Syrian Rebels Claim to Kill Dozens of Soldiers

SANA, via Associated Press

An image released by Syria’s official news agency showed Damascus residents gathering at the scene of a blast on Monday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria was convulsed by one of the most violent days in months on Monday, with heavy fighting reported around Palestinian neighborhoods in southern Damascus, at least two car-bomb explosions and strikes by government aircraft on numerous rebel targets.

Sharply conflicting accounts emerged from the government and the rebels on the toll from a car bombing near the central city of Hama, with the rebels reporting dozens of soldiers dead and the government saying just two civilians were killed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with a network of contacts inside Syria, said that Jabhet al-Nusra, a jihadist organization, and other rebel groups in the region collaborated in a suicide car bombing of a government checkpoint in a village near Hama, killing at least 50 soldiers.

“They targeted one of the biggest checkpoints in the region. It’s a big building where the regime forces were headquartered,” said Ahmad Raadoun, a member of the Free Syrian Army in the Hama suburbs, who was reached via Skype.

Mr. Raadoun, who said he was about 20 miles from the village of Ziyara, where the attack took place, said the bomb caused extensive casualties and other damage in what he described as a “big operation.”

The official news agency, SANA, said the explosion, outside a government building called the Rural Development Center, was orchestrated by terrorist groups and left 2 civilians dead and 10 wounded. The government has repeatedly labeled opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad as terrorist organizations.

The reasons for such divergent accounts could not be immediately ascertained.

Checkpoints in rural areas often serve as rudimentary bases for the government, with large numbers of men and matériel stationed in them to carry the fight across the province.

Another car bombing was reported in Mazzeh 86, a Damascus neighborhood on the slopes below the presidential palace, home to many members of the security forces. The forces are dominated by members of Mr. Assad’s Alawite minority, which controls the country.

The Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for that attack, saying in a statement that its fighters had targeted officers as well as members of the armed militias who fight for the government. The statement, posted on Facebook, claimed a large number of casualties but did not give any figures.

The Syrian Observatory said the bomb, which it described as a booby-trapped car that exploded in Bride Square, killed 5 people and wounded more than 30, some of them critically.

Pictures posted on Facebook showed a large column of smoke rising from the area.

Damascus residents reached by telephone said that they were trying to flee the heavy fighting, but that there was so much going on in every direction that they did not quite know where to run.

“There is very, very intense shelling on southern Damascus right now,” said an activist reached by Skype who goes by Abu Qays al-Shami. At least 10 people were killed as government helicopters and tanks blasted the area, he said.

Residents said the fighting had erupted in and around the Yarmouk camp in southern Damascus, the center of Palestinian life in Syria for decades. Many Palestinians have sided with the nearly 20-month-old anti-Assad uprising, but the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a splinter Palestinian group long supported by the government, still backs Mr. Assad. The fighting erupted between the organization and government opponents.

Elsewhere in southern Damascus, government helicopters were shelling the restive neighborhood of Hajjar al-Aswad, a target of frequent attacks in recent weeks, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, an anti-Assad activist group that keeps track of casualties. SANA said five people were killed in Yarmouk, including a woman and three children, when a mortar shell hit a public minibus. The agency blamed terrorist organizations.

In its daily roundup of violence around the country, SANA also said that government forces clashed with opposition groups in the eastern city of Deir ez-Zour and in Aleppo, the northern city that has been a battleground since midsummer.

Activist organizations reported a number of airstrikes around the country.

One extremely graphic video posted from the village of Kafrnabel, near Idlib, shows bloodied victims dumped into a truck in the aftermath of what was described as an aerial assault. A shot of the main street shows flames leaping from vehicles and residents running around in panic. At least five men and one woman died, the Syrian Observatory said, but more victims were believed buried under the rubble. Video accounts cannot be independently confirmed.

