Understanding Donor Behavior to Increase Contributions

JEN SHANG understands the power of prayer — to open wallets.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Jen Shang specializes in the psychology of giving.

Ms. Shang, who bills herself as the only philanthropic psychologist in the world, recently advised a religious organization to tinker with a direct-mail fund-raising solicitation, to encourage potential donors to pray before deciding to give.

Some religious people, Ms. Shang found, "pray and read Bibles when making a major life decision before they talk to others, think about it, meditate about it, let their emotions cool down."

The experiment paid off. In early research, the solicitation with the suggestion of prayer "significantly" increased the campaign's response rate compared with previous appeals.

In the following edited and condensed conversation, Ms. Shang, who is on leave from her position as assistant professor at the Center of Philanthropy at Indiana University to teach at the University of Bristol in Britain, delves into donor behavior and shares some simple ways for nonprofit organizations to increase donations.

Q. Describe the different psychological hurdles donors must jump over before they open their wallets.

A. Grabbing a donor's attention is the very first psychological step that a supporter takes during a potentially lifelong journey that they take with a charity. This is the step where donors become aware of the existence of a giving opportunity. To give money, people need to then be satisfied with the ways that organizations treat them as supporters. They need to trust the organization to best achieve what they would like to achieve with their limited funds. They need to commit to supporting the organizations in such a way that the commitment itself is meaningful to them as individuals. The psychological transformation from paying attention to giving money is the process of integrating that cause from the external world into one's most inner sense of who they are.

Q. Some nonprofits rely on stark imagery of starving children or earthquake victims in appeals. Do those images motivate or dissuade donors?

A. Speaking from the charities' perspective, they do not "rely" on those images per se. They strategically use those images to portray the case for support for individual donations during a particular time period during a supporter's relationship with a charity. At the beginning stage of this relationship, donors might be attracted to the organization through those images. Then they might get to know a bit more about all the great things that these charities are doing, and then their giving is not directly related to the images anymore, so that they would continue to give even without the images.

Q. You write that nonprofits can increase contributions "by changing a handful of words in a solicitation." What are those magic words?

A. There are nine adjectives Americans use to describe a moral person: kind, caring, compassionate, helpful, friendly, fair, hard-working, generous and honest. Charities can randomly select a couple of adjectives from those nine words and use them in their fund-raising solicitations when appropriate. We've found that women then increase their giving on average by 10 percent.

Q. What words in solicitations prompt men to give more?

A. The adjectives that male donors used during our focus groups include strong, responsible and loyal.

Q. How important is it for nonprofits to thank donors?

A. It's extremely, extremely, extremely important for nonprofits to thank people properly.

Q. Define "properly."

A. It's done immediately, the first opportunity they get to thank people. When they thank people, they need to make sure that with first-time donors they are really taking a donor on a journey that this person will travel with the nonprofit to achieve some social goal. Thanking needs to serve the purpose of holding the donor's hand on this exciting journey.

Q. How common is it for donors to cite atonement as a motivation for a gift?

A. Of all the people I have studied, a few thousand, I cannot recall anybody mentioning atonement as their primary motivation for a gift. This includes people supporting faith-based organizations.

Q. Several celebrity billionaires, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, announced plans in recent years to spend much of their fortunes on philanthropy. How does what's been called "conspicuous charity" influence donors with more modest budgets? Could a potential donor feel as if their gift is inconsequential?

A. No. That usually doesn't even come into the discussion. If a charity is doing its job right, every single donor feels that they are valued, and every single donor knows exactly how their donation is being spent and the difference their donation makes.

Q. You've interviewed many millionaires as well as donors of modest means. Does wealth influence donor behavior?

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Malaria Vaccine Candidate Produces Disappointing Results in Clinical Trial

The latest clinical trial of the world's leading malaria vaccine candidate produced disappointing results on Friday. The infants it was given to had only about a third fewer infections than a control group.

But researchers said they wanted to press on, assuming they keep getting financial support, because the number of children who die of malaria is so great that even an inefficient vaccine can save thousands of lives.

Three shots of the vaccine, known as RTS, S or Mosquirix and produced by GlaxoSmithKline, gave babies fewer than 12 weeks old 31 percent protection against detectable malaria and 37 percent protection against severe malaria, according to an announcement by the company at a vaccines conference in Cape Town.

