Experiment Examines Racial Bias in Penalties for Touchdown Celebrations

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Chiefs cornerback Brandon Flowers (24) was called for a penalty in 2011 after celebrating a touchdown in front of the fans.

A Kansas City Chiefs cornerback returns an interception 58 yards for a touchdown, then flexes his biceps in the end zone with one foot resting on the ball. A Seattle wide receiver makes a throat-slashing gesture after catching a 52-yard pass for a score. A running back for Green Bay lies on his back in the end zone and waves his legs and arms to mime a snow angel after an 80-yard scoring catch. After an 18-yard touchdown catch on Jan. 1, a Buffalo receiver exposes an undershirt that has "Happy New Year" written on it.

Each of these touchdown celebrations last season resulted in a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. But they had one other commonality: The fouls were called on black players.

It cannot be determined from those few cases and limited data whether race played any role in those penalties for excessive celebration. But a study published in July in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by two researchers in psychology at Northwestern University tested the question of bias in unsportsmanlike conduct penalties called after touchdowns. The two researchers, Erika V. Hall, a doctoral candidate, and Robert W. Livingston, an associate professor of management and organizations, tried to gather more insight by posing a series of hypothetical situations to a group of people.

They randomly assigned 44 men and women, who were nonblack and qualified as familiar with football after answering a pretest question, to read one of several accounts of a fictional N.F.L. play, each with details that varied slightly. In one version, a wide receiver named Malik Johnson makes a spectacular fingertip catch and sprints into the end zone. Then he spikes the ball in front of a defender named Jake Biermann, goes into his signature touchdown dance, flexes his muscles and waits for a reaction from the crowd. In a second version, everything is the same, except the wide receiver is Jake Biermann and the defender is Malik Johnson.

In other variations, the stories and names are the same but when the wide receiver — either Jake or Malik — scores he calmly flips the ball to the referee and trots to the sideline.

None of the participants were told that the experiment involved race. Instead, they were asked to rate the players for arrogance and to say how much of a salary bonus each should be rewarded with for his catch and score.

Malik and Jake were rated equally for arrogance when they celebrated and for humility when they didn't. But when it came to rewards and penalties, the differences were stark. Biermann was rewarded about equally whether he celebrated or not. But Johnson incurred a sort of "hubris penalty," receiving a significantly lower reward if he celebrated with a touchdown dance than if he gave the ball to the official and jogged off the field.

"The same pattern of blacks being punished more than whites seems to hold true both in the N.F.L. and in this experiment," Livingston said. "I would conclude that the results are generalizable to N.F.L. referees."

He added: "These football fans reached a conclusion that was based in part on the race of the player, because everything else about the scenarios was identical. All of this happens unconsciously. No one is doing it on purpose."

But others argue that there is almost certainly not enough data to draw conclusions about whether bias is involved. One expert not involved in the study, Joe Magee, an associate professor of management and organizations at New York University, said it would be a stretch to apply these laboratory findings to the N.F.L. But, he added: "It's a perfectly adequate and rigorous study. We have different expectations about how people should behave depending on their social or economic group. There's a backlash when they act in ways that contradict the stereotypes."

In any case, there has been little chance to test the hypothesis recently. So far this season, no one has been flagged for excessive celebration.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Laos to Proceed With Mekong Dam Project

BANGKOK — Ignoring criticism that a huge hydroelectric dam could irreparably damage the ecology of the Mekong River, the government of Laos said on Tuesday that it was pushing ahead with the multibillion-dollar project, the first dam to be built on the lower portion of the iconic river.

"I would say I'm 100 percent sure it's going ahead," Daovong Phonekeo, deputy director general of the Laotian Department of Electricity, said by telephone on Tuesday.

Laotian government officials and executives of a Thai construction company that is to build the dam are to officially inaugurate the project at a ceremony on Wednesday in Xayaburi, the remote province in northwestern Laos where the dam is to be situated.

The electricity from the project will be sold to Thailand and will provide billions of dollars of revenue to Laos, one of the poorest countries in Asia. But the project has been criticized by scientists who are concerned that the dam may disturb spawning patterns and lead to the extinction of many species of fish that have for centuries been the main source of protein for millions of people along the river's banks.

The United States State Department issued a statement on Monday questioning the rush to complete the dam. "The extent and severity of impacts from the Xayaburi dam on an ecosystem that provides food security and livelihoods for millions are still unknown," it said.