At the United Nations on Monday, a top relief official said the organization’s aid effort in Syria “is very dangerous and very difficult.” The official, John Ging, director of operations of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters at a news conference that the United Nations was supplying 1.5 million people in Syria with food and that nearly half is delivered into areas of conflict, but “there are areas beyond our reach, particularly areas under opposition control for quite a long time.”

Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

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Critic’s Notebook: ‘Start-Ups: Silicon Valley’ and ‘LOLwork’ on Bravo

When word got out about “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” the valley started to have conniptions. Among the more clever responses was a tweet by a TechCrunch editor: “Here Comes Silicon Valley Boo Boo.”

Bravo

The siblings Ben and Hermione Way bumble through a presentation after a toga party in “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.”

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Of course the real geeks of Mountain View and Menlo Park are smart enough to know that reality is the last thing to expect from a Bravo reality show. What you expect is manufactured camaraderie and conflict, tears, cleavage and product placement, and when “Start-Ups” begins on Monday night that’s what you’ll get, along with togas and flying cocktails. Any new technology is strictly a rumor, and the only deal making happens between consenting adults at the toga party.

On the basis of a trailer released by Bravo, “Start-Ups” has already been criticized — and rightly so — for focusing on the lovely cityscapes of San Francisco rather than the flat expanses of San Jose, Sunnyvale and the other cities that actually make up Silicon Valley. The pilot has an aerial shot of downtown Mountain View and a few scenes inside the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto, but the dominant images are panoramic views of the sexier city to the north.

Also more than a little unreal, in Silicon Valley terms, is the homogeneity of the six-member principal cast, which is generally attractive — one woman is a former Milwaukee Bucks dancer — and entirely white; Asians and blacks appear around the edges as friends, bosses and hair and makeup women. Much of the episode is spent establishing the entrepreneurial bona fides of these six as well as the reality-TV personas they wear like wineglass tags: mean, vain, ambitious, alcoholic, gay, British.

That leaves time for just two significant scenes: the party, at which apps, Web sites and online shows (none of the six entrepreneurs plans to make a physical product) take a back seat to fighting, flirting and skimpy costumes; and an actual pitch, by two of the cast, to an actual Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Dave McClure.

The pitch is the episode’s high point, as the brother and sister Ben and Hermione bumble and brazen their way through a disastrous presentation of a health-and-fitness app that doesn’t yet exist. It begins badly when Mr. McClure finds Hermione, post-party, sleeping under a conference table, and doesn’t improve when he learns there is no product to look at, just a few screen shots on a laptop. Ben, whose explanation of the app is cut off by Mr. McClure, provides the pilot’s one laugh-out-loud moment when he huffs, “I found it slightly disrespectful, him just going through the whole thing and making his own judgments.”

Making its debut on Bravo on Wednesday night is “LOLwork,” another reality series set in the digital world. It takes us inside the offices of Cheezburger, a Seattle-based Internet humor publisher built on funny pictures of cats with fractured-English captions, and while its story lines appear to be as staged as those of “Start-Ups,” it has a depressed, workaday vibe that makes it by far the superior show.

“LOLwork” is about real people doing a real job. In the pilot the staff members of Cheezburger (its primary Web site is icanhascheezburger.com) are pitted against one another in a competition that was probably made for TV, but they’re not glamorized. We can see that they’re young, smart, prematurely cynical and fully aware of both the superficiality and profitability of what they do for a living.

In “Start-Ups” the would-be entrepreneurs describe their products in grandiose generalities: “It’s an app to help you live longer and stay fitter,” “It’s an app around personal goals,” “I want other people to have that same satisfaction that I’ve had in changing my life.” In “LOLwork” Ben Huh, the chief executive of Cheezburger, tells the employee whose idea wins the contest, “It was so bad that it was good, and ironically that’s actually the kind of stuff that works on the Internet.” You can practically hear the souls of his workers shriveling.

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Unlikely Model for H.I.V. Prevention: Porn Industry

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

INDUSTRY DATABASE Shylar Cobi, right, a film producer, confirmed test results of the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya.

