MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la RepubblicaSped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

The promises of the robotic age,reported on with enthusiasm in themainstream media and the technol-ogy world, envision a future where ourlives are improved by our new friends

made of metal,wire, transis-tors and imbuedwith artificialintelligence. Thesemachines willhelp us care for el-derly Alzheimer’spatients, teachchildren with be-

havioral disorders and let us manageoffices from afar.

The mind meld of computer andman, known as the Singularity, has taken on religious overtones among

the high priests of technology in Sili-con Valley.

Others are not so sure these prom-ises are a good thing.

“The very idea of artificial intel-ligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending thatmachines can take on more and more human responsibility,” Jaron Lanier, the author of “You Are Not a Gadget,”wrote in The Times. Mr. Lanier, who has titles like “partner architect”at Microsoft and “innovator in resi-dence” at a university, cautions that thinking of robots as fellow creaturesinstead of tools is “reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives inmisguided and ultimately damaging ways.”

A new generation of robots is mak-

ing it possible for workers to seem to be in two places at once, The Times reported. These mobile machines, known as telepresence robots, usu-ally have a computer monitor as the “head” and a body on wheels that al-lows the remote user to move around a room. Some doctors are using these to examine patients from afar. Man-agers are using them to attend meet-ings remotely or roll the robot around an office in California when they areat a desk in Toronto.

While some say these machines let them have “interpersonal connec-tions” during meetings and interactwith people as if they were in thesame room, not all are convinced.

“It’s cool, but it’s a little gimmicky,”Michael Arrington, founder and co-

editor of the technology news Website TechCrunch, told The Times. Al-though he now lives much of the yearin Seattle and manages his SiliconValley Web site from afar, he said hewould consider the robot as a stunt,perhaps for an interview, but not torun his company.

“You can walk around, but you can’t really see what’s going on,” he said.

On a practical level, if robots that are now entering the classroom becomepopular in the teaching field the wayother computing technologies have,John Markoff wrote recently in TheTimes, parents may have questionsthat go beyond ethical and practicalconcerns: “Does this robot really ‘get’my child? Is its teaching style right

for my son’s needs, my daughter’stalents?”

RUBI, a robot which is mounted ona pair of tennis shoes with a screenin its torso, mechanical arms and aboxy head, was successful teachingchildren, according to tests conductedin San Diego, The Times reported. Butthere were some unanticipated prob-lems. Children flocked to RUBI whenit first joined the classroom, but bythe end of the day a couple of boys hadripped off its arms.

“The problem with autonomousmachines is that people are so un-predictable, especially children,”Corinna E. Lathan, chief executive of a Maryland company that makes a remotely controlled robot, CosmoBot, to assist in therapy with develop-mentally delayed children, told The Times. “It’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen.”

TOM BRADY

Doubters in the Church of Technology

V VIMONEY & BUSINESS

Ads that follow you,

from Web site to site.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A habit of debunking

medical myths.

INTELLIGENCE: Roma are a convenient scapegoat, Page II.

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW

GALINA LITVYAK HAD stopped by the

kiosk down the road, wandered through

nearby supermarkets and badgered

friends for the latest rumors. Nobody knew where

to find it. All over her middle-class neighborhood,

the stores were filled with an ample selection of

goods, reflecting just how much Moscow has

changed over the last two decades. With one ex-

ception.

The Great Buckwheat Shortage of 2010 was

not letting up.

As if the summer’s brutal heat, forest fires

and drought were not enough, this country is

now suffering through one final bit of weather-

related misery, a scarcity of a beloved staple

that is causing a kind of national time warp.

Russians like Ms. Litvyak, 72, a retired book-

keeper, are falling back on scrounging habits

honed under Communism. And not liking it.

“I cannot locate buckwheat anywhere, and if

I could, it would be too expensive for me to buy

it,” she said as she entered a sprawling super-

SERGIO COSTA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A scarcity of buckwheat, a beloved staple, has

many Russians in a panic. A shopper outside an

otherwise well-stocked Moscow supermarket.

An Uncertain Harvest A scarcity of available wheat traced to drought, floods, speculation and a Russian export ban

has political leaders and agricultural experts fearing future consequences.

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

UNITED NATIONS

WITH MEMORIES STILL

fresh of food riots set off

by spiking prices just

two years ago, agricultural experts

early this month cast a wary eye on

the steep rise in the cost of wheat

prompted by a Russian export ban

and the questions looming over har-

vests in other parts of the world be-

cause of drought or flooding.

Food prices rose 5 percent glob-

ally during August, according to the

United Nations, spurred mostly by

the higher cost of wheat, and the

first signs of unrest erupted as 10

people died in Mozambique during

clashes ignited partly by a 30 per-

cent leap in the cost of bread. Fol-

lowing the riots, the government

reversed the price increases.

“You are dealing with an unsta-

ble situation,” said Abdolreza

Abbassian, an economist at the

United Nations’ Food and Agricul-

ture Organization in Rome.

“People still remember what hap-

pened a few years ago, so it is a

combination of psychology and the

expectation that worse may come,”

he added. “There are critical months

ahead.“

The Food and Agriculture Orga-

nization has called a special session

of grain experts from around the

world on September 24 to address

the supply question. Given that the

fields stretching out from the Black

Sea have been the main source of a

huge leap in wheat trade over the

past decade, the fluctuating weather

patterns and unstable harvests

there will have to be addressed, he

said.

It is an issue not limited to Russia

alone. Harvest forecasts in Ger-

many and Canada are clouded by

wet weather and flooding, while

Con tin ued on Page IV

Con tin ued on Page IV

Food costs are

rising around the

world, spurred

in part by poor

harvests. An

increase in the

price of bread

led to riots

in Maputo,

Mozambique,

causing 10

deaths. The

government later

backed down. A

young protester

in Maputo.

IIIWORLD TRENDS

Angry patients,

frightened doctors.

LENS

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 III

By MARTIN FACKLER

KYOTO, Japan — The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the schoolgate, using bullhorns to call the students cock-roaches and Korean spies.

The December episode was the first in a series of demonstrations at the Kyoto No. 1 Korean El-ementary School that shocked conflict-averseJapan, where even political protesters on theradical fringes are expected to avoid embroiling regular citizens, much less children. Responding to public outrage, the police arrested four of theprotesters last month.

More significantly, the protests signaled theemergence here of a new type of ultranational-ist group, openly anti-foreign in their message,and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations.

Local news media have dubbed these groups the Net far right, because they are loosely orga-nized via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are avirtual community that maintains its own Web sites .

While these groups remain a small if noisyfringe element here, they have won growing at-tention as an alarming side effect of Japan’s long economic and political decline. Most of theirmembers appear to be young men, many of whomhold the low-paying part-time or contract jobsthat have proliferated in Japan in recent years.

“These are men who feel disenfranchised intheir own society,” said Kensuke Suzuki, a soci-ology professor at Kwansei Gakuin University.“They are looking for someone to blame, and for-eigners are the most obvious target.”

The largest group appears to be the cumber-somely named Citizens Group That Will NotForgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan,known here by its Japanese abbreviation, theZaitokukai, which has some 9,000 members.

The Zaitokukai gained notoriety last year when

it staged noisy protests at the home and junior high school of a 14-year-old Philippine girl, de-manding her deportation after her parents were sent home for overstaying their visas. More re-cently, the Zaitokukai picketed theaters showing“The Cove,” a documentary about dolphin hunt-ing here that rightists branded as anti-Japanese.

In interviews, members of the Zaitokukai and other groups blamed foreigners, particularlyKoreans and Chinese, for Japan’s growing crime and unemployment, and also for what they calledtheir nation’s lack of respect on the world stage.Many seemed to embrace conspiracy theoriestaken from the Internet that China or the UnitedStates were plotting to undermine Japan.

“Japan has a shrinking pie,” said Masaru Ota,37, a medical equipment salesman who headedthe local chapter of the Zaitokukai in Omiya, aTokyo suburb. “Should we be sharing it with for-eigners at a time when Japanese are suffering?”

While the Zaitokukai has grown rapidly since it was started three and a half years ago with just 25 members, it is still largely run by its founder and president, a 38-year-old tax accountant who goes by the assumed name of Makoto Sakurai.Mr. Sakurai leads the group from his tiny office inTokyo’s Akihabara electronics district. He says the group is not racist, and rejected a comparisonwith neo-Nazis.

“They have made Japan powerless to stand upto China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who re-fused to give his real name.

Mr. Sakurai defended the protests at the Ko-rean school in Kyoto as justified to oppose theschool’s use of a nearby public park, which hesaid rightfully belonged to Japanese children.