The State Department said it was concerned that countries sharing the river "have not reached consensus on whether the project should proceed."

The Mekong River passes through parts of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea.

Although the dam is being constructed on a part of the Mekong River that is entirely inside Laos, riparian countries of the lower Mekong signed an agreement in 1995 to consult with one another before proceeding with large projects on the river.

Laos appears to have steamrollered through that process despite objections raised at a meeting last December, when representatives from Vietnam and Cambodia called for further studies.

Laos says it is satisfying the requirement to consult with other countries — but only consult. "This is not an international issue," said Mr. Daovong of the Department of Electricity. "It's more an internal affair."

That approach has left environmentalists incensed.

"It's unbelievable that just a small group of people who hold power are able to doom the river," said Pianporn Deetes, a Thai environmental activist who was born and grew up near the Mekong in northern Thailand.

"We are not just crazily opposing the project," she said. "What we want is some information on the pros and cons."

Thai environmentalists say there is a troubling precedent: A dam constructed two decades ago in northeastern Thailand on the Mun River led to the disappearance of nearly two-thirds of the 265 species in the river.

Laotian officials and Thai executives involved in the Xayaburi project dismiss criticism of the dam as the misinformed concerns of a small group of activists.

Environmentalists are "trying to stir up controversy and anger among uneducated villagers and mislead people," Rewat Suwanakitti, the deputy managing director of Xayaburi Power, the company leading the project, said by telephone.

Hans Guttman, chief executive of the Mekong River Commission, the advisory organization that coordinates studies and meetings among the four lower-Mekong countries, said Laos had proposed several changes to the dam to address criticism, including a system that would flush sediment downstream and a revised "fish ladder" to help fish bypass the dam and reach spawning grounds.

But the Laotian government has not yet provided a revised blueprint of the dam, Mr. Guttman said. "We have not seen it and we are not aware of it," he said.

The Thai foreign minister, Surapong Tovichakchaikul, said on Tuesday that the government was "not opposed" to the dam.

Construction of the dam will begin "right after the ceremony" on Wednesday, said Mr. Rewat, the Xayaburi Power executive.

Much work has already been done. C. H. Karnchang, a Thai company that is carrying out the construction, has spent the past two years building access roads and hauling equipment to the remote site.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Alarm Over India’s Dengue Fever Epidemic

Enrico Fabian for The New York Times

A man at the Yamuna River, an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. Filthy standing water abounds in New Delhi. More Photos »

NEW DELHI — An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world.

India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in just a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue (pronounced DEN-gay) is now endemic in half the world's nations.

"The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse," said Dr. Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization's lead dengue coordinator.

The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm-weather vacations with the disease, which has reached the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.

Here in India's capital, where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic's growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets under the shade of a huge banyan tree outside the hospital entrance recently.

Among them was Neelam, who said her two grandchildren were deathly ill inside. Eight-year-old Sneha got the disease first, followed by Tanya, 7, she said. The girls' parents treated them at home but then Sneha's temperature rose to 104 degrees, a rash spread across her legs and shoulders, and her pain grew unbearable.

"Sneha has been given five liters of blood," said Neelam, who has one name. "It is terrible."

Officials say that 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.

"I'd conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations," said Dr. Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert focused on dengue research.

A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue's actual toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and that have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, "which was deliberated at the highest levels," is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.

"There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher," the official said. "Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure."

The problem with that policy, said Dr. Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India's "massive underreporting of cases" has contributed to the disease's spread. Experts from around the world said that India's failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness's vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.

"When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it's a joke," said Dr. Harold S. Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to the World Health Organization, even though India's population is 60 times larger.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

The Aftermath: Storm Raises Costs of Shoring Up Coastal Communities

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

AT SEA: A roller coaster mangled by Hurricane Sandy in Seaside Heights, N.J. The state has embraced the practice of beach nourishment: bringing in sand to build up coastlines and barrier islands.

For more than a century, for good or ill, New Jersey has led the nation in coastal development. Many of the barrier islands along its coast have long been lined by rock jetties, concrete sea walls or other protective armor. Most of its coastal communities have beaches only because engineers periodically replenish them with sand pumped from offshore.

Now much of that sand is gone. Though reports are still preliminary, coastal researchers say that when Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it washed enormous quantities of sand off beaches and into the streets — or even all the way across barrier islands into the bays behind them.

But even as these towns clamor for sand, scientists are warning that rising seas will make maintaining artificial beaches prohibitively expensive or simply impossible. Even some advocates of artificial beach nourishment now urge new approaches to the issue, especially in New Jersey.