LOS ANGELES — Before they take off all their clothes, the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya go through a ritual unique to the heterosexual adult film industry.

First, they show each other their cellphones: Each has an e-mail from a laboratory saying he or she just tested negative for H.I.V., syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Then they sit beside the film’s producer, Shylar Cobi, as he checks an industry database with their real names to confirm that those negative tests are less than 15 days old.

Then, out on the pool terrace of the day’s set — a music producer’s hilltop home with a view of the Hollywood sign — they yank down their pants and stand around joking as Mr. Cobi quickly inspects their mouths, hands and genitals for sores.

“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Cobi, who wears a pleasantly sheepish grin, says. “I’m only qualified to do this because I’ve been shooting porn since 1990 and I know what looks bad.”

Bizarre as the ritual is, it seems to work.

The industry’s medical consultants say that about 350,000 sex scenes have been shot without condoms since 2004, and H.I.V. has not been transmitted on a set once.

Outside the world of pornography, the industry’s testing regimen is not well known, and no serious academic study of it has ever been done. But when it was described to several AIDS experts, they all reacted by saying that there were far fewer infections than they would have expected, given how much high-risk sex takes place.

“I don’t think there’s any question that it works,” said Dr. Allan Ronald, a Canadian AIDS specialist who did landmark studies of the virus in prostitutes in a Nairobi slum. “I’m a little uncomfortable, because it’s giving the wrong message — that you can have multiple sex partners without condoms — but I can’t say it doesn’t work.”

Despite the regimen’s apparent success, California health officials and an advocacy group, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, are trying to make it illegal to shoot without condoms. They argue that other sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the industry, though the industry trade group disputes that.

In January, the city of Los Angeles passed a law requiring actors to wear condoms. A measure to do the same for the whole county is on the ballot on Tuesday.

Producers say the condom requirement will drive them out of business since consumers will not buy such films. Local newspapers like The Los Angeles Times oppose the ballot measure, calling it well-intentioned but unenforceable, and warning that it could drive up to 10,000 jobs out of state.

Very frequent testing makes it almost impossible for an actor to stay infected without being caught, said Dr. Jacques Pepin, the author of “The Origins of AIDS” and an expert on transmission rates. “And if you are having sex mostly with people who themselves are tested all the time, this must further reduce the risk.”

When the virus first enters a high-risk group like heroin users, urban prostitutes or habitués of gay bathhouses, it usually infects 30 to 60 percent of the cohort within a few years, studies have shown. The same would be expected in pornography, performers can have more than a dozen partners a month, but the industry says self-policing has prevented it..

“Our talent base has sex exponentially more than other people, but we’re all on the same page about keeping it out,” said Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest studios.

Performers have to test negative every 28 days, although some studios recently switched to every 14.

If a test is positive, all the studios across the country that adhere to standards set by the Free Speech Coalition, an industry trade group, are obliged to stop filming until all the on-screen partners of that performer, all their partners, and all their partners’ partners, are found and retested. In 2004, the industry shut down for three months to do that.

It has had briefer shutdowns in each of the last four years.

In 2009 and 2010, no other infected performers were found. Coalition representatives said an infected woman in 2009, from Nevada, may have had an infected boyfriend, and offered evidence that a man infected in 2010 in Florida had worked outside the industry as a prostitute. The 2011 test was a false positive.

A shutdown in August came after several actors got syphilis, not H.I.V. All performers were given a choice: Take antibiotics, or pass two back-to-back syphilis tests 14 days apart.

Read More..

Unlikely Model for H.I.V. Prevention: Porn Industry

Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

INDUSTRY DATABASE Shylar Cobi, right, a film producer, confirmed test results of the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya.

LOS ANGELES — Before they take off all their clothes, the actors who perform as James Deen and Stoya go through a ritual unique to the heterosexual adult film industry.