Teachers and parents at the school called that a flimsy excuse to vent what amounted to racistrage. If Japan doesn’t do something to stop thishate language,” said Park Chung-ha, 43, whoheads the school’s mothers association, “where will it lead to next?”

In Japan, Anti-ForeignProtests Grow Louder

Discontent With DoctorsGrows Violent in China

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

SHENYANG, China — Forget the calls bymany Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city’s 27 public hos-pitals really needed, officials decided in July,was police officers.

The goal: to keep disgruntled patients andtheir relatives from attacking the doctors.

The decision was reversed after Chinesehealth experts argued that the police were pub-lic servants, not bodyguards.

But officials in this hub of nearly eight million people had a point. Chinese hospitals are dan-gerous places. In 2006, the last year the HealthMinistry published statistics on hospital vio-lence, attacks by patients or their relatives in-jured more than 5,500 medical workers.

“I think the police should have a permanent base here,” said a neurosurgeon at Shengjing Hospital. “I always feel this element of dan-ger.”

In June alone, a doctor was stabbed to deathin Shandong Province by the son of a patientwho had died of liver cancer. Three doctorswere severely burned in Shanxi Provincewhen a patient set fire to a hospital office. Apediatrician in Fujian Province was also in-jured after leaping out a fifth-floor window toescape angry relatives of a newborn who haddied under his care.

Over the past year, families of deceased pa-tients have forced doctors to don mourningclothes as a sign of atonement for poor care, andorganized protests to bar hospital entrances.Four years ago, 2,000 people rioted at a hospi-tal after reports that a 3-year-old was refused treatment because his grandfather could notpay $82 in upfront fees. The child died.

Such episodes are on the rise. Officials at all levels of government are on guard against unrest thatcould spiral and threaten theCommunist Party’s power.

Doctors and nurses saythe strains in the relationsbetween them and patients’ relatives are often the re-sult of unrealistic expecta-tions by poor families who,having traveled far and ex-hausted their savings on care, expect medical miracles.

But the violence also reflects much widerdiscontent with China’s public health care sys-tem. Although the government, under Com-munist leadership, once offered rudimentaryhealth care at nominal prices, it pulled back inthe 1990s, leaving hospitals largely to fend for themselves in the new market economy.

By 2000, the World Health Organizationranked China’s health system as one of theworld’s most inequitable, 188th among 191 na-tions. Nearly two of every five sick people wentuntreated. Only one in 10 had health insur-ance.

Over the past seven years, the state has nar-rowed if not eliminated the gap in public healthcare spending with other developing nations of similar income levels, health experts say, pour-

ing tens of billions of dollars into governmentinsurance plans and hospital construction.

The World Bank estimates that more thanthree in four Chinese are now insured, althoughcoverage is often basic. And far more peopleare getting care: the World Bank says hospitaladmissions in rural counties have doubled infive years.

“That is a steep, steep increase,” said JackLangenbrunner, human development coordi-nator at the World Bank’s Beijing office. “Wehaven’t seen that in any other country.”

Still, across much of China, the quality of careremains low. Almost half the nation’s doctors have no better than a high school degree, ac-cording to the Organization for Economic Co-

operation and Development.Many village doctors didnot make it past junior highschool.

Primary care is scarce,so public hospitals — notori-ous for excessive fees — are typically patients’ first stop in cities, even for minor ail-ments.

Once admitted, patientsare at risk of needless surgery.

Patients appear to be even more likely toget useless prescriptions. Drug sales are hos-pitals’ second biggest source of revenue, andmany offer incentives that can lead doctors tooverprescribe .

Meanwhile, doctors seem as unhappy as pa-tients. They complain that they are underpaid,undervalued and mistrusted.

Like some other cities, Shenyang has beenseeking ways to ward off disturbances, includ-ing setting up hospital mediation centers. Still, the city reported 152 “severe conflicts” betweenpatients and doctors last year.

At Hospital No. 5, the memory of a January attack remains fresh. After a doctor referreda patient with a temperature to a fever clinic — standard practice in China — frustrated rela-tives beat the doctor and several nurses with a mop and sticks.

Now a banner strung across the hospital’smain lobby exhorts: “Everyone participate inthe sorting out of the law and order problem!”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DU BIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Both patients and doctors in China are unhappy with the health care system. A

hospital in Shenyang has asked for police protection.

Little training forChinese doctors andlow-quality care.

Li Bibo, Helen Gao and Xin Hui contributed research from Beijing, and Wang Xiao from Shanghai.

Shenyang reported 152 ‘‘severe conflicts’’

at hospitals last year. A doctor examined

an infant at a hospital in July.

Repubblica NewYork

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Direttore responsabile: Ezio MauroVicedirettori: Gregorio Botta,

Dario Cresto-Dina,Massimo Giannini, Angelo Rinaldi

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Supplemento a cura di: Alix Van Buren,Francesco Malgaroli

In recent years, I have often saidto European friends: So, you didn’tlike a world of too much Americanpower? See how you like a worldof too little American power — be-cause it is coming to a geopoliticaltheater near you.

Yes, America has gone from being the supreme victor of World War II,with guns and butter for all, to oneof two superpowers during the coldwar, to the indispensable nationafter winning the cold war, to “TheFrugal Superpower” of today. Getused to it, Americans. That’s ournew nickname. American pacifistsneed not worry any more about“wars of choice.” We’re not doingthat again. We can’t afford to invadeGrenada today.

Ever since the onset of the GreatRecession of 2008, it has been clearthat the nature of being a leader —political or corporate — was chang-ing in America. During most of thepost-World War II era, being a lead-er meant, on balance, giving things

away to people. Today, and for thenext decade at least, being a leaderin America will mean, on balance,taking things away from people.

And there is simply no way thatAmerica’s leaders, as they have totake more things away from theirown voters, are not going to look tosave money on foreign policy andforeign wars. Foreign and defensepolicy is a lagging indicator. A lotof other things get cut first. But thecuts are coming — you can alreadyhear the warnings from Secretaryof Defense Robert Gates. And a fru-gal American superpower is sureto have ripple effects around theglobe.

“The Frugal Superpower: Amer-ica’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era” is actually the titleof a very timely new book by mytutor and friend Michael Mandel-baum, the Johns Hopkins Univer-sity foreign policy expert. “In 2008,”Mandelbaum notes, “all forms ofgovernment-supplied pensions andhealth care (including Medicaid)constituted about 4 percent of totalAmerican output.”

At present rates, and with the ba-by boomers soon starting to drawon Social Security and Medicare,

by 2050 “they will account for a full18 percent of everything the UnitedStates produces.”

This — on top of all the costs ofbailing ourselves out of this reces-sion — “will fundamentally trans-form the public life of the UnitedStates and therefore the country’sforeign policy.” For the past sevendecades, in both foreign affairsand domestic policy, our definingwatchword was “more,” arguesMandelbaum. “The defining fact of foreign policy in the second decadeof the 21st century and beyond willbe ‘less.’ ”

When the world’s only super-power gets weighed down with thismuch debt — to itself and other na-tions — everyone will feel it. How?Hard to predict. But all I know isthat the most unique and importantfeature of American foreign policyover the last century has been thedegree to which America’s diplo-mats and naval, air and groundforces provided global public goods — from open seas to open trade andfrom containment to counterterror-ism — that benefited many othersbesides us.

United States power has beenthe key force maintaining globalstability, and providing global gov-ernance, for the last 70 years. Thatrole will not disappear, but it willalmost certainly shrink.

Great powers have retrenchedbefore: Britain for instance. But, asMandelbaum notes, “When Britain could no longer provide global gov-ernance, the United States steppedin to replace it. No country nowstands ready to replace the UnitedStates, so the loss to internationalpeace and prosperity has the poten-tial to be greater as America pullsback than when Britain did.”

After all, Europe is rich butwimpy. China is rich nationally butstill dirt poor on a per capita basisand, therefore, will be compelledto remain focused inwardly and re-gionally. Russia, drunk on oil, cancause trouble but not project power.“Therefore, the world will be a more disorderly and dangerous place,”Mandelbaum predicts.

How to mitigate this trend? Man-delbaum argues for three things:

First, Americans need to get backon a sustainable path to economicgrowth and reindustrialization,with whatever sacrifices, hardwork and political consensus thatrequires.

Second, we need to set priorities.We have enjoyed a century in whichwe could have, in foreign policyterms, both what is vital and what is

desirable. For instance, I presumethat with infinite men and moneyAmerica can succeed in Afghani-stan. But is it vital? I am sure it isdesirable, but vital?