The practice has long been controversial.

Opponents of beach nourishment argue that undeveloped beaches deal well with storms. Their sands shift; barrier islands may even migrate toward the mainland. But the beach itself survives, because buildings and roads do not pin it down.

By contrast, replenishment projects often wash away far sooner than expected. The critics say the best answer to coastal storms is to move people and buildings away from the water, a tactic some call strategic retreat.

Supporters of these projects counter that beaches are infrastructure — just like roads, bridges and sewer systems — that must be maintained. They say beaches attract tourists and summer residents, conferring immense economic benefits that more than outweigh the costs of the projects. Also, they argue, these beaches absorb storm energy, sparing buildings inland.

New Jersey has embraced this approach with gusto. Stewart C. Farrell, a professor of marine geology at Stockton College of New Jersey, said that since 1985 80 million cubic yards of sand had been applied on 54 of the state's 97 miles of developed coastline: a truckload of sand for every foot of beach.

Dr. Farrell and his colleagues have calculated that the work cost more than $800 million — before adjusting for inflation.

Typically, the federal government pays 65 percent of the cost; the state and towns share the rest.

By now in New Jersey, most beaches "are engineered dikes," said Thomas Herrington, a professor of ocean engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, who has been working with the state to assess its coastal protection. About half of its coastal communities have projects still under way, so their beaches are already approved — at least in theory — for topping up with sand as needed.

But even if there is money for that work, engineers must find the sand. Around the nation, that is getting more and more difficult. The problem is particularly acute in New Jersey.

"We know from geological surveys — and New Jersey is a prime example — that offshore sand, high-quality sand, is a highly finite resource," said S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal scientist with the United States Geological Survey and the University of Hawaii.

Underwater ridges of sand lie offshore, but engineers must go farther and farther (and spend more and more) to find them, Mr. Williams said, adding that eventually "it is not going to be there."

And while it is theoretically possible to replenish a beach with material mined inland, that approach would create other problems, said Robert Young, a coastal geologist who directs the program for the study of developed shorelines at Western Carolina University. "Trucks full of sand weigh a lot," he added. "There is a tremendous toll on highway infrastructure." And excavating inland sand "would create holes that would be miles in diameter."

Howard Marlowe, a prominent advocate of replenishment projects, agrees that the nation needs "a better way of managing short supplies of sediment."

Mr. Marlowe is president of Marlowe & Company, a lobbying concern that represents many Atlantic and Pacific coastal communities. He said in an interview that sand supplies should be managed "holistically" — and on a regional basis, not town by town, as is now largely the case.

Managers should look at inlets, ports and the Intracoastal Waterway, as well as offshore sand sources, Mr. Marlowe said, adding, "You have to have an interstate approach."

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bryan Norcross, Speaking Beyond What’s Forecast

David Walter Banks for The New York Times

ON AIR: Bryan Norcross in the studio.

As Hurricane Sandy made its way up the coast, Bryan Norcross sat at his desk in the Weather Channel's headquarters in Atlanta, waiting for the National Hurricane Center to issue a warning for the Northeast.

In many ways, he is still waiting.

"On Friday, Jim Cantore asked me on the air, 'Are they going to issue a hurricane watch for the Northeast?' " said Mr. Norcross, 61, referring to his fellow Weather Channel meteorologist. "And I said, 'They've got to do it tomorrow' " — meaning Oct. 27, two days before the arrival of dangerous winds — to give people time to prepare.

But as that day came and went, no such warning was issued. Because the storm was predicted to become a post-tropical system by the time it hit land, the hurricane center (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA) chose not to issue any hurricane advisory, fearing that the confusion that might result from a midstorm shift in warnings.

"We all looked at ourselves and said, 'You've got to be kidding,' " Mr. Norcross said — and when he returned late that night to the Atlanta house he uses during hurricane season, he took to his blog to express his frustration.

"I'm betting," he wrote, that the hurricane center's rules "didn't envision a super-mega-combo freak of a storm slamming into the most populated part of the country.

"When all hell is breaking loose, sometimes you've got to break a few rules to do the right thing."

Nobody knows this better than Mr. Norcross. In 1992, then a weatherman in South Florida, he became the breakout star of Hurricane Andrew when he broadcast live for 23 hours straight, much of it from a storage room, at WTVJ, an NBC affiliate. Many residents credited his steady tone and resourceful tips (if you have ever huddled in a bathtub covered by a mattress, you can thank Mr. Norcross) with getting them through the storm. Afterward, some Floridians scrawled "Norcross for President" on their battered homes.