Last year, in a trial in children up to 17 months old, the same vaccine gave 55 percent protection against detectable malaria and 47 percent against severe malaria.

The new trial "is less than we'd hoped for," Moncef Slaoui, chairman of research and development at Glaxo, said in a telephone interview. "But if a million babies were vaccinated, we would prevent 260,000 cases of malaria a year. This is a disease that kills 655,000 babies a year — 31 percent of that is a very large number."

The company, which has already spent more than $300 million on the vaccine, wants to keep forging ahead, Mr. Slaoui said, "but it is not just our decision."

It also depends on the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which has put more than $200 million of its Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financing into the vaccine, and on the World Health Organization, which has helped talk seven African countries into allowing the vaccine to be tested on their children.

The Gates Foundation declined to say how much money it was ultimately prepared to spend on an imperfect vaccine; this set of trials is set to go into 2014.

"The efficacy came back lower than we had hoped, but developing a vaccine against a parasite is a very hard thing to do," Bill Gates said in a prepared statement. "The trial is continuing, and we look forward to getting more data to help determine whether and how to deploy this vaccine."

All the families in the trial were given insecticide-treated mosquito nets and encouraged to use them; 86 percent did, so the vaccine's results were achieved on top of other anti-malaria measures.

RTS, S contains a protein found on the parasite's surface that provokes an immune reaction. It was first identified decades ago by two New York University scientists, Ruth and Victor Nussenzweig. The vaccine was developed by Glaxo in Belgium and initially tested on American volunteers by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

When the Gates Foundation began focusing on global health in the early part of this century, it was one of the first projects the foundation adopted. Different ways to make the vaccine more effective, including adding different boosters and giving more shots, are being experimented with. Other vaccines using different ways to provoke an immune reaction exist, but none are as far along in clinical trials.

Like an H.I.V. vaccine, one against malaria has proved an elusive goal. The parasite morphs several times, exhibiting different surface proteins as it goes from mosquito saliva into blood and then into and out of the liver. Also, even the best natural "vaccine" — catching the disease itself — is not very effective. While one bout of measles immunizes a child for life, it usually takes several bouts of malaria to confer even partial immunity. Pregnancy can cause women to stop being immune, and immunity can fade out if someone moves away from a malarial area — presumably because they no longer get "boosters" from repeated mosquito bites.

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Climate Change Report Outlines Perils for U.S. Military

WASHINGTON — Climate change is accelerating, and it will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe, the nation's top scientific research group said in a report issued Friday.

The group, the National Research Council, says in a study commissioned by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems.

Hurricane Sandy provided a foretaste of what can be expected more often in the near future, the report's lead author, John D. Steinbruner, said in an interview.

"This is the sort of thing we were talking about," said Mr. Steinbruner, a longtime authority on national security. "You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we're saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this was an example of what they could mean. We're also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that."

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. "We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there's no uncertainty about that — but we just don't know the details," he said. "We do know they will be big."

The study was released 10 days late: its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.

Climate-driven crises could lead to internal instability or international conflict and might force the United States to provide humanitarian assistance or, in some cases, military force to protect vital energy, economic or other interests, the study said.

The Defense Department has already taken major steps to plan for and adapt to climate change and has spent billions of dollars to make ships, aircraft and vehicles more fuel-efficient. Nonetheless, the 206-page study warns in sometimes bureaucratic language, the United States is ill prepared to assess and prepare for the catastrophes that a heated planet will produce.

"It is prudent to expect that over the course of a decade some climate events — including single events, conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence in particular locations, and events affecting globally integrated systems that provide for human well-being — will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global system to manage and that have global security implications serious enough to compel international response," the report states.

In other words, states will fail, large populations subjected to famine, flood or disease will migrate across international borders, and national and international agencies will not have the resources to cope.

The report cites the simultaneous heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2010 as disparate but linked climate-related events that taxed those societies.

It also cites the Nile River watershed as a place where climate-related conflict over water and farmland could arise as the combined populations of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia approach 300 million. South Korea and Saudi Arabia have purchased fertile land in the Nile watershed to produce crops to feed their people, but local forces could decide to seize the crops for their own use, potentially leading to international conflict, the report says.