Finally, we need to shore up ourbalance sheet and weaken that ofour enemies, and the best way todo that in one move is with a muchhigher gasoline tax.

America is about to learn a veryhard lesson: You can borrow yourway to prosperity over the shortrun but not to geopolitical powerover the long run. That requiresa real and growing economic en-gine.

And, for us, the short run isnow over. There was a time whenthinking seriously about Ameri-can foreign policy did not requirethinking seriously about economic policy. That time is also over.

An America in hock will have nohawks — or at least none that any-one will take seriously.

America’s venture into Iraq was a war, but it was also a nation-building exercise. The United States has spent$53 billion trying to reconstruct Iraq, the largest development effort since the Marshall Plan.

So how is it working out?On the economic front, there are

signs of progress. It is hard to knowwhat role the scattershot Americandevelopment projects have played, butthis year Iraq will have the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world, and it isexpected to grow at a 7 percent annualclip for the next several years.

“Iraq has made substantial progresssince 2003,” the International Mone-tary Fund reports. Inflation is reason-ably stable. A budget surplus is expect-ed by 2012. Unemployment, though still15 percent, is down from stratosphericlevels.

Oil production is back around prewarlevels, and there are some who say Iraqmay be able to rival Saudi production.That’s probably unrealistic, but Iraqwill have a healthy oil economy, for bet-ter and for worse.

Living standards are also improv-ing. According to the Iraq Index, the au-thoritative compendium of data on thissubject from the Brookings Institution,a nonprofit public policy organization,833,000 Iraqis had phones before the in-vasion. Now more than 1.3 million havelandlines and some 20 million havecellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, morethan 1.7 million do.

In the most recent Gallup poll, 69percent of Iraqis rated their personalfinances positively, up from 36 percentin March 2007. Baghdad residents saythe markets are vibrant again, withnew electronics, clothing and even li-

quor stores.Basic services are better, but still

bad. Electricity production is up by 40percent over pre-invasion levels, but because there are so many more air-conditioners and other appliances,widespread power failures still occur.

In February 2009, 45 percent of Iraqissaid they had access to trash removalservices, which is woeful, though upfrom 18 percent the year before. Forty-two percent were served by a fire de-partment, up from 23 percent.

About half the American money hasbeen spent building up Iraqi securityforces, and here, too, the trends are pos-itive. Violence is down 90 percent frompre-surge days. There are now more than 400,000 Iraqi police officers and200,000 Iraqi soldiers, with operationalperformance improving gradually. Ac-cording to an ABC News/BBC poll lastyear, nearly three-quarters of Iraqishad a positive view of the army and thepolice, including, for the first time, a majority of Sunnis.

Politically, the basic structure issound, and a series of impressive lawshave been passed. But these gains areimperiled by the current stalemate at the top.

Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle Easton the Index of Political Freedom fromThe Economist’s Intelligence Unit — behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco,but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar andTunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis saythey want a democracy, while only 19percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantialprogress on the things development ef-forts can touch most directly: econom-ic growth, basic security, and politicaland legal institutions. After the disas-ter of the first few years, nation build-

ing, much derided, has been a success.President Obama now can point to a large national project that has contrib-uted to measurable, positive results.

But it is a success that is fragile andincomplete. Iraqi material conditions are better, but the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity.

There is still very little social trust.Iraq is the fourth-most-corrupt nationon earth, according to TransparencyInternational’s rating system. The roleof women remains surprisingly circum-scribed. Iraqi politicians clearly find itvery hard to compromise (though theymay be no worse than American politi-cians in this regard).

Human capital is lagging. Most doc-tors left Iraq after the invasion, and itis hard to staff health clinics. The engi-neers left too, so American-built plantslie dormant because there is no onewith the skills to run them. Schools aresuffering because of a lack of teachers.

Ryan Crocker, the former ambas-sador, recently wrote an article in TheNational Interest noting that fear stillpervades Iraq. Ethnic animosities arein abeyance, but they are not gone.Guns have been put in closets, but notdestroyed.

The gains the United States is en-abling may vanish if the Americanmilitary withdraws entirely next year.Bottom-up social change will requiretime and patience. Obama will have toheed the advice of serious Iraq hands like Crocker, Michael O’Hanlon ofBrookings and Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, and putaside plans to withdraw completely.

Such a move may rob him of a cam-paign talking point. But it will safe-guard an American accomplishmentthat has been too hard won.

DAVID BROOKS

Nation Building Works

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Superbroke, Superfrugal,Superpower?

America must learn

to live within

its means.

PARIS

The scapegoat — that indestruc-tible anti-hero whose resilience defies time, trends and geography — hauntsthe political landscape today all over the globe as it has many times before. Governments, even democraticallyelected ones, that run out of momen-tum and imagination, tend to blametheir failures on those whose origin,skin color, religion or lifestyle seem toendanger national cohesion.

From Paris to Tokyo by way of Arizo-na, otherness is extolled while the Oth-er is regarded with distrust. Witnessthe expulsions of Roma to Romania orBulgaria, the distressing serial offeredthis summer by France, the land of lib-erté, égalité and fraternité.

In the collective unconscious, theRoma embody the perfect pariah.Even when sedentary, they remainwanderers with no land and no borders,doomed to drag myths and fantasies along in their wake.

As soon as a threesome of dark-haired, swarthy little girls clad in flow-ery dresses slips into a Paris subway tobeg or rasp out an age-old lament, thetension mounts in the car. I know: I feelthe same tension sometimes. Women clutch their purses while men thrust their wallets and cellphones deeperinto their pockets.

Back in the village where I grew up,Gypsies, who wore themselves out inlargely fruitless attempts to sell mopsdoor to door, aroused a mixture of fear

and hostility. We dreaded the torrent of obscure prophecies their women —modern avatars of the witches of longago — showered on those who turnedthem away too roughly.

Could it be that the France of Presi-dent Nicolas Sarkozy, son of a Hungar-ian immigrant, is edging imperceptibly toward state racism? If the internation-al press is anything to go by, not to men-tion the condemnations from leftists, organized activists, prominent intel-lectuals and church leaders, the ques-tion is valid.

The use of the term “deportation”and the historical references, tend torevive the specter of the Holocaustorchestrated by Nazi Germany in the1940s. It is an extreme, if inept, anal-ogy that is nurtured by an indeliblehistorical trauma. For if Jews werethe prime target of Hitler’s extermina-tion policy, it also decimated Europe’sGypsy communities.

It is absurd to ascribe fascistic in-tentions to the French executive, butit would be equally so to deny the im-pact of the populist — and thereforevote-attracting — drive illustrated bythe government-claimed clampdown,amply inspired by the model imple-mented in Italy by Silvio Berlusconiand his allies.

In substance, there is nothing re-ally new. Every year between 7,800and 10,000 Roma are escorted — touse the accepted euphemism — tothe French border, and many of thempromptly return. The form, however,has changed: whereas Paris usedto sneak the Roma out, the evictionsare now covered by the media, if notstaged for their benefit.

To put it plainly, it is no longer a mat-ter of carrying out shameful expulsions

but of flattering the “true” France, theone that slaves away and suffers and is out of work, in contrast to parasiteswho have suddenly cropped up from elsewhere and outsiders who take ad-vantage of the system.

Why them? Why now? In the midst ofa rotten summer ruined by the econom-ic slump, on the eve of a fall fraught withturbulent social issues, Mr. Sarkozy at-tempted to create a security diversion.He also hopes to win back the fringevoters who find the simplistic slogans ofan openly xenophobic far right appeal-ing and to trap the socialist opposition,torn between its humanistic catechismand the need for firmness.

It would be unworldly to ignore thefact that gang leaders run the beggingmarket like a criminal syndicate andconfiscate most of the loot from minorsduly trained in the techniques of pick-ing pockets. But the fact remains thatmost of the ten to twelve million Romain the European Union — scarcely over15,000 of whom are in France — wishonly to find a decent site for their trail-ers, a job and a school for their chil-dren.

From Paris to Bucharest you hearthe same refrain: “Those people don’twant to fit in.” But what do we know? What have we done to help them do so?Disinclined to lend support to second-rate citizens, the Romanian authoritieshave invested only a tiny portion of thecredits allocated for the purpose by theEuropean Union.

Everyone agrees: the Roma issuecan only be dealt with on a Europeanscale with all 27 member countriesworking closely with the countries of origin. And the process should get un-der way as soon as possible: the anti-heroes too are tired.