Twenty years later, the trim, slow-talking Mr. Norcross, who now lives in Miami during the off-season, keeps his eye on hurricanes from the cushier environs of the Weather Channel, using television cameras, his blog and Facebook to issue technically detailed and often passionate reports about systems he believes pose high risk. To many self-described weather nerds, he is still "the most trusted hurricane human on the planet," as a woman on Twitter recently described him.

Last week, his criticism of the hurricane center and of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City for briefly playing down Hurricane Sandy's severity once again placed him in the middle of the storm. While the government did a top-notch job predicting the storm's path, he says, the confusion over warnings exposed the failings of a system ill equipped for an age of rising seas and monster storms.

"They made outstanding forecasts," he said of NOAA. "Their strength forecast was essentially perfect, and their storm surge forecast for New York City was absolutely as good as a forecast can be these days."

But when it came time to issue warnings, Mr. Norcross believes NOAA was hamstrung by its byzantine guidelines, ultimately placing its bureaucracy ahead of its obligation to make people understand the danger they faced.

At the heart of the matter is NOAA's bifurcated system for issuing storm advisories. There is one set of warnings for tropical storms, and another set for northeaster or winter storms.

Technically, this most recent event was both, "a hybrid storm with a hurricane in the middle, wrapped up in a nor'easter," Mr. Norcross said. The rules simply weren't made with such a system in mind. "That's when you have to call an audible," he said.

"Yes, the warnings they put out for hurricane-force wind warnings and then coastal flood warnings and all these sorts of things all cumulatively mean the same thing," he said. "But the average disc jockey or TV announcer or anchorman is not going to communicate those things fully and accurately and with the same impact as simply with the two words: hurricane warning."

That lack of urgency from NOAA may have contributed to the dismissive tone of Mr. Bloomberg's news conference the Saturday before the storm, in which he sounded not particularly nervous. "Although we are expecting a large surge of water, it is not expected to be a tropical-storm- or hurricane-type surge," he said, adding that after the storm, the city should consider giving aid to regions north or south of the city that would surely be harder hit.

"I'm baffled by what the mayor said," Mr. Norcross said on the air that night. "Shocked, to tell you the truth."

Later that night, he was even more blunt.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

A Collective Effort to Save Decades of Research at N.Y.U.

The calls started coming in late on Tuesday and early Wednesday: offers of dry ice, freezer space, coolers. By the end of Thursday there were dozens more: A researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College would clear 1,000 tanks to save threatened zebra fish; another, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, promised to replace some genetically altered mice that were lost; and a doctor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia even offered take over entire experiments, to keep them going.

As hurricane-driven waters surged into New York University research buildings in Kips Bay, on the East Side of Manhattan, investigators in New York and around the world jumped on the phone to offer assistance — executing a reverse Noah's ark operation, to rescue lab animals and other assets from a flooding vessel.

"I've had 43 people who have offered to help so far, and some of them are direct competitors," said Gordon Fishell, associate director of the N.Y.U. Neuroscience Institute, who lost more than 5,000 genetically altered mice when storm waters surged the night of Oct. 30, cutting off power. "It's just been unbelievable," he said. "It really buoys my spirits and my lab's."

Staff members at N.Y.U. worked around the clock to preserve research materials, running in and out of darkened buildings without elevator service, hauling dry ice and other supplies up anywhere from 2 to more than 15 floors.

The university's medical center also got instant help, from almost every major research institution in the area.

The response reflects large shifts in the way that science is conducted over the past generation or so. Individual labs always compete to be first, but researchers increasingly share materials that are enormously expensive and time-consuming to reproduce. The loss of a single cell line or genetically altered animal can slow progress for years in some areas of biomedical research.

"We are totally dependent on each other in the life sciences now, for a very large number of cell lines and extracts, research animals and unique chemical tools and antibodies that might not have backup copies anywhere in the world, or in very few places," said Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. "Losing any of these tools tears a significant hole in the entire field."

Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry at N.Y.U.'s medical school, has studied genetics for 30 years, accumulating valuable mice strains and stocks of extracts from cell nuclei that would be extremely difficult to replace. The extracts must be stored at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dr. Reinberg said he lost all of his mice: nine strains, including more than 1,000 animals that died in the storm surge. But he managed to save all of the cell extracts by moving some containers into freezers at N.Y.U. labs that weren't affected and others to the Rockefeller, Columbia and Cornell medical centers, each of which cleared space, he said.