The 18-month study is not the first such report from government agencies or research organizations to draw a direct link between climate change and national security concerns.

The National Intelligence Council produced a classified national intelligence estimate on climate change in 2008 and has issued a number of unclassified reports since then. The Pentagon and the White House have also highlighted the role of climate change in humanitarian crises and security threats.

The National Research Council recommends in the new report that all government agencies improve their ability to monitor the global climate and assess the risks to populations and critical resources around the world.

Yet Mr. Steinbruner said that as the need for more and better analysis is growing, government resources devoted to them are shrinking. Republicans in Congress objected to the C.I.A.'s creation of a climate change center and tried to deny money for it. The American weather satellite program is losing capability because of years of underfinancing and mismanagement, imperiling the ability to predict and monitor major storms.

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Square Feet: Geothermal Energy Advocates Hope Systems Get a Second Look

Advocates for geothermal energy say that the path of destruction cut by Hurricane Sandy, which unearthed fuel tanks, ravaged cooling towers and battered air-conditioners, has already persuaded some building owners to switch to geothermal systems that use underground pipes to harness the earth's energy for heating and cooling buildings.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The geothermal energy system at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, installed in 2007 at a cost of $675,000.

"We're seeing dozens of these half-empty and empty oil tanks just popping up all over the place in the flooded areas," said David E. Reardon, the manager of geothermal drilling for the Miller Environmental Group, an environmental response, remediation and restoration services company based in Calverton on Long Island that has been involved in poststorm environmental cleanup throughout the region.

"Those tanks become buoyant in all that water," he said. But since geothermal systems don't use fossil fuels or mechanical systems that are exposed to the elements, Mr. Reardon said, he started fielding calls from people asking for estimates on geothermal systems just days after the storm. "Often it's a case where they were considering doing it, but were waiting for something to finally no longer be able to be repaired," he said, and the storm has ended that wait.

Geothermal energy systems, common in countries like Iceland and China, use the constant temperature of the earth to heat and cool buildings.

Geothermal wells are dug to a depth where the earth regulates the temperature of water or a liquid circulating through the system. Geothermal systems may require one well or dozens to regulate a building's temperature, depending on the size of a building and type of system installed. While the systems are called wells, they are actually an underground network of pipes connected to heat pumps to circulate water or some other liquid.

Because digging geothermal wells can be expensive and logistically difficult, the systems have been slow to catch on in New York City. Yet, according to the Rockefeller Foundation and DB Climate Change Advisors, "buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the world's primary energy and are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions," said Jack DiEnna, the executive director of the Geothermal Heat Pump National and International Initiative, based in Washington.

Installing a geothermal system can significantly reduce a building's carbon footprint, and over the last decade, the number of geothermal heat pump systems in the city has grown steadily. More geothermal systems are installed in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the United States.

Most systems are being installed in institutional buildings, multifamily residential buildings and relatively small commercial buildings. There have been systems installed by several prominent organizations and sites in the city, including the American Institute of Architects, the Times Square TKTS Booth, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Queens Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo Lion House. In some of the outer boroughs and the suburbs, geothermal systems for single-family homes are also becoming more popular.

In all, more than 100 geothermal projects are in operation in the five boroughs, and about 90 percent of those projects are what are known as closed loop vertical bore systems, Mr. DiEnna said. A closed loop system is sealed from the ground and liquids are reused within the system, while an open loop system has discharge water it releases into a ground well or surface water.

Because building sites in the city, particularly Manhattan, tend to be small, the wells tend to be vertical, just like the buildings. Manhattan is not an ideal location for geothermal heat pump systems, because the wells must go so deep — to depths of roughly 1,500 feet — to reach the volume of land necessary to provide a constant temperature. In other areas with more available land, a geothermal heat pump system can be more spread out and much shallower, making it less costly to dig.

Elsewhere, larger scale geothermal projects known as enhanced geothermal systems have raised serious concerns because these larger power-production projects involve drilling wells down to tens of thousands of feet and fracturing the bedrock so water can be injected to create steam.