First, they show each other their cellphones: Each has an e-mail from a laboratory saying he or she just tested negative for H.I.V., syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Then they sit beside the film’s producer, Shylar Cobi, as he checks an industry database with their real names to confirm that those negative tests are less than 15 days old.

Then, out on the pool terrace of the day’s set — a music producer’s hilltop home with a view of the Hollywood sign — they yank down their pants and stand around joking as Mr. Cobi quickly inspects their mouths, hands and genitals for sores.

“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Cobi, who wears a pleasantly sheepish grin, says. “I’m only qualified to do this because I’ve been shooting porn since 1990 and I know what looks bad.”

Bizarre as the ritual is, it seems to work.

The industry’s medical consultants say that about 350,000 sex scenes have been shot without condoms since 2004, and H.I.V. has not been transmitted on a set once.

Outside the world of pornography, the industry’s testing regimen is not well known, and no serious academic study of it has ever been done. But when it was described to several AIDS experts, they all reacted by saying that there were far fewer infections than they would have expected, given how much high-risk sex takes place.

“I don’t think there’s any question that it works,” said Dr. Allan Ronald, a Canadian AIDS specialist who did landmark studies of the virus in prostitutes in a Nairobi slum. “I’m a little uncomfortable, because it’s giving the wrong message — that you can have multiple sex partners without condoms — but I can’t say it doesn’t work.”

Despite the regimen’s apparent success, California health officials and an advocacy group, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, are trying to make it illegal to shoot without condoms. They argue that other sexually transmitted diseases are rampant in the industry, though the industry trade group disputes that.

In January, the city of Los Angeles passed a law requiring actors to wear condoms. A measure to do the same for the whole county is on the ballot on Tuesday.

Producers say the condom requirement will drive them out of business since consumers will not buy such films. Local newspapers like The Los Angeles Times oppose the ballot measure, calling it well-intentioned but unenforceable, and warning that it could drive up to 10,000 jobs out of state.

Very frequent testing makes it almost impossible for an actor to stay infected without being caught, said Dr. Jacques Pepin, the author of “The Origins of AIDS” and an expert on transmission rates. “And if you are having sex mostly with people who themselves are tested all the time, this must further reduce the risk.”

When the virus first enters a high-risk group like heroin users, urban prostitutes or habitués of gay bathhouses, it usually infects 30 to 60 percent of the cohort within a few years, studies have shown. The same would be expected in pornography, performers can have more than a dozen partners a month, but the industry says self-policing has prevented it..

“Our talent base has sex exponentially more than other people, but we’re all on the same page about keeping it out,” said Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest studios.

Performers have to test negative every 28 days, although some studios recently switched to every 14.

If a test is positive, all the studios across the country that adhere to standards set by the Free Speech Coalition, an industry trade group, are obliged to stop filming until all the on-screen partners of that performer, all their partners, and all their partners’ partners, are found and retested. In 2004, the industry shut down for three months to do that.

It has had briefer shutdowns in each of the last four years.

In 2009 and 2010, no other infected performers were found. Coalition representatives said an infected woman in 2009, from Nevada, may have had an infected boyfriend, and offered evidence that a man infected in 2010 in Florida had worked outside the industry as a prostitute. The 2011 test was a false positive.

A shutdown in August came after several actors got syphilis, not H.I.V. All performers were given a choice: Take antibiotics, or pass two back-to-back syphilis tests 14 days apart.

Read More..

Silicon Valley Objects to Online Privacy Rule Proposals for Children

Washington is pushing Silicon Valley on children’s privacy, and Silicon Valley is pushing back.

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have all objected to portions of a federal effort to strengthen online privacy protections for children. In addition, media giants like Viacom and Disney, cable operators, marketing associations, technology groups and a trade group representing toy makers are arguing that the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule changes seem so onerous that, rather than enhance online protections for children, they threaten to deter companies from offering children’s Web sites and services altogether.