INTELLIGENCE/VINCENT HUGEUX

Inconvenience of Otherness

Vincent Hugeux, a reporter atL’Express, a French news magazine,is the author of “Iran, State of Alert”and “Straight Talk on Africa.”Send comments tointelligence@nytimes.com.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

crops in Argentina will suffer fromdrought, as could Australia’s, accord-ing to agricultural experts. The bumpin prices because of the uncertaintyabout future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will facehigher bread prices in the comingmonths.

Food prices are still about 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassiansaid, when a tripling in the price of riceamong other staples led to food riotsin about a dozen countries and helpedtopple at least one government.

“If you look at the numbers globally,the Americans, the Europeans andthe Australians can make up the sup-ply,” Mr. Abbassian said of the wheat harvest, playing down the chancesof repeating the 2008 crisis. “There is no reason for this hype, but once the psychological thing sets in it is hard tochange that perception, especially ifRussia keeps sending bad news.”

The wheat crop this year globallyis also the third highest on record, ac-cording to the organization, but thesudden supply interruptions make the markets jittery. In June, Russia waspredicting a loss of just a few millionmetric tons due to hot weather, butby August it announced it would lose about one-fifth of its crop. Wheat pric-es more than doubled in that period.

“There are reasons to be watch-ing this and to be concerned because regionally there will be supply chal-lenges,” said Justin P. Gilpin, the headof the Kansas Wheat Commission.“There is uncertainty in the market-place.”

A decade ago, the area around theBlack Sea — mainly Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — used to supply just about 4 percent of the wheat traded in-ternationally. But most of the growthin demand globally has been suppliedfrom there, and the region now pro-duces about 30 percent of the wheattraded internationally, said Mr. Ab-bassian. This is the first time a supply crisis has originated from the Black

Sea area, he noted.Prime Minister Vladimir V. Pu-

tin announced September 2 that theRussian ban on grain exports wouldextend into 2011. The price of wheatjumped again, and that has had a spill-over effect into other grains like cornand soybeans. The forecast for theglobal rice harvest has also dropped, although it is still expected to be higherthan in 2009 and should be a record, thefood group said.

After two days of rioting in Maputo early this month set off by price in-creases for bread and utilities likeelectricity and water, the governmentin Mozambique reversed its decision to increase bread prices. But 10 peoplehad been killed and 300 injured. Price increases have been much sharper inMozambique than in most of the worldbecause prices were kept artificiallylow before elections last year, some

analysts said.As with any commodity, questions

of wheat shortages spur speculationand hoarding, and experts suggestboth are at play in the current market. They believe that more money is wash-ing through the commodity market forwheat because with interest rates solow and the stock market so volatile,investors are putting their money inagricultural commodities markets.

But the world also has to come toterms with changing weather patternsdue to climate change, argued Profes-sor Per Pinstrup-Anderson, an expertin international agriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

“We are going to have much bigger fluctuations in weather and therefore the food supply than we had in the past,so we are going to have to learn howto cope with fluctuating food prices,”Professor Pinstrup-Anderson said.

By PAUL GREENBERG

The world’s largest tuna — the giant Atlantic bluefin —is equipped with akind of natural GPS system and cancross and recross the Atlantic Oceanmultiple times during its life. Its fu-rious metabolism enables the fish tosprint at more than 65 kilometers anhour and hunt relentlessly at frigiddepths in excess of 455 meters.

Yet in spite of all of its feral charac-teristics, scientists have announcedan important step toward convert-ing the Atlantic bluefin, in rapid de-cline in the wild, into a farm animal.Researchers at a European Union-financed program, Selfdott, said theyhad succeeded in spawning the Atlan-tic bluefin in captivity.

If they can solve the problem ofraising the offspring to adulthood,the bluefin may join Atlantic salmon,rainbow trout, and other fish as an in-dustrially farmed staple of the mod-ern fish market. Which brings up aninteresting question: Can a farmedversion of bluefin tuna be better forthe earth — and the species?

In the last 50 years, the global sea-food market has transformed fromone based on wild fish to one in whichfarming supplies nearly half of themarket, according to the United Na-tions Food and Agriculture Organiza-tion.

Leading this transition is wild At-lantic salmon, which collapsed asa commercial species in the 1960s

and was subsequently replaced inthe marketplace by farmed Atlanticsalmon. Atlantic salmon’s availabilityhas not been without repercussions.Farmed salmon are often grown inthe pathways of wild salmon migra-tion routes, and many groups haveplaced farmed salmon on their “donot eat” lists, largely because of thethreat that farm-born diseases, wasteand parasites may pose to already de-pressed runs of wild salmon.

But cultivating Atlantic bluefintuna, environmentalists argue,could be even more harmful to theocean than salmon farming. Atlanticbluefin are already ranched in great

numbers — taken from the wild andfattened in net pens with wild foragefish like herring and sardines. It maytake anywhere from 2 kilograms to 6kilograms of wild fish to grow a singlekilogram of Atlantic bluefin.

The Stanford economist Rosamond Naylor addressed the issue in a re-cent paper in The Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences. “Mostforage fisheries,” Ms. Naylor wrote“are either fully exploited to overex-ploited or are in the process of recov-ering from overexploitation.”

If she is right — and if bluefin tunafarming is ramped up to the level ofsalmon farming, which producesmore than 900,000 metric tons a year— the effect on forage fish, the foun-dation of the oceanic food chain, couldbe devastating. A worldwide overhar-vest of forage fish could damage othercommercial species that also rely onthese fish. But alternatives to foragefish are being developed, includingfeed pellets made from algae andother vegetable matter.

Global fishing moratoriums onAtlantic bluefin have been proposed(and rejected by the many nationsthat catch bluefin). But other optionsbeing discussed include greatly re-ducing fishing quotas and closingspawning grounds in the Mediterra-nean and the Gulf of Mexico to fishingentirely.

Perhaps, in the end, this is whatthe Atlantic bluefin tuna might re-ally need. Not human interventionto make them spawn in captivity. Butrather human restraint, to allow them to continue spawning in the wild.

market called Perekrestok (Inter-section), where she would again bedisappointed. “I went from store tostore. I would ask, ‘When is the buck-wheat coming in?’ and they wouldsay, we don’t know, it’s because ofthe heat or because of the drought,or something like that. There is nobuckwheat anywhere.”

Such complaints may seemtrivial, but the authorities aretaking them very seriously.Dating back to the czars, public dis-content over shortages — of flour orsausage, table salt or vodka — hasoften touched off political instabilityin Russia.

Russians eat buckwheat all daylong, turned into a hot cereal forbreakfast, a side dish with meat,stuffing, pancakes and in myriadother ways. Deprive them of it forany lengthy period, and the reactioncould be fierce.

President Dmitri A. Medvedevhas brought up the buckwheat short-age in visits to provincial centers,trying to assure the country that thegovernment is working to alleviateit. He warned that law-enforcementagencies would crack down on thosewho manipulate the buckwheatmarket.

The buckwheat crop was undoubt-edly affected by the drought, whichis likely to cut overall grain produc-tion by about a third. But officialsfrom the Kremlin on down insistthat there are sufficient quantitiesof buckwheat available for Russianconsumers, especially now that thegovernment has banned grain ex-ports until at least 2011 in order tostabilize the domestic market.

So suspicion has fallen on panic-buying, hoarding and speculation

— practices that also hark back toSoviet times.

“We need to reduce this panic-buying, including by explainingwhat is going on,” Mr. Medvedevsaid. “Many people, especially theelderly, remember that if somethingis disappearing, then you have toimmediately buy it, because later onthere won’t be any.”

Before the summer, buckwheattypically retailed for about 50 centsa half kilogram in Moscow. Now it is

$1 a half kilogram or more, if it canbe found.

Buckwheat is not as central to the Russian diet as wheat, but it is con-sidered more of a distinctly Russian food, a hearty plant that flourishes on the Siberian steppes. Generations of children have been raised on thestuff, which is valued for its nutrients,and school lunchrooms seem to gothrough it by the ton. In Eastern Eu-rope, it is known as kasha.

“For a lot of Russians, this is prob-lem No. 1 now — where are you go-ing to get buckwheat?” said OksanaSidneva, 32, who was also at the Per-

ekrestok supermarket.Her son, Dima, 13, chimed in, “It’s

the only cooked cereal that I willeat.”

The shortage is especially jarringbecause supermarkets and big boxstores in Moscow and many othermetropolitan areas have almost ev-erything else.

Irina Yasina, an economist andcommentator, said the buckwheatshortage demonstrated how Rus-sians were scarred by Soviet hard-ships.