A few years ago, a project in Switzerland was shut down after it caused small earthquakes, and another project in Northern California was also stopped because of similar concerns. But the static, small-scale geothermal heat pump systems installed in the New York area bear little relation to these projects, said Daniel P. Schrag, a professor of geology and director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard.

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After Hurricane Sandy, Debating Costly Sea Barriers in New York Area

As the storm chugged toward the Eastern Seaboard at 3 p.m. on Oct. 27, an engineering crew in Stamford, Conn., was at the ready. It was time.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

An aerial view of the hurricane barrier site in Stamford, Conn., in 1986. An expert estimates that any such barrier system to block storm surges in the low-lying areas of New York City would cost at least $10 billion to $17 billion.

With the click of a computer mouse, machinery on the seafloor groaned into action and a gate was slowly pulled from the deep, locking into place high above the surge from Long Island Sound.

Two days later, when storm waters from Hurricane Sandy ripped through the East Coast, much of Stamford, a city of 124,000, sat securely behind a 17-foot-high barrier that easily blocked an 11-foot surge.

The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the two-mile-long barrier system, completed in 1969, helped prevent about $25 million in damage to businesses and homes. The protected area encompasses about 600 acres, including downtown Stamford.

Stamford's mayor, Michael A. Pavia, said: "It was extremely effective in protecting areas that would have been flooded completely by this storm. It made all the difference in the world."

The technology of movable sea barriers, from Stamford's modest flap gate to London's mighty 10-gate system in the River Thames, has long intrigued engineers and planners contemplating a solution for low-lying areas of New York City. The notion is that such a system could one day block surges from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.

Now, in the aftermath of the devastating storm, one question is front and center: Should New York armor itself with steel and concrete at a cost of billions of dollars?

Experts whose barrier designs and studies from a conference in 2009 were issued on Monday in book form argue that anything short of sea gates would be a "Band-Aid" approach.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed wariness about the barrier proposal, saying he is not sure the gates would work well enough. Yet, it is clear that his administration's view is evolving.

Jeroen Aerts, a researcher with the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands who was hired by New York in 2009 to assess flood risks and protections, said officials initially preferred to focus on cheaper and less-intrusive options like flood-proofing buildings and expanding wetlands to absorb more water.

The assumption, he said, was that unlike New Orleans, New York City is far enough above sea level and skilled enough at evacuations that it could prevent a major loss of lives.

The turning point was Tropical Storm Irene, which in August 2011 mostly skirted the city but pummeled other coastal areas in the region. After that storm, the mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability asked Dr. Aerts, a geographer and an expert on water risk management and climate, to compare the costs and benefits of barriers with those of smaller-scale changes like building levees around sewage treatment plants and elevating subway stations.

Dr. Aerts, who is expected to present a draft of his findings in January, estimates that any barrier system would cost $10 billion to $17 billion. New York would need $10 billion to $12 billion more to shore up the areas on the sides of the barriers, he added. Still, he said, the city should consider building the barriers.

Brian A. Colle, a professor of atmospheric science who is part of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, contends that barriers would have made a big difference when the storm pounded the area last week.

He said that if gates had been placed in strategic spots like the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey, they would have protected some of the areas that were swamped by floodwaters, including the edges of Lower Manhattan, low-lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens and the western part of Staten Island, as well as Jersey City and Hoboken, N.J.

"The idea is that you raise these barriers, and anywhere inside of that you're basically protected," Dr. Colle said, adding, "With a solid barrier, we basically can have business as usual in Lower Manhattan."

But vexing questions remain. Would industries tolerate immense disruption from the construction of barriers in the city's busy waterways? Would residents object to the marring of vistas? With climate change advancing, can scientists accurately predict the size of hurricanes that the sea gates would one day have to withstand?

And where would the $10 billion-plus in construction money come from? Even a study — taking into account the complexity of New York waterways, projections in the rise in sea levels and other factors — would take years and millions of dollars.

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Observatory: For Maya, Climate Change May Have Been Blessing and Curse

Douglas Kennett/Penn State

A pyramid in Caracol, Belize. The Maya culture thrived in rainy times but collapsed in turmoil during times of drought, according to new research.

The ancient Maya civilization may have risen — and then fallen — in response to climate change, scientists report after creating precise climate records going back 2,000 years.