“If adopted, the effect of these new rules would be to slow the deployment of applications that provide tremendous benefits to children, and to slow the economic growth and job creation generated by the app economy,” Catherine A. Novelli, vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, wrote in comments to the agency.

But the underlying concern, for both the industry and regulators, is not so much about online products for children themselves. It is about the data collection and data mining mechanisms that facilitate digital marketing on apps and Web sites for children — and a debate over whether these practices could put children at greater risk.

In 1998, Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in an effort to give parents control over the collection and dissemination of private information about their children online. The regulation, known as Coppa, requires Web site operators to obtain a parent’s consent before collecting personal details, like home addresses or e-mail addresses, from children under 13.

Now, federal regulators are preparing to update that rule, arguing that it has not kept pace with advances like online behavioral advertising, a practice that uses data mining to tailor ads to people’s online behavior. The F.T.C. wants to expand the types of data whose collection requires prior parental permission to include persistent ID systems, like unique device codes or customer code numbers stored in cookies, if those codes are used to track children online for advertising purposes.

The idea is to preclude companies from compiling dossiers on the online activities — and by extension the health, socioeconomic status, race or romantic concerns — of individual children across the Web over time.

“What children post online or search as part of their homework should not haunt them as they apply to colleges or for jobs,” Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, said in a recent phone interview. “YouTube should not be turned into YouTracked.”

The agency’s proposals have provoked an intense reaction from some major online operators, television networks, social networks, app platforms and advertising trade groups. Some argue that the F.T.C. has overstepped its mandate in proposing to greatly expand the rule’s scope.

Others say that using ID systems like customer code numbers to track children “anonymously” online is benign — and that collecting information about children’s online activities is necessary to deliver the ads that finance free content and services for children.

“What is the harm we are trying to prevent here?” said Alan L. Friel, chairman of the media and technology practice at the law firm Edwards Wildman Palmer. “We risk losing a lot of the really good educational and entertaining content if we make things too difficult for people to operate the sites or generate revenue from the sites.”

The economic issue at stake is much bigger than just the narrow children’s audience. If the F.T.C. were to include customer code numbers among the information that requires a parent’s consent, industry analysts say, it might someday require companies to get similar consent for a practice that represents the backbone of digital marketing and advertising — using such code numbers to track the online activities of adults.

“Once you’ve said it’s personal information for children that requires consent, you’ve set the framework for a requirement of consent to be applied to another population,” Mr. Friel said. “If it is personal information for someone that’s 12, it doesn’t cease being personal information when they are 13.”

Indeed, many of the F.T.C.’s proposed rule revisions have vocal detractors.

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Benghazi Attack Raises Doubts About U.S. Abilities in Region

Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters

The attack at the American Mission on Sept. 11, seen here, and an annex in Benghazi, Libya, points to a limitation in the capabilities of the American military command responsible for countries swept up in the Arab Spring.

WASHINGTON — About three hours after the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack, the Pentagon issued an urgent call for an array of quick-reaction forces, including an elite Special Forces team that was on a training mission in Croatia.

The team dropped what it was doing and prepared to move to the Sigonella naval air station in Sicily, a short flight from Benghazi and other hot spots in the region. By the time the unit arrived at the base, however, the surviving Americans at the Benghazi mission had been evacuated to Tripoli, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were dead.

The assault, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, has already exposed shortcomings in the Obama administration’s ability to secure diplomatic missions and act on intelligence warnings. But this previously undisclosed episode, described by several American officials, points to a limitation in the capabilities of the American military command responsible for a large swath of countries swept up in the Arab Spring.

At the heart of the issue is the Africa Command, established in 2007, well before the Arab Spring uprisings and before an affiliate of Al Qaeda became a major regional threat. It did not have on hand what every other regional combatant command has: its own force able to respond rapidly to emergencies — a Commanders’ In-Extremis Force, or C.I.F.