“The reaction to this is absolutelySoviet — it is a classic, Soviet-stylepanic,” Ms. Yasina said. “Remem-ber, it has been only 20 years sincethe Soviet collapse. I am 46 yearsold. For 20 years, I have lived undernormal conditions. But the rest ofthe time, I lived under conditions oftotal shortages. And habits acquiredduring childhood are stronger thanany others. It becomes almost a re-flex.”

Still, not everyone has been fret-ting. Some elderly Russians pointedout that the Soviet experience hadendowed them with another charac-teristic: stoicism .

“I lived through World War II,when we had nothing to eat, onlytwo potatoes a day,” said ValentinaNovikova, 74, a retired teacher. “Inthe 1980s, there were such shortag-es, we stood on such lines. So if thereare shortages of buckwheat — well,it’s nonsense. We lived through that,and we will live through this.”

A Divide on Taming the Wild Tuna

Russians FretOver LackOf a Beloved Food Staple

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the past, food shortages in Russia touched off political instability.

CHRIS PARK/ASSOCIATED PRESS; ABOVE LEFT, TONY GENTILE/REUTERS

With Atlantic bluefin tuna in steep decline, scientists are developing

methods to farm the species, leading to environmental concerns.

Uncertain Harvests Con tin ued from Page I

Con tin ued from Page I

Drought and climate change alter the math of the food supply.

Farm-bred tuna could lead to a collapse inthe fish they eat.

Scarcity of buckwheat triggers a return tohoarding habits .

Barry Bearak contributed reporting from Johannesburg.

Paul Greenberg is the author of“Four Fish: The Future of the LastWild Food.”

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 V

By JULIA WERDIGIER

LONDON — The euro? It’s finished,Hugh Hendry proclaimed. China?Headed for a fall.

President Obama? “If there was a wayto short Obama, I would,” Mr. Hendrysaid.

Mr. Hendry runs the successful hedge fund firm Eclectica Asset Management.It is an old-school macroeconomic fund company with a big-think, globe-strad-dling style.

At 41, Mr. Hendry isalso emerging fromthe normally secretive world of hedge funds tocaptivate fans and foeswith a surprising level of candor.

Last May, on Britishtelevision, he verbally sparred with JeffreyD. Sachs, director ofthe Earth Institute at Columbia Universityin New York and per-haps the best-knowneconomist writing ondevelopmental issues. Before that, he took onJoseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, about the future of the euro.“Hello, can I tell youabout the real world?”Mr. Hendry interjectedat one point. Video of the encounter was ahuge hit on YouTube.

“I’ve got such a big mouth,” he said. “I have to be very careful what I say.”

His outspokenness has won Mr. Hen-dry a reputation for challenging the eco-nomics establishment.

His big worry lately has been China.Mr. Hendry says he believes that China’sdays of heady growth are numbered.

“The idea is that things would happentoday that are commonly thought of asimpossible, most notably a significantreversal of China,” Mr. Hendry said.

Marc Faber, the money managerknown as Doctor Doom for his bearish views, calls Mr. Hendry “a deep think-er.”

“He has strong views and expressesthem, not to get publicity but because he has a great understanding of the mar-

kets,” Mr. Faber said.Some London investors are more criti-

cal. Two declined to comment on Mr.Hendry, saying they did not want to “get into a fight” with him.

Mr. Hendry has made — and some-times lost — money for his investors.In 2008, the Eclectica Fund was up 50percent one month and down 15 percent another. The fund bet correctly thatGreece’s troubles would ripple through

to the market for Ger-man bonds. But thefund lost money bet-ting on European sov-ereign debt last year.

Mr. Hendry’s officeis behind a scruffyshopping mall in Lon-don. During an inter-view, he wore a white oxford shirt, jeansand blue ConverseChuck Taylor sneak-ers, and hipster horn-rim glasses.

The son of a truckdriver, Mr. Hendrywas the first in hisfamily to attend a uni-versity — Strathclyde,in Glasgow. He studiedaccounting and joineda large Edinburghmoney manager.

Frustrated thathe could not challenge the investmentstrategies of his bosses, he jumped toCredit Suisse Asset Management inLondon. There, a chance meeting withan equally opinionated hedge fund man-ager, Crispin Odey, led to a job. Beforelong, Mr. Hendry struck out on his own.

The inspiration for his investment ap-proach comes from an unlikely source:“The Gap in the Curtain,” a 1932 novelby John Buchan. The plot centers onfive people who are chosen by a scien-tist to take part in an experiment thatwill let them glimpse one year into thefuture.

Mr. Hendry calls the novel “the bestinvestment book ever written” becauseit taught him to envision the futurewithout neglecting what happenedleading up to it, a mistake many inves-tors make, he said.

By AUBREY BELFORD

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Afteryears of being known for corrup-tion and instability, this country isemerging from the global financial crisis with a new reputation — eco-nomic golden child.

Indonesia’s economy, the largest in Southeast Asia, grew at an annu-al rate of 6.2 percent in the secondquarter of this year. In 2009, grossdomestic product expanded just 4.5percent.

The stock market hit a record highin late July and has been among the best-performing equities marketsin Asia. The currency, the rupiah,has appreciated nearly 5 percentthis year against the dollar, among the strongest showings in Asia.

“Foreign investors have beenflowing to Indonesia from maybearound mid-2009,” said Lanang Tri-hardian, an analyst at SyailendraCapital, a fund management firm inJakarta. That investment, he said,“is mostly going to capital markets,to bonds, to stocks.’’

Foreign investment was heldin check for years after the 1997economic crisis in Asia. But in thesecond quarter of this year, thecountry had 33.3 trillion rupiah,or $3.7 billion, in foreign direct in-vestment, a 51 percent rise from ayear earlier, according to the gov-ernment, and is on track to attractmore this year.

The largest share of that invest-ment comes from within the Asso-ciation of Southeast Asian Nations.Japan and South Korea, as well asEuropean countries, make up muchof the rest.

Some here are saying that theMuslim-majority democracy, oneof the world’s most populous coun-tries, could soon merit the kind ofattention that investors now lavish on China and India.

More than a decade after theoverthrow of the Suharto dictator-ship in 1998, the country has sta-bilized. Its natural resources, likepalm oil, copper and timber, are ingreat demand in China.

President Susilo BambangYudhoyono has reduced debt andachieved some success fightinggraft, and power has devolved to lo-cal governments.

The country’s relatively youngpopulation of 240 million and gov-ernment stimulus policies havekept consumption humming.

In Jakarta, worsening trafficand a proliferation of megamallsare seen as signs of the growingstrength of the middle class.

Despite the progress, about 15percent of the population lives be-low the country’s official povertyline of around $1 a day, and unem-ployment is over 7 percent.

The government believes thatone way to achieve more sustained

growth is foreign investment. ItsInvestment Coordinating Board ishoping to attract $30 billion to $40billion in annual foreign investmentby 2015, said Gita Wirjawan, head of the agency.

In an economy currently worth$650 billion a year, that is not much. But it is “optically” very important, Mr. Wirjawan said. The govern-ment announced in August thatChina’s sovereign fund was hoping to invest $25 billion in infrastruc-ture projects in Indonesia. Posco,the South Korean steel giant, re-cently signed a $6 billion deal tobuild a plant in Indonesia.

“We’re seeing an increasing re-location of factories by the Taiwan-ese, the Koreans and Japanese fromVietnam and China,” Mr. Wirjawansaid.

The Indonesian Footwear Asso-ciation has said that major brandsincluding Asics, Mizuno and NewBalance shifted some production to Indonesia this year because of ris-ing costs elsewhere.

Many feel that Indonesia’s timehas come again.

“In Asia there is a feeling thatafter you invest in China and afteryou invest in India, where are yougoing to invest?” said Fauzi Ich-san, senior economist for Standard Chartered in Indonesia.

“It’ll have to be Indonesia. It’s anatural destination.”

By MIGUEL HELFT

and TANZINA VEGA

Julie Matlin liked the shoes she sawon Zappos.com. She wasn’t ready to buy them, but the shoes started to fol-low her.

“For days or weeks, every site I wentto seemed to be showing me ads forthose shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a motherof two from Montreal. “It is a prettyclever marketing tool. But it’s a littlecreepy, especially if you don’t knowwhat’s going on.”

Online shoppers have grown accus-tomed to being tracked by digital ad-vertisements for products that interestthem .

While the technique, called person-alized retargeting , is not new, it is morepervasive with companies like Googleand Microsoft having entered the field.And it has reached a precision that isleaving consumers with the feelingthey are being watched as they roam online stores.

In the digital advertising business, this form of marketing is hailed as abreakthrough, showing consumersthe right ad at the right time. “The over-whelming response has been positive,”said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing at Zappos, a unitof Amazon.com.

