. If the cases come to trial, juries will have to decide whether the defendants are at fault, whether the plaintiffs are actually sick and whether their conditions were caused by their work at the disaster site, Mr. Tyrrell said.

    The litigation is complex and politically charged. Among those suing are firefighters, police officers, construction workers and other responders who draw public sympathy. Many elected officials and advocacy groups are demanding compensation, long-term medical treatment and monitoring for the workers from the federal government.

    Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg supports a bill pending in Congress that would offer federal relief to people harmed by work at the site. But the city has, at the same time, been fighting the workers in court, arguing, among other things, that it is immune from damages in cases involving a civil defense disaster or a national emergency. At issue is how great the city’s liability would be if it lost the cases.

    “We would rather stand with the responders before Congress than fight them in the courtroom,” said Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor. “Responders and workers should not have to prove that the city or the contractors are somehow responsible for their harms — which plaintiffs are obligated to prove and which the city thinks is not the case.”

    Still, in 2007, Mr. Bloomberg said the city was willing to explore settling the cases.

    Although the cases have been consolidated, they are being considered separately and not as a class-action lawsuit. The court, lawyers for the plaintiffs and the city are selecting a small group of sample cases to bring to trial in the hope that the verdicts will guide settlement of the remaining lawsuits.

    “No one seriously thinks that all of these cases would ever be tried,” said Richard A. Nagareda, a law professor who teaches complex civil litigation at Vanderbilt University Law School. “Ultimately, everybody understands there’s going to be some sort of comprehensive settlement. The question is, what is the price?”

    The city is arguing that its liability is capped at $350 million under federal law, but lawyers for the plaintiffs are disputing that figure. If they prevail, the city could face an enormous cost for its share of the compensation. The city and its contractors are covered by an insurance fund of almost $1 billion financed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The private contractors named as defendants have their own insurance, although the coverage available has not been determined.

    “We believe there’s sufficient coverage to pay all claims with money to spare,” Mr. Napoli said.

    As in other cases involving exposure to environmental hazards, establishing cause and effect is likely to be difficult. The plaintiffs have been asked to fill out lengthy questionnaires that ask about pre-existing diseases, their medical history as far back as 1995 and other exposures that could have caused the illnesses, like the use of tobacco products.

    But what makes the 9/11 cases even more daunting, some legal experts note, is that the collapse and conflagration of the two towers in 2001 created an unfamiliar toxic soup from the dust and fumes.

    “There’s not a lot of experience with this kind of risk,” said Anthony J. Sebok, a professor who specializes in mass torts at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “It may be very difficult from a technical point of view to get testimony from experts.”

    The cases also involve thousands of people claiming hundreds of different ailments of varying severity. Many of them were subject to different types of exposure over different periods. To make the litigation more manageable, a severity chart has been created to classify injuries in six major disease categories by type and seriousness, a classification scheme that will help the court pick a sample of cases.

    The trials could still be delayed as lawyers continue to request documents, file motions and work their way through hearings to decide which expert testimony will be allowed. No decision has been made on whether to try the first cases separately or together, but Judge Hellerstein has said that he is not “enamored of the idea” of grouping the cases and that he may bring in other judges to conduct simultaneous trials.

    Some of the plaintiffs said they hoped for a fair resolution. Glen Klein, 51, a former police officer from Centereach on Long Island who blames his respiratory and gastrointestinal problems on the hundreds of hours he spent on recovery work at ground zero, said that any money would go to pay about $30,000 in credit-card debt he had acquired since his ailments forced him to stop working in 2005.

    Anything else he would invest, he said.

    “If I woke up one day with a rare cancer, I’d like to take care of my family,” said Mr. Klein, who is married and has three children. “I feel I’m just waiting for the hammer to drop on me.”


    Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company


     

  • I love this wining hand as a symbol for life.

  • My Freshman Year I.D. Photo Villanova, 1970

January 29, 2010

  • J. D. Salinger Dies at 91

    An Appraisal | J. D. Salinger..

    Of Teen Angst and an Author’s Alienation

    By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

    What really knocked readers out about “The Catcher in the Rye” was the wonderfully immediate voice that J. D. Salinger fashioned for Holden Caulfield — a voice that enabled him to channel an alienated 16-year-old’s thoughts and anxieties and frustrations, a voice that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores.