"We were able to save many things; it was just phenomenal to get that kind of help," said Dr. Reinberg, whose house in New Jersey has had no power.

"Later in the week, at a Starbucks, I could finally download all my e-mail, and there were messages from people at the University of Pennsylvania and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, asking how they could help us re-establish the mouse lines we lost," he said.

Some scientists have become interdependent because their students, who develop a specialty in specific tissues or animals, often move among labs. Research projects sometimes draw on experiments or analyses the students worked on at more than one place.

One researcher working in Dr. Fishell's lab was formerly a student of Dr. Stewart Anderson of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who sent Dr. Fishell a text message on Wednesday to offer help. "I told him that even if it costs money, we're happy to keep experiments rolling, if we're able to," Dr. Anderson said.

By late Thursday, freezer space in minus-112-degree units was extremely tight in the city. So was dry ice.

Susan Zolla-Pazner, director of AIDS research at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had lost power in her 18th-floor lab in the department's building at 23rd Street and First Avenue. She finally hired a company to haul her 20 freezers-full of specimens, for safekeeping.

"We spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday hauling 1,300 pounds of dry ice up to the 18th floor, using the stairs, to stabilize the freezers first," said Dr. Zolla-Pazner, who is also a professor of pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. "And the dry ice people would only take cash. I have about 25 to 30 people working for me, and everyone was out there on 23rd Street, reaching into their pockets to get what we needed. It was a herculean and heroic effort on the part of everyone here, and that is the story that needs to be told."

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Protecting New York City, Before Next Time

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio

URBAN WETLANDS A rendering of Lower Manhattan that shows tidal marshes to absorb waves.

Arriving in Venice years ago, Robert Benchley, the New York journalist and wit, is said to have sent a mock-panicked telegram to his editor: "Streets flooded. Please advise."

After the enormous storm last week, which genuinely panicked New York with its staggering and often fatal violence, residents here could certainly identify with the first line of Benchley's note. But what about the second?

If, as climate experts say, sea levels in the region have not only gradually increased, but are also likely to get higher as time goes by, then the question is: What is the way forward? Does the city continue to build ever-sturdier and ever-higher sea walls? Or does it accept the uncomfortable idea that parts of New York will occasionally flood and that the smarter method is to make the local infrastructure more elastic and better able to recover?

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday gave a sea wall the nod. Because of the recent history of powerful storms hitting the area, he said, elected officials have a responsibility to consider new and innovative plans to prevent similar damage in the future. "Climate change is a reality," Mr. Cuomo said. "Given the frequency of these extreme weather situations we have had, for us to sit here today and say this is once in a generation and it's not going to happen again, I think would be shortsighted."

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The water rose in Dumbo, Brooklyn, on Monday.

But some experts in the field who have thought deeply about how to protect New York from huge storms like Hurricane Sandy — and especially from the coastal surges they produce — suggested that less intrusive forms of so-called soft infrastructure might prove more effective in sheltering the city than mammoth Venetian sea walls. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seemed to agree with them on Thursday when he said: "I don't think there's any practical way to build barriers in the oceans. Even if you spent a fortune, it's not clear to me that you would get much value for it."

According to the experts — architects, environmentalists and civil engineers — large-scale projects like underwater gates are expensive, cumbersome and difficult to build. More important, they say, such undertakings are binary projects that work just fine until the moment they do not.

Whatever the way forward, Klaus H. Jacob, a Columbia University seismologist and an expert on urban environmental disasters, said the century-event of Hurricane Sandy could become, because of rising seas alone, an annual occurrence by 2100.

"We know what we have to do," said Dr. Jacob, who predicted last week's tragedy with eerily prescient detail in a 2011 report. "The question is when do we get beyond talking and get to action."

Among those actions already proposed are relatively minor alterations to the building code, to ban housing boilers and electrical systems in basements, and slightly more apocalyptic strategies, like one known as managed retreat, in which people would cede low-lying areas to the sea. While no one is calling for a mass and permanent exodus from the Rockaways, for instance, some experts, like Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia University, said that as parts of New York became more difficult — and costly — to protect, managed retreat needed at least to become "part of the public discussion."