But the technique is bringing threatsof industry regulation.

“Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said JeffChester, executive director of the

Washington-based Center for DigitalDemocracy. “It illustrates that there isa commercial surveillance system inplace online that is sweeping in scopeand raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”

But retargeting relies on a form of online tracking that is not particularlyintrusive. Programs use small filescalled cookies that are exchangedwhen a browser visits a site. Cookies

are used by virtually all commercialWeb sites for various purposes, includ-ing advertising, keeping users signedin and customizing content.

In remarketing, when a person visitsan e-commerce site and looks at a prod-uct, a cookie is placed into that person’sbrowser, linking it with the product.When that person, or someone using the same computer, visits another site,the advertising system creates an ad for that same product.

Mr. Magness, of Zappos, said that consumers may be unnerved becausethey may feel that they are beingtracked as they browse the Web. To re-

assure consumers, Zappos, which is us-ing the ads, displays a message insidethe banner ads that reads “Why am I seeing these ads?” When users click onit, they are taken to the Web site of Cri-teo, the advertising technology com-pany behind the Zappos ads, where theads are explained.

But some advertising and media ex-perts said that explaining the technol-ogy behind the ads might not allay thefears of many consumers.

“When you begin to give people a sense of how this is happening, they re-ally don’t like it,” said Joseph Turow, aprofessor at the Annenberg School forCommunication at the University ofPennsylvania .

While start-ups like Criteo and Tel-lApart are among the most active re-marketers, the technique has also beenembraced by online advertising giants.Google began testing this technique in2009, calling it remarketing to connotethe idea of customized messages likespecial offers or discounts being sentto users.

For Google, remarketing is a more specific form of behavioral targeting,the practice under which a person whohas visited NBA.com, for instance, maybe tagged as a basketball fan and latershown ads for related merchandise.

Behavioral targeting has been de-bated in Washington, and lawmakers are considering various proposals to regulate it.

When Advertising Age, the adver-

tising industry publication, tackledthe subject of remarketing recently,Michael Learmonth described being stalked by a pair of pants he had con-sidered buying on Zappos.

“As tracking gets more and morecrass and obvious, consumers willrightfully become more concernedabout it,” he wrote. “If the industry istruly worried about a federally man-dated ‘do not track’ list akin to ‘do notcall’ for the Internet, they’re not reallyshowing it.”

Even some advertising executiveshave reservations about highly person-alized remarketing . “I don’t think that

exposing all this detailed informationyou have about the customer is neces-sary,” said Alan Pearlstein, chief ex-ecutive of Cross Pixel Media.

He supports more subtle ads that, forinstance, could offer consumers a dis-count coupon if they return to an onlinestore. “What is the benefit of freakingcustomers out?”

Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes,Ms. Matlin said that she felt even worsewhen she was hounded recently byads for a dieting service she had usedonline. “They are still following mearound, and it makes me feel fat,” shesaid.

ROMEO GACAD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

CHRISTINNE MUSCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Julie Matlin was tempted by a pair of shoes on Zappos.com. Then the

shoes started showing up on other sites she visited.

Companies push ads that some shoppers find creepy.

Stalker Ads Unsettle Online Shoppers

Outspoken Figure Emerges From World of Hedge Funds

Thriving Indonesia Attracts Foreign Funds

HAZEL THOMPSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“If there was a way to short

Obama, I would.”

HUGH HENDRY

English hedge fund manager.

After years

of decline

and corrupt

government,

Indonesia’s

economy is

booming.

Children

play near a

construction

site.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Nothing quite like it, a dinosaurwith two sicklelike claws on eachfoot, was known to live in the finalperiod of the age of great reptiles.Little wonder fossil hunters in Ro-mania were astonished when theyunearthed remains of a distant rela-tive of Velociraptor, the familiar sin-gle-claw predator of fierce repute,and saw its unusual stocky limbsand double-clawed feet.

The discoverers reported in lateAugust that the dinosaur, the size ofa gigantic turkey, was a meat-eating creature that lived more than 65million years ago in the Late Creta-ceous period. They named it Balaurbondoc, which means “stockydragon.”

Romanian scientists andother experts said that Balauris the first reasonably complete skeleton of a predatory dinosaurfrom Europe at that time. Theysaid the discovery may provide insights into the development ofdinosaurs and other animals ina long-ago European ecosystemmuch different than today.

Before the end of the Creta-ceous, Europe was an archi-pelago of islands in higher seas.Previous fossil discoveries indi-cated that life there followed thepattern known as the “islandeffect.” Animals in isolation, in-cluding plant-eating dinosaurs,often evolved as smaller, more primitive versions of their con-tinental relatives. Balaur bothdid and did not seem to conform to the pattern.

In a report in The Proceed-ings of the National Academyof Sciences, the discovery teamsaid the unusual species “pro-vides support for the aberrantnature of the Late CretaceousEuropean island-dwellingdinosaurs, but indicates thatpredators on these islands were not necessarily small, geographicallyendemic or primitive.”

Not being geographically endem-ic, the scientists said, meant thatBalaur showed kinship to dinosaursoutside Europe, and so there musthave been connections with life inAsia and North America. But it was unclear, they noted, if “the ‘islandeffect’ was expressed differently, or at all, in these animals.”

“We’ve been waiting for some-thing like this, and it’s really, really weird,” Mark A. Norell, a dinosaurpaleontologist at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York and a co-author of the paper,said in a recent interview.

The researchers said the Balaurskeleton showed at least 20 charac-teristics in the foot, leg and pelvisnot seen in other predatory dino-saurs. The most singular of theseis the two sharp claws on each foot, one evolved from the big toe, the oth-er from the second toe. It appearedthat the stout lower limbs were used to grasp and disembowel prey.

Stephen L. Brusatte, a graduate

student at Columbia University inNew York who analyzed the fossils,said that compared with Velocirap-tor, “Balaur was probably more ofa kickboxer than a sprinter, and itmight have been able to take downlarger animals than itself, as manycarnivores do today.”

It is “a new breed of predatorydinosaur,” he said, “very differ-ent from anything we have everknown.”

By NATALIE ANGIER

Scientists have recently document-ed surprising cases of male animalsattending to offspring with an avidity long thought to be the province of themother.

Reporting in the journal AnimalBehaviour, Julia Fischer of the Ger-man Primate Center in Göttingen de-scribes how male Barbary macaques use infants as “costly social tools” tobond with other males and strengthen their social clout.

“Lots of primates are suckers forbabies,” said Sarah Hrdy, the prima-tologist and author of “Mothers andOthers.”

But it is not just primates. Amongsome large, flightless birds like emusand rheas, the male is often the solekeeper of the nest. Scientists now haveevidence that such father-focusedchild care may represent the primor-dial avian program, one that datesback to the birds’ storied ancestors,the dinosaurs.

Some fish also subscribe to it. Sci-entists have learned that the malepipefish — which, like his seahorserelatives, becomes pregnant and givesbirth to live young — fine-tunes theflow of nutrients to his gestating ba-bies depending on how he feels about their mother.

In 90 percent of mammalian spe-cies, promiscuity is common and pa-ternity uncertain. Yet in the remain-ing 10 percent, we find most of the

world’s primates.For instance, when the males of the

cotton-top tamarin and the commonmarmoset findthat a mate is pregnant,their hormones and the dendritic con-nections in their brains change, andthey put on weight — all in preparationfor the heavy lifting to come.

Female marmosets and tamarinsgenerally give birth to twins, and fromthe moment the babies are born the male will carry them most of the time.He’ll hold them on his lap. As he swingsthrough trees, the twins will cling to thecomforting thermal pads between hisshoulder blades. If the babies cry, hemust go to them and pick them up.

Marmosets and tamarins become dream daddies because their partnersare queen bees of fecundity. A mothermonkey can’t possibly handle the ener-getics of lugging around a pair of grow-ing twins. Not when she is expectedboth to produce a double dose of milkand to become pregnant again roughlytwo weeks after giving birth.

“When I first started watching themonkeys, I thought the females were so mean,” said Sofia Refetoff Zahed

at the University of Wisconsin. “Theinfants would try to get food, to getwhatever the mother had, and themom would grab it back and go away. The dad, on the other hand, would giveup his food.

“Then I got pregnant with my sec-ond child while I was still nursing the first,” she added. “Then I understood. You do get grouchy.”

But a male Barbary macaque’s fas-cination with infants can also lookless than kid-friendly. Within days of being born, every infant is fair gamefor male pawings. “A male will ap-proach a mother slowly,” Dr. Fischer said, “seize the moment, and take the infant.” He will carry the infant un-der his belly, or in his arms, and he’ll advance in a friendly fashion toward other males .