    Mr. Salinger had such unerring radar for the feelings of teenage angst and vulnerability and anger that “Catcher,” published in 1951, remains one of the books that adolescents first fall in love with — a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential, a book that first awakens them to the possibilities of literature.
    Whether it’s Holden or the whiz-kid Glass children or the shell-shocked soldier in “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” Mr. Salinger’s people tend to be outsiders — spiritual voyagers shipwrecked in a vulgar and materialistic world, misfits who never really outgrew adolescent feelings of estrangement. They identify with children and cling to the innocence of childhood with a ferocity bordering on desperation: Holden wants to be the catcher in the rye, who keeps kids from falling off a cliff; Seymour communes with a little girl on the beach about bananafish, before going upstairs to his hotel room and shooting himself in the head.
    Such characters have a yearning for some greater spiritual truth, but they are also given to an adolescent either/or view of the world and tend to divide people into categories: the authentic and the phony, those with an understanding of “the main current of poetry that flows through things” and those coarse, unenlightened morons who will never get it — a sprawling category, it turns out, that includes everyone from pompous college students parroting trendy lit crit theories to fashionable, well-fed theater-goers to self-satisfied blowhards who recount every play in a football game or proudly wear tattersall vests.
    Like Franny, Mr. Salinger’s people feel that “everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making.”
    Mr. Salinger was able to empathetically limn the nooks and crannies of his youthful narrator’s psyches, while conjuring up a sophisticated, post-F. Scott Fitzgerald, post-World War II Manhattan — a world familiar to his New Yorker readers, bounded by Radio City Music Hall and Bergdorf Goodman and Central Park (where Holden wonders about the ducks on the lagoon and where they go when it freezes over in the winter). In doing so, he not only domesticated the innovations of the great modernists — their ability to manipulate stream of consciousness, to probe their characters’ inner lives — but he also presaged the self-inventorying characters of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and the navel-gazing musings of the writers of many Me Generations to come.
    Some critics dismissed the easy surface charm of Mr. Salinger’s work, accusing him of cuteness and sentimentality, but works like “Catcher,” “Franny and Zooey” and his best-known short stories would influence successive generations of writers. His most persuasive work showcased his colloquial, idiomatic language, his uncanny gift for ventriloquism, his nimble ability to create stories within stories, as well as his unerring ear for cosmopolitan New Yorkese (what he called an “Ear for the Rhythms and Cadences of Colloquial Speech”) and his heat-seeking eye for the telling gesture — the nervously lit cigarette, the X-ray look, the inhibited station-platform kiss.
    Like Holden Caulfield, the Glass children — Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Seymour, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker — would emerge as avatars of adolescent angst and Mr. Salinger’s own alienated stance toward the world. Bright, charming and gregarious, they are blessed with their creator’s ability to entertain, and they appeal to the reader to identify with their braininess, their sensitivity, their febrile specialness. And yet as details of their lives unfurl in a series of stories, it becomes clear that there is a darker side to their estrangement as well: a tendency to condescend to the vulgar masses, an almost incestuous familial self-involvement and a difficulty relating to other people that will result in emotional crises and in Seymour’s case, suicide. “Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don’t like,” Zooey’s mother says, adding, “You can’t live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.”
    Over time, Mr. Salinger’s work grew more elliptical. Tidy, well-made tales like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” gave way to the increasingly prolix “Zooey” and the shapeless ruminations of “Seymour — An Introduction.” And as his Glass stories grew more and more self-conscious and self-referential, readers became increasingly aware of the solipsism of that hothouse family of geniuses.
    “Seymour” is a long, vexing monologue by Buddy Glass about his late brother that coyly conflates the identity of Buddy and Mr. Salinger (playing the sort of mirror games that Mr. Roth would play with his semiautobiographical heroes). And “Hapworth 16, 1924” (which appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1965) takes the form of a verbose, digression-filled letter ostensibly written from summer camp by the 7 -year-old Seymour. The story actually serves as a revisionist history of the Glass family and a sort of defensive gibe by Mr. Salinger at his critics. Having been accused of loving his characters too much, of being too superficially charming, the author gave us a new take on one of his heroes, turning the once saintly Seymour — the family’s “blue-striped unicorn,” “consultant genius” and “portable conscience” — into an obnoxious child given to angry outbursts and implausible intellectual boasts.
    That story — the last work published during the author’s lifetime — not only reflected Mr. Salinger’s own Glass-like withdrawal from the world but also underscored his own fear that he might one day “disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms.” Yet however sour and self-reflexive that tale was, it would never eclipse the achievement of “Catcher” in the minds of Mr. Salinger’s fans — a novel that still knocks people out, a novel, if you really want to hear about it, that is still cherished, nearly six decades after its publication, for its pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence and its indispensable hero.