The researchers, whose findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science, reconstructed rainfall patterns using cross-sections of stalagmites from a cave near the ancient city of Uxbenka, in what is now southern Belize. First, they dated the samples with the technique called uranium-thorium dating; then, to generate a climate record, they measured oxygen isotopes, which are sensitive to rainfall.

The early classic Maya period — about A.D. 450 to 660 — "was remarkably wet," said an author of the study, Douglas Kennett, a geo-archaeologist at Penn State. "There was a proliferation of population, an increase in agriculture and a rise in divine kings that became prominent leaders."

But then things dried up. The researchers compared the climate record with an existing "war index" — a log of hostile events based on how often certain keywords occurred in Maya inscriptions on stone monuments — and found a strong correlation between drought and warfare between cities.

"About A.D. 660, you get indications of some social stress that goes up in tandem with this drying period," Dr. Kennett said.

Maya cities were linked, but each operated with its own autonomous political structure. When resources were strained, the groups may have turned against one another.

Over several hundred years, "the social fabric was eventually destabilized," Dr. Kennett said. Most Maya cities collapsed between A.D. 800 and 900.

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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.

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Square Feet: Geothermal Energy Advocates Hope Systems Get a Second Look

Advocates for geothermal energy say that the path of destruction cut by Hurricane Sandy, which unearthed fuel tanks, ravaged cooling towers and battered air-conditioners, has already persuaded some building owners to switch to geothermal systems that use underground pipes to harness the earth's energy for heating and cooling buildings.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The geothermal energy system at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, installed in 2007 at a cost of $675,000.

"We're seeing dozens of these half-empty and empty oil tanks just popping up all over the place in the flooded areas," said David E. Reardon, the manager of geothermal drilling for the Miller Environmental Group, an environmental response, remediation and restoration services company based in Calverton on Long Island that has been involved in poststorm environmental cleanup throughout the region.

"Those tanks become buoyant in all that water," he said. But since geothermal systems don't use fossil fuels or mechanical systems that are exposed to the elements, Mr. Reardon said, he started fielding calls from people asking for estimates on geothermal systems just days after the storm. "Often it's a case where they were considering doing it, but were waiting for something to finally no longer be able to be repaired," he said, and the storm has ended that wait.

Geothermal energy systems, common in countries like Iceland and China, use the constant temperature of the earth to heat and cool buildings.

Geothermal wells are dug to a depth where the earth regulates the temperature of water or a liquid circulating through the system. Geothermal systems may require one well or dozens to regulate a building's temperature, depending on the size of a building and type of system installed. While the systems are called wells, they are actually an underground network of pipes connected to heat pumps to circulate water or some other liquid.

Because digging geothermal wells can be expensive and logistically difficult, the systems have been slow to catch on in New York City. Yet, according to the Rockefeller Foundation and DB Climate Change Advisors, "buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the world's primary energy and are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions," said Jack DiEnna, the executive director of the Geothermal Heat Pump National and International Initiative, based in Washington.

Installing a geothermal system can significantly reduce a building's carbon footprint, and over the last decade, the number of geothermal heat pump systems in the city has grown steadily. More geothermal systems are installed in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the United States.

Most systems are being installed in institutional buildings, multifamily residential buildings and relatively small commercial buildings. There have been systems installed by several prominent organizations and sites in the city, including the American Institute of Architects, the Times Square TKTS Booth, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Queens Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo Lion House. In some of the outer boroughs and the suburbs, geothermal systems for single-family homes are also becoming more popular.

In all, more than 100 geothermal projects are in operation in the five boroughs, and about 90 percent of those projects are what are known as closed loop vertical bore systems, Mr. DiEnna said. A closed loop system is sealed from the ground and liquids are reused within the system, while an open loop system has discharge water it releases into a ground well or surface water.

Because building sites in the city, particularly Manhattan, tend to be small, the wells tend to be vertical, just like the buildings. Manhattan is not an ideal location for geothermal heat pump systems, because the wells must go so deep — to depths of roughly 1,500 feet — to reach the volume of land necessary to provide a constant temperature. In other areas with more available land, a geothermal heat pump system can be more spread out and much shallower, making it less costly to dig.