To respond to the Benghazi attack, the Africa Command had to borrow the C.I.F. that belongs to the European Command, because its own force is still in training. It also had no AC-130 gunships or armed drones readily available.

As officials in the White House and Pentagon scrambled to respond to the torrent of reports pouring out from Libya — with Mr. Stevens missing and officials worried that he might have been taken hostage — they took the extraordinary step of sending elite Delta Force commandos, with their own helicopters and ground vehicles, from their base at Fort Bragg, N.C., to Sicily. Those troops also arrived too late.

“The fact of the matter is these forces were not in place until after the attacks were over,” a Pentagon spokesman, George Little, said on Friday, referring to a range of special operations soldiers and other personnel. “We did respond. The secretary ordered forces to move. They simply were not able to arrive in time.”

An examination of these tumultuous events undercuts the criticism leveled by some Republicans that the Obama administration did not try to respond militarily to the crisis. The attack was not a running eight-hour firefight as some critics have contended, questioning how an adequate response could not be mustered in that time, but rather two relatively short, intense assaults separated by a lull of four hours. But the administration’s response also shows that the forces in the region had not been adequately reconfigured.

The Africa Command was spun off from the European Command. At the time it was set up, the Pentagon thought it would be devoted mostly to training African troops and building military ties with African nations. Because of African sensitivities about an overt American military presence in the region, the command’s headquarters was established in Stuttgart, Germany.

While the other regional commands, including the Pacific Command and the Central Command, responsible for the Middle East and South Asia, have their own specialized quick-reaction forces, the Africa Command has had an arrangement to borrow the European Command’s force when needed. The Africa Command has been building its own team from scratch, and its nascent strike force was in the process of being formed in the United States on Sept. 11, a senior military official said.

“The conversation about getting them closer to Africa has new energy,” the military official said.

Some Pentagon officials said that it was unrealistic to think a quick-reaction force could have been sent in time even if the African Command had one ready to act on the base in Sicily when the attack unfolded, and asserted that such a small force might not have even been effective or the best means to protect an embassy. But critics say there has been a gap in the command’s quick-reaction capability, which the force would have helped fill.

A spokesman for the command declined to comment on how its capabilities might be improved.

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Massive Open Online Courses Are Multiplying at a Rapid Pace

Clockwise, from top left: an online course in circuits and electronics with an M.I.T. professor (edX); statistics, Stanford (Udacity); machine learning, Stanford (Coursera); organic chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana (Coursera).

IN late September, as workers applied joint compound to new office walls, hoodie-clad colleagues who had just met were working together on deadline. Film editors, code-writing interns and “edX fellows” — grad students and postdocs versed in online education — were translating videotaped lectures into MOOCs, or massive open online courses. As if anyone needed reminding, a row of aqua Post-its gave the dates the courses would “go live.”

The paint is barely dry, yet edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million — growing “faster than Facebook,” boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Mike Sokolosky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.” Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.

“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.

WHAT IS A MOOC ANYWAY?

Traditional online courses charge tuition, carry credit and limit enrollment to a few dozen to ensure interaction with instructors. The MOOC, on the other hand, is usually free, credit-less and, well, massive.

Because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll, faculty can’t possibly respond to students individually. So the course design — how material is presented and the interactivity — counts for a lot. As do fellow students. Classmates may lean on one another in study groups organized in their towns, in online forums or, the prickly part, for grading work.

The evolving form knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social networking. Unlike its antecedent, open courseware — usually written materials or videotapes of lectures that make you feel as if you’re spying on a class from the back of the room — the MOOC is a full course made with you in mind.

The medium is still the lecture. Thanks to Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional videos, MOOC makers have gotten the memo on the benefit of brevity: 8 to 12 minutes is typical. Then — this is key — videos pause perhaps twice for a quiz to make sure you understand the material or, in computer programming, to let you write code. Feedback is electronic. Teaching assistants may monitor discussion boards. There may be homework and a final exam.