    .. ..

    ..
    Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

January 28, 2010

  • BOB DYLAN - Subterranean Homesick Blues lyrics

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    Johny's in the basement
    Mixing up the medicine
    I'm on the pavement
    Thinking about the government
    The man in the trench coat
    Badge out, laid off
    Says he's got a bad cough
    Wants to get it paid off
    Look out kid
    It's somethin' you did
    God knows when
    But you're doin' it again
    You better duck down the alley way
    Lookin' for a new friend
    The man in the coon-skip cap
    In the big pen
    Wants eleven dollar bills
    You only got ten.

    Maggie comes fleet foot
    Face full of black soot
    Talkin' that the heat put
    Plants in the bed but
    The phone's tapped anyway
    Maggie says that many say
    They must bust in early May
    Orders from the DA
    Look out kid
    Don't matter what you did
    Walk on your tip toes
    Don't try, 'No Doz'
    Better stay away from those
    That carry around a fire hose
    Keep a clean nose
    Watch the plain clothes
    You don't need a weather man
    To know which way the wind blows.

    Get sick, get well
    Hang around an ink well
    Ring bell, hard to tell
    If anything is goin' to sell
    Try hard, get barred
    Get back, write Braille
    Get jailed, jump bail Join the army, if you failed
    Look out kid
    You're gonna get hit
    But users, cheaters
    Six-time losers
    Hang around the theaters
    Girl by the whirlpool
    Lookin' for a new fool
    Don't follow leaders
    Watch the parkin' meters.

    Ah get born, keep warm
    Short pants, romance, learn to dance
    Get dressed, get blessed
    Try to be a success
    Please her, please him, buy gifts
    Don't steal, don't lift
    Twenty years of schoolin'
    And they put you on the day shift
    Look out kid
    They keep it all hid
    Better jump down a manhole
    Light yourself a candle
    Don't wear sandals
    Try to avoid the scandals
    Don't wanna be a bum
    You better chew gum
    The pump don't work
    'Cause the vandals took the handle

  • As Devices Pull More Data, Patience May Be Required



    Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

    Jake Vance watching a game on his phone. The N.F.L. and M.L.B. are offering apps to fans.

    January 28, 2010

     As Devices Pull More Data, Patience May Be Required

    By JENNA WORTHAM

    Could Apple’s new iPad end up being too much of a good thing?

    Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, played up the iPad’s ability to stream live baseball games and hit movies during his demonstration on Wednesday. But people who are willing to pay more to get that content over AT&T’s 3G data network may pay another price: glacial downloads and spotty service on an already overburdened system.
    America’s advanced cellphone network is already beginning to be bogged down by smartphones that double as computers, navigation devices and e-book readers. Cellphones are increasingly being used as TVs, which hog even more bandwidth. They can also transmit video, allowing for videoconferencing on cellphones.
    And a new generation of netbooks, tablet PCs and other mobile devices that connect to cellphone networks will only add to the strain. “Carrier networks aren’t set to handle five million tablets sucking down 5 gigabytes of data each month,” Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, said.
    Wireless carriers have drastically underestimated the network demand by consumers, which has been driven largely by the iPhone and its applications, he said. “It’s only going to get worse as streaming video gets more prevalent.”
    An hour of browsing the Web on a mobile phone consumes roughly 40 megabytes of data. Streaming tunes on an Internet radio station like Pandora draws down 60 megabytes each hour. Watching a grainy YouTube video for the same period of time causes the data consumption to nearly triple. And watching a live concert or a sports event will consume close to 300 megabytes an hour.
    “Video is something the industry needs to get a handle on,” Mr. Cusick said.
    AT&T, the sole carrier of the iPhone in the United States, has become the butt of jokes and the cause of vexation for its customers in major cities because of dropped calls, patchy service, and other network hiccups.
    The other carriers may share the problem as they sell more data-sucking devices; sales of smartphones are expected to increase 30 percent this year, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.
    In a recent briefing with analysts, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s chief executive for mobility, said that users of smartphones, primarily the iPhone, were straining the network by watching video and surfing the Web. The company reported an unprecedented increase in wireless data use of nearly 7,000 percent since late 2006.
    Jake Vance, for example, catches every Red Sox game he can — mostly on his iPhone.
    “I watch every game I can’t get on TV,” he said. “I’ve also been known to watch baseball at home on my iPhone while my wife is watching something else on TV.”
    Last season, Mr. Vance, 27, who works long hours making cupcakes in the vegan bakery he owns with his wife in Rutherford, N.J., listened to the audio streams of 70 games and watched 30 live games using Major League Baseball’s iPhone app.
    “The iPhone has changed the consumer’s expectation of what a mobile device is able to do,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president for devices at AT&T. “We are working rapidly to make sure they can meet those expectations.”
    Yet, even as carriers struggle to meet the demands on their networks, they are encouraging the use of more sophisticated devices and the swelling catalogs of apps. Analysts expect carriers will generate more than half their revenue from data in three or four years, up from less than 30 percent today.
    The carriers increasingly look to data plans and services like streaming high-quality video and audio as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition, Ross Rubin, an analyst with the NPD Group, said.
    AT&T, for example, is offering a $30-a-month unlimited data plan to iPad owners. Customers are not locked into a long-term contract as they are for their cellphones, which makes the new service more enticing. “They want to plant the seeds in consumers’ minds now about what the potential is, even before the networks are ready. But they have to balance between providing a poor experience and overloading the network,” Mr. Rubin said.
    Networks in other countries have similar problems, said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst. But many carriers outside of the United States balance out network use with tiered data plans. And bandwidth-intensive smartphones are often spread across multiple carriers in the same city.
    Still, some, like O2 in Britain, have suffered from service failures because of a concentration of iPhone owners in dense urban areas like London.
    Streaming video and live video broadcasting are still in the early stages of adoption. But most have already gained significant traction among consumers. The $10 version of the M.L.B. app that allows users to stream live games has been downloaded roughly 300,000 times since it went on sale in June, said Bob Bowman, chief executive of MLB.com.
    “We didn’t even have the full season to sell the application,” Mr. Bowman said. “We think we’re going to see a substantial increase next season.” The app was demonstrated on the iPad at the event on Wednesday with Mr. Jobs.
    The National Football League recently announced plans to make its RedZone channel, which offers real-time highlights, updates and live snippets of games, available to cellphone users next season.
    Knocking Live, a free app that allows iPhone and iPod Touch owners to stream live video to one another, akin to a live video conference, has been downloaded more than 275,000 times, according to its developer, Pointy Heads Software. Nearly 540,000 live-streaming video sessions were initiated since the app became available in early December. On average, 120 gigabytes of data are shared each day, and the company estimates that around 90 percent of the sessions were over AT&T’s 3G network.
    Ustream.tv, a Web site that allows anyone to set up a live broadcast of things as varied as a wedding ceremony and round-the-clock coverage of newborn puppies, recently introduced a free app that allows iPhone and Android-powered smartphone owners to broadcast video directly from their handsets. Within its first two weeks of availability, the company said users uploaded more than 500,000 mobile broadcasts.
    “The ease and simplicity of being able to pull your phone out, hit a button and go live” is what makes the app so appealing, said Brad Hunstable, president of Ustream.
    Mr. Hunstable said that the data required to broadcast or watch live video using Ustream’s app is comparable to that of watching a YouTube video. But the company is testing a high-definition version of its iPhone app, which will use more bandwidth.
    “As the technology improves, so does our ability to stream in higher quality,” he said.


    Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

January 27, 2010

  • Schumacher could race beyond 2012

    By Matt Beer Wednesday, January 27th 2010, 15:22 GMT

    Michael SchumacherMichael Schumacher is open to the possibility of continuing his Formula 1 comeback beyond his current three-year deal with Mercedes.

    The seven times world champion has been signed through to the end of 2012, by which time he will 43 years old. But he says there is no guarantee that he will stop racing at that point.

    "The good thing is that Mercedes believes in me and is giving me the chance for three years to have success," said Schumacher in an interview with German newspaper Bild. "But it does not mean it has to end after three years."

    Schumacher said his excitement over his return was so great he could easily see himself committing for longer than his present contract.

    "I thought about everything very carefully: Am I just spontaneously high or will my enthusiasm last?" he said. "I have been excited for quite some time and can imagine doing this for a few years."

    Mercedes GP boss Ross Brawn said earlier today that the team knew it could not rely on Schumacher too far into the future so was keen to develop his team-mate Nico Rosberg as a championship challenger too.