Elsewhere, larger scale geothermal projects known as enhanced geothermal systems have raised serious concerns because these larger power-production projects involve drilling wells down to tens of thousands of feet and fracturing the bedrock so water can be injected to create steam.

A few years ago, a project in Switzerland was shut down after it caused small earthquakes, and another project in Northern California was also stopped because of similar concerns. But the static, small-scale geothermal heat pump systems installed in the New York area bear little relation to these projects, said Daniel P. Schrag, a professor of geology and director of the Center for the Environment at Harvard.

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After Hurricane Sandy, Debating Costly Sea Barriers in New York Area

As the storm chugged toward the Eastern Seaboard at 3 p.m. on Oct. 27, an engineering crew in Stamford, Conn., was at the ready. It was time.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

An aerial view of the hurricane barrier site in Stamford, Conn., in 1986. An expert estimates that any such barrier system to block storm surges in the low-lying areas of New York City would cost at least $10 billion to $17 billion.

With the click of a computer mouse, machinery on the seafloor groaned into action and a gate was slowly pulled from the deep, locking into place high above the surge from Long Island Sound.

Two days later, when storm waters from Hurricane Sandy ripped through the East Coast, much of Stamford, a city of 124,000, sat securely behind a 17-foot-high barrier that easily blocked an 11-foot surge.

The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the two-mile-long barrier system, completed in 1969, helped prevent about $25 million in damage to businesses and homes. The protected area encompasses about 600 acres, including downtown Stamford.

Stamford's mayor, Michael A. Pavia, said: "It was extremely effective in protecting areas that would have been flooded completely by this storm. It made all the difference in the world."

The technology of movable sea barriers, from Stamford's modest flap gate to London's mighty 10-gate system in the River Thames, has long intrigued engineers and planners contemplating a solution for low-lying areas of New York City. The notion is that such a system could one day block surges from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.

Now, in the aftermath of the devastating storm, one question is front and center: Should New York armor itself with steel and concrete at a cost of billions of dollars?

Experts whose barrier designs and studies from a conference in 2009 were issued on Monday in book form argue that anything short of sea gates would be a "Band-Aid" approach.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed wariness about the barrier proposal, saying he is not sure the gates would work well enough. Yet, it is clear that his administration's view is evolving.

Jeroen Aerts, a researcher with the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands who was hired by New York in 2009 to assess flood risks and protections, said officials initially preferred to focus on cheaper and less-intrusive options like flood-proofing buildings and expanding wetlands to absorb more water.

The assumption, he said, was that unlike New Orleans, New York City is far enough above sea level and skilled enough at evacuations that it could prevent a major loss of lives.

The turning point was Tropical Storm Irene, which in August 2011 mostly skirted the city but pummeled other coastal areas in the region. After that storm, the mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability asked Dr. Aerts, a geographer and an expert on water risk management and climate, to compare the costs and benefits of barriers with those of smaller-scale changes like building levees around sewage treatment plants and elevating subway stations.

Dr. Aerts, who is expected to present a draft of his findings in January, estimates that any barrier system would cost $10 billion to $17 billion. New York would need $10 billion to $12 billion more to shore up the areas on the sides of the barriers, he added. Still, he said, the city should consider building the barriers.

Brian A. Colle, a professor of atmospheric science who is part of the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, contends that barriers would have made a big difference when the storm pounded the area last week.

He said that if gates had been placed in strategic spots like the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey, they would have protected some of the areas that were swamped by floodwaters, including the edges of Lower Manhattan, low-lying areas of Brooklyn and Queens and the western part of Staten Island, as well as Jersey City and Hoboken, N.J.

"The idea is that you raise these barriers, and anywhere inside of that you're basically protected," Dr. Colle said, adding, "With a solid barrier, we basically can have business as usual in Lower Manhattan."

But vexing questions remain. Would industries tolerate immense disruption from the construction of barriers in the city's busy waterways? Would residents object to the marring of vistas? With climate change advancing, can scientists accurately predict the size of hurricanes that the sea gates would one day have to withstand?

And where would the $10 billion-plus in construction money come from? Even a study — taking into account the complexity of New York waterways, projections in the rise in sea levels and other factors — would take years and millions of dollars.

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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.

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