Here, then, are three proposals — some traditional, some fantastic, but all at least theoretically workable — designed to reduce the effects of storms like Hurricane Sandy on three especially vulnerable New York neighborhoods: Lower Manhattan, the Red Hook and Gowanus sections of Brooklyn, and the northern shore of Staten Island.

Lower Manhattan

Marshy Edges, Absorptive Streets

Picture a fringe of mossy wetlands strapped like a beard to Lower Manhattan's chin, and you are halfway toward imagining the plan to protect the financial district and its environs dreamed up by the architect Stephen Cassell and a team from his firm, Architecture Research Office, and a partner firm, dlandstudio.

"Our goal was to design a more resilient city," Mr. Cassell said. "We may not always be able to keep the water out, so we wanted to improve the edges and the streets of the city to deal with flooding in a more robust way."

Among the most disturbing images to emerge from the aftermath of the storm was that of a pile of cars floating upended in the waters of a parking lot near Wall Street. Lower Manhattan, where most of the borough's power failures occurred, is vulnerable to floods like this not just because it sits low in relation to the sea; it also juts out on heaps of artificial landfill, into the fickle waters of New York Harbor. It is probably not coincidental that the flooded areas of Manhattan, largely correspond to the island's prelandfill borders.

To prevent incursions by water, Mr. Cassell and his planners imagined ringing Lower Manhattan with a grassy network of land-based parks accompanied by watery patches of wetlands and tidal salt marshes. At Battery Park, for instance, the marshes would weave through a series of breakwater islands made of geo-textile tubes and covered with marine plantings. On the Lower East Side of the island, Mr. Cassell and his team envisioned extending Manhattan by a block or two — with additional landfill — to create space for another new park and a salt marsh.

Beyond serving as recreation areas, these engineered green spaces would sop up and reduce the force of incoming water.

"When there's a storm surge, it creates an enormous amount of energy," Mr. Cassell said. "Wetlands absorb that energy and protect the coastline."

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

After Getting Back to Normal, the Big Job Is to Face a New Reality

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Workers shoveled sand from a garage in Long Beach, N.Y. on Sunday.

First, life has to be rewound to Friday, Oct. 26 — the last weekday before Hurricane Sandy crippled and disoriented the New York area. To make that happen, repairs to damaged power grids, transportation networks and housing will grind on for weeks, if not months, at a staggering cost.

But the bigger question is what occurs after that.

Basic restoration leaves everything just as vulnerable to the next monster storm. Hurricane Sandy is now a gauge of the region's new fragility. Climate change and extreme weather are presenting government — and the public — with some overwhelming choices.

The authorities must not only reopen the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, but also ponder whether to put up sea gates or install inflatable plugs to protect it. Shorted-out circuits in Consolidated Edison's flooded substation in the East Village stand a foot off the ground in metal sheds. They always seemed impervious to flooding but no longer are.

In New Jersey, the historic Hoboken train terminal had five feet of water sloshing in the waiting room and switches and power substations exposed to salt water. Will it do just to dry them out?

More broadly, officials must ask whether it is sensible to replace buildings on the Manhattan waterfront, the Jersey Shore or the Long Island coast — and continue to dare nature. After all, the waters surrounding New York have been rising an inch a decade, and the pace is picking up.

In recent days, elected officials, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, have warned that bold steps are needed, that to simply mop up is a fool's errand. Experts agree.

"It's a no-brainer for New York," said J. David Rogers, a professor of geological engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

"You've got such enormous assets and infrastructure that you want to protect."

But some experts also say that after rhythms return to normal, a no longer frazzled public may rebel if taxes and fees rise sharply to pay for better defenses.

The cost of the repairs alone will certainly reach tens of billions of dollars. Far-reaching solutions will cost many billions more.

And the cost of not doing them, Professor Rogers said, includes the threat that disrupted businesses might abandon an environment that feels unsafe. New Orleans, he noted, was the banking and insurance capital of the South until the great flood of 1927.

There is evidence of what is possible. The Netherlands, one of the world's lowest-lying countries, has made storm protection a function of national security.

Following the severe flooding in 1953 that killed more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands, the Dutch strengthened their oceanfront defenses to what is known as 10,000-year protection — something that will repel a menace that has a 0.0001 percent chance of occurring in a given year. With climate change rejiggering storm calculations, there is talk of elevating that protection to the 100,000-year level.

Not that the Dutch system has an unblemished record of success. Environmental experts point out that by the 1970s, the large-scale building projects had caused environmental damage.

More recent efforts to harmonize the defenses with nature leave enormous gates open to allow water to flow. The gates can be shut in the face of a storm.