    "Michael has come out of retirement but we have to accept that there will come a day when he has to stop forever and then we will have Nico," Brawn told the official F1 website.

    The next major step in Schumacher's comeback takes place next Monday, when he tests the 2010 Mercedes F1 car for the first time.

    copyright. Autosport Magazine. 2010

  • Why Boys Can’t Keep Up

    The Gender Gap:

    By: Education.com (View Profile)

    For decades, it’s been a prevailing belief: girls are at a disadvantage in the classroom, especially when it comes to certain subjects. But the classroom gender gap might not be what you expect. These days, it’s more likely to be male students that just can’t seem to keep up with their female counterparts.

    Richard Whitmire, education reporter and author of Why Boys Fail: Saving our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind, says that the problem starts early, but is most notably reflected by two indicators: rising aspirations by female high school seniors while those of male students stay flat, and lagging representation of men in college graduation rates. “Among those earning bachelor’s degrees it’s almost 58 percent female,” he said, “and among community colleges it’s 62 percent female.”

    What’s behind the new gender gap? Theories of why boys are struggling in today’s classrooms abound. In her controversial book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, Christina Hoff Sommers writes that classrooms remodeled to serve the needs of girls are creating a reverse sexism that hurts boys. Less structured learning environments and less focus on grades and competition are hallmarks of a changing school landscape that, according to Sommers, puts boys at a disadvantage.

    Others speculate that a lack of boy-friendly reading material, a scarcity of male teachers, and the disappearance of recess may be hurting boys in the classroom. So which of these theories is really behind the problem?

    In his book, Whitmire says, he sifted through all the theories cited as sources of the problem. Whitmire argues that, while some of these factors may contribute to the problem, there’s one major issue that’s holding boys back. “If you solve this one big thing,” he says, “then you could solve the brunt of the issue, and that is the literacy issue.”

    Reading and writing have always been an integral foundation for classroom learning. But more recently, Whitmire explains, an extra emphasis on literacy in the early years sets many male learners back from the get-go. “School reform pushed literacy demands into earlier and earlier grades,” Whitmire explains, and boys are at a developmental disadvantage when it comes to early literacy challenges. Where girls tend to pick up reading earlier, boys typically need more time. The problem is that without awareness, support and effective instruction, they may never catch up.

    According to Whitmire, parents should keep a close eye on what is going on at school if they want to prevent problems. “If your son is struggling, and the teacher says ‘Oh don’t worry, boys always get a slow start and they always catch up,’ that should set off alarm bells. Don’t assume that all of a sudden boys are going to catch up.”

    Peg Tyre, author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do, agrees. In her book, she outlines the following warning signs: “Watch out for teachers who complain that boys are too active, who clamp down on boys’ fantasy play, who allow boys to languish in reading and writing, who chastise boys for poor organization or bad handwriting.”

    Whitmire advises that parents keep an eye on their son’s attitudes and school performance to identify trouble early on. “Any boy who doesn’t take an interest in reading in early elementary school or who has very limited writing skills,” he says, may be in trouble. What then? Here are three tips to help parents get their sons on track:

    • Make reading and writing guy-friendly. “Things that young boys like to read about may not be considered literature by teachers,” says Whitmire, so make sure that boys get plenty of reading material that appeals to them, from sports magazines to sci-fi adventures. The same goes for writing. “A lot of teachers won’t let boys write about intergalactic space wars, which is what they really care about,” says Whitmire. Provide a space at home for boys to pursue their imaginations, and make sure that they’re able to express themselves through writing at school.
    • Rep for recess. Due to increasing academic demands on students and schools, recess has gone the way of the dodo in many districts. However, research shows that young students benefit academically, as well as physically and behaviorally, when they get breaks to blow off steam on the playground. If recess is endangered at your school, express your concerns to the administration and band together with like-minded parents to bring back breaks in the school day.
    • Tap into private tutoring. Some research has shown that boys benefit from a heavy phonics approach, so if they’re not getting enough instruction in school, it might be beneficial to line up more help on the side. The same goes for elementary school, when the focus in the classroom shifts from reading fluency to reading comprehension and literary analysis. For boys that may still be getting comfortable with reading, ongoing literacy tutoring could provide a boost.

    If you’ve tried these tactics and your son is still struggling to succeed, it may be time to take more drastic action. “Ask for another teacher, complain to the administration, or change schools,” says Whitmire. “It’s very hard to play catch-up.”

    By Rose Garrett of Education.com