The MOOC certainly presents challenges. Can learning be scaled up this much? Grading is imperfect, especially for nontechnical subjects. Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20 people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.

Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it. “Signing up for a class is a lightweight process,” says Dr. Ng. It might take just five minutes, assuming you spend two devising a stylish user name. Only 46,000 attempted the first assignment in Dr. Ng’s course on machine learning last fall. In the end, he says, 13,000 completed the class and earned a certificate — from him, not Stanford.

Laura Pappano is author of “Inside School Turnarounds” and writer in residence at the Wellesley Centers for Women.

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Well: The Mental Fallout of the Hurricane

In the small Connecticut town where I grew up, the tornado of 1979 remains the storm, a freak tornado packing 86-mile-per-hour winds that churned through the streets, killing three people, injuring hundreds and destroying several hundred homes and businesses, including many in my neighborhood.

I was 15 at the time, at home alone looking after my 10-year-old sister and 5-year-old brother. For months afterward, like others caught in the surprise storm, we struggled with memories of that afternoon. During the first few days, I kept reliving the moments huddled with my siblings in the corner; later, I had recurring nightmares and became paralyzed with fear whenever I heard a clap of thunder.

Even today, I tend to worry more than most whenever the sky looks odd or when the weather suddenly turns muggy and dark, the slightest hint of what my sister and I have come to call “tornado weather.”

For almost three decades now, health care experts have been studying the psychological effects of natural disasters and have found that disasters as varied as the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Andrew (1992) and Hugo (1989) left significant, disabling and lasting psychological scars in their wake. While individuals with pre-existing mental health issues were at particular risk, everyone was vulnerable. In New Orleans a month after Hurricane Katrina, for example, 17 percent of residents reported symptoms consistent with serious mental illness, compared with 10 percent of those who lived in surrounding areas and only 1 to 3 percent in the general population.

Most commonly and most immediately, the survivors suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms like recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, a hair-trigger temper and an emotional “numbing,” much of which could be considered normal in the first couple of months after a disaster. “It’s a pretty natural thing to have nightmares after living through a natural disaster,” said Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the effect of natural disasters on the mental health of survivors. “It would almost be abnormal if you didn’t.”

Over time, when those symptoms abated, survivors were able to move on. When they didn’t, or when other mood disorders like anxiety and depression appeared, mental health issues quickly became a leading cause of disability for survivors, further hampering other efforts at recovery.

But the research has also revealed that we can mitigate the psychological fallout, even after the disaster has occurred. Studies from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have shown that what communities, governments and even elected officials do in the weeks, months and years that follow can have a significant effect on how individuals fare psychologically.

For example, among Hurricane Katrina survivors, there were striking differences in the rates of mental health disorders, depending on how people felt about the difficulties they had finding food and shelter. Survivors who continued to face such adversity because of the government’s slow response had significantly higher rates of mental health problems.

“There’s no question that the best thing the federal, state and municipal governments can do to protect against psychopathology in these kinds of situations is to restore the day-to-day functioning that keeps everyone healthy,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, lead author of the study and chairman of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

For now, experts are predicting that the psychological fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be less severe than that from Hurricane Katrina. But their optimistic predictions rest in part on the response thus far of government officials and the larger community.

“People pull together at times like this,” Dr. Kessler noted. “To the extent that those affected by Sandy can build on this sense of community and get back to normal, it could be an opportunity for people to grow and even develop a sense of accomplishment because of what they’ve been through.”

What I remember today as clearly as the blinding whiteness of the tornado winds that enveloped our house and the terror that gripped my siblings and me back in 1979 are the state and local officials and rescue workers who appeared almost immediately, the churches and community organizations that organized shelters and fund-raisers, and the neighbors, sleeves rolled up, who cleared debris and cooked for one another.