In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers erected 100-year protection after Hurricane Katrina. Already, most experts feel it is inadequate; efforts are under way to imagine a 500-year defense system, though such an undertaking remains years away.

While New York building codes generally set standards to account for 100-year protection, Professor Rogers said he believed that the city should consider nothing less than 500-year protection.

Few Simple Solutions

Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, an independent urban research group, said the region should consider measures like storm barriers and sea gates, as well as better ways to seal transit stations, tunnels and utility plants against water.

Power companies, he said, need to rethink continually putting wires back on telephone poles — when winds knock them down — rather than burying them, as costly as that can be. Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said he was unimpressed by the aggressive plans trumpeted by some politicians, including those that call for a levee around New York. Some solutions could end up causing more problems, Professor Bea said.

He said tightening and improving the current system might be more sensible than an enormous new system. "At least with the current system, you know where it's weak," he said.

In New Jersey, the storm surge swamped the electric switch yards and substations of Public Service Electric and Gas. But Ralph LaRossa, the utility's president, expressed skepticism about the need for making all of its equipment stormproof.

Reporting was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, David W. Chen, Patrick McGeehan and John Schwartz.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Scientist at Work Blog: The Majesty of Rinchen Zoe

Aaron Putnam, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, is a leader of an expedition to Bhutan to examine links among climate, glaciers and water resources in the Himalaya.

Wednesday, Oct. 3

A slow morning followed our long slog to the Darlay Marpo campsite, at 4,700 meters (about 15,400 feet) above sea level. David Putnam and Paul Krusic, among others, suffered from nausea and headaches that were probably a result of a combination of dehydration and altitude. Still not all horses, and hence not all equipment, had arrived at our camp.

It turns out that confusion among horsemen led to our gear's being deposited at a camp downstream. The marginal health of our group, as well as the lack of essential equipment, prohibited us from making the final push to high camp for yet another day. However, conditions were clearer and brighter, adding a much-needed psychological boost, particularly for those who were in recovery.

In the morning, some of us worked to diagnose and repair problems that had arisen with the generator. I then took the opportunity in the afternoon to venture a few kilometers (about two miles) up valley to the edge of our field area at 5,100 meters (about 16,700 feet) above sea level.

I could still feel myself adjusting to the effects of altitude while climbing the steep morainal slope that brought me to the edge of our field area. However, as I crested the final ridge, all of my physical woes were forgotten as I witnessed, for the first time, the majestic, glacier-covered landscape of the Rinchen Zoe region.

Until that point, all of my knowledge of the area came from inspecting aerial photographs and reading painfully brief online accounts of treks through the region. And finally, after a year of planning and six days of walking uphill, I saw with my own eyes the landscape that holds the clues to unraveling the climate mysteries of Shangri La.

Directly before me lay moraine ridges peppered with massive granite boulders, signifying colder times with more extensive glacier ice. I could see the modern remnants of that former glacier in the distance; its melting terminus has since receded onto steep granite cliffs, and the resulting icefalls resemble the teeth of a dragon.

It was from this first impression that I devised later, with help from Tshewan Rigzin (of the Hydro-Meteorological Services Division), the informal name Drukso Gangri (Dragon Tooth Ice Mountain/Glacier).

After investigating the ridges of old glacial debris for roughly half an hour, I was satisfied that the integrity of the landforms and boulders would be suitable for developing a detailed map and robust chronology of past glaciation.

I then bounded back to Darlay Marpo camp. With each step downward I felt more energetic, perhaps due to a combination of increased oxygen supply and the sheer excitement of having finally seen this area that I had, until just then, only dreamed of studying. I returned to our site to report on both the scientific qualities of the field area and the sheer beauty of the region.

That evening we designed plans for the next day. Because the members of the glaciology team are faced with a very short time frame in which to complete their work, we decided that we would split into two groups the next day.

Ed Cook and Karma Tenzin would stay at Darlay Marpo to examine the high, frost-beaten juniper shrubs, while the rest of us would make our way to high camp at the mouth of Tachanggay Tso, the glacier-fed lake at the heart of our field site.

Once at high camp, Summer Rupper and Josh Maurer would work with Tshewan and Pashu Pati Ssarma, both of the Hydro-Meteorological Services Division, to erect the automatic weather station.

Meanwhile, Mike Roberts and I would venture high onto the glacier itself to scout a safe access route and outline a longitudinal transect along which Summer and Josh could implant stakes to monitor glacier melt and accumulation rates.