“If they don’t have an infant, theycan’t interact,” Dr. Fischer said.“There would be too much tension be-tween them.”

A male may hold on to an infant forhours .

The researchers initially assumedthat baby handling might have a tran-quilizing effect on the males, but onmeasuring the macaques’ hormonelevels, they found the opposite: car-rying an infant caused a male’s stress hormones to spike. The scientists now propose that the males use the infants as “battle symbols,” as Dr. Fischer put it, “to show other males that they can bear the stress.”

By KATIE HAFNER

Presidential elections can be fatal.Win an Academy Award and you’re

likely to live longer than had you beena runner-up.

Interview for medical school on arainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall.

Such are some of the surprisingfindings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a leading researcher who discreditspreconceived notions in the medical world.

For over 20 years, first at StanfordUniversity in California, now at theUniversity of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier,50, has applied scientific rigor to topicsthat in lesser hands might have been dismissed asiconoclastic. His work hasshattered myths about the predictors of longevity, the organization of healthcare and the workings of the medical mind.

“He’ll go totally against intuition, andcome up with a beautiful finding,” saidEldar Shafir, a professor of psychologyand public affairs at Princeton Uni-versity in New Jersey who has workedwith Dr. Redelmeier.

Dr. Redelmeier was the first to studycellphones and automobile crashes. Apaper he published in 1997 concludedthat talking on a cellphone while driv-ing was as dangerous as driving while

intoxicated. His collaborator, RobertTibshirani, a statistician at Stanford,said the paper “is likely to dwarf all ofmy other work in statistics, in terms ofits direct impact on public health.”

As an internist who works at Sun-nybrook Hospital in Toronto , Dr. Re-delmeier sees a large number of crashvictims. He found that about 25 more people die in crashes on presidentialElection Days in the United Statesthan the norm, which he attributes to increased traffic, rushed drivers and unfamiliar routes.

In preparation for a recent interview,Dr. Redelmeier had written on an indexcard some of his homespun philoso-phies. “A great deal of mischief occurswhen people are in a rush,” he read.

To that end, he studied the psychol-ogy around changing lanes in traffic. Ina study in 1999, Dr. Redelmeier and Pro-fessor Tibshirani found that while carsin the other lane sometimes appear tobe moving faster, they are not.

“Every driver on average thinkshe’s in the wrong lane,” Dr. Redelmeiersaid. “You think more cars are passingyou when you’re actually passing themjust as quickly. Still, you make a lane change where the benefits are illusory.”Changing lanes increases the chancesof collision about threefold.

Often he works from a hunch. In

December, Dr. Redelmeier examinedUniversity of Toronto medical school admission interview reports from 2004to 2009. After correlating the interviewscores with weather archives, he de-termined that candidates who inter-viewed on foul-weather days receivedratings lower than candidates whovisited on sunny days. In many cases,the difference was significant enoughto influence acceptance.

Dr. Redelmeier’s work on longevity began 10 years ago, when he was watch-ing the Academy Awards and noticed that the celebrities “don’t look anythinglike the patients I see in clinic,” he said.“They seem so much more vivacious. Itseemed so much more than skin deepand might go all the way to longevity.”

His findings: Academy Award win-ners live an average of three years lon-ger than runners-up. One explanation

could be an added measure of scrutiny,a public expectation of healthier liv-ing.

His approach to research goes handin hand with some pronounced person-ality quirks. His e-mails are written aslists, with a number assigned to eachthought. He does this, he said, to focuson the content of a message rather thanget distracted by grammar, punctua-tion and syntax.

Despite collaborating with him,Professor Tibshirani has reservationsabout some of Dr. Redelmeier’s choices,and declined to work on the AcademyAwards study.

“I honestly thought it was frivolous,and we’ve argued about it,” ProfessorTibshirani said. He also questionedthe Election Day research. “Of coursethere’s more traffic, so it seemed self-evident,” he said.

That perspective amuses Dr. Re-delmeier. When asked about it via e-mail, he responded within one of his numbered missives:

15) I sometimes tell a joke to tacklethe issue

16) that is, about people’s ability to judge “frivolity”

17) namely, imagine Charles Darwin150 years ago

18) at the time he disappointed his fa-ther by neglecting medical training

19) and asked, instead, to go on a two-year vacation in the tropics

20) with an emphasis on bird watch-ing (finches)

21) the father was not impressed andthought the son was wasting his time

Dr. Redelmeier takes the results of his research seriously. He rides hisbike to work, and when he does drive,he resists “small temptations to changelanes.”

ANDREA PLOSS

MICK ELLISON

Balaur bondoc, discovered recently

in Romania, reveals sicklelike claws

on each foot. Scientists say it is the

first complete fossil of a predatory

dinosaur to be found in Europe

from the Late Cretaceous period.

SAMI SIVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier

uses rigorous scientific methods

to debunk myths.

Theories about longevity and the dangers of hurrying.

Male Barbary macaques use baby asa networking tool.

Among Animals, Fathers Who Mother

An Unorthodox Physician Shatters Common Beliefs

A Kickboxing RelativeOf the Velociraptor Is Found

Some male

animals are

good parents.

Barbary

macaques

use babies as

status symbols

to help them

bond with

other males.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010 VII

By ALAN LIGHT

Late last year, in a Nashville re-cording studio, Robert Plant, theformer Led Zeppelin frontman, had a revelation. He was working on a new solo record, a project he began after scrapping plans for a sequel to“Raising Sand,” his 2007 album of duets with the country singer AlisonKrauss that sold 2.5 million copiesworldwide.

“I suddenly felt very free and lib-erated,” Mr. Plant said by telephonefrom his home in England near the Welsh border. “The moment wasopen ended, with a hugehorizon, and that’s how I used to feel about mu-sic. This great weightfell away from me and I thought, ‘I could be 17here.’ It took me back tohow I felt when I was inthe Band of Joy.”

Inspired by this emo-tion, and by the remark-able set of musicians he was working with (ledby the guitarist and co-producer Buddy Millerand including the singerPatty Griffin), Mr. Plant decided to title this new album “Band of Joy,”after the group in which he and the late drummerJohn Bonham playedbefore the formation ofLed Zeppelin in 1968.With a laugh, Mr. Plant,62, described that band’s“wonderful, crazy, incendiary qual-ity,” saying: “It was constantly im-ploding internally and externally. Wewere so frustrated and so hungry, butit was great.”

The creation of the “Band of Joy”album, which is being releasedSeptember 14 on Rounder Records,wasn’t quite so chaotic, though it didrequire a few twists and turns along the way. After the unexpected suc-cess of “Raising Sand,” which won a 2009 Grammy as album of the year, Mr. Plant and Ms. Krauss tried torecord a follow-up. This in itself wasa bit of a surprise, since Mr. Plant’s solo career has seen him go to great lengths to avoid repeating himself,venturing down avenues like rocka-billy, folk and Middle Eastern mu-sic.

“We cut quite a lot of stuff with Ali-son,” he said, “and we spent enough

time to know that we just didn’t havethe right material.”

After those sessions Mr. Plantcalled Mr. Miller, who had been inthe “Raising Sand” touring band,and asked if he would assemblemusicians for a solo project. He had gathered dozens of songs that hewas interested in recording, rangingfrom indie rock to traditional spiri-tuals. Mr. Miller, with the sense that he needed musicians who would “be able to travel where the music tookthem,” assembled a small band withthe multi-instrumentalist Darrell

Scott, the bassist Byron House and the drummer Marco Giovino.

“The musicianshipof these guys is almostfrightening,” Mr. Plantsaid. “Singing with them,I’m just sliding down the rigging with a knife inmy teeth, trying to makeoff with a few experienc-es. Sometimes I think Ishould just be helpingout in catering.”

Mr. Plant said that thefeel of the recordings re-minds him of “that otherband,” as he sometimesrefers to Led Zeppelin.

“A lot of this albumis acoustic-based stuffalong with adventurousrhythm,” he said. “Itcreates excitement withrestraint, which pleases me no end, like we did

back on ‘Led Zeppelin III.’ ’’If Mr. Plant has always been so

concerned with finding new direc-tions, why was he so committed toreturning to Nashville after aban-doning the second album with Ms. Krauss?

“I just haven’t had enough moun-tain music yet,” he said. “I don’twant to just go on some kind of clevermusical voyage. I want to go placeswhere I’m amazed. The South is stillintoxicating for me, I’m still taking it all in.”