When the new homes finally began to emerge from the rubble the following spring, it wasn’t the cookie-cutter skyline of raised ranches and colonials that was restored. Instead, the neighborhood became a showplace of modest but quirky family abodes — a brown, modern geometric house on one corner, a yellow, partly subterranean one a few doors down.

From a devastating storm, my neighbors had managed to build new dreams.

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Well: The Mental Fallout of the Hurricane

In the small Connecticut town where I grew up, the tornado of 1979 remains the storm, a freak tornado packing 86-mile-per-hour winds that churned through the streets, killing three people, injuring hundreds and destroying several hundred homes and businesses, including many in my neighborhood.

I was 15 at the time, at home alone looking after my 10-year-old sister and 5-year-old brother. For months afterward, like others caught in the surprise storm, we struggled with memories of that afternoon. During the first few days, I kept reliving the moments huddled with my siblings in the corner; later, I had recurring nightmares and became paralyzed with fear whenever I heard a clap of thunder.

Even today, I tend to worry more than most whenever the sky looks odd or when the weather suddenly turns muggy and dark, the slightest hint of what my sister and I have come to call “tornado weather.”

For almost three decades now, health care experts have been studying the psychological effects of natural disasters and have found that disasters as varied as the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Andrew (1992) and Hugo (1989) left significant, disabling and lasting psychological scars in their wake. While individuals with pre-existing mental health issues were at particular risk, everyone was vulnerable. In New Orleans a month after Hurricane Katrina, for example, 17 percent of residents reported symptoms consistent with serious mental illness, compared with 10 percent of those who lived in surrounding areas and only 1 to 3 percent in the general population.

Most commonly and most immediately, the survivors suffered post-traumatic stress symptoms like recurrent nightmares, flashbacks, a hair-trigger temper and an emotional “numbing,” much of which could be considered normal in the first couple of months after a disaster. “It’s a pretty natural thing to have nightmares after living through a natural disaster,” said Ronald C. Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who has studied the effect of natural disasters on the mental health of survivors. “It would almost be abnormal if you didn’t.”

Over time, when those symptoms abated, survivors were able to move on. When they didn’t, or when other mood disorders like anxiety and depression appeared, mental health issues quickly became a leading cause of disability for survivors, further hampering other efforts at recovery.

But the research has also revealed that we can mitigate the psychological fallout, even after the disaster has occurred. Studies from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have shown that what communities, governments and even elected officials do in the weeks, months and years that follow can have a significant effect on how individuals fare psychologically.

For example, among Hurricane Katrina survivors, there were striking differences in the rates of mental health disorders, depending on how people felt about the difficulties they had finding food and shelter. Survivors who continued to face such adversity because of the government’s slow response had significantly higher rates of mental health problems.

“There’s no question that the best thing the federal, state and municipal governments can do to protect against psychopathology in these kinds of situations is to restore the day-to-day functioning that keeps everyone healthy,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, lead author of the study and chairman of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

For now, experts are predicting that the psychological fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be less severe than that from Hurricane Katrina. But their optimistic predictions rest in part on the response thus far of government officials and the larger community.

“People pull together at times like this,” Dr. Kessler noted. “To the extent that those affected by Sandy can build on this sense of community and get back to normal, it could be an opportunity for people to grow and even develop a sense of accomplishment because of what they’ve been through.”

What I remember today as clearly as the blinding whiteness of the tornado winds that enveloped our house and the terror that gripped my siblings and me back in 1979 are the state and local officials and rescue workers who appeared almost immediately, the churches and community organizations that organized shelters and fund-raisers, and the neighbors, sleeves rolled up, who cleared debris and cooked for one another.

When the new homes finally began to emerge from the rubble the following spring, it wasn’t the cookie-cutter skyline of raised ranches and colonials that was restored. Instead, the neighborhood became a showplace of modest but quirky family abodes — a brown, modern geometric house on one corner, a yellow, partly subterranean one a few doors down.

From a devastating storm, my neighbors had managed to build new dreams.

Read More..

Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

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