The next morning we executed the plan early. One shipment of gear had already been sent to our high campsite at Tachanggay Tso. Mike, Summer, Josh and I clambered up to our high campsite to assess the surroundings. It was gorgeous weather, and Drukso Gangri was illuminated from top to bottom, providing an ideal opportunity for Mike and me to scout a safe access route.

From the southern end of the lake we peered northward to the glacier. The best approach appeared to be onto the lower, melting portion of the glacier at its western end. We thought that we could access the ice by traveling along the western lateral moraine ridge that towered above the lake. The only catch was that we could not see what might lie between the uppermost portion of the lateral moraine and the glacier itself. It could be a nice bedrock bench, or it could be a deep, impassable chasm. We had no idea. The only way to find out was to see it with our own eyes.

With that, Mike and I set out for the glacier by climbing the long lateral moraine ridge that led toward the western edge of Drukso Gangri. After about an hour of boulder-hopping and scrambling, we reached an overlook that allowed us to assess the landscape between the moraine ridge and the glacier margin. To our delight, it indeed was a broad, gentle valley of glacially transported boulders draped over bedrock. There was a river gorge, but it was easily avoidable.

We meandered our way across the boulder field, and finally, at long last, reached the edge of the ice.

The lower, western edge of Drukso Gangri is a gentle glacier slope that is in complete ablation. Swirls of contorted, fine-grained debris bands are being exposed at the glacier surface.

Upon reaching the ice edge, Mike and I stepped into our harnesses, snapped on our crampons and walked onto the ice. We headed toward the lowest possible elevation that we could reach safely on the glacier, and wedged a bamboo stake into a crevasse that would mark the lower end of Summer and Josh's transect.

The ice was bare and most crevasses were visible, making navigation on the ice straightforward. We climbed upward along the glacier, marking more points, until we reached the base of what appeared to be a navigable icefall.

We ended the transect at about 5,340 meters (17,520 feet) above sea level, which accounted for nearly 100 meters of vertical relief along which Summer and Josh will measure glacier melt.

After registering GPS waypoints, Mike and I descended from the glacier and headed back to camp as darkness descended. We finally arrived at camp in a tired but euphoric mood, and we reported our success to the others. Finally, having reached our field area after six hard days of travel, we have confirmed that all aspects of the landscape will be suitable for our moraine and glacier work. Time to get to work!

Editor's Note:

Correction: An earlier version of this post had the incorrect height for the level at which Aaron Putnam and Mike Roberts marked the transect. It was 5,340 meters, not 15,340.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Observatory: Surrounded by Humans, Elephant in South Korea Learns to ‘Speak’

Current Biology

Angela Stoeger and Daniel Mietchen recording Koshik's vocalizations at the Everland Zoo in South Korea.

At the Everland Zoo in South Korea, there is a young male elephant that can speak Korean.

His vocabulary includes "annyong" (hello), "anja" (sit down), "aniya" (no), "nuo" (lie down) and "choah" (good). Researchers say the elephant, whose name is Koshik, vocalizes in a novel way: He puts his trunk in his mouth.

The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.

"We asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard, and they understood him," said Angela S. Stoeger, a biologist at the University of Vienna and one of the study's authors. "We also compared his imitative vocalizations with that of other elephants, and it was very different."

In fact, Koshik seems to imitate the pitch and timbre of human speech, and of his trainers in particular.

The researchers think that Koshik started imitating human speech out of a need to socialize. For seven years when he was a juvenile and at a critical stage in his development, he was the only elephant at Everland Zoo.

"He adapted vocalizations to his human companions, the only social contact he had," Dr. Stoeger said.

It is not clear, however, how much Koshik understands, or whether he is capable of learning more. While he seems to know the meaning of "sit," for instance, he does not expect his trainers to sit when he says the word himself.

"He's basically using this as a social function, but not really to communicate with the keepers," Dr. Stoeger said.

Since 2002, Koshik has had a female Asian elephant as a companion. Although he interacts and socializes with her using typical calls, he also continues to produce his Korean utterances with the people around him.

Previously, Dr. Stoeger and her colleagues discovered an African elephant that imitates the sound of truck engines and another African elephant that imitates the sounds of the Asian elephants that it grew up near.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 2, 2012

The caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the University of Vienna researcher who described vocalizations by a young elephant in South Korea. She is Angela S. Stoeger, not Ashley.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More