What Mr. Plant calls his “wander-lust” is presumably the reason hecontinues to resist a Led Zeppelinreunion. The guitarist Jimmy Pageand the bass player John Paul Jones have expressed enthusiasm for theidea.

“I don’t need to go anywhere I’vebeen before,” Mr. Plant said.

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BEIJING — “Watch out for thatsword,” the rehearsal director shouted.“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Lots of weapons were on a stage ofthe Beijing Opera Academy of China. Teenage future opera stars were armedwith lances, spears, swords and dag-gers as they carried out an elaboratelychoreographed, intricate, stylized andacrobatic fight scene, all to the clash of cymbals, drums, wooden clappersand a substantial orchestra of Chinesestring and woodwind instruments.

Here and there in this ever-more-steel-and-glass metropolis where old neighborhoods disappear from onemonth to the next, there is a glimpse of what the city used to be like: quiet,tree-shaded streets with small store-fronts and bicycles, a locust tree lean-ing over a wall that hides an old court-yard house.

This modest and slightly shabbytheater is part of the Beijing OperaAcademy, in a neighborhood in thesouthwest part of the city that has notbeen entirely torn down and rebuilt yet. And, of course, nothing could moresuggest old Beijing than Beijing opera,with its masks, its stylized movements,strangely modern arias, its fantastical-ly intricate scenes of battle, and, prob-ably most important, its audience ofconnoisseurs who know when to shouta throaty “hao!” — good! — after anespecially well-executed movementor song.

The worry, though, is that, like the oldneighborhoods, Beijing opera could fallvictim to China’s rampant commercial-ism and modernization.

“Objectively speaking, right nowthere are some difficulties,” said QiaoCuirong, a senior professor at the Na-tional Academy of Chinese TheaterArts, summing up the current state ofthe opera. “People are interested inmoney and modernity and Westernthings, so our own culture has lostsomething.”

It would be premature to say that Bei-jing opera has turned into a relic, but clearly it is not what it was in the late

18th to early 20th century, when it wasnorthern China’s most popular theatri-cal entertainment. The opera certainlywas not helped by the fact that duringthe turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Rev-olution the form was deemed feudalis-tic and reactionary. But then again sowas just about every other art form, including Western music and moderndance, both of which have since madevigorous recoveries.

But the opera faces particular diffi-culties, aside from the aging and fadingaway of a knowledgeable audience.

“The more you know about Beijing opera, the more you love it,” said LiuHua, a former performer and now a teacher at the school. “The problem isthat it takes a lot to know it, and fewerand fewer people have the time or theinclination.”

Also, Beijing opera is an especially demanding form, both to perform andto witness. “It takes a very long time tostudy, at least 8 to 10 years just to get inthe door as a performer,” Ms. Qiao said.“And the whole thing is very slow. It’snot like a movie, and right now peoplewant things to be fast. That’s why we’relosing the young crowd.”

Still, there seems to be no shortageof students. Young people start their training at 11, going to one of the sev-eral Beijing opera academies around

the country.“Children really like it,” Ms. Qiao

said. “Another reason is that someparents love it, and they want theirchildren to learn it, even if they’re notthinking about having them become professionals.”

Given that Beijing opera is fading in popularity, especially among theyounger generations, it seems strangethat so many young people would wantto go through rigorous years of train-ing.

“It’s such good training that the stu-dents can go in almost any direction even if they don’t end up in the opera,”Ms. Liu said.

“A lot of our students end up on tele-vision or in the movies,” she added.“There are a lot of martial-arts movies,and our students are all good at martialarts. ”

The Chinese Ministry of Culture lav-ishly subsidizes the opera.

“Everybody’s doing their best tokeep this as a cultural treasure, wheth-er people go to see it or not,” Ms. Qiaosaid.

By CHARLES McGRATH

On a blistering afternoon last June, outside a Polish social club, men inheavy wool tuxedos, with slicked-back hair and pencil-thin mustaches,were blotting their brows. Nearbywere some very slender young women in spangly, ankle-length dresses. Butbecause this was Brooklyn, wherepeople wear weird clothes all the time,nobody paid them attention.

A few blocks away, a seaside board-walk had miraculously arisen, com-plete with clubs, restaurants andsnack vendors. Except that the shopswere empty. And where the oceanshould have been, there was, instead,a wall of metal shipping containers.

This brand-new ghost town is the $5million set for “Boardwalk Empire,” anHBO series that begins September 19.

“Boardwalk Empire” is set inAtlantic City, New Jersey, in 1920,during the first year of Prohibition,and the big outdoor set, the vintageclothing and historical research areall evidence of the unusual, painstak-ing lengths the show’s creators havegone to recreate a mostly unfamiliarera. Martin Scorsese directed the pi-lot episode and became an executiveproducer of the series.

Prohibition, which made the sale andmanufacture of alcohol illegal, was tiedboth to the introduction of the incometax and universal suffrage, and radi-cally altered the relation of citizen andgovernment.

“Prohibition is like a guilty secret,or an embarrassment,” said DanielOkrent, a former public editor for TheNew York Times, who has just pub-lished a history of the period, “LastCall: The Rise and Fall of Prohibi-tion.” “How do you explain that for 13years there was an amendment to theConstitution of the United States thatsaid you couldn’t get a drink legally?It beggars the imagination.”

“Boardwalk Empire” is based inpart on a book by the same name. In2006 HBO showed the book to Terence Winter, who wrote many “Sopranos”episodes for the network.

“I’ve always loved the way peopletalked in the ’20s, and the clothes, thecars,” he said. “It was such a transi-tional period. The world was chang-ing so much. And in some ways it wasa very modern time. This was almosta hundred years ago, but they had air-planes, telephones, people went to the movies all the time.”

Mr. Winter focused on the ’20s and

Enoch Johnson, known as Nucky, byfar the most vivid character in thebook. Nucky was a political boss andstalwart of the Republican Party whofrom 1911 to 1941 controlled all the vicein Atlantic City. He occupied a wholefloor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, risingevery day at 3 p.m. to travel in a pow-der-blue Rolls-Royce.

The real Nucky was tall and broad-shouldered, with an enormous, dome-like head. In the show, fictionalizedslightly as Nucky Thompson, he’splayed by the bug-eyed, slightly ca-daverous Steve Buscemi, another“Sopranos” alumnus.

“ My inspiration for Nucky was thePrince of Wales,” said John A. Dunn,the show’s costume designer, refer-ring to the dandy who later becameEdward VIII.

Mr. Dunn was standing recently in astorage room in a Brooklyn soundstage.Nucky’s suits were on a rack next to AlCapone’s and near Arnold Rothstein’sand Lucky Luciano’s. (They are alsocharacters in “Boardwalk Empire.”)

Mr. Dunn used vintage clothing,either rented or bought on eBay or invintage clothing shops; otherwise thecostumes were handmade. “The greatsurprise for me was the color,” he said.

“Because of photographs we tend tothink of ’20s clothing as black andwhite, but really there was this splash of new, bold color, maybe in reaction toWorld War I.”

The show’s music, bright and ebul-lient, is also authentic and also a reac-tion to the end of the war. People want-ed to get up and dance, as Mr. Okrentpointed out, and Prohibition, or thespeakeasy culture, conveniently(and for the first time) mingled men,women and alcohol in an atmosphereof congenial illicitness. Some of theshow’s tunes haven’t been heard forclose to a century.

“Marty and Terry both wanted themusic to be historically accurate,”said Randall Poster, the music coor-dinator for the series. “So we just im-

mersed ourselves in this fascinatingtransitional period when ragtime isjust beginning to turn into jazz.”

The research even extended to theway people talked and what they read in the ’20s. One of the characters isreading a novel by Henry James; an-other keeps a copy of Sinclair Lewiswith him.

“I hate to say it, but before TV peo-ple spoke better and were better readthan we are,” Mr. Winter said. “Theywere probably more literate.”

And they also had their vices. “Wehave whiskey, wine, women, song andslot machines,” the real Nucky oncesaid. “I won’t deny it, and I won’t apol-ogize for it. If the majority of the peo-ple didn’t want them, they wouldn’tbe profitable.”

ABBOT GENSER/HBO

ELISA HABERER FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

GREGG DELMAN

Robert Plant

continues to seek

out new musical

adventures in

Nashville.

In China,A FlashyArt FormIs Fading

Vintage Look at America’s Age of Vice

With a Nod to His Past, Robert Plant Moves On

Prohibition

is the subject

of the new

TV series

“Boardwalk

Empire.”

Steve

Buscemi, left,

stars; Martin

Scorsese

directs.

Beijing opera requires more

than 8 years of study. A student

rehearsing.

Repubblica